Saw a license plate in the supermarket parking lot today: “ARRRM8E”

From the headline until nearly the last paragraph, this condescending, sexist piece of drek willl go down in my Feminist Hall of Shame. And it’s from AP. It figures.

What a ride: Woman, 82, inducted into Hall of Fame

Wow. A woman was inducted into the Hall of Fame. What, the first one ever? Is that why you don’t identify her in the headline, like you would any other inductee into the Hall of Fame? Does she not have a name? Well, let’s look at the lead.

Betty Skelton Erde is 82 and lives in a retirement community where many are content to putter about in golf carts. Not Erde: She drives a blazing red Corvette to match her red hair and really means it when she says, “I like fast cars.”

An auto racing pioneer, Erde (Uhr-Dee) once was the fastest woman on Earth, setting female speed records at Daytona Beach and Utah’s Bonneville salt flats half a century ago. On Wednesday, she reaches a new milestone as only the fifth woman inducted into the Motorsports Hall of Fame of America in suburban Detroit.

Oh, she has a name. You even tell us how to pronounce it. And she’s not the first. She’s the fifth woman inducted. So the headline is just, gee, sexist. And those “female” speed records? Aren’t they supposed to be either “speed records” or “women’s speed records”?

Dozens of firsts are attached to her name: the auto industry’s first female test driver, in 1954; the first woman to set a world land speed record in 1956 (145 mph at Daytona Beach); and then the world land speed record for women in 1965, hitting 315.72 mph at Bonneville.

Funny, those aren’t all “female” speed records. I do believe the word “world” was in front of some of them. And here’s what the writer describes as Erde’s first drive in a fast car:

In February 1954, at France’s invitation, Erde went to Daytona. She climbed into a Dodge sedan, went 105.88 mph on the beach - that’s when folks still raced on sand - and set a stock car record.

That’s a record. Not a “female” record. What a bunch of condescending, sexist crap.

The AP also manages to quote one of the more sexist remarks from the time period when sexist remarks were, well, unremarkable. So when you read this, you nod your head and say, “How quaint. So glad men have learned not to be such morons today.”

“I would venture to say there is no other woman in the world with all the attributes of this woman,” France once remarked. “The most impressive of them all is her surprising and outstanding ever-present femininity, even when tackling a man’s job.”

But when you read the AP article, which includes this:

But if Erde was aware of how different she was for a woman at the time - unmarried, without children - she didn’t show it.

“I had to do what I wanted,” she said.

You have to wonder what century the writer is living in. And what is wrong with her. Because this drek was written by a woman. Perhaps she’s aiming for one of those “female” writing prizes.

We have reached the height of irony. Who needs sexist male writers when a woman will do the job for him?

Well done, Sister Suffragette.

Last week I noted that Hamas and Hezbollah, both proxies of Iran, support the genocidal regime of Sudan.

Writing in the Weekly Standard, Jonathan Schanzer gives the history behind the relationship. It started with:

The story begins in1989, when an Islamist-inspired coup brought Brigadier Omar al-Bashir to power. Within months, Islamists tied to the National Islamic Front (NIF) held key posts in the government, security services, and other important sectors. As journalist Judith Miller noted, Sudan became “the only Sunni Arab state to have embraced absolutist, militant Islamic rule.” Weapons and oil supplies began to arrive from Iran. The two states, despite the Sunni-Shiite divide, became fast allies.

It didn’t take long for those ties to expand:

In December 1991, Iranian President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani paid an official visit to Khartoum, accompanied by more than 150 Iranian officials. “The Islamic Revolution of Sudan,” he proclaimed, “alongside Iran’s pioneer revolution, can doubtless be the source of movement and revolution throughout the Islamic world.” Iran pledged $17 million in financial aid to Sudan, and arranged for an additional $300 million in Chinese weapons to be delivered there. Iran further pledged one million tons of oil each year.

Schanzer concludes:

The three-way ties over nearly two decades explains the current Hamas and Iranian support for Bashir, and why they ignore the incontrovertible evidence of genocide. This yields two key observations.

First, both Sunni and Shiite Islamists are hypocritical and inconsistent when they proclaim that they seek justice.

More broadly, the Islamist support for the Darfur genocide reveals much about the dangers of Islamism, and must not be ignored.

(h/t Smooth Stone at her new digs)

Perhaps when experts try to assure us that Iran has not thoughts of destroying Israel, they could explain why Iran and its allies have this love for the genocidal regime in Khartoum.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

In the early 80’s Saturday Night Live had a recurring character, Tyrone Green, played by Eddie Murphy who was a “poet” whose most famous work was “Cill my landlord.” In one sketch, Tyrone shows his versatility, he’s not just a poet, he’s a conceptual artist too.

And of course the all white crowd loves him. They shower Tyrone with self indulgent adulation for his work, imbuing it with a non-existent profundity. And he repays their praise with scorn.

The dilettantes see themselves as sophisticates for embracing and understanding the noble savage. But Tyrone is not so noble.

Man #1: Tyrone, now everyone here knows that you’re most famous for writing “Kill My Landlord.” Do you suppose that you could recite that for us?

Tyrone: No! Shut up! I will recite my latest poem that I wrote about you bougie white trash scum. It’s called “I Hate White People” by Tyrone Green.

They want to be enlightened by Tyrone but are too blind to see that the enlightened artist holds them in absolute contempt.

While not 100% analogous, veneration of a similar sort has been expressed for the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish who died a few days ago. Ethan Bronner writing in the New York Times described him:

Mahmoud Darwish, whose searing lyrics on Palestinian exile and tender verse on the human condition led him to be widely viewed as the pre-eminent man of Palestinian letters as well as one of the greatest contemporary Arab poets, died Saturday night in Houston after complications from heart surgery. He was 67.

And while Bronner takes pains to describe Darwish as an artist, no doubt his international acclaim stemmed from his poltics.

Nonetheless, politics played a major role in Mr. Darwish’s life and work. Born to a middle-class Muslim farming family in a village near Haifa in what is today Israel, Mr. Darwish identified strongly with the secular Palestinian national movement long led by Mr. Arafat.

Mr. Zaqtan and Mr. Abed Rabbo said he was the author of Mr. Arafat’s famous words at the United Nations General Assembly in 1974: “I come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter’s gun. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.”

He also wrote the Palestinian declaration of independent statehood in 1988 and served on the executive committee of the P.L.O. But he quit in the early 1990s over differences with the leadership and moved firmly out of the political sphere, lamenting the rise of the Islamist group Hamas and what he viewed as the bankruptcy of Palestinian public life.

But this leaves something unsaid. Why was it that he left the PLO? Bronner emphasizes that he lamented the rise of Hamas, but Darwish wasn’t necessarily such a strong proponent of peace with Israel.

Time Magazine’s Scott MacLeod’s hagiographic obituary includes this information about Darwish:

He moved to the West Bank in 1996 although he had resigned from the PLO to protest Arafat’s Oslo Accords peace agreement with Israel. Darwish, who had grudgingly agreed to sit on Arafat’s Executive Committee, accepted the principle of a two-state solution but doubted–so far, correctly–that the Oslo deal, which he felt was a sell-out to Israel, would lead to a genuine Palestinian state.

Oslo was a sell out to Israel? That claim’s consistent with Hamas. And why has Darwish been correct? MacLeod implies, of course, that Darwish “correctly” didn’t trust Israel.

But is it the fault of Israel or the failure of the PLO and Hamas to create a nation? Just this week Israel made another overly generous offer to the “moderate” Abbas and having been secure in pledges of millions from Kuwait and Israel, he rejected it.

But it wasn’t just Darwish’s objection to Oslo that is troublesome. The was a more basic problem to Darwish that Martin Peretz observes:

But the tender poetry is not what endears him to his public. There is a poem by Darwish, “Those Who Pass Fleeting Words,” not at all so tender but in fact aggressive…

Above I wrote that Ethan Bronner tried to minimize the political aspect of Darwish’s poetry, but what he wrote was extremely political and that was its appeal. Peretz republishes a translation of one of Darwish’s poems:

The time has come for you to go away
And dwell where you wish but do not dwell among us
The time has come for you to go away
And die where you wish but do not die among us

This poem was addressed to Israel. It does not speak of compromise. And this is an important point about Palestinian nationalism. It doesn’t simply seek to enfranchise Palestinians it seeks to disenfranchise Jews. For all of the flowery words that pseudo-intellectuals are using to eulogize Darwish and credit him with giving a voice to exile, they ignore - some intentionally, some not - the extremity of his views and how that extremism is the true voice of Palestinian nationalism.

Like the pretensions of the clueless fans of Tyrone Green they impute a meaning to Darwish’s art that isn’t there.

As Peretz writes about the “olive branch” line that Bronner and others mention:

Nonetheless, Darwish couldn’t keep his poetic priorities in order…or, rather, his political life for a time overwhelmed his poetry. After all, he was the poet who handed pistol-toting Yassir Arafat for his appearance at the U.N. General Assembly the infamous slogan: “I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter’s gun.” Of course, the olive branch was entirely metaphorical and the gun was metaphorical not at all.

That being the case, the line isn’t an expression of conciliation, but a threat.

In the SNL skit, Tyrone Green’s fans are clueless fools who think that Green’s “art” somehow ennobles them. In the case of Mahmoud Darwish, the media people who wrote of his death and his art believe that his poetry somehow romanticized the cause of the Palestinians. While I have little doubt that Darwish’s views represented the Palestinians accurately, it was the Irredentism he expressed that was the basis for his appeal.

In an e-mail Elder of Ziyon summed it up nicely:

Poetry doesn’t make one moderate

Darwish’s fans, for the most part, tried to hide that aspect of his poetry. What they fail to appreciate is that this is precisely why, fifteen years after Oslo there is still no Palestine. Palestinian nationalism is not mainly about the end of an exile, it is mainly about the end of an existing country. It was a sentiment that was accurately captured by the Palestinians’ poet.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.