Bernard Lewis and the Dangerous Creed of Freedom

In his memoir Notes on a Century, Bernard Lewis observes that it has become “fashionable to assume that everything Western is bad”. Lewis, nonetheless, allows himself to make one “blatantly chauvinistic statement” by claiming that “the quest for knowledge” is a “peculiarly Western feature”. Throughout the past half-millennium, from the time of the earliest European Orientalists, the intellectual curiosity of Western philologists, adventurers and scholars has transcended provincialism, religion, sentiment and compliance. Notes on a Century goes a long way towards explaining why this phenomenon appears to be under threat, dwelling as we do in an era of “intellectual conformism unknown for centuries”.

The article can be read in full at the following link:

http://www.quadrant.org.au/magazine/issue/2012/10/bernard-lewis-and-the-dangerous-creed-of-freedom

Comandante Catastrophe

Ivan Aristeguieta and five friends, part of the ever-growing Venezuelan Diaspora, drove all the way from Adelaide to Canberra on the weekend in the vain hope of helping to vote out Hugo Chávez. It was not be. El Comandante has secured another term in office by “winning” one million votes more than his rival, Henrique Capriles, although the real figure is anybody’s guess.

The article can be read in full at the following link:

http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/qed/2012/10/commandante-catastrophe

Hollywood Rebel

Leftist theatre critics used to love David Mamet. The restaging of Glengarry Glen Ross at the London Apollo in 2007 sent the Guardian’s Michael Billington into paroxysms of socialist joy at the “pleasing irony” of “this attack on capitalism finally installed in our theatre’s commercial heartland”. Though careful to note Mamet’s “sneaking regard” for the salesmen portrayed in the play, Billington assured his readers that the real kick in the work sprang from its depiction of “the ugliness of a society that depends on greed and gullibility”. Six months later, Billington was crestfallen after the hitherto leftist Mamet announced a political volte-face.

The article can be read in full at the following link:

http://spurmag.net/2012/10/09/david-mamet-daryl-mccann/

David Marr, headkicker

The commonplace ALP apologist is the political equivalent of a football fan who sports a Collingwood Always sticker on his car window. Every (alleged) boorish act performed by Tony Abbott as an undergraduate provides insight into the man preparing to be our next prime minister, while Julia Gillard’s time in the far-Left Socialist Forum is dismissed as inconsequential. Ditto the Slater & Gordon business. David Marr would agree with them, but his “Political Animal: The Making of Tony Abbott”, Quarterly Essay 47, represents something more than the work of a Labor hack. There are even a few passages in his portrait of Abbott that could be considered not only fair but almost generous. David Marr is no Labor Party stooge. He is, however, a ruthless, steely-eyed ideologue of the Left.

The article can be read in full at the following link:

http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/qed/2012/09/david-marr-headkicker

The Big Bang Theory

Living in an apartment in Los Angeles are two physicists, Leonard and Sheldon, both of whom have jobs at the California Institute of Technology. Two of their co-workers, aerospace engineer Howard and astrophysicist Raj, also spend a lot time at the apartment. All four possess the most brilliant intellects, and yet in their early thirties they remain avid fans of sci-fi, fantasy, and comic books. This is the setting for the television programme The Big Bang Theory.

The article can be read in full at the following link:

http://spurmag.net/2012/09/03/the-big-bang-theory/ 

Modern-day Anti-Semitism and the Campaign for Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS)

Dear Protester,

 Allow me to introduce myself. I am a passer-by who gave you the evil eye last week outside an Israeli-owned business in Rundle Mall. I was on my way to a second-hand bookshop; you were banging your drum in support of the Campaign for Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS). A word bubbled up inside of me, as I frowned in your direction, and that word was “anti-Semite”.

How Obama is Fashioning Post-America

Not until the first week of June did it dawn on America’s liberal-leftist mainstream media, which constitutes the virtual entirety of America’s mainstream media with the exception of Fox News and various populist radio stations, that The One might only serve the one term. This is not how the fairy tale was supposed to end. Two Time magazine writers, Mark Halperin and Elizabeth Dias, lashed out at Matt Drudge’s “media freak show” website Drudge Report, accusing it of being a “circus” posting items scornful of “Obama and Vice President Joe Biden and their wives”. Drudge Report had even given prominence to Edward Klein’s “virulently” anti-Obama tome, The Amateur, just when Klein was being “barred from major TV appearances and mostly ignored by the mainstream media”. Anti-Obama polemic apparently has no place in the public domain during an election year.

The article can be read in full at the following link:

http://www.quadrant.org.au/magazine/issue/2012/9/how-obama-is-fashioning-post-america