Glenn Greenwald’s Partner Detained By British Security; Was Transporting Top Secret Documents

Early Sunday morning, Glenn Greenwald learned that his Brazilian partner, David Miranda, was detained and interrogated for nine hours by security officials at London’s Heathrow airport. The officials also seized Miranda’s electronic devices: his phone, laptop and so forth. At first glance, if he was indeed held because of his association with Greenwald, this was a horribly tone-deaf and heavy-handed move by British officials, especially knowing that Miranda was apparently detained under the U.K.’s Terrorism Act of 2000, Schedule 7.

But then, as the day wore on, more details came to light indicating that Miranda wasn’t detained simply because of a “despotic” worse-than-the-Mafia attack on an innocent spouse.

h/t Terry Glavin

The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald inadvertently argues that every Muslim in the west should be interred or deported

Basically making the banal and morally vapid argument that 'one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter,' The Guardian's columnist Glenn Greenwald wrote on Thursday that the horrific beheading of an off-duty soldier on the streets of London was not an act of terrorism.

Greenwald's reasoning boils down to his question: "Can it really be the case that when western nations continuously kill Muslim civilians, that's not "terrorism", but when Muslims kill western soldiers, that is terrorism?"

The ramifications of the position taken in Greenwald's column are staggering if indeed he and more significantly, if Muslims living in the west genuinely believe it.

Employing a puerile moral equivalency, Greenwald maintains that "it's true that the soldier who was killed yesterday was out of uniform and not engaged in combat at the time he was attacked. But the same is true for the vast bulk of killings carried out by the US and its allies over the last decade."

But there's a matter of major significance that Greenwald's thinking postulates. The terrorists who murdered Lee Rigby as he was innocently walking in the London suburb of Woolwich were converts to Islam of Nigerian origin. If they are not terrorists, if they are behaving the same way he says western nations do in Islamic countries, then on whose behalf were they acting? The west hasn't attacked Nigeria, nor were the Woolwich terrorists wearing Nigerian or any military uniforms.

Speaking of terrorism, Greenwald wrote, "the term at this point seems to have no function other than propagandistically and legally legitimizing the violence of western states against Muslims while delegitimizing any and all violence done in return to those states."

By that logic, when US or UK soldiers launch attacks against the Taliban, or al Qaida, or during the wars against Iraq, if a Muslim is killed, then it is an attack against all Muslims.

Greenwald's position only makes sense if one holds the view that the west is in a war against all Muslims and more to the point, that the reverse is also true.

And if that's the case, if Glenn Greenwald is correct, then every single Muslim in the west is an enemy soldier walking among us, which gives western countries the right to deport or inter them in prison camps until the war is over.

Of course Greenwald is wrong. Like most moral relativists, he hasn't the capacity to think through the implications of the rhetorical contortions he distorted himself into while acting as an apologist for terrorism.

All Muslims are not at war with the west. The vast majority find the Woolwich terrorists as repugnant as anyone else.

Nor is the west at war with all Muslims. Neither western civilians nor military personnel living in Islamic states  go around randomly killing Muslim soldiers or civilians for the sake of their being Muslim, nor is anyone in their right mind claiming they have such a right. If a Catholic is murdered by a Muslim terrorist, as often happens, the Pope does not give dispensations that allow the killing of any available Muslim in retaliation.

But this recent horror in Woolwich does highlight another aspect of the dilemma the west faces in dealing with its growing Muslim population.

Sunder Katwala wrote in The Globe and Mail:

The hearts of the vast majority of Britain’s three million Muslim citizens will have sunk on hearing the news of the Woolwich killing. The condemnations came quickly, yet many were also scratching their heads wondering how Britain’s Muslim majority could ever get their voices heard more powerfully than the dramatically newsworthy preachers of hate.

The "preachers of hate" to whom Katwala refers are embedded in many of England's and the west's mosques. Just as in the movie Trainspotting, his friends warily accepted the sociopathic villain Begbie, similarly many Muslims may find the Jihadist "preachers of hate' scary and deplorable, but tolerate them nonetheless because to their co-religionists, they are "one of us."

Until all western Muslims and the rest of us shun and ostracize the preachers of hate, be they in the mosques or on the editorial pages of The Guardian,  then we will remain a long way from seeing the end of terrorism in our streets.



UPDATE: This post originally identified the Woolwich terrorists as Nigerian Muslims who had immigrated to England. Thanks to information from readers that has been corrected to "converts to Islam of Nigerian origin." Thank you to the readers of this blog and your comments are always welcome.

Glenn Greenwald, The Guardian's vile terror apologist, is at it again

This time,  The Guardian's sanctimonious nitwit, who is so egregious a terror-apologist that even Bill Maher has called him out for it, was making excuses for the savages who beheaded an off-duty soldier on the streets of London yesterday:

That this was a barbaric and horrendous act goes without saying, but given the legal, military, cultural and political significance of the term "terrorism", it is vital to ask: is that term really applicable to this act of violence? To begin with, in order for an act of violence to be "terrorism", many argue that it must deliberately target civilians. That's the most common means used by those who try to distinguish the violence engaged in by western nations from that used by the "terrorists": sure, we kill civilians sometimes, but we don't deliberately target them the way the "terrorists" do.

But here, just as was true for Nidal Hasan's attack on a Fort Hood military base, the victim of the violence was a soldier of a nation at war, not a civilian. He was stationed at an army barracks quite close to the attack. The killer made clear that he knew he had attacked a soldier when he said afterward: "this British soldier is an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth."

h/t Sam Schulman

Here you go, Glenn - if they did it to you, I'm sure it wouldn't be terrorism..

check out the last 2 minutes of this video:

UPDATE: Murdered terror victim, Drummer Lee Rigby, father of a 2 year-old

The Trouble with Intellectuals

One of the distinctive aspects of British culture is that the word "intellectual" seems to be regarded as a term of abuse. WH Auden summed it up neatly when he wrote: "To the man-in-the-street, who, I'm sorry to say, / Is a keen observer of life,/ The word 'Intellectual' suggests right away/ A man who's untrue to his wife."    

Auden wasn't alone in thinking that intellectuals suffer from ethical deficiencies. The journalist and historian Paul Johnson once devoted an entire book, Intellectuals: from Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky (2000), to proving that some of the 20th century's most prominent thinkers were moral cretins. 

Read the rest of this amusing and interesting column by John Naughton in The Guardian

Martin Amis: 'If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children's book'

Best-selling, critically acclaimed British author Martin Amis has offended children's literature authors with his recent comments in an interview on BBC TV.

"People ask me if I ever thought of writing a children's book," Amis said, in a sideways excursion from a chat about John Self, the antihero of his 1984 novel Money. "I say, 'If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children's book', but otherwise the idea of being conscious of who you're directing the story to is anathema to me, because, in my view, fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable."  

"I would never write about someone that forced me to write at a lower register than what I can write," he added.  

But in an angry blog response on her website, author Lucy Coats, whose books include the Greek Beasts and Heroes series and novel Hootcat Hill, called Amis's remark "arrogant twaddle" with an "implicit insult to those of us who do write children's books".  

And writer Jane Stemp, whose book The Secret Songs was shortlisted for the 1998 Guardian children's fiction award, and who has cerebral palsy, said: "I have brain damage ... So Amis couldn't have insulted me harder if he'd sat down and thought about it for a year. Superglueing him to a wheelchair and piping children's fiction into his auditory canal suddenly seems like a good idea."

h/t macleans.ca

Naomi Wolf wants sexual assualt victims to be named

Feminist author Naomi Wolf is now arguing in Britain's socialist-leaning newspaper, The Guardian, that sex assault victims, whose identities courts have shielded for the last generation, should now be revealed.

And why this sudden turnaround?

Because Wiki-leaks Julian Assange is the subject of sexual assault charges!

Also: On rape, the left still doesn't get it

"It's been known for some time that Assange was accused of using his body weight to force sex on one woman, ignoring her demand that he use a condom, and penetrating the other woman while she slept, also without a condom, despite her wishes; yet writer after writer has treated the whole thing as a big joke. It was "sex by surprise" – some arcane Swedish thing – wrote Dave Lindorff on Truthout. Also, Assange didn't tell the second woman about the first and didn't return her phone call. Hell hath no fury like a groupie scorned.

Appearing on Keith Olbermann's show after he put up $20,000 to help bail Assange out of a British jail, Michael Moore – apparently an expert on Swedish rape law – called the case "a bunch of hooey"

Stephen Fry gets in trouble for telling the truth about women's attitude towards sex and relationships

English writer, actor, director, thinker Renaissance Man, Stephen Fry is in hot water with English women and the Looney Left these days for saying that women use sex in order to get relationships.

Duh.

As far as I'm concerned, that's about the equivalent of getting in trouble with Jack Daniels for saying drinking a bottle of their whiskey makes you drunk.

Fry, who is Gay, was being a bit tongue-in-cheek in his interview with Attitude magazine when he suggested he felt sorry for straight men because women only want sex in order to have a relationship.

He said: “I think most straight men feel they disgust women. They find it difficult to believe that women are as interested in sex as they are. For good reason. If women liked sex as much as men there would be straight cruising areas in the way there are gay cruising areas. 

“I feel sorry for straight men. The only reason women will have sex with them is that sex is the price they are willing to pay for a relationship with a man, which is what they want. They want a boyfriend and then they want commitment.

“Of course a lot of women will deny this and say, ‘Oh, no, but I love sex, I love it!’ But do they go around having it the way that gay men do?

Now for anyone who's dated more than three women, you'd figure most of what he's saying is somewhat obvious, but even so, it's riled up the leftist British sisterhood.

The Guardian has published a flurry of letters from women who have chosen to ignore both the humor of his comments or their context or the substance of womens' preference for relationships over meaningless sex, and fixate on the "cruising" aspect such as:

"Can you honestly say that it is frigidity rather than the very real threat of violence, coercion and assault that prevents women from stalking parks looking for a sexual liaison? I find the idea of walking across a park after dark extremely risky (not risqué), let alone trusting that I could engage in a sexual encounter there that I knew would be pleasurable rather than abusive.

Surely the idea of sex without consequences is contingent upon the likelihood of not actually having to face any consequences. There are very few women who have grown up without experiencing some form of verbal assault, unwanted sexual attention, or much worse, that has sharpened their awareness of the need to acknowledge their own vulnerability.

These experiences mean that there is a difficult line to walk between consensual sex and coercion which makes it difficult to relate to Fry's glib comments"

It also inspired a Guardian column from someone named Hephzibah Anderson. She is the author of  something called, "Chastened: My Modern Adventure in Old-Fashioned Romance."  In her outrage, Ms Anderson graces us with the information that  "A while ago, I did actually elect to go a year without sex. It wasn't easy, Mr Fry, but it was rewarding."  She also provides:

"There have always been women who've used sex to barter with (and that doesn't mean they didn't also enjoy it), but if it's mistakenly used today to secure emotional engagement, that's because it's become downright eccentric to insist on commitment before hopping into bed with someone. Men have long sought to control female sexuality and, despite endless talk of G-spots and foreplay, the sex that surrounds us today is of a decidedly masculine sensibility. According to Fry, a woman may only prove that she's not a frigid man-hater – that she's enlightened enough to be fully in touch with her female sexuality – by catering to male peccadilloes. Gay male peccadilloes at that."

The Telegraph described this tempest in a teapot as "Stephen Fry angers feminists by claiming women do not enjoy sex" and characterized his humorous comments as a "bizarre outburst in which he claimed that women are incapable of enjoying sex."

What I find bizarre is the twisting of his words and the overblown reaction to all of this.

The Telegraph reported,  "Fry’s remarks have been branded “rubbish” and "madness" by feminists who have questioned his qualifications for making pronouncements on female sexuality."

Fry has close to 2 million twitter followers and on the subject he tweeted: "So some f------- paper misquotes a humorous interview I gave, which itself misquoted me and now I'm the Antichrist. I give up."

Don't give up, Stephen. If you do, the bad people win.

You can use this link to read what Fry has to say, in his own words, about the silly "controversy" and the distortions that have claimed that he said women don't enjoy sex.

Tony Blair's strange middle-aged sister-in-law takes up the veil, or hijab, or something and finally finds a way (so far) to stop drinking alcohol

Lauren Booth, half-sister to Cheri Blair, which makes her a half-sister-in-law to former British PM Tony Blair, has recently converted to Islam and wrote about the experience, where else, but in The Guardian?

One is left to wonder whether her conversion is based on religious conviction, or is her version of an extreme form of AA after a number of failed efforts when she writes, "In the past my attempts to give up alcohol have come to nothing; since my conversion I can't even imagine drinking again." (ed. OK, We'll see how long that lasts.)

Her new found warmth in the sisterhood has led her to the employ of Iranian fuhrer, Mahmood Ahmadinejad, where she works at Press TV, the Iranian state-controlled media organ that also employs bellicose ex-British MP George Galloway.

Evidently there is some history of mental instability in Ms. Booth's family. She is related to John Wikes Booth.