Drawing the Line Against Jihad

When cartoonist Bosch Fawstin tried to sell the first chapter of his serialized graphic novel The Infidel through conventional channels, he received word that the distributor he had chosen rejected the comic as “violating our terms of service.” That general phrase no doubt referred to Fawstin’s use of storytelling elements that make Western publishers nervous: unapologetic American heroes delivering payback to jihadists who are motivated not by “blowback” against the CIA and colonialism, but by the religious imperative of Islam itself.

Fawstin is a cartoonist who scored a nomination for an Eisner Award – the comics industry equivalent of an Oscar – for his debut graphic novel, Table For One. He’s also a FrontPage contributing artist and the author/illustrator of ProPIGanda: Drawing the Line Against Jihad, a collection of images and essays that serve as a companion piece to The Infidel. Feeling certain that the distributor’s rejection of chapter one didn’t bode well for chapter two, Fawstin decided to digitally serialize the works himself from his blog site. Download them here.

A story within a story, The Infidel is about twin brothers Killian Duke and Salaam Duka whose lives veer in polar opposite directions after the 9/11 attacks. Killian (who just happens to closely resemble his creator Fawstin) responds to the atrocity by creating a counter-jihad superhero comic book called Pigman, while Salaam submits fully to Islam. Pigman's battle against his archenemy SuperJihad is mirrored in the escalating conflict between the twins. The novel also reflects Fawstin’s own personal journey from Albanian Muslim to apostate to Ayn Rand devotee.

‘Color Purple’ Author Censors Herself to Punish Israel

In a move that Alan Dershowitz correctly calls “bigotry and censorship,” writer Alice Walker has said she would not allow the translation of her novel The Color Purple into Hebrew because “Israel is guilty of apartheid and persecution of the Palestinian people, both inside Israel and also in the Occupied Territories.” She also said that South Africans have assured her Israel’s policies are worse than apartheid.

Walker intends to bring this evil, repressive Israeli regime to its knees by denying Hebrew-only readers access to her 30-year-old novel about black women burdened by sexism, racism, and poverty. This is the same Israel that allows its Arab citizens full rights, the only country in the Middle East that respects women’s rights, gay rights, and human rights for that matter.

No word on whether Walker will also deny her book to Palestinians until 1) the Hamas leadership repudiates the goal stated in its charter of utterly destroying the Jewish state, 2) stops indoctrinating Palestinian children to become suicide bombers, and 3) stops honoring the murderers of Jewish children.

MSNBC Host on the War on Terror: America Needed a Racial Enemy

Speaking Monday at the Take Back the American Dream conference in Washington D.C., MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry shared an interesting progressive perspective on our response to the 9/11 attacks: namely, that they gave the United States the opportunity to once again wreak “horrific racial violence” against an imaginary enemy.

The three-day Take Back the American Dream Conference 2012 is a creation of former New Left radical Robert Borosage, founder, director, president and/or board member of various progressive organizations like the Institute for America’s Future and the Campaign for America’s Future (CAF), the organizers and hosts of the conference. CAF describes itself as “the strategy center for the progressive movement.” In addition to speakers like Borosage and Melissa Harris-Perry, the conference boasted leftist rock star Van Jones.

Ms. Harris-Perry, or Harris, or Perry – let’s just say MHP, as she goes by on her website –anchors the weekend Melissa Harris-Perry Show on the leftist mouthpiece MSNBC. A former neighbor to now-President Obama, MHP is also a Tulane Professor of Political Science, having previously served on the faculties of the University of Chicago and Princeton University after studying at Wake Forest, Duke and even seminary.

There must be something in the rarefied air of such prestigious academic institutions that renders its intellectuals incapable of acknowledging the reality that lesser mortals easily grasp. One doesn’t have to have a wall full of academic honors to see that on 9/11, America was attacked by a very real enemy who had openly declared war on us, had been waging it for many years before 9/11, and have been ever since. Apart from rabid conspiracy theorists and the lemmings brainwashed by the fact-challenged hatemongers at MSNBC, the average American sees this truth clearly. But progressive professors who aren’t satisfied with the simplicity of Occam’s Razor feel compelled to abandon inconvenient facts and shoehorn the sweep of history into their race-obsessed, anti-American theoretical constructs.

Hipster Icon Patti Smith: ‘We Can Live with Terrorism’

In a fawning profile of Patti Smith, the grande dame of bohemian pretension, an interviewer from England’s Telegraph raved about “all her colours, her raging but formed opinions, her uncompromising spirit, the torrent of words and art and music that have poured from her for more than 40 years.” Here is one of Smith’s raging opinions, albeit more uninformed than formed: “We can live with terrorism.”

For those who are blissfully ignorant of Patti Smith’s putative artistic genius, her creative “torrent” includes poetry, artwork, and music of negligible impact and popularity. Her sole appearance on the musical charts, for example, is 1978’s “Because the Night,” a song written by superstar Bruce Springsteen with some lyrical additions by Smith.

Nonetheless, her “Godmother of Punk” persona and her association with more talented figures of hipster adoration like pornographic photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and heroin-fueled novelist William Burroughs have earned her a National Book Award for Nonfiction (for her name-dropping memoir Just Kids), an Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the French Minister of Culture, and a slot in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Do such awards even have any credibility anymore? Barack Obama has a Nobel Peace Prize, for Pete’s sake.

School Principal Doesn’t Want Kids ‘Exposed’ to Conservative Speaker

After three weeks of preparation, research and numerous rewrites, Gerald Molen –a  motivational speaker, former U.S. Marine, and Oscar-winning film producer – drove ninety minutes from his home to Ronan High School in Montana last month to deliver a graduation speech. He was shocked upon his arrival to find that Principal Tom Stack had decided to disinvite him and cancel the speech. He was further stunned to learn the reason that he wouldn’t be allowed to address the students – it was because he is “a right-wing conservative.”

Molen has an impressive 25-year Hollywood résumé. He is the producer of such films as Rain Man, Days of Thunder, Stephen Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, the first two Jurassic Park films, Twister, and Minority Report. He has spoken at dozens of schools but doesn’t accept a fee. When one is offered, he asks that it be donated to the Shoah Foundation, the nonprofit organization founded by Spielberg and dedicated to Holocaust remembrance.

When speaking to students, Molen usually invokes the name of Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist credited with saving 1,100 Jews during the Holocaust and the subject of the Oscar-winning 1993 film that Molen and Spielberg co-produced. He points to Schindler as an example of what courageous individuals can accomplish, and Molen had planned to do so again in his presentation at Ronan High School.

Obama Courts Young Hollywood

It seems like only yesterday that President Barack Obama was in Los Angeles ensnarling traffic and pocketing a record-setting $15 million in Hollywood campaign donations at George Clooney’s fundraiser for him. But last week he was back again for a two-day whirlwind tour of Tinseltown’s moneyed elite that included five more fundraisers.

Before heading off for a breakfast last Thursday that concluded the trip, Obama met privately at the Beverly Hilton with two dozen hot young Hollywood stars, enlisting their aid for his re-election campaign. The meeting was part of Obama’s “Young America Effort” to enlist a new wave of younger voters like the ones who helped propel him into office the first time around.

Among the starry-eyed actors who were awed by Obama the demi-god were The Avengers star Jeremy Renner, Glee actress Dianna Agron, Star Trek's Zachary Quinto, Southland's Ben McKenzie, The Fantastic Four’s Jessica Alba, Scrub’s Zach Braff, Superman Returns’ Brandon Routh, Lost’s Ian Somerhalder, Bryan Greenberg, Adam Rodriguez, Jared Leto, Kal Penn and Sophia Bush. If many of those names aren’t familiar, rest assured that they are very well-known to the young audience Obama hopes they will reach out to on his behalf.

Anarchy in the UK

Amid the pomp and ceremony of England’s recent Diamond Jubilee, marking sixty years of the Queen’s reign, a grim truth was being glossed over: England is gradually capitulating to the law of the jungle.

Last month, nine Muslim men were convicted for organized sex crimes ranging from rape to sex trafficking over more than two decades of sexual violence against underage white girls in the north of England. The gang passed the victims around to have sex with several men a day, several times a week in houses, cars, taxis and kebab shops. One thirteen-year-old was forced to have sex with twenty men in one night.

The kicker is that authorities had evidence of it as far back as 1991 and could have prevented years of abuse to dozens of young girls. But complaints to the police and social workers were ignored.

Why? Former Member of Parliament Ann Cryer declared that the authorities were “petrified of being called racist and so reverted to the default of political correctness.” As journalist Melanie Phillips puts it, in politically correct Britain, no criticism of religious or ethnic identities is allowed: “And so the child rape industry proceeded with repeated failures to prosecute.”

John Carter and The Master of Adventure

After weathering mixed reviews and relatively tepid domestic earnings ($72 million) earlier this year, the science fiction adventure epic John Carter was written off as a box office calamity of Waterworld-sized proportions. This has been blamed mostly on ineffective marketing, notably a movie trailer which neglected to make viewers aware of the film’s historic background and seminal influence (a problem that might have been avoided if Disney had run with this inspired fan trailer instead).

But the movie’s unabashed heroic romanticism began resonating with review-proof fans worldwide (where it has earned $200+ million) and reviving the flick’s financial pulse. Now JC is set to release on DVD this week, and will likely do brisk business. Perhaps it will also introduce more fans to John Carter’s creator, one of the most prolific, imaginative novelists of the 20^th century – or any century, for that matter: Edgar Rice Burroughs.

This year marks the 100^th anniversary of the publication of Burroughs’ first novel, A Princess of Mars, the book upon which John Carter is largely based. Burroughs, or ERB, is more familiar to many as the creator of Tarzan of the Apes, one of the most recognizable and enduring figures in pop culture history. Born in 1875 in the wake of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, ERB has been called by many the father of American science fiction. His 60+ novels, ripping tales of high adventure set everywhere from the earth’s core to the African veldt to the jungles of Venus, served as inspiration for countless writers and scientists from Arthur C. Clarke and Ray Bradbury to Carl Sagan and Jane Goodall.

No Matter What… They’ll Call This Book Racist

Less than a month after the inauguration of our post-racial president, Attorney General Eric Holder declared that America was “a nation of cowards” for not having “frank conversations about the racial matters that continue to divide us.” Of course, not only does the left have a vested interest in perpetuating that racial divide, but their idea of a “frank conversation” about race is to simply shout down the right with relentless charges of racism. Hence the title of Harry Stein’s new book, No Matter What… They’ll Call This Book Racist: How Our Fear of Talking Honestly About Race Hurts Us All.

Stein, a contributing editor at City Journal, is the author of novels, memoirs, and distinctively-titled satirical political commentary like his two previous books, How I Accidentally Joined the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy: (and Found Inner Peace) and I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican: A Survival Guide for Conservatives Marooned Among the Angry, Smug, and Terminally Self-Righteous.

His latest book is a fresh, honest attempt to provoke the serious thinking about race “that liberal enforcers have heretofore rendered impossible,” and thus to begin looking for solutions. The premise of the book alone is enough to cause progressive heads to explode:

The idea that it is racism that has millions of underclass blacks mired generation after generation in physical and spiritual poverty  is not only false, but the greatest impediment to fundamentally altering that dreadful state of affairs… The real problem is a culture of destructive attitudes and behaviors that denies those in its grip the means of escape.

Evil Flourishes Again - China's One Child Policy

If you're in the L.A. area on June 18, please check out this event put on by the Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, featuring Reggie Littlejohn of Women's Rights Without Frontiers. She'll be discussing China's One Child Policy, and I'll be introducing her. I've seen Reggie speak before, and her presentation is very powerful and compelling. I guarantee you'll find it moving and informative.

Roman Polanski and the New Jews

Famed (and infamous) director Roman Polanski has announced that his next film project will be D, a political thriller based on the real-life tale of Alfred Dreyfus, the French Jew wrongly imprisoned for spying at the turn of the century. What drew him to the topic? Its anti-Semitic theme? Perversely, it is about a persecuted minority – just not the one you might think.

The creative force behind such films as Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown, and The Pianist among many others, Polanski pled guilty to raping an underage girl in 1977, then fled the United States for the protection of France’s non-extradition law. There his filmmaking career has thrived and he has lived the high life of a revered artist. The list of awards and honors bestowed upon him and his films is towering; he is even the recipient of France’s highest civilian honor, the Legion d’Honneur, alongside such notables as Gen. George Patton, Victor Hugo, and, coincidentally, Dreyfus himself.

Polanski and his apologists consider his fugitive status to be nothing more than petty persecution on the part of Puritanical Americans who don’t understand that a great artist should be above the law. So when Polanski was in Switzerland to attend the Zurich Film Festival in 2009 and was put temporarily under chateau arrest at the behest of the U.S., French Culture Minister Frédéric Mitterrand gave vent to melodramatic outrage:

To see him thrown to the lions and put in prison because of ancient history — and as he was traveling to an event honoring him — is absolutely horrifying. There's an America we love and an America that scares us, and it's that latter America that has just shown us its face.

China’s One Child Policy: A Real War on Women

While the American feminist left devotes its time, money and energy to pushing for taxpayer-funded contraception, claiming the right to call each other “slut,” and ranting about the right’s fictional “War on Women,” there is a real war being waged on one out of every five women and girls in the world –China’s “One Child Policy.” The soul-wrenching reality of this rather bureaucratic-sounding term is a cruelty that is unimaginable to most Americans: forced abortion and sterilization, female infanticide, and a concomitant rise in sexual slavery throughout Asia.

Reggie Littlejohn is a real warrior for women’s rights. The founder and president of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers (WRWF), she has spoken five times before the U.S. Congress, twice at the European Parliament, and at the British and Irish Parliaments as well.  She has also briefed the White House, State Department and Vatican about blind Chinese activist Chen Guangcheng and One Child Policy issues.

Texas University Cancels Book with Israeli Authors

A female Arab author claims a “cherished victory” by forcing the University of Texas to scrap the publication of an anthology of women’s voices from the Middle East – because two of the twenty-nine writers were Israeli.

The Center for Middle Eastern Studies at UT Austin was planning to publish the book in honor of the late American scholar Elizabeth Fernea, a professor there whose life and work were focused on the Middle East.

At first, novelist Huzama Habayeb was delighted to contribute as one of fifteen Arab writers. But that turned to “horror,” as a Gulf News editorial put it, when she realized that the collection would also feature two Israeli women, Yehudit Hendel and Orly Castel-Bloom. Habayeb withdrew her manuscript, complaining to the Center that Israel is an “occupier” of her land “Palestine” – although she was born in Kuwait, raised in Jordan, lives in Dubai, and has never set foot in Israel.