Hennessy’s View

The U.N. Secretary-General is quite furious at Denmark for permitting Geert Wilder’s film "Fitna" from seeing the light of day, according to Reuters.

"Freedom must always be accompanied by social responsibility," Ban said.

"We must also recognize that the real fault line is not between Muslim and Western societies, as some would have us believe, but between small minorities of extremists, on different sides, with a vested interest in stirring hostility and conflict," Ban said.

Funny.  When his own organization calls for extermination of Jews or death to Christians, he calls it the U.N. doing its job.  The U.N.’s job, then, must be annihilation of the West.

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According to Michelle, (h/t allahpundit)Network Solutions, a wimp of web hosting known for overcharging customers ($35 for a domain name registration), brought down the web site promoting Geert Wilder’s new film, Fitna: the movie, citing complaints from rag-head terrorists. 

This site has been suspended while Network Solutions is investigating whether the site’s content is in violation of the Network Solutions Acceptable Use Policy. Network Solutions has received a number of complaints regarding this site that are under investigation. For more information about Network Solutions Acceptable Use Policy visit the following URL:http://www.networksolutions.com/legal/aup.jsp

I say, let’s bring down Network Solutions, the Herndon, Virginia-based Internet serviced provider. The company was recently purchased by General Atlantic, who should hear from you.  (CEO is William E. Ford.  Chairman is Stephen A. Denning.)  The company would love to hear from you:

In the meantime, Hennessy’s View would be proud to serve as a mirror for the film.  If you don’t think we’re all pussies, yet, then check this out from Stop the ACLU. 

MORE:  Here’s a great quote from the filmmaker via FoxNews.com:

Wilders told FOX News in January that he believed Western culture was better off than the "retarded" Islamic culture and likened the Koran to Adolf Hilter’s book, ‘Mein Kampf.’

Read the entire story on Breitbart.

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With a week separating us from Obama’s Race speech, we can look to the real lesson it taught:  Barack Obama lacks the personal courage required of leaders.

Since the Rev. Jeremiah Wright controversy reached the tipping point with The O’Reilly Factor on Thursday a week ago, Obama has pointed many fingers and blamed many people, including his "typical white person" grandmother.  But most politicians dodge blame.  What demonstrates Obama’s remarkable lack of courage was his direct dealings with a man he professes to love:  the Rev.

Obama admits that he witnessed Wrights vituperations against whites and against America.  Obama claims such speech offends him.  I’ll grant him that, finally, he’s admitted the truth.

A leader, though, would have confronted his mentor in private.  A leader would have attempted to spare his friend additional embarrassment.  A leader would have risks their friendship to save Wright’s soul and reputation.  A leader would have.  Barack didn’t.

Other men are tested under battle in uniform.  Some are tested with the loss of a child or when only their own honesty separates them from great wealth.  In Obama’s case, it seems Providence tested him with Rev. Wright’s outspoken race hatred and anti-patriotism.  But the child-senator from Illinois proved to be too timid, too weak to help his friend see the light.  Instead, Barack placated and enabled Wright’s great weaknesses until those weaknesses consumed the both of them.

Like all weak men, Obama will fade into the scrap heap of history soon.  He will be forgotten, and it’s too bad–he offered something, just not enough.

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Liberals, as a group, display a genetic inaptitude toward history.  "Liberal historian," then, becomes oxymoronic. 

One example of the phenomenon comes from the cult of Global Warming.

The brilliant Anthony Watts has uncovered some old newspapers from 1922 and 1933 that prove my point very well.  From the Washington Post of November 2, 1922, we learn that the death of the Arctic ice cap was nigh:

The Arctic ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot, according to a report to the Commerce Department yesterday from Consul Ifft, at Bergen, Norway.

Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers, he declared, all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone. Exploration expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met with as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes. Soundings to a depth of 3,100 meters showed the gulf stream still very warm.

Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, the report continued, while at many points well known glaciers have entirely disappeared. Very few seals and no white fish are found in the eastern Arctic, while vast shoals of herring and smelts, which have never before ventured so far north, are being encountered in the old seal fishing grounds.

More dramatic than copied text, though, is an image of the original article, at least for those like me who treasure old newspaper clippings. [Click Me to see original article] 

Bear in mind that the tools available in 1922 to measure extent of ice coverage were less comprehensive than today’s satellite images.  Still, this article is telling.  Al Gore, undoubtedly, will declare Captain Martin Ingebrigtsen a conspirator in the Big Oil plot to wipe out life on planet earth.  Ingebrigtsen was a Norwegian sea captain who sailed the Arctic for 54 years.  The article recounts his observations of changes to water temperatures, ice extent, and biology of the region due to climate change from 1918 to 1922. 

In another article from 1933, we learn that the situation remedied none over the intervening decade. As Watts points out, in 1934, we had the hottest year in modern history . . .

the dust bowl and great depression occurred, followed by World War II. The climate changes again, a return to a colder phase lasting all the way until about 1978 when the “new ice age” was being discussed. Then the great PDO shift occurred and warming has been the norm since then.

There wasn’t any push then to accept blame for the change or to take action to change the climate. Many people look to the graph below though and see something other than natural variations.

The difference today is that during this warming phase, much like what led up to 1934, had a significant El Nino year of 1998, and it set off alarm bells. Because unlike in the 30’s, when this paper was written, somebody was ready to step in with a cause that they believed could be modified by action- man made CO2.

So, before you sentence your infants to a lifetime of mental retardation through the careless use of CFLs, learn history.  Man-made carbon dioxide omissions, if in any way responsible for recent increases in mean temperature, are infinitesimal in their effect.  Blame nature, and nature’s God, not man. 

If you don’t believe me, perhaps you’ll believe one of the planet’s leading climate scientists, Jennifer Marohasy.  There, now, don’t you feel silly for buying carbon offsets?

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No matter how painful, eventually you must go into his room.  Each book on the shelves, every dirty sock strewn carelessly on the floor in anticipation of picking it up tomorrow, the odd angle of the pillow on the bed, and the scent–oh, God, above all the scent–remind you both of the life and of its passing.  Still, you must open the door, for his passing didn’t relieve you of your duties. In fact, your duties doubled. 

Rising up from your pessimism, you reach the top stair and look to your right.  Even his door projects his image.  You think of a half dozen other things you could do on the second floor before you open the grand door on the right.  You stall, emotions in overdrive.  You use the bathroom to splash some cold water on your face and check your hair.   It’s grayer than it was just this morning.  And your eyes look older and sadder. But these are just more delays. 

You turn out of the bathroom, and there he is on the door–the door you must open.  Just before your hand reaches the knob you notice a hand print right their on the door.  On his door.  Back to the bathroom for a damp cloth.  He’s barely gone and already the door is stained.  Not stained; just smudged.  You return with the cloth and clear the smudge, then return the cloth to the sink and try again.

This time, you hardly notice his face on the door and your courage is greater than it was last time and your fingers and palm wrap around the cold brass knob that reminds you of something on an old sailing ship.  Click.  The door opens.  Gratitude, for having known him, envelopes you.

There was the time when you were twelve or so and first his voice but then remembered you’d heard him before on television when you were really young.  Your mom said something about him, at the time. You were too young to remember anything except that he had the same first name as you, and everyone was surprised to see him on such a racy television show.  But you’d remember his name this time.  In fact, the name was magic and wonderful and poetic like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar or Thurston Howell, III.  But his name was not like theirs.  His name was more like yours, and you assumed he’s Irish like you. So you listened to every surprising word and mentally imitated his unusual accent and you never stopped listening even now as you push open the door to his room.

Returning to the present, you look around, speechless, at the many things he left behind.  In photographs, you see his dream walking through others eyes, and one picture takes you back to the first time you saw his name in print.  Your mom took you to a new B. Dalton that just opened in Hampton Village.  You spot his name on the cover of a magazine, and Mom gives three dollars to buy it.  Three hours later, you feel glutinous, having raced through this paper paradise too fast.   You think of Paul on the road to Damascus. 

Sunday afternoons become appointment television.  Your beloved Big Red must wait while you tune to PBS to meet Edward Teller, Mark Greene, and countless other fascinating, brilliant people.  You fall on the floor laughing at the scene in Bananas when Woody Allen scans the pornography section of a book store to find, between Penthouse and Playboy, National Review.  Again, in Annie Hall, when Woody finds a copy of National Review in Diane Keaton’s apartment and angrily demands, "why don’t you call William F. Buckley to come over and kill the spider?" 

Now inside the room, you find yourself immersed in memories of the Man at Yale.  You’re glad, so glad, you decided to open the door.  But before your pride adheres, you realize that he opened the door for you.  You and millions of others. 

The first issue of National Review published since William F. Buckley escaped the surly bonds of Earth arrived today.  As I did with the first issue I ever touched in 1978, I read this one cover to cover.  Like Buckley’s life, the issue was too short, yet complete. 

Buy many copies of this issue.  Make your children read it, and if they’re too young or unborn, save for when they’re ready.  Every American child deserves to know the man who launched the last great defense of the last great hope for freedom.  Every child deserves to know the life that every happy warrior should hope to lead.

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I came down with some horrendous flu on Sunday and have been running a fever ever since.  (I must have gotten too close to Michelle Malkin’s blog.)

I hope to write more after Obama’s speech.

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I watched tonight’s edition of one my favorite shows, “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.”  Following is Oprah’s Big Give.

I was never a huge Oprah Winfrey fan, but learning that she chooses an anti-American racist as her minister poisoned whatever good feelings I might have had for her.

Differences between races because of cultural histories are certain.  Oprah and Obama, though, demonstrate, in their allegiance to Reverend Wright, a moral corruption that cannot be papered over with soothing rhetoric or million dollar giveaways.  At some point, penance comes due.

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Today’s fatwa from the new pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, the separatist and anti-American church in which Barack Obama bends his knee, places a pivotal decision before the senator:  he is either with them or against them.

The church, whose manifesto and pastor spoke indefensible words of separatism and hate, could have taken its lumps, reformed, and move on.  Instead, under the direction of the Reverend Otis Moss II, it came out swinging.  Moss accused the media and society at large of character assassination and "crucifixion."

Nearly three weeks before the 40th commemorative anniversary of the murder of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the Reverend Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.’s character is being assassinated in the public sphere because he has preached a social gospel on behalf of oppressed women, children and men in America and around the globe.

If chanting  "God damn America" and visiting Muammar Qaddafi with the anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan helps the oppressed, then spitting into one’s palm while spinning three revolutions on one’s right foot will cure cancer.

Ed Morrissey on Hot Air  points out that elsewhere in the church’s release, Moss speaks of his church as "inclusive and global."  Well, only if you don’t count Caucasians.  

The reaction puts Obama in a difficult place.  Having sworn to stand by the church while superficially denouncing its former pastor’s hate speech, Obama, now, must decide which principles guide his public life.  If he stays with and defends his church, he leaves behind his pretence to bridge-building.  If he leaves his church, he admits that the roots of his philosophy were diseased since germination. 

This is a no-win for Obama.

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If America still has a serious racial divide, then black preachers may be the chief perpetuators. 

The Power of the Black Pulpit

The preacher is a powerful, revered figured in black Christian communities (Jones, 1989). Good families teach their children to learn from and emulate the preacher’s words and actions.  According to Kirk Byron Jones,

The roots of black preachers’ prerogative and power are in the soils of African religion and American racism. The African reality of a wholistic [sic]as opposed to a secular and a sacred life, the place of the black church as sole as well as "soul" refuge during slavery, and the gift of oratory made the preacher the symbolic head and heart of his people.

From Washington & Lee University: 

Outside of the pulpit the African American preacher is a staple to African American families as he is called upon to participate in nearly all important family events. He is called upon to perform weddings and funerals, to bless new born children, visit the sick, console the grieving, council the confused, and is expected to be available at anytime to his congregants.

Clearly, then, the black preacher has disproportionate influence over the thoughts and actions of his congregation.

Race Hatred Commonplace in Black Churches

Some black commentators and advocates, even Barack Obama, have touched on the issue, but I haven’t heard anyone address it directly:  Reverend Wright’s hate-filled rhetoric is accepted as given in the black Christian community. The Reverend Wright is not the exception, but the rule.  The "white devil" is the center of many sermons.  Inciting race hatred by black preachers is encouraged through donations to these churches, and by supposed healers, like Obama, who nod their heads in agreement with the anti-white vitriol spewing forth from African-American pulpits every Sunday.

Two women on The O’Reilly Factor on March 14 showed surprise that white Americans did not know that black ministers routinely attack the United States and whites verbally from the pulpit. They do it, according to Reverend Wright, under the self-proclaimed direction of God almighty.  "God damn America," Wright bellowed to his congregants.  "That’s in the Bible."

The women defended both Obama and Wright, using the defense, "It’s a black thing; you wouldn’t understand."  Bob Beckel later used the same defense on Hannity and Combs.

Therefore, we can proceed with the understanding that anti-white, anti-US speech is not an exception in black pulpits. 

Racist White Ministers

Do racist white ministers exist?  Of course.  Very likely, they rail against blacks as Wright rails against whites.  But society’s tolerance for white-on-black hatred is, rightfully, condemned and its practitioners ostracized, jailed, and fined. In fact, whites are punished, not for actual racism, but for saying anything that any black person might not want to hear. One need look no further than Geraldine Ferraro, Walter Mondale’s running mate and lifelong liberal activist and politician.  For merely pointing out the obvious–that Obama’s blackness empowered his ascendancy–Ms. Ferraro was labeled "racist" and driven from public life.  Her punishment would have been similar had she mentioned, only, that she didn’t like Obama’s tie.

No Justice, No Peace

Hatred spewed from pulpits has a disproportionate influence on the thinking of congregants, particularly the young.  Barack Obama encourages succeeding generations to sit and absorb the hateful teachings of evil men like the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. 

Obama’s childishness surfaces all the more when he decries divisiveness creeping into the public debate, as Allahpundit points out on Hot Air.   Obama isolates this trend to the past few weeks, ignoring his own spiritual guidance counselor’s generation of divisiveness.  As is his wont, Obama blames others for the race-hatred monster he perpetuates through Rev. Wright.

Obama’s embrace of Wright, despite recent denouncements, demonstrates not only poor judgment on Obama’s part, but a malicious, subconscious desire to perpetuate race hatred.   While Obama may truly believe that he can turn Wright’s hatred into inter-racial love, such vainglory only highlights his shortsightedness and ignorance.  He lacks the intellectual equipment necessary to fully understand the consequences of hate speech, and he proves his glib shallowness.  After all, Obama likes to remind us that "words matter."

It’s the influence on the next generation that chills.  As Mark Steyn wrote this morning on Nation Review’s The Corner:

But that’s what makes Obama’s association with Wright so significant. He’s not from Alabama. He’s a biracial middle-class Kenyan-Kansan Hawaiian-born Indonesian-raised Columbia and Harvard graduate who chose to immerse himself in the most corrosive and paranoid end of a racial-grievance ghetto mentality that is nothing to do with him, his family or his upbringing. He doesn’t have the same excuse as a Jackson, Sharpton or Farrakhan. Why would he do such a thing? I wouldn’t expose my kids to the four-letter ravings of Jeremiah Wright because I wouldn’t want them to grow up loathing their country. I find it hard not to think less of a man who does.

As with all of Obama’s other "lapses in judgment," there are only two possibilities:  1) He’s a liar, or 2) he’s stupid. Neither makes a good president.

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