Politics

Moscow News

A group of top Muslim clerics have demanded that Orthodox Christian symbols be removed from the Russian coat of arms and have complained about the Russian authorities and power-wielding structures allegedly refusing to abide by the principle of secularity, the Interfax news agency reported.

“This is not only a question of the Russian coat of arms. We can say that icons are all but put up on the walls of state offices,” Nafigulla Ashirov, chairman of the Spiritual Board of Muslims of Asian Russia, told journalists.
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Christian Science Monitor Patrick Chisholm December 1, 2005

Big-government solutions pull poor people in, and push employers out.

A hurricane exposes the poverty of America’s inner cities, and the champions of big government make political hay out of it. Riots lay bare the underclass in Paris’s suburbs, and the French are astounded that such a thing could exist in their country.

In fact, Democrats have long controlled almost all of America’s inner cities. The Brookings Institution recently ranked the 50 largest cities in the United States according to their concentrations of poverty. A quick check reveals that the 10 cities with the highest concentrations of poverty have Democratic mayors, with the exception of New York City (whose Republican mayor is something of an anomaly in a Democratic-dominated city). By contrast, the few Republican big-city mayors hail mainly from cities with the least concentration of poverty.

This tells us that there is something terribly wrong with the statist policies that Democrats, and to an increasing extent Republicans, favor. The tragedy of the riots in France, where similar policies prevail, illustrates the same point.

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Dhimmi Watch

From MEMRI:

On October 20, 2005, the Lebanese press reported that a delegation from the Presbyterian Church USA, headed by Father Nihad Tu’meh and with Robert Worley as its spokesman, visited southern Lebanon at the invitation of Hizbullah, and met there with the terrorist organization’s commander in southern Lebanon Nabil Qawuq…

A year previously, on October 17, 2004, a Presbyterian Church USA delegation visiting Lebanon also met with Qawuq. MEMRI TV translated excerpts from a report on the meeting that was aired by Hizbullah’s Al-Manar TV. During the meeting, church elder Ronald Stone said, “We treasure the precious words of Hizbullah and your expression of goodwill towards the American people. Also, we praise your initiative for dialogue and mutual understanding. We cherish these statements that bring us closer to you. As an elder of our church, I’d like to say that according to my recent experience, relations and conversations with Islamic leaders are a lot easier than dealings and dialogue with Jewish leaders.”…
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2005.11.15 Interfax:

Moscow, November 15, Interfax – The Russian Orthodox Church wants Vladimir Lenin’s remains buried.

“Lenin should be buried, because the idea of mummification is beyond the realm of Russian cultural and religious traditions,” Metropolitan of Smolensk and Kaliningrad Kirill, head of the Moscow Patriarchate’s foreign relations department, said at a press conference at Interfax on Tuesday in Moscow.

“This is an artificial phenomenon with a strange mysticism,” he said.

“Lenin’s burial need not set society ablaze, bring protesters out into the streets, create tensions between a part of population and the authorities or hamper the process of society consolidation, which – disregarding the radicals’ position – is underway with God’s help,” the metropolitan said.

If you have not yet read Theodore Dalrymple’s Our Culture, What’s Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses, do so soon. There is a chapter in the book titled “Barbarians at the Gate” which chronicles (and predicted as it turns out) the lawlessness we see in France today. This book is a must read. My review of it can be found on Townhall.com.

Wall Street Opinion Journal JOEL KOTKIN Tuesday, November 8, 2005

France’s rigid economic system sustains privilege and inspires resentment.

The French political response to the continuing riots has focused most on the need for more multicultural “understanding” of, and public spending on, the disenchanted mass in the country’s grim banlieues (suburbs). What has been largely ignored has been the role of France’s economic system in contributing to the current crisis. State-directed capitalism may seem ideal for American admirers such as Jeremy Rifkin, author of “The European Dream,” and others on the left. Yet it is precisely this highly structured and increasingly infracted economic system that has so limited opportunities for immigrants and their children. In a country where short workweeks and early retirement are sacred, there is little emphasis on creating new jobs and even less on grass-roots entrepreneurial activity.
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• Filmmaker Michael Moore insists that corporations are evil and claims he doesn’t invest in the stock market due to moral principle. But Moore’s IRS forms, viewed by Schweizer, show that over the past five years he has owned shares in such corporate giants as Halliburton, Merck, Pfizer, Sunoco, Tenet Healthcare, Ford, General Electric and McDonald’s.
• Staunch union supporter Rep. Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) has received the Cesar Chavez Award from the United Farmworkers Union. But the $25 million Northern California vineyard she and her husband own is a non-union shop.

  The hypocrisy doesn’t end there. Pelosi has received more money from the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees union than any other member of Congress in recent election cycles.

  But the Pelosis own a large stake in an exclusive hotel in Rutherford, Calif. It has more than 250 employees. But none of them are in a union, according to Schweizer, author of “The Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty” and a regular contributor to the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and other periodicals.

  The Pelosis are also partners in a restaurant chain called Piatti, which has 900 employees. The chain is – that’s right, a non-union shop.

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World Net Daily Dennis Prager

One of the more appealing aspects about being on the Left is that you do not necessarily have to engage your opponents in debates over the truth or falsehood of their positions. You can simply dismiss your opponent as “anti.”

Anti-worker: It all began with Marxism. If you opposed communism or socialism, you were not merely anti-communist or anti-socialist, you were anti-worker. This way of dismissing opponents of leftist ideas is now the norm. Anyone, including a Democrat, who raises objections to union control of state and local politics is labeled anti-worker: “anti-teacher,” “anti-firefighter,” “anti-nurse,” etc. This is how the unions are fighting California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s attempts to rein in unauthorized union spending of members’ dues to advance leftist political goals. He is depicted as an enemy of all these groups.
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