“Men do not long continue to think what they have forgotten how to say.”
-C.S. Lewis
Mark Steyn has an article with a videolink to Attorney General Eric Holder’s squirming on the Congressional hook while he twists and turns like an earthworm to avoid uttering the phrase “radical Islam.”
Who’s the coward now Mr. Holder?
Over at PJTV, Bill Whittle created a little visual aid to go with one of his marvelous commentaries, in the form of a table. (Older posts go into a subscription-only file, so hurry.)
In three columns: the 9/11 Commission Report, the 2008 National Intelligence Strategy, the 2009 FBI Counter-Terrorism Analytical Lexicon. In each column is a word count, how ofter certain words and phrases appear in each document.
Summarized thusly:
“Violent extremism” 9 – 9 – 29
“Enemy” 39 – 0 – 0
“Jihad” 126 – 0 – 0
“Muslim” 145 – 0 – 0
“Islam” 322 – 0 – 0
“al-Queda” 36 – 1 – 0
“Sharia” 2 – 0 – 0
I’m not even going to comment, you can’t make this stuff up.
I will treat you to an anecdote from a few years back though.
During the commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Konzentrationslager, my wife was perusing the web site of Krystina Janda, the grande dame of Polish theater. She is a lovely lady of a certain age, who we’ve had the pleasure of seeing play Marlene Dietrich on stage and with whom my wife occasionally corresponds.
Janda had collected several dozen articles about the ceremonies from the major newspapers and magazines of Western Europe, including The UK and Ireland.
What had her and my wife steamed was, in nearly every single article the camp was referred to as the “Polish” concentration camp. The word “Nazi” appeared (if memory serves) precisely once, the word “German” – never.
This is one of those examples of clever lying I collect. It’s not technically wrong, the camp was “Polish” in the sense of being in Poland. (Though come to think of it, that could be argued, since Poland was then incorporated into the Greater German Reich.) Nonetheless, it’s a whopper.
Robert A. Heinlein once pointed out the highest from of the art of lying is to tell the truth selectively.
And of course, as Eric Hoffer said, “We lie loudest when we lie to ourselves.”
So have we become so soft, so cowardly, that we’ve become afraid to utter the name of evil?
* And by the way, an observation about the town of Oswieciem according to Jan Karski, the man who tried to warn the world about the Holocaust.
That’s the Polish name of the town of Auschwitz. I’ve been there, an experience I can safely say I’ll never forget.
The reason it has a German name is, the town was ethnic German before WWII. When Poland was invaded by the Third Reich and the Soviet Untion, Polish reserves assembled at the army base there. The base which was taken over by the Nazis and converted into a concentration camp.
When the Polish army retreated from it, the townspeople were taking pot shots at them from their windows with hunting rifles.
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