The Holocaust and History Trivialized by Another' Public Scholar'

I was returning my tuxedo rental on Tuesday and caught more Howard Zinn inspired American History from a Yale University academic on National Public Radio.  The self-absorbed dimwit ROBERT Seigel for NPR allowed an obviously inflated resume to get away with a a very loopy consideration of The Holocaust ( 1939-1945), not only unchallenged, but candied with typical NPR lick-spittle.

Robert Siegel interviewed the author of  Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning.

The basic theme of the tome is that Hitler the total Statist Monster was anti-Government, like some Tea Partier and destroyed States ( government protects Jews as well as Julias!)  that he did not take a shine to, like George W. Bush, and was not so much an human malevolence, as he was addicted to tales of the American West. Al Hitler allowed States like France, Holland and Norway to continue and Jews were just ducky!

Now, for the real villains -USA!

Doic Snyder says that the 7th Cavalry inspired the Einsatzgruppen to play Garryowen when knocking off Yiddish Commie Comanches.

It is not enough to study history, writes about history, or contribute to a 'the conversation, ' American academics must be recognized as 'public scholars.'  Here is one.

Profesor Tim Snyder of Yale.

 Hitler and men and women of his generation grew up in the late 19th century aware of what was happening in the United States, understanding it as an example of a successful land colonization, as a successful example of wiping out native peoples and transforming a whole region. So he saw the Americans as an inspiring example of what could be done.. . . One of the lessons of the Holocaust is that when you face choices between ideology and science, you should first see if science offers you solutions, and I mean this particularly in a time of climate change in which real shortages of food and real shortages of water are just around the corner.

Remember the Holocaust?  The one that took place between seventy and seventy-five years ago?  Well, forget it.  Ignore Elie Weisel.  Ignore Buchenwald.  That stuff was just the reification of Hitler's watching too many American Westerns.

Yep.  The Old Paper Hanger got hankerin' to do to Communists . . .You Know Jews?   . . .what Old Cump Sherman and Phil Sheridan did to indigenous peoples in North America.

Damn them Washington Redskins!

Deny evil. Deny the  two decades of lebensraum memes from Old Al and deny Mein Kampf and accept aDoc Snyder's hot new way to dismiss the murder of 6 millions Jews and remember that Hitler was pretty damn nice to French, Dutch and German Jews.

America inspired (1939) and inspires ( all current) genocide, says Professor Tim Snyder.

This horseshit is was passes for public scholarship.

Inside Out - Leo High School and a Little Flower Learning Moment Killed by PC

 

Little Flower Lancers: 1966-67  15 - 11   Palos Hills District Champions     
                             Thanksgiving Tourney Champions                             District Scores                                Semi-final Beat Stagg 85-42                             Title Game Beat St. Francis de Sales 69-66                             Oak Lawn Regional Tournament                                        

I am here at Leo High School every morning with the chirping of the birds, sometime between 4 AM and 5AM,depending on my duties to attend, or my level of laziness. This is a good time to get some work done and to write down ideas for development that might benefit this great old school.

In the winter months, I go directly to the boiler room and start up the furnaces.  It does not take long to heat up this well-constructed ninety year old gem and in the summer months my windowless inner cubicle gets hotter than the hinges of Hell.

Please, remember that I am talking about the building, a four story 32,000 square foot pile of concrete, ree-bar, wood, conduit, pipes, carpet and furniture.  It is not a school until at least one scholar arrives to learn and another to teach. Only then, does the place I drive to each morning become a school.
A school is a gathering of scholars usually disciples and a master, or masters.  From the Middle Ages all the way to the day John Dewey destroyed the notion of shared truth, students were called discipuli and the teacher magister. Latin was the langiuage of scholarly discourse.

In my lifetime, I witnessed the euthanizing of Latin and the Death of God by academics and churchmen.  Latin was deemed irrelevant, the vernacular ascended to Parnassus and the Vatican dome.  That is too bad.  The mystery of learning has gone the way of sacred liturgy -no mystery and no beauty.  Education means punching one's ticket for entry to something else.

Good teaching only comes from good scholars.  These days, paper means scholarship. Teacher certification is the stamp on the back of one's hand to the very special velvet roped section of Club Career marked education.

A good teacher has some capacity to articulate the facts, opinions, concepts and skills mastered over number of years in schools, or other occupations.  Two men who would recoil, if one called them scholars gave me a special learning moment. A young self-absorbed priest more concerned with social justice and artificial peace killed that moment.

I was in eighth grade when Little Flower High School Basketball was making a name for itself.  Parish founder and beating heart Monsignor McMahon was placed on Emeritus status and replaced by a nice guy, who allowed John Cardinal ( Louisiana Fats) Cody to systematically destroy the parish which featured a magnificent campus comprising the church, rectory, a fruit orchard grammar school and high school.  The grammar school was free to parishioners and high school almost free ( my 1969-70 tuition was $ 80).  We had many good teachers who volunteered their time, or received an almost invisible stipend for services - some were not even Illinois State Certified.

In my eighth grade year, we went to the community center in the high school - a state of the art gymnasium - to watch the Lancers on the hardwood.  These were athletic and graceful young men who had been coached by Tom Spatz (Leo '58) and Jim Dolan ( Leo '54).  They were magnificent human beings and they worked long and hard hours with us.

We (8th graders) were spazes. Uncoordinated bones and skin attached to undisciplined brain pans.

These two men, the  best PE teachers I ever had in all of my years of schooling,  made all of the boys in our class learn close order drill. Veterans Jim Dolan and Tom Spatz attempted to de-spaz thirty or more eleven year olds, by combining commands and movements: "Step with your left foot, Hickey! Your other LEFT!  Jesus Christ, did you have polio when you were younger, or are you deaf?"

We were awkward (spazmodic), graceless, distracted and chaotic, as all boys are, until we learned to keep pace, time and balance on command.

One the assistant priests, at Little Flower, a social engineer of the Msgr. Reynold Hillenbrand stamp complained that Spatz and Dolan were turning us precious little boys into goosestepping storm troopers and the weak pastor bowed to political correctness.  Close order drill no more, Mr. Dolan de-volunteered and Mr. Spatz stuck to basketball.

We went back to spaz. In four years, Cardinal Cody sold the filled to capacity and debt free Little Flower High School and Community Center to the Chicago Board of Education.  The parish closed in 1993.

Father Cupcake saved us from the goosestep and Msgr, Go-Along made nice with Louisiana Fats.

Thus, a school activity that was deemed irrelevant by a person not engaged in the activity, whatsoever, was legislated out of existence The rise of the pest, the pain-the-ass in the vernacular, had dawned.

Good teaching has nothing to do with State Certification, Inquiry, or political correctness.

Just saying.

The Pimpslapeur Approach to Shocking Language Works!

Language, even shocking language, requires a bit of commitment.  There are all manner of approaches to language via linguistics.  Linguistics is the study of tongues . . .not literal tongues; rather, the sounds made by tongue clacking slurping and clucking from the old pie hole. You know, speech . . .talk . . .stuff w

I have read and heard advertisements for such language approaches as Rosetta Stone, Pimsleur, and Esperanto Espresso, or Grunt.   I remember taking speed-reading lessons in eighth grammar school based upon Gestalt peripheral reading exercises.  We watched a TV show.  In pre-PC times we would talk ethnic Jewish and Italian until  'Hey!it's became too cold talk!'

I learned Latin and English and used to have a pretty fair command of conversational Spanish.  I can read French and some German thanks to English and Latin lessons.  The language that has really influenced me in my three score years here is Shocking Language.

Shocking Language was learned de la famille, at school, the workplace and most especially the playground. Shocking language happens because shock is easily apprehended even by the tiniest of tots.  A recent University of Maine study attests to the signal advantage shocking language affords lonely, hurt, vulnerable and frustrated children.

I am by nature and inclination a standing eight count.  My earliest childhood memories are honeyed with uncles' knuckles to back of the noggin, sharp words and threats of violence only majesty Cinerama in Technicolor could capture the moment.  Nothing like a whack with a 2X4 on the bridge of nose to one's attention - ' Did you HEAR me, Patrick?'

My name is shocking trochaic dimeter - stress/unstress: PAT rick/ HICKey.  I hear one, or two feet of that and I cover up in the fetal position, awaiting almost certain to arrive buffets and bootings.  No one ever good news'd me with PAT rick, let lone PAT rick/HICK,ey. Shocking.

We can say shocking things as children.  Our infant musings are taken cum grano salis by most adults, except elected officials.  " My Dad, says you got crabs, Mr. DiCola!!"

We were all at one time pygmy Joe Bidens.

My son Conor,at age three,  followed a morbidly obese man around the Amtrak train platform in Niles Michigan explaining to all and sundry -"He likes Cake!  That man likes his Cake!  You like Cake Mister?  That guy likes cake!"  followed by a very maternal muzzling from his wide-eyed Mammy!  I was of absolutely no help, whatsoever.

Scatologically graphic words, phrases and imagery can shock, as much as sexually graphic offenses verbal universal.  However those are much too common, churlish and MTV for our tastes. Such language is only appropriate for persons behind the wheel of an automobile being challenged by Hipsters on bicycles.

Rather, let's consider the application of Shocking Language borne by iconoclastic view masters of the world's sense of propriety.

I was introduced to the parents of prospective students by our marginally educated principal as " Mr. Hickey, Our BeKnighted English Teacher!"

I assured the parents that their two boys would be instructed with more than a few moments of lucidity in my care and assured the shocked Mom and Dad that my grasp of vocabulary exceed the command of my superior Ms. Sheepshanks, a State certified job holder.

The parents were charmed and enrolled their children ASAP.  The educator remains benighted. Shocking language helps, once apprehended as homophone failure sounding  from a Peter Principled Principal..

My Old buddy DooDah Ma#$% of LaPorte County, Indiana was charged with assault following an imbroglio at the Prairie Tavern (PT) in Rolling Prairie. Doodah looked like Randall 'Tex' Cobb on a windy day and was a superior bartender and judge of human worth.

A serial lawsuit perpetrator had staked out PT as his latest victim and pretended to be hurt.  Doodah ushered the man out with some brio and the man's false teeth fell to the floor.  Doodah was asked by the judge about the events.  Doodah explained, " Your Honor, the gentleman in question made a general threat to one and all upon entering.  I detected . . . .smelled you Honor . . . the pungent aroma of marijuana upon his person and asked him to leave.  He refused and gently escorted the man making this accusation to the door. At the door, this man returned my courtesies and patience with hocker spat in my direction which I dodged."

The robed County magistrate was spell bound, " What then Mr. Mag#$%?"

" I bitch-slapped him, " replied well-spoken tap-tun.

"Please, explain Mr. Mag#$%," encouraged the jurists." I whacked him in the chops with back of my hand Your Honor . . .you know . . .a bitch slap?"

"Continue, MR. Ma#$%, ordered the Hoosier Black Robe.

" I picked up the man's bridge work washed it off in the sink and returned the undamaged choppers to the larcenous dope smoker. . ." and with a majestic sweep of his arm announced, " in full view of twenty sober and industrious Christians, now Present, Your Honor!"

Case dismissed.

Shocking language?  Shocking testimony and shockingly sound judgment.

Laundering History with Patrick T. Reardon - The Fort Dearborn " Collision of Visions"

 

Patrick T. Reardon, a former scholar-in-residence at the Newberry Library, is a member of the board of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, sets us all straight -a massacre is a vision collision. 

This Aboriginal American is not, in fact scalping some white dude with an imperialistically flawed vision of Manifest Destiny, or Prof. Keating would hold  ReMaxing the Plains. Nope, the noble and much put upon Red Gent is protesting the bullies according to the statutes of Injun Anti-Hate Law.

Speak on it Patrick T. ( from the Chicago Tribune -8/15/2012)

What happened two centuries ago on Aug. 15, 1812, on the Lake Michigan shore near what is now 18th Street has long been called the Fort Dearborn Massacre.
But it wasn't a massacre. - Patrick T. Reardon

It wasn't?  Well, I'll be dipped and rolled!  What was it there, Patrick T.?

The real story of Fort Dearborn is a collision of those visions. - Patrick T. Reardon

Dang!  How so?

The word "massacre" was used immediately after the battle as a rallying cry for the American war effort. It led to a series of attacks by U.S. forces on Indian villages (just as the Aug. 15 battle was itself in partial revenge for an American assault on the village at Tippecanoe 10 months earlier). - Patrick T. Reardon

Were those "assaults" visions, like Nancy Pelosi's ghost-whispers to Maggie Sanger and Sojourner Truth?

 Chicago was "a symbol of an imposed colonial presence."The hamlet of Chicago was made up of a few homes of traders and farmers around Fort Dearborn in what was known as Indian Country. This was a vast area around Lake Michigan where the American-European world and the Indian culture coexisted, often uneasily, for the purpose of trade.
In 1812, there were three visions of the future of Indian Country:
•Indians wanted to retain their wide-open spaces where they could freely range and hunt as they had for centuries.
•American presidents and officials wanted to take the Indian land and "turn it into real estate," to use Keating's phrase — land that could be bought, sold and developed.
•Trader John Kinzie and other Americans and Europeans who lived and prospered on the edge of white civilization, often marrying Indian women, wanted to keep Indian Country as it was. - Patrick T. Reardon

Patrick T., were those colonialist Americans set to deconstruct the rubric of the Aboriginal American Confederation via a semiotic construct of their own - like scalping the Red buggers?

Looking back from the 21st century, we may be tempted to say, well, the victory of the white civilization was inevitable. That misses the point — even if true.
The story of Fort Dearborn is a creation narrative of our city. The real story isn't about good guys and bad guys. It isn't about a massacre. - Patrick T. Reardon

It ain't? So, it never happened . . .the way the sculptors and Abe Lincoln and and all them frog-eating Voyageurs and Jean Baptiste Du Sable seemed to go along with until a Park Lady and her her historical back-up lady,  Professor Real Estate Keating,  wanted to PC up some open space in the south Loop?
Sort of the Century 21-ing of the 19th Century and ReMaxing Injun Land,  through genocidal wars of one-way victors, what be white eyes? I am soooooo ashamed of my see-through Irish pelt, Patrick T.!

This is important to Chicagoans today because we live in an increasingly multicultural, multiethnic city — and an increasingly multicultural, multiethnic nation. - Patrick T. Reardon

Now, hold the phone there, Patrick T. . . . Were there not multiculturals and multi-ethnics sharing visions amidst the wild onions and swamps along the lakefront, the three colliding visions of 1812 were not the results of multicultural contretemps? Hmmm? Or, are you holding that only now have we multicultural diversity one big world of many hues and Hughs of many sizes and shapes?

If we recognize the competing visions that were present at our city's inception, we will have an easier time recognizing, understanding and dealing with the competing visions of our own time.
If we insist on the false and simplistic good-versus-bad view of an event 200 years ago, we're going to have a hard time ever finding common ground.

 Let me back up to your openers, Patrick T. - better yet you say it . . .

It was a battle in two simultaneous wars. Some 500 Potawatomis and their allies encircled the 110 men, women and children who had marched out of Fort Dearborn at the mouth of the Chicago River that morning, heading for Fort Wayne in Indiana Territory. The soldiers from the garrison formed a line and advanced on the Indians.
Sixty-eight of the Fort Dearborn contingent lost their lives in the fighting and its aftermath. Fifteen of the Indian attackers were killed.

500 Potawatomis - the casino ancestry?  Okay, we can safely assume by your scholarly delineations that the 500 Potawatomis were all gents, males, patriarchal war-mongering, testosterone fueled danglers against "the soldiers and the ladies and the kids.  The score was 68 -15; a sport might call that a massacre and not a real estate initiative, much less a collision of visions. Imagine if they had diversity, anti-bullying, racial sensitivity and CeaseFire back then!

Patrick T. thanks for sharing your historical visions, fully filtered through a Marxist lens.  Old Karl had an interesting spin of the Civil War back when he was covering it for old Horace Greeley's  New York Daily Tribune*.  Looking forward to your views on the Pullman Agreement to Disagree of  1894, The St. Valentine's Day Spat, The Republic Steel Collision of Vission, and the 1968 Chicago Democratic Contention.


Pat Hickey is a good fellow of the Morgan Park Kean Gas Coffee Salon and a really sarcastic guy who makes fun of pretentious fops who wear berets in America, or drive Hummers in the city, and also unchallenged pedantic academic yahoos; yet, he  only waters his lawn during droughts and soberly  recycles according to the dictates of Rahm Emanuel's Zone 6 ( serviced by Waste Management).
 *

While the workingmen, the true political powers of the North, allowed slavery to defile their own republic, while before the Negro, mastered and sold without his concurrence, they boasted it the highest prerogative of the white-skinned laborer to sell himself and choose his own master, they were unable to attain the true freedom of labor, or to support their European brethren in their struggle for emancipation; but this barrier to progress has been swept off by the red sea of civil war.

The workingmen of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes. They consider it an earnest of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world. [B]

Signed on behalf of the International Workingmen’s Association, the Central Council:

Longmaid, Worley, Whitlock, Fox, Blackmore, Hartwell, Pidgeon, Lucraft, Weston, Dell, Nieass, Shaw, Lake, Buckley, Osbourne, Howell, Carter, Wheeler, Stainsby, Morgan, Grossmith, Dick, Denoual, Jourdain, Morrissot, Leroux, Bordage, Bocquet, Talandier, Dupont, L.Wolff, Aldovrandi, Lama, Solustri, Nusperli, Eccarius, Wolff, Lessner, Pfander, Lochner, Kaub, Bolleter, Rybczinski, Hansen, Schantzenbach, Smales, Cornelius, Petersen, Otto, Bagnagatti, Setacci;

George Odger, President of the Council; P.V. Lubez, Corresponding Secretary for France; Karl Marx, Corresponding Secretary for Germany; 

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/ct-perspec-0815-dearborn-20120815,0,1083021.story

http://patricktreardon.com/

Thank You, Mr. President! May We Have Another Slap? St. Xav's Thanks Obama Administration for Stripping Its Catholic Identity -and They Helped!

Notre Dame positioned itself as the gelding Catholic University, not only when it invited Planned Parenthood's 1st President of the United States to parse and get an Honorary Degree, but more so when it sic'd the cops on an elderly priest and others for saying a rosary for the unborn.

Not to be outdone, Georgetown University, purportedly a Jesuit University, took down the crucifixes and covered IHS with a shroud to please Planned Parenthood's 1st President of the United States.

Last April, Planned Parenthood's 1st President of the United States had his Labor Department strip Chicago's St. Xavier University ( the oldest college in Chicago) of its Catholic identity, because there were not enough Mercy Nuns on the Board.

That was done in order to clear the path for adjunct instructors, like Planned Parenthood's 1st President himself, to organize into a union.

In response, St. Xavier University invited Planned Parenthood's 1st President of the United States's former Chief Parser - Bob Gibbs.

The Catholic Church is anathema to Planned Parenthood's 1st President of the United States, because the Catholic Church refuses to say that Abortion is Ok and that Homosexual Marriage is not acceptable. Abortion and Homosexual Marriage is not Ok.

It is OK with too many politicians, who only get Catholic when it is St. Paddy's Day and they need to press the flesh, Vatican II cupcake clerics -priests who preach on Sundays about Gary loves Barry. or "Who's To Say" and goofy old nuns who work for Planned Parenthood, Hamas, and anything but their vocations.

Get this nonsense - St. Xavier was stripped of its Catholic Identity;yet, it will bend over backwards to help the very White House that has it in the cross-hairs



Robert Gibbs speaking at Chicago's Saint Xavier University Thursday. By Lynn Sweet on October 17, 2011 2:55 PM | No Comments
WASHINGTON--Former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs hits Chicago on Thursday, to speak at
Saint Xavier University, 3700 W. 103rd St. Tickets are still available.

Gibbs, who is advising the Obama 2012 re-election campaign headquartered in Chicago, will be back behind a podium earlier in the day, in a press conference Saint Xavier is arranging. 9emphasis my own)
Gibbs joined the Obama operation during then state Sen. Barack Obama's 2004 general election campaign for the U.S. Senate. He is now on the speaking circuit and is a top surrogate for the Obama team.

Tickets for the 7 p.m. Gibbs talk start at $20. From Saint Xavier: "A limited number of $200 priority tickets are available, which include priority seating and admission to an exclusive post-lecture wine and cheese reception with Gibbs. Tickets may be purchased online at www.sxu.edu, keyword: voices or by calling (866) 468-3401."

Yet, Catholics for the most part are coming to understand that not only is President Obama and his folks no friend of Catholics, no friend of any people of faith.

Planned Parenthood stands only for killing unwanted children and everything else is mascara. Planned Parenthood paid good money to get Barack Obama elected and he is acting accordingly.

Catholics voted for President Obama. Catholics might want to re-think that vote.

In the past year, Obama's Justice Department has argued in court that defenders of traditional marriage — the most visible segment of which are observant Catholics and bishops — should be regarded in law as the equivalent of racists. His National Labor Relations Board has issued rulings against two Catholic schools, St. Xavier University in Chicago and Manhattan College in New York, saying that they are not sufficiently Catholic to warrant religious exemptions from federal labor law —a stunning breach of the precedent in which religious bodies, not government officials, decide who qualifies as a member of a particular church. Those rulings followed on the heels of a highly publicized crusade by Obama's Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to punish North Carolina's Belmont Abbey College for removing contraception coverage from its employee health plans, a move the Catholic school made to conform to church doctrine.

When someone kicks me in the nuts, I tend not to ask him over for a snack, an ice cold bottle of pop, a Netflix or two and another leggy wind-up and kick to the gents.

"As Kingfishers Catch Fire" - Anti-Religion Bigots and PC Nitwits in Academia

Be the Difference?

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves - goes itself myself it speaks and spell,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.

Gerard Manely Hopkins S.J.

Marquette University is embroiled in a controversy over the hiring of wildly Gay feminist and edgy polemicist Jodi O'Brien -

In less than a week, sociologist Jodi O’Brien has become a household name in Milwaukee.
O’Brien, currently the chair of the Department of Anthropology, Sociology and Social Work at Seattle University, was offered the position of dean of the Klingler College of Arts and Sciences at Marquette University. O’Brien accepted. Then the offer was withdrawn.
O’Brien just happens to be an out lesbian and feminist who studies gender, sexuality and religion, among other subjects.
Many faculty members, students and alumni are defending O’Brien and questioning whether Marquette is truly a top-notch academic institution that takes seriously its Jesuit mission to “search for truth.”

Marquette University like almost every other nominally Catholic college ( Loyola, DePaul & etc.) twists into a pretzel to be media friendly and 'intellectually free.'

No less a Jesuit than poet Gerard Manley Hopkins was wildly orthodox. Hopkins is one of the greatest late 19th Century poets and its best imagist.

Hopkins is a dead white man.

Jodi O'Brien is a lively lesbian and a loud Abortion advocate. So the Marquette University hires this edgy loudmouth and expects absolutely no blowback from donors who were educated in a Catholic Marquette and might be a tad uneasy about paying someone to deconstruct the foundations of faith.

Get this there was blowback and instead of poop-can-ing the contract with O'Brien, Marquette's amoeba spined Dr. Danny Maguire spouts this -the controversy has made Marquette look like a “cult school.” over the University deciding to rescind the offer to make the O'Brien the Dean of Arts and Sciences.

A Cult School, Danny Boy?

Really?

Here's a different thought - A Catholic University has a Right and an Obligation to be Catholic.

This is exactly what is occurring with the recent case of Marquette University rescinding its dean job offer to Jodi O'Brien. She made use of her rights to be a lesbian and to promote the lesbian lifestyle. She has written about this way of life and has no problems admitting who she is and is willing to stand up for her rights.

Marquette University has the right to its identity, to its system of beliefs and to promote its Catholic way of life. Both the professor and the university have the right to be who they are, to promote who they are and to have acceptance for what they choose to be.

It was decided that O'Brien's personal choices and her way of life and subsequent teachings would cause conflict with the original intent and mission of Marquette. Marquette has the right to provide its students with professors, deans and classes that fall into the particular mission statement or goals of the university.

O'Brien may feel that her rights were violated and that the university's actions were discriminator, which is where the problem comes in. An institution has the right to decide who teaches and leads and who does not; it's a basic freedom.

Now if Marquette had said no women or no Jewish teachers or no African-Americans, that would be wrong and the proper actions should be taken to correct the problem. But that is not the case here.

Ask yourself, if someone openly denied the Holocaust and spoke out about it but then wanted to join a Jewish committee and was denied, would anyone raise an eyebrow? If someone was openly racist, wrote books about it and then wanted to join the NAACP but was denied, would it be an issue?

What we can learn from this episode is this: We in America have rights and freedoms and privileges, which most of the rest of the world does not have. With these rights and freedoms come responsibilities and consequences.

If you are a known alcoholic, which you can choose to be if you want to drink your health away, you might not be given that school bus driving job. If you are a known racist and you promote it openly, you might not get that NAACP position. If you are a lesbian and openly promote it, you might not get that position at Marquette University. Just as O'Brien has the right to be a lesbian and to promote it, so does Marquette have the right to promote a Catholic lifestyle and way of life.

Freedom works both ways.

Brian Brehmer of Milwaukee in an Op Ed piece - Click my post title.

Religion is not a bad thing, unless of course you begin and end your day without a thought of your own and get your ideas only from NPR, Bill Maher, Sex in the City, Will and Grace ( that still on?), Sir Elton John, the subtext of Billy Elliot, and Wildebeests of the View.

Our music, architecture, literature, science, philosophy and diets are rooted in religion . . .until we got too comfortable to really care.

Kevin Myers _ The Nature of Jihadist Maj. Hasan - PC Apologists -This is a Must Read!

Shall we not BS one another? At least during the Holidays. Let's not pretend that Oprah gives to Leo High School -even though this Catholic school has been all black since the 1990's. Let's not pretend that Marque Kirque and his twin Marque Kirque Dillard are on the level. Let's not pretend that the suicides of Michael Scott or Christopher Kelly are not hand-cuffd to politics or their political patrons. Let's not pretend that Major Hasan the Terrorist is merely a mental defective.

Irish Journalist Kevin Myers honestly presents the reasons why Maj. Hasan joined other Jihadists - His personal contract with Allah.

But at bottom, jihad -- the holy struggle -- is the key liberator which enables the Muslim fundamentalist to depart from the rules of the society in which he is living.

Jihad can be formed as a result of the teachings of an imam, but it boils down to a personal contract between Allah and the believer, based on an extreme interpretation of Islam. This effectively declares: "If you feel very strongly that the rules in the Holy Koran about never injuring the innocent, and always respecting women and children, and respecting the rights of the kaffirs to remain non-believers, are subordinate to jihad, then these rules do not apply to you.

Moreover, if you feel specifically enjoined to break these rules in pursuit of jihad and martyrdom, the reward shall be paradise and all the blissful wherewithal of the heavenly hereafter."

This notion of a personal contract with Allah, that authorises a believer to break even the most civilised and civilising laws of the Koran, is a sure-fire recipe for murderous irrationality and social anarchy.

And these have become the defining feature of almost every Muslim society in the world. So where there are no Muslims, the problem of jihadist terrorism does not exist either. It is the most obvious statement imaginable, yet it is worth making. Bolivia, Paraguay, Chile, Iceland, Japan, Mozambique, Taiwan: they do not have Muslim immigrants, and so do not have the problem of Islamic terrorism.

Here, then, is the San Andreas fault within Islam, on which tectonic disjuncture just about all 20th and 21st century Islamic societies have fallen apart. No matter how much the majority Muslim population seeks to live in peace and friendship with their neighbours, if enough fundamentalist mavericks feel they have received their heavenly mandate, then the result is the same, and even within outwardly benign communities.

Hence Fort Hood Texas, September 11 New York, July 7 London, Holland, Denmark, Belgium, France, Norway, Bali, Kenya, Tanzania, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, Iran, Anatolia, Egypt, Algeria, Jordan, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bali, Bombay, Australia.

Such universal belligerence has no universal cause, other than in the universality of Islam, which seems so often to respond lethally to local conditions, whatever they are. To be sure, there is no such thing as a single, typical, Islamic society. The barren and barbaric Hindu Kush is not the same as the perfumed court of the Ottomans. But somewhere inside the greater Islamic mind is an absurd sense of victimhood: and where there is no local grievance, why then there is always "Palestine", as if those few disputed acres in the vast Islamic landmass of Afro-Asia merited the unanimous and indignant global furies of all Muslims, from Delhi to Dearborn.

This same querulous organ of self pity also resents Muslims becoming the subject of intelligence operations after an Islamic atrocity, as if it were reasonable and wise to subject Mexican laptop-dancers and Lapland reindeer-herders to equal levels of scrutiny and suspicion.

India has been the home of Islamic moral-secessionists for longer than anywhere else. And the Indian intelligence services are often almost paralysed in their hunt for Islamic-terrorists by the political power of Muslim "community leaders" who unfailingly denounce terrorism -- but then equally denounce any action by Indian intelligence against members of the Muslim communities: for such actions, it is argued, are clear proof of the fundamentally Islamophobic nature of the Indian state, and the reason for the fundamentalists' actions in the first place.


This is a sealed moral system, an internal autonomy that is immune to penetration or logic. Fear of such accusations of Islamophobia -- phobophobia -- almost certainly prevented Major Nidal Malik Hasan's superior officers from disciplining him for his public jihadist outpourings.


Pre-emptive action would certainly have been portrayed by the liberal media as Islamophobic discrimination against a patriotic Muslim, and would have enraged that reliable stock-character of media portrayal, "moderate Muslims".

Thirteen genuine patriots are now dead as the price of such phobophobic appeasement. More importantly, the US must now wake up to the consequences of its open-door immigration policy, just as Britain did four years ago after July 7. The subsequent pattern will presumably be similar. Watch now, as "victimised" American Muslims close ranks, the burka and the hijab become commonplace amongst their womenfolk, and the rest of the US asks in tones of awestruck horror: My God, what have we done?

kmyers@independent.ie

Emphases My Own

Di Di Mao! Anita Dunn Gone!

The Dipwad Goof Mao-Mao-ing Communications Director for President Obama's Original Amateur Hour White House called it Qs!

Dunn also came under attack in recent weeks from conservatives over a speech she gave in which she described Chinese leader Mao Zedong as one of her “favorite political philosophers.” Fox TV host Glenn Beck said Dunn’s comment about Mao, who is considered responsible both for the modernization of China and for the deaths of millions of Chinese, was the equivalent of expressing admiration for Hitler.

A White House official said Dunn’s departure was unrelated to the battle with Fox.

Dunn, whose career in Democratic politics dates back to the Carter White House, served in a top role in Obama’s presidential bid, overseeing policy, communications, and research. Dunn had long been a consultant to Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) and stayed on the sidelines until he opted against a run.

Anita Dunn a sparkling nit-wit from the Carter Years ( President Obama's Dumbell Dore - Jimmy Be) who wowed school kids with her Wikpedia Symbiosis of Mother Theresa and Chairman Mao - with the camera's rolling mind you - has resigned, while President Obama goes to Fort Hood to parse the "Man-Made' Disaster by Major Hasan.

These people mock Sarah Palin?