One guitar: 25 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall

Germans tear down the Berlin Wall, November 1989. (Image via REMC.org)

What does the rock group Foreigner have to do with the fall of the Berlin Wall?  New post up at Liberty Unyielding.  Enjoy!

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Facts and implications: Notes on Diana West’s American Betrayal

What are the implications of the extensively documented fact that agents of the Soviet government were employed in high positions in the United States government in the 1930s and 1940s?  Do we have a skewed view of World War II because we have failed to address that question?  If our perspective changed, would we judge that we didn’t even win World War II – but, to be more accurate, Stalin did?

Diana West’s remarkable new book, American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character, compiles some potential answers to these questions.  As West argues early in the book,

Intolerance and anti-Semitism: Britain jumps shark

Perhaps it was one thing – a less alarming thing, if you will – for Tommy Robinson and Kevin Carroll to be arrested by the London police for walking into a Muslim neighborhood.  Melanie Phillips posted a well-documented criticism of the English Defence League, and of Robinson, in particular, after she was inundated with angry responses when she referred, in a previous post, to their association with thuggish actions and racism.

Robinson and Carroll, and their political group, the English Defence League (EDL), have connections to the racist British National Party (BNP), which was founded as a whites-only organization.  Even Brits who agree with much of the EDL and BNP agendas are at pains to point out that the BNP is an avowedly racist organization.  Calling it racist is not an exaggeration by the Left.  Indeed, the UK Independence Party, the libertarian party which has been making political gains against both Labour and Conservatives, is at equal pains to distance itself from the racism of the BNP.

“Islamism” and the West: How do you solve a problem like the AP Stylebook?

The Associated Press has decided that the word “Islamist” may not be used to describe anything objectionable.  Lori Lowenthal Marcus calls out the relevant passage from the news service’s newly revised stylebook:

[An Islamist is] an advocate of a political movement that favors reordering government and society in accordance with laws prescribed by Islam.  Do not use as a synonym for Islamic fighters, militants, extremists or radicals, who may or may not be Islamists.

Hmmm.  It’s an interesting question who will be called an Islamist by AP writers, given this definition.

Who is an Islamist?

Presumably,