Author Archives: Lila

Turn the lights on: legalize infanticide

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Matt Walsh blog:

We are a nation in moral chaos. Why shouldn’t it look and feel like it? I think it should. I think it would be better if it did.

If I could go back to the slave days, I’d tell those hypocrites to repeal their laws against kidnapping and false imprisonment. I’d tell them to confront the fact that slavery IS false imprisonment — outlaw both or outlaw neither.

And that’s what I’m saying now to our own society of hypocrites; our culture of cowards; our nation of traitors who bat not an eye at the mass murder of the innocent. Either outlaw infanticide in all of its forms, or don’t outlaw it in any form.

This is how neo-liberal ideology survives. It has to erect all of these arbitrary guidelines, and distinctions without differences, and capricious rules and limits. It sets you on a path to Hell, but it takes you there slowly, and it sings you happy songs along the way. It plants the seeds of evil and self-worship into your heart, but it can not let the seeds blossom too quickly. Neo-liberals are only neo-liberals as long as they can hide from their own reflections.

It tells you that abortion is a wonderful expression of a woman’s “right to choose.” But killing newborns? That’s totally different! Or killing a pregnant woman? That’s clearly double homicide!

Let’s stop this madness. Turn the lights on. Neo-liberals, like mold, need darkness to thrive. So turn the lights on. You want legal infanticide? OK, have it your way.

And perhaps we shouldn’t stop there. If unborn humans are expendable, then newborn humans must be expendable; but if newborn humans are expendable, why shouldn’t older humans be seen expendable, too?”

Film to expose abortionist Kermit Gosnell’s serial infanticide

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UPDATE

A conservative site has a list of other abortion facilities guilty of negligence, showing that the Gosnell case is not an outlier. This is the ugly, brutalizing industry that abortion activists try to prettify with touchy-feely movies.

ORIGINAL POST

A film-maker couple is intent on exposing the murderous career of Kermit Gosnell, the millionaire African-American Philadelphia abortionist who was found guilty of severing the spines of new-born babies whom he had failed to successfully abort. It has been called the most important story not being covered by the major media in America:

“It has been described as one of the most important stories never told: the case of Kermit Gosnell, an abortion doctor some believe killed thousands of babies over the span of three decades.

From the 1970s to early 2010, the sign on Gosnell’s West Philadelphia clinic read “Women’s Medical Society.” But in 2010, after investigating claims of an illegal prescription drug operation, federal agents discovered what they call a “house of horrors.”

Three years later, a jury found Gosnell guilty on three counts of murder for killing babies that were born alive. He was also convicted of manslaughter in the death of a 41-year-old Bhutanese immigrant who died from a botched abortion while under his care.”

Trying to work up funding for their project, the film-makers, Anne McElhinney and her husband Phelim McAleer, ran into problems with the supposedly independent crowd-sourcing site, Kickstarter, which they believe tried to censor the project.

Heritage.org reports that Gosnell  killed at least a hundred babies and it published gruesome photos of the body parts stored in the clinic:

Abortion doctor's 'house of horrors'

Gosnell’s assistants (including a 15 year old)  were untrained, but participated in the procedures and prescribed medicine; Gosnell’s instruments were rusty and old and the clinic was filthy.

“This case is about a doctor who killed babies … What we mean is that he regularly and illegally delivered live, viable, babies in the third trimester of pregnancy – and then murdered these newborns by severing their spinal cords with scissors …. Over the years, many people came to know that something was going on here. But no one put a stop to it.”

This was the number of reporters at this trial:

bench

This is the grand jury report on Gosnell’s house of horrors.

Some excerpts:

“Mrs. Mongar was just one of many patients victimized by Gosnell’s depravity. There were scores more. At least one other mother died following an abortion in which Gosnell punctured her uterus and then sent her home. He left an arm and a leg of a partially aborted fetus in the womb of another woman, and then told her he did not need to see her when she became sick days later, having developed a temperature of 106 degrees. He perforated bowels, cervixes, and uteruses. He left women sterile. He also killed live, viable, moving, breathing, crying babies. He killed them by cutting their spinal cords after their mothers had delivered them after receiving excessive amounts of medication designed to induce active labor. This report documents multiple murders of viable babies. The evidence makes a compelling case that many others were murdered.”

According to the report, Gosnell made $10-15,000 every night from a few hours of work.

Even more damning was his attitude:

“Gosnell routinely cracked jokes about babies whose necks he had just slit. He treated his patients with condescension – slapping them, providing abysmal care, and often refusing even to see or talk to them – unless they were Caucasian, or had money.”

Gosnell’s procedures were performed on babies that had been delivered, were viable, and  exhibited pain.

“After the baby was expelled, Cross noticed that he was breathing, though not for long. After about 10 to 20 seconds, while the mother was asleep, “the doctor just slit the neck,” said Cross. Gosnell put the boy’s body in a shoebox. Cross described the baby as so big that his feet and arms hung out over the sides of the container. Cross said that she saw the baby move after his neck was cut, and after the doctor placed it in the shoebox. Gosnell told her, “it’s the baby’s reflexes. It’s  not really moving.”

Gosnell crushed the skulls of babies that had been delivered and were viable:

“Under further questioning, Massof acknowledged that Gosnell and he almost al
ways cut the spinal cords, and sometimes suctioned skulls as well, after the babies were fully expelled by their mothers, when there was clearly no need or medical reason to collapse the skull. Tina Baldwin’s testimony also made it clear that Gosnell was not cutting spinal  cords, crushing babies’ skulls, or suctioning in order to allow the head to pass through the cervix. Even while claiming that Gosnell sometimes suctioned a fetus’s skull in order to
get  it through the birth canal, her description of his technique belied her claim: She said
that he would “crack” the neck after the head was out – when only the baby’s torso was
still inside the mother – and then suction the brain matter out.”

Her killed several of the women who came to him with over-dosages and bad medication, and, at least in one case, refrained from doing anything to reverse his actions:

“After returning several minutes later with the medicine case, however, Gosnell did not use any of the drugs in it to try to save Mrs. Mongar’ s life. O’Neill said that she tried to use the defibrillator “paddles” to revive Mrs. Mongar, but that they did not work. Still no one called 911. Even though an overdose was immediately suspected as the cause of Mrs. Mongar’s cardiac arrest, O’Neill testified that Gosnell instructed her not to administer Narcan, a drug that could have reversed the effects of the Demerol. She said that Gosnell told her it would not work on Demerol – which is not true according to the toxicology expert who appeared before the Grand Jury. O’Neill testified that Gosnell took the time to look through the case of medicines and that he was “thrilled” to find it was up-to-date. This is puzzling, since he seemed to have no intent of actually using the drugs to try to save Mrs. Mongar.”

In 2013, Population Research Institute reported on the suppressed story and blamed ideology for the media silence:

“The mainstream media has done an excellent job of completely ignoring the trial of Kermit Gosnell. As everyone knows by now, Gosnell was the Philadelphia abortionist famous for “snipping the spines” of newborns who happened to survive his efforts to abort them.

The state health authorities ignored his clinic for 17 long years. Then one of his patients died from a drug overdose. At long last, the authorities decided to come in and take a look around.

They were horrified by what they found. There was blood and animal feces everywhere and the stench of urine filled the air. Jars filled with the severed feet of babies lined the shelves, ghoulish “trophies” of Gosnell’s grisly work.

Then, when the investigators attempted to check the medical licenses of Gosnell’s employees, whom he referred to as his fellow “doctors,” they found that they had none. They were practicing medicine without a license.

After Gosnell’s arrest became public, present and past workers in his abortion mill began to come forward with their own stories. They spoke of babies crying after being born alive, only to be silenced by Gosnell’s scissors. They spoke of having to wrap up these tiny corpses in tissue and throw them in a deep freeze.

This trial should be making the headlines in every major paper, and be leading the news broadcasts each night. Every other mass murder story in America ignites a media frenzy, after all. Yet Gosnell’s trial has been greeted by silence. The national media is doing its best to pretend it doesn’t exist.

One Washington Post blog writer explains the lack of coverage in an article entitled Why Kermit Gosnell hasn’t been on page one: “I say we didn’t write more because the only abortion story most outlets ever cover in the news pages is every single threat or perceived threat to abortion rights. In fact, that is so fixed a view of what constitutes coverage of that issue that it’s genuinely hard, I think, for many journalists to see a story outside that paradigm as news.”

Again, a post on HuffPost Live echoed this sentiment: “For what it’s worth, I do think that those of us on the left have made a decision not to cover this trial because we worry that it’ll compromise abortion rights. Whether you agree with abortion or not, I do think there’s a direct connection between the media’s failure to cover this and our own political commitments on the left. I think it’s a bad idea, I think it’s dangerous, but I think that’s the way it is.” In other words, the mainstream media, predominantly leftist, sees this case as detrimental to abortion “rights”, so they ignore abortion wrongs.”

Many pro-life activists believe Gosnell is only the tip of the iceberg:

“Prosecutors say Gosnell routinely cut live babies in the back of the neck to sever their spines. Pro-abortion groups have suggested Gosnell’s alleged murder of live children is the exception in the abortion industry.

But a video released by the pro-life group Live Action shows Washington, D.C., abortion doctor Cesare Santangelo telling a 24-weeks pregnant woman he will not give medical care to a baby born alive.”

Bastiat: Nations in devolution need catastrophe to learn

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Frederic Bastiat:

“When misguided public opinion honors what is despicable and despises what is honorable, punishes virtue and rewards vice, encourages what is harmful and discourages what is useful, applauds falsehood and smothers truth under indifference or insult, a nation turns its back on progress, and can be restored only by the terrible lessons of catastrophe.”

Heaven-Haven

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A nun takes the veil

Heaven-Haven

By Gerard Manley Hopkins

I HAVE desired to go
Where springs not fail,
To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail
And a few lilies blow.

And I have asked to be
Where no storms come,
Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,
And out of the swing of the sea

Mommy dearest makes snuff-movie, calls critics “haters”

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UPDATE:

Please note that this piece is not intended to bash or mock women who have undergone abortions. That is a matter between a woman and her conscience, at least under current law.

The post is intended to deride an abortion-activist who turns a  matter that at all other times she claims is private into a public spectacle, even while branding critics as pure evil, for simply telling her what they think about it.

ORIGINAL POST

Yet another gloriously “humanitarian” feminist, not content with aborting her child,  goes viral with the deed so she can blot out her guilt.….

The malign mommy didn’t really film her first trimester abortion in gory detail, because that would put a crimp in her “you-go-girl” story.

She just filmed herself – the heroine of the episode.

A genuine aborti-flick would have shown the unpleasant reality behind the flattering fiction.

And, of course, this brand of feminism is all about spinning flattering fiction…. and erasing unflattering reality.

Mommy dearest writes:

“A first trimester abortion takes three to five minutes. It is safer than giving birth. There is no cutting, and risk of infertility is less than 1 percent. Yet women come into the clinic all the time terrified that they are going to be cut open, convinced that they won’t be able to have kids after the abortion. The misinformation is amazing, but think about it: They are still willing to sacrifice these things because they know that they can’t carry the child at this moment.

[Lila: To an objective observer, this “sacrifice” is nothing of the sort. It is sheer recklessness.]

“There are three options for a first-trimester abortion: medical abortion, which is the pill; a surgical abortion with IV sedation, where you’re asleep through the whole thing; and a surgical abortion with local anesthesia during which you’re awake. Women are most terrified of being awake.

[Lila: Indeed.]

“I could have taken the pill, but I wanted to do the one that women were most afraid of. I wanted to show it wasn’t scary — and that there is such a thing as a positive abortion story. It’s my story.

Everyone at the clinic was really supportive of filming it.”

[Lila:  Mass man is at his core a voyeur, a bored busy-body.  He seems never happier than when playing peeping- tom at your expense, or sharing more than you want to know, at his own.]

“At first they wanted to sit down and talk about the real consequences of this. There are a lot of politics involved. We knew we could have hundreds of protesters at our door; we could have bomb threats. Working at an abortion clinic, every once in awhile it feels like you’re working in a war zone.

[Lila:  Her self -dramatization takes away the focus from the real victims, her unborn baby.]

“But I said, “Bring it,” and they were on board.

I knew the cameras were in the room during the procedure, but I forgot about them almost immediately. I was focused on staying positive and feeling the love from everyone in the room. I am so lucky that I knew everyone involved, and I was so supported. I remember breathing and humming through it like I was giving birth. I know that sounds weird, but to me, this was as birth-like as it could be. It will always be a special memory for me. I still have my sonogram, and if my apartment were to catch fire, it would be the first thing I’d grab.

[Lila: If this were metaphysics, it would be excellent. As abortion documentary, it’s nothing more than delusion.]

“The first night I posted the video to my Facebook page, I couldn’t sleep. I went out with friends, and I was so paranoid people were looking at me a certain way because they saw my video. The intimacy of it made me nervous, even though I really wanted people to see it.

[Lila: Can anyone any more wonder why the population doesn’t object to its medical records being pawed through by the government? People simply have no sense of privacy. If the love of private life is the mark of the civilized man, then we must confront the truth that we are no longer civilized.]

“Then I looked at my Facebook wall. I was expecting this tsunami of hateful, scary things, but everyone was so breathtakingly supportive. People who I have never talked to started writing their own abortion stories.

[Lila: Bad taste, thy name is “sisterhood.”]

“I had one woman who messaged me saying she’d had an abortion that week and she was plagued with guilt. Her boyfriend called her a killer, but she said she was recovering well and appreciated the video. Another woman told me she’d had a miscarriage and that because of my video she felt like she could talk to me about it. Just all of these things started pouring out of women.

There were hateful responses, of course, which was the hardest part of this whole thing. When I put it up on YouTube, pro-lifers put it on their newscasts. And so I got, “You’re a Nazi,” “You deserve to die,” “You killed your baby.” Just so much blind hatred without knowing who I am or what I’m about.

[Lila: This so-called  “hatred” is far from blind. It’s the wide-awake anger of the sentient and the just, appalled by her self-absorption and indifference to what is, finally, a killing.

It is both natural and good to hate something hate-worthy, like  irresponsible killing.]

“Still, every time I watch the video, I love it. I love how positive it is. I think that there are just no positive abortion stories on video for everyone to see. But mine is.

I know there are women who feel great remorse. I have seen the tears. Grieving is an important part of a woman’s process, but what I really wanted to address in my video is guilt.

[Lila: Yes, guilt. That little voice from one’s conscience that says that abortion is not all fine-and-dandy.]

“Our society breeds this guilt. We inhale it from all directions. Even women who come to the clinic completely solid in their decision to have an abortion say they feel guilty for not feeling guilty. Even though they know 110 percent that this is the best decision for them, they pressure themselves to feel bad about it.

I didn’t feel bad. I do feel a little irresponsible and embarrassed about not using birth control. I mean, Emily, wake up! What are you doing? I was going against the advice I give to patients all the time. So I had them put an IUD in after the abortion. I was able to learn and move forward. And I am grateful that I can share my story and inspire other women to stop the guilt.”

Lila: Translation:

As long as you can make yourself feel good about it, go ahead and do what you want. Ignore anyone who suggests that, if not garden-variety murder, this is something less and more at the same time.

Above all, feel good, because feeling good is all that matters.

For that, keep tight control of the language and the images.

Don’t let either get out of your control.

As long as you can make yourself look good, through subversion of the language  you can feel good.

As long as you feel good, you are good.

And anyone who fails to go along with that self-portrait, why, they’re nothing more than haters.

In which I pat myself on the back for keeping out of it..

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Over at Bob Wenzel’s entertaining blog, the libertarians are having it out with each other again – the thick libertarians and the thin.

(http://www.sodahead.com/united-states/which-political-party-is-best-for-america/question-2611731/?page=3&link=ibaf&q=&esrc=s)

First, Sheldon Richman took on Walter Block and Lew Rockwell.

He accused them of not supporting their arguments with evidence.

Bionic Mosquito zapped him.

The verdict from the gallery was a resounding win for the home-team.

Then it was Jeffrey Tucker’s turn to come out swinging against Thomas Aquinas,

who, being dead,  was ably defended by the learned David Gordon.

Next, N. Stephan Kinsella arm-wrestled with a minarchist and called him names like “loser,”

which is par for the course, when it comes to N. Stephan Kinsella.

I woman-fully restrained myself from throwing any sticks or stones, as part of my endless violated not-so-New Year’s resolution to “play nicer.”

[See, Mr. Tucker? I took your humanitarian advice to heart in spirit, even though I criticized it in letter.]

But I admit I missed drawing blood.

And I admit I enjoyed watching others draw blood:

http://johnkreng.wordpress.com/2012/03/05/review-of-bloodsport-1988/

But, honestly, I didn’t get much satisfaction from any of it.

A wee bit of Schadenfreude, maybe.

But, for a brutalist outcaste – a “hater” and a “bigot” –

….not bad at all.

Recommended reading: Jonathan Haidt: “Why Good People are Divided by Religion and Politics”

Tradition carries authority in itself

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Thomas Fleming at Chronicles  – the link no longer works – (h/t to The Thinking Housewife) suggests that men, reasoning on their own, are likely to promote their own ends, when subverting traditional moral teaching:

“Let us never forget that white males created and promoted feminism, that feminism is a male ideology. The women feminists were inconsequential eccentrics-compare the negligible influence of Mary Wollstonecraft with that of her lover Godwin, for example. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the other harridans they cite so often were regarded as freaks by both sexes.

Why did men create feminism? If we put the question to Godwin, Laclos, and Sade, they would say-if they were honest-that liberating women from control of fathers and husbands made them more vulnerable to seduction and exploitation, and that was certainly the foundation of the Playboy philosophy, and it has been said explicitly. Capitalists would have added that by liberating women, they could lower wages and make more money-remember it was the Republicans and the Chamber of Commerce that came up with the equal rights amendment and “Equal pay for equal work.”

But libertinism and capitalist exploitation are not the root of the problem. Feminism is an outgrowth of Renaissance anti-Christian individualism that makes of every son, daughter, sister, brother, wife,. parent nothing more than an interchangeable algebraic entity. Throughout the 18th century, the unreflecting encyclopedists and their disciples asked stupid questions like, “Why should one religion be preferred to another,” and “Why should aristocrats have social privileges not enjoyed by peasants,” and “Why should men have rights that women don’t have?” The most obvious answers are the ones we give to children when they ask why they can’t stay out till midnight or eat in the living room. BECAUSE YOU CAN’T. Why, daddy? BECAUSE I SAID SO.

In other words, challenges to the natural order of things must be met with exertions of authority, not with ingenious arguments. But, no, stupid white European males who could not see beyond the end of their nose – or perhaps another organ – destroyed, one by one, the foundations of a decent and normal social order. So-called conservatives were content to wring their hands or, more often, go with the flow which they tried feebly to slow but never halt, much less reverse course.”

Thus, in arrangements that have endured more or less satisfactorily near-universally, over recorded time (and such is the physical and public dominance of men over women), the onus must be on the reformers to provide the evidence that the changes they propose will actually improve, rather than destroy, the social fabric:

“It is only natural to assume—and scientific research has gone a long way to verify this assumption—that in the evolution of mammalian, specifically primate species, males and females developed specialized roles:  Men became the experts in hunting large game and fighting the enemies of family and clan.  Because these specialties are associated with certain attributes of mind and spirit as well as with bodily functions, the nervous and hormonal systems of males and females develop somewhat differently.  The differences, in any individual cases, may be quite slight, but overall women are more verbal, men more analytical, women more inclined to what is now called “multi-tasking,” men more prone to concentrating on problems one at a time.  For a detailed survey of evidence down to the early 1980’s, see my book, The Politics of Human Nature. As human societies have grown and developed—often in strange and wonderful ways–they have always been shaped by these fundamental facts of sexual dimorphism. In a near-universal pattern of dominance, younger humans defer to their elders and females to males.”

Pope’s Ridiculed Warning About Contraception Proves Prophetic

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Business Insider:

“Painting the Catholic Church as “out of touch” is like shooting fish in a barrel, what with the funny hats and gilded churches. And nothing makes it easier than the Church’s stance against contraception.

Many people, (including our editor) are wondering why the Catholic Church doesn’t just ditch this requirement. They note that most Catholics ignore it, and that most everyone else finds it divisive, or “out-dated.” C’mon! It’s the 21st century, they say! Don’t they SEE that it’s STUPID, they scream.

Here’s the thing, though: the Catholic Church is the world’s biggest and oldest organization. It has buried all of the greatest empires known to man, from the Romans to the Soviets. It has establishments literally all over the world, touching every area of human endeavor. It’s given us some of the world’s greatest thinkers, from Saint Augustine on down to René Girard. When it does things, it usually has a good reason. Everyone has a right to disagree, but it’s not that they’re a bunch of crazy old white dudes who are stuck in the Middle Ages.

So, what’s going on?

The Church teaches that love, marriage, sex, and procreation are all things that belong together. That’s it. But it’s pretty important. And though the Church has been teaching this for 2,000 years, it’s probably never been as salient as today.

Today’s injunctions against birth control were re-affirmed in a 1968 document by Pope Paul VI called Humanae Vitae.  He warned of four results if the widespread use of contraceptives was accepted:

  1. General lowering of moral standards
  2. A rise in infidelity, and illegitimacy
  3. The reduction of women to objects used to satisfy men.
  4. Government coercion in reproductive matters.

Does that sound familiar?

Because it sure sounds like what’s been happening for the past 40 years.

As George Akerloff wrote in Slate over a decade ago,

By making the birth of the child the physical choice of the mother, the sexual revolution has made marriage and child support a social choice of the father.

Instead of two parents being responsible for the children they conceive, an expectation that was held up by social norms and by the law, we now take it for granted that neither parent is necessarily responsible for their children. Men are now considered to be fulfilling their duties merely by paying court-ordered child-support. That’s a pretty dramatic lowering of standards for “fatherhood.”

How else are we doing since this great sexual revolution? Kim Kardashian’s marriage lasted 72 days. Illegitimacy: way up. In 1960, 5.3% of all births in America were to unmarried women. By 2010, it was 40.8% [PDF]. In 1960 married families made up almost three-quarters of all households; but by the census of 2010 they accounted for just 48 percent of them. Cohabitation has increased tenfold since 1960.

And if you don’t think women are being reduced to objects to satisfy men, welcome to the internet, how long have you been here? Government coercion: just look to China (or America, where a government rule on contraception coverage is the reason why we’re talking about this right now).

Is this all due to the Pill? Of course not. But the idea that widely-available contraception hasn’t led to dramatic societal change, or that this change has been exclusively to the good, is a much sillier notion than anything the Catholic Church teaches.

So is the notion that it’s just OBVIOUSLY SILLY to get your moral cues from a venerable faith (as opposed to what? Britney Spears?).

But let’s turn to another aspect of this. The reason our editor thinks Catholics shouldn’t be fruitful and multiply doesn’t hold up, either. The world’s population, he writes, is on an “unsustainable” growth path.

The Population Bureau of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations sees (PDF, h/t Pax Dickinson) the rate of population growth slowing over the next decades and stabilizing around 9 billion in 2050…and holding there until 2300. (And note that the UN, which promotes birth control and abortions around the world, isn’t exactly in the be-fruitful-and-multiply camp.)

More broadly, the Malthusian view of population growth has been resilient despite having been proven wrong time and time again and causing lots of unnecessary human suffering. For example, China is headed for a demographic crunch and social dislocation due to its misguided one-child policy.

Human progress is people. Everything that makes life better, from democracy to the economy to the internet to penicillin was either discovered and built by people. More people means more progress. The inventor of the cure for cancer might be someone’s fourth child that they decided not to have.

So, just to sum up:

  • It’s a good idea for people to be fruitful and multiply; and
  • Regardless of how you feel about the Church’s stance on birth control, it’s proven pretty prophetic.

Oliver Twist: Once Anti-Semitic, Now Universal?

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Scena.org:

“A new study by an Australian academic, John Waller, argues that Dickens took his story from the memoirs of a poorhouse boy, Robert Blincoe, published in 1832, five years before Oliver. The Real Oliver Twist (Icon Books, £16.99) may have uncovered a source of Dickensian detail, but no affinity of character.

As for Fagin, there is no telling where he came from. Dickens admitted that he knew no Jews at the time. Yet, like Shakespeare before him, he allowed the villain a certain endearing avuncularity. One feels Fagin’s sorrow as gives up Oliver to the custody of Sikes. Rachel Portman’s attractive score studiously underplays the accompaniment of Jewish music to Jewish misery.

Ben Kingsley endows the villain with tragic inevitability: a lonely old man, scrabbling for trinkets of security and a little human warmth. The story ends in his prison cell, gallows rising in the square outside. Instead of Dickens’ happy ending, showing Oliver’s acceptance into polite society, the apotheosis is cruel and appropriately sanctimonious. In this, and most other ways, the film is true to the spirit of the story and of the author’s ambiguities: for the blurring of anti-semitism is something in which Dickens himself ultimately conspired.

In 1860, Dickens sold his London home to a Jewish banker, James Davis. ‘The purchaser of Tavistock House will be a Jew Money-Lender,’ he told a friend. Some time later he added: ‘I must say that in all things the purchaser has behaved thoroughly well, and that I cannot call to mind any occasion when I have had money-dealings with anyone that have been so satisfactory, considerate and trusting.’

He took quite a shine to the banker’s wife, Eliza Davis, who reproached him in a letter of 1863 for the ‘great wrong’ he had committed in Oliver Twist. Two years later, Dickens created in Our Mutual Friend the noble character of Riah, an elderly Jew who finds jobs for downcast young women in Jewish-owned factories. ‘I think there cannot be kinder people in the world,’ exclaims one of the girls. ‘There is nothing but good will left between me and a People for whom I have a real regard and to whom I would not willfully have given an offense,’ wrote Dickens to Mrs Davis.

He set about revising Oliver Twist in light of her criticisms, removing almost all mention of ‘the Jew’ from the last 15 chapters. In one of his last public readings in 1869, a year before his death, Dickens cleansed Fagin of stereotypical caricature. ‘There is no nasal intonation; a bent back but no shoulder-shrug: the conventional attributes are omitted,’ or so the reports have it.

This attempt to make amends redeems Oliver Twist, for me, from the index of anti-Semitic English literature, a list that stretches from Chaucer through Marlow to Trollope and Belloc, Agatha Christie and T S Eliot. It was certainly Dickens’ final intention that ‘the Jew’ should be incidental in Oliver Twist and in his film Polanski has given the story a personal dimension that renders it irreproachably universal.“

US-backed mobs burn 30 alive in Odessa

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Daniel McAdams on US-backed mass-murder in Odessa:

“Friday in Odessa, Ukraine, more than 30 anti-Kiev protesters were burned alive, as a US-backed pro-Kiev mob set fire to the trade union building into which they ran to escape the pro-Kiev crowd. It was the largest loss of life in Ukraine since the US-backed coup in February, and it may well be a turning point in the east versus west struggle that ensued.

The pictures from the scene were ghastly (warning: graphic), as desperate protesters tried to claw their way out of the building as they were burned alive. Also ghastly were the photos of the young girls happily making the molotov cocktails that were thrown into the building. These smiling girls are accomplices to mass murder.

More ghastly still, was the US media coverage of the savage event. Even when a 25 minute video available clearly demonstrated what happened in Odessa, clearly demonstrated who was responsible for the incineration of unarmed protesters, the US media all hewed to the State Department line that pointedly refused to pin any blame on the pro-Kiev mob supported by Washington. Said the State Department release:

The events in Odesa that led to the deadly fire in the Trade Union Building dramatically underscore the need for an immediate de-escalation of tensions in Ukraine. The violence and efforts to destabilize the country must end.

Contrast this to US government’s very different position when violence broke out in Kiev in February: even as evidence pointed to much violence committed by the protesters, the US nevertheless blamed the then-Yanukovich government exclusively.

Double standards.

And the US media was not far behind the State Department in its Odessa spin.

According to the Los Angeles Times:

Thirty of the victims died of smoke inhalation after a fire was set in the central trade union building, where pro-Russia separatists reportedly had taken up sniper positions to fire on pro-unity demonstrators.

LA Times spins it like burning more than 30 protesters alive was a purely defensive measure. But if they were all snipers, why did they not shoot their way out?

In lock-step with the State Department, the NY Daily News reported that:

…for reasons still unclear, a fire broke out in a trade union building and the death toll started to climb.

This even though their own article features a photo of a pro-Kiev protester tossing a firebomb into the building!

As to be expected, the New York Times followed the State Department line of avoiding any real reporting that might damage the US-backed regime in Kiev, preferring to present the act of mass murder as some sort of tragic accident:

Violence also erupted Friday in the previously calmer port city of Odessa, on the Black Sea, where dozens of people died in a fire related to clashes that broke out between protesters holding a march for Ukrainian unity and pro-Russian activists

There are too many more examples of the US media’s lock-step reporting on this event to cover here.

But even the virulently anti-Russian and pro-Kiev Kyiv Post could get the basic reporting correct:

A mob shouted “Glory to Ukraine” and “Death to enemies” as the building burned with people inside.

That makes it pretty clear who did the torching and who did the dying.

Continued the Kyiv Post:

Photographs circulating on Twitter and Facebook show people – some presumably in their teens – mixing explosive concoctions in discarded beer bottles before lobbing them into the building.

Why did the US media not report any of this? Because they did not want the American public to see any possibility other than the US government official line, which is that the post-coup government in Kiev and its supporters represent the legitimate and democratic will of the people and anyone who protests against that government or its supporters is a Russian agent and a terrorist.

The US mainstream media marches lock-step with the US government, even to the point of covering up a most vile mass murder. It is only alternative sources and networks like RT (and RPI) that dare to cross the State Department line.

No wonder the US State Department has declared war on RT.”

(No: RT is also not to be trusted fully. It’s to be balanced against the US media and both to be weighed against what independent analysts – such few as there are – say).