Tuesday, October 24, 2006

Grandstanding on Islam

Further to my recent post about the Ayn Rand Institute's growing anti-Islamic hysteria, Yaron Brook's UCLA speech is reported in The Daily Bruin The report claims Brook suggested that "a way to defeat these (Islamic totalitarian) regimes is to kill up to hundreds of thousands of their supporters." Well, I suppose that is a way...
Brook said the increase in extremist activities throughout the Islamic world is due to a continued moral weakening in the U.S.

"What challenges us is our own moral weakness," which are multiculturalism and moral relativism, Brook said.

The solution is for the U.S. and the West to find a philosophy that embraces their moral good, which are the ideas of Ayn Rand, an author and founder of objectivism, Brook said. Objectivist philosophy promotes objective reality, rationality, self-interest and capitalism.

The self-interest tenet of objectivism advocates that one's own life is worth defending by any means necessary, which would allow the United States to justify defeating Islamic totalitarianism by killing a large number of its supporters, according to Brook.
Brook seems to be following the standard "talk tough but be sure to carry nothing in the way of actual policy recommendations" so beloved of Objectivist wanna-be-radicals. Given that in reality the man is too terrified to publish his remarks in case Barbara Branden says something mean about him in an internet forum, I doubt the various Islamic totalitarians are losing much sleep over this blowhard.

*PS: Don't let this update distract you from Greg Nyquist's superb examination of Whittaker Chambers' notorious review of 'Atlas Shrugged' below.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

This whole conversation is worse than silly. Stop US support for Israel and for the various US backed tyrants in the Middle East
going back to the Shah for generations and the Saudis and
the militant Islam threat would vanish. There never was a militant
Islamic threat in Afghanistan prior to the Soviet invasion in 1979. Brook is an Israeli MORON,
Barbara Branden CORRECTLY called
him on his more extreme genocidal
remarks. Democracy over there brought Hamas and Hezbollah to political power. The US never cared
about democracy there or here.
This is like going on RoR or SOLO
to reason with lunatics, arguing with the KGB as Rand put it in another context.

Daniel Barnes said...

MH:
>This is like going on RoR or SOLO
to reason with lunatics, arguing with the KGB as Rand put it in another context.

Oh go on, you love it...;-) I thought I was agreeing with you!

Anonymous said...

Ok, maybe you're right !

Michael Prescott said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Michael Prescott said...

Out of curiosity, is the Michael Hardesty who contributes commments to this site the same person who is known as a Holocaust revisionist?

From "A Brief History of Holocaust Revisionism":

"In 1975, Earl W. Thomas of Silver Spring, Maryland, had Barnes translate Rassinier's Drama of the European Jews, added a foreword by Michael Hardesty and published it under Steppingstones Publications."

At another site, someone named Michael Hardesty writes, "...the Holocaust Revisionists are largely correct. There is legitimate dispute about the six million figure, the gas chambers, the idea
of a centrally-planned extermination of Jews, the meaning of the Wannsee Conference, the Anne Frank Diary, the lampshade stories and much more. [Rather] than regurgitate the same old questionable atrocity stoies people should read Butz, Faurisson, Rassin[i]er and several other authors."

Who are Butz, Faurisson, and Rassinier?

On another Web site, we are told that Arthur Butz "is the author of the revisionist bible, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century: the case against the presumed extermination of European Jewry (1976). Cloaked in the language of academia, the book argues that Zyklon-B gas was used not for extermination purposes, but for delousing."

Robert Faurisson is described as "the main propagator of Holocaust denial in France. One of the most prominent revisionists, Faurisson uses the idea of a Jewish conspiracy to account for the 'myth' of the Holocaust.... Faurisson denies that gas chambers were used for mass extermination at Auschwitz, and claims instead that typhus was the real killer."

Paul Rassinier "was one of the first revisionists. Himself a Holocaust survivor, he used his book, The Drama of the European Jews (1964), to minimise the numbers that had been killed. He also claimed that there was no Nazi policy of genocide against the Jews, and argued that no gassings took place."

Anonymous said...

Arthur Butz is a professor emeritus
of electrical engineering at Northwestern University. His 1976
book The Hoax Of The 20th Century is still the best critical examination of the conventional
holocaust orthodoxy in print in english, has gone through several revisions.
Robert Faurisson is a retired professor of Literature ay Lyon
College in France. He has published a massive collection of writings that are in english available from the ihr.org site,
largely from the Journal of Historical Review issues available
for download at same.
Paul Rassinier was a French Resistant and concentration survivor at Buchenwald and Dora, he
published several books in the 50s
and 60s on this subject. I wrote the foreword to his main one, The
Drama of The European Jews, available from Amazon, Alibris, etc. He died in the late 60s.
Faurisson has been jailed, fined
and physically attacked many times,
once or twice almost fatally. In France, Germany, Belgium, Austria,
Spain, Israel, Canada, the former Iron Curtain countries holocaust revisionism is a penal offense.
Anyway, ihr.org is the best site
for dissident views on this subject. I support it with some
reservations.