Harry's Place

Best wishes to all Harry’s Place readers for 2011.

May you find a party in your oven too.

Finally we have been subjected to the acme of post modern moral relativism on the idiot Left courtesy – of course – of The Guardian. Writing in their Comment Is Free section, Stephen Kinzer makes an impassioned plea to “End Human Rights Imperialism Now”.
In a piece blurbed “Imposing western, ‘universal’ standards on developing countries has [...]

by Joseph W
James Kirchick in the Wall Street Journal has an excellent piece on Wikileaks:
Last week, the crusading “anti-secrecy” website released a diplomatic cable from the U.S. Embassy in Harare. It describes a 2009 meeting between Mr. Tsvangirai and diplomats from the U.S. and Europe, both of which have imposed sanctions on the Zimbabwean regime.
Since 2009, the two [...]

A founder of one of the first gay football teams said he was “pinching himself” after being appointed an MBE.
Londoner Aslie Pitter, 50, was recognised for helping to tackle homophobia after setting up London-based Stonewall FC almost 20 years ago.
He told the BBC it was nerve-racking being one of the first openly gay teams to [...]

Not long after I published my recent article praising Laurie Penny, the very same Penny wrote an article published by the Guardian where, to my amusement, she referred to “cockroaches and sour-faced vendors of the Socialist Worker.”  The key point that she was making was that “The young people of Britain do not need leaders, [...]

I couldn’t force myself to read in its entirety this latest paean to Communist Cuba, written by an American visitor named Richard Levins for The Monthly Review and cross-posted at Socialist Unity.
However a couple of things caught my eye.
First, even among the most starry-eyed admirers of Castro’s Cuba, there seems now to be a [...]

This article by Ben Cohen is crossposted from The Huffington Post
Marx’s observation, proffered in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, about history repeating itself first as tragedy, then as farce, has been regurgitated so often that one feels a sheep-like silliness in reciting it again. But that’s the thing about transcendent quotes: there are times [...]

by Joseph W
Israel Shamir responds in the comments to this piece:
Is it so difficult to quote correctly? What I said is “kill a Jew within thyself”. And it is completely crazy to describe the communist paper as a neo-Nazi one…
Shamir has worked hard to appear credible. The BBC even described Shamir as merely a “political [...]

We’ve posted before about the (I’m being polite) perennially misinformed Republican Congresswoman Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, a Tea Party favorite.
I knew that Bachmann is a former Democrat, but I didn’t know the reason for her political conversion. Until now.
In an address to an audience in Michigan, Bachmann said:
I was a Democrat when I grew up. [...]

A website named “Shoah: The Palestinian Holocaust” is dedicated to demonizing Israel. It regularly employs such terms as “Zio=nazis” and “Israhell.” Its URL is, obscenely, shoah.org.uk.
Shoah is, of course, the Hebrew word for the Nazi Holocaust.
The website provides no information about who is behind it. At the bottom of the website is a line that [...]