German schools rename ‘St. Martin’s Day’ fest – but look who opposes doing that

St. Martin’s Day – too Christian for the European left. (Image: Mitteldeutsche Zeitung)

You just know this latest in the thousand cuts of “multi-kulti” cultural suicide has to do with fear of offending Muslim immigrants.  And it does.

But I urge readers to look past the surface and keep in mind who’s doing the slice-and-dice job.

The story at hand involves a school in Oberkassel, Dusseldorf, which has redesignated the traditional St. Martin’s Day festival, held on 11 November, as an absurdly generic “Festival of Light.”  German media reported this late last week, and it was picked up quickly by English-language outlets.  (It’s worth making the point, as an aside, that we not only have to give up the richness of our own Western culture to supposedly avoid offending those from other cultures; we have to dumb everything down as well, turning ourselves into primitive animists and nature-worshipers.  Having a festival about “light” is so 10,000 years ago.)

The future of our time: Rewriting ‘Westphalianism’

Past master. (Image via Outside the Beltway)

Reading Henry Kissinger’s typically well-considered and intelligent article for the Wall Street Journal this weekend (“A Path out of the Middle East Collapse”), I had a growing sense that it isn’t so much a prescription for the future as a description of the past.

The sense began with the first paragraph, in which Kissinger defines the scope of what’s collapsing, and dates it only to 1973, when the U.S. moved to stabilize the Middle East during the Yom Kippur War.

But far more than recent U.S. policy on the Middle East is collapsing today.  What we’re seeing is more like the collapse of “Rome” itself:  the organization of Western power as a Europe-centric territorial phenomenon, setting unbreachable boundaries north, south, and west of a restless and perennially “unorganizable” Middle East.

Memphis and the inconvenient dead: We’re all snarling jihadis now

Graves of WWII soldiers in Libya, desecrated by jihadis. (Image via euronews)

Congratulations to the Memphis City Council.  As Howard Portnoy reported, Memphis’s finest voted this week to dig up the remains of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest – and his wife – from their resting place beneath Forrest’s statue in a Memphis park.

It’s politically incorrect, according to the council, for the Forrests’ bones to repose there any longer.

“It is no longer politically correct to glorify someone who was a slave trader, someone who was a racist on public property,” said City Council member Myron Lowery.

So now our own, all-American Memphis, Tennessee is just like the jihadi animals who’ve been attacking graves around the Middle East, as they slash and burn their way through the post-Arab Spring landscape.

Ramadi’s fall has positioned Iran for a big score

Refugees from a fallen Ramadi clog the roadways outside Baghdad in May 2015. (Image: Corbis via Newsweek)

If you listen to the mainstream media, you probably think mainly that a superior force of Iraqi national troops abandoned the city of Ramadi to Islamic State 10 days ago – by implication, doing so in spite of U.S. support to the Iraqis and the battle.

As Americans were wondering “What happened?” over the past week, words uttered by Ashton Carter, the U.S. secretary of defense, came to seem like the answer.  His signature comment was to the effect that the Iraqis were unwilling to fight.

As a cherry on top, I heard (Tuesday evening) a news anchor on the local ABC affiliate chirp out the theory that Carter’s harsh assessment “may have prompted” the Iraqi government to mount its impending operation to retake Ramadi.  The implication is that the Iraqis had to be goaded into it.  Local affiliates don’t make up foreign-affairs news narratives on their own; this was undoubtedly fed to them by the staff at ABC headquarters.

A world without a hegemon

New post up at Liberty Unyielding.  Enjoy!