I continue to think that the volume of War Against/On Christmas items thrown up by the Google news search engine is heavier than last year.

Not from the MSM of course. There the subject is been declared taboo. And even in the local press factual items are more commonly found in the letters and comment threads – for instance this letter in the Muncie, Indiana Star Press published today:

Last year I counted four songs that even referenced Christ at the Muncie schools’ annual Christmas sing. This year it was less than that. But sadly, many won’t take the time to notice. Growing up in Muncie, I can remember when this city contributed to the spirit and celebration of Christ and Christmas, from the annual Christmas displays to former Mayor Jim Carey speaking as mayor on Christmas. I have not heard our current mayor say a word about Christmas publicly in a prayer for any event.

(There is, of course, also nothing in The National Review, where the War Against Christmas competition was started by Peter Brimelow some 15 years ago. They formally fled the field in 2006. In fact this year there seems to have been a further cut-back on Christmas references generally – something of a reversion to the early years of this decade. No doubt having Obama on the hook in Afghanistan, the controlling NeoCon faction feels it can stint on paying the Christian levies.)

The provincial press is running a number of “On the one hand/On the other hand/On the third hand” pieces which could be generously interpreted as acknowledging and protesting (very timidly) against the repression of Christmas. An example from Colorado Springs is OUR VIEW: A perfect time for ‘Merry Christmas’ Wayne Laugesen, editorial page editor, for the editorial board The Gazette December 19,2009

By saying “Merry Christmas,” one is thoughtful and inclusive, wishing cheer to anyone stable enough to accept kind words…Those who consider “Happy Holidays” an affront to Christians may need help. Likewise, for non-Christians who take “Merry Christmas” as an affront. To react negatively to a Christmas wish is to insult Christians…

(VDARE.com readers might like to participate in the vote about “saying “Merry Christmas” to strangers” at the lower right of this editorial.)

So far the most ingenious stratagem Anti-Christmas forces have produced this year is to publicize outfits like the Advent Conspiracy, effectively telling Christmas supporters that unless they observe the festival in an extreme and ascetic way, their objections are somehow illegitimate. A leader in this ploy has been Peace on Earth in Our Time By Christopher Beam Slate Dec 17, 2009.

Of course this assertion is extremely intrusive and objectionable. Who would suggest to Jews that only if they observe the High Holy Days in the manner of the Hasidim may they have the event at all?

The Beam article, while irritatingly gloating over the fruits of eliminating MSM discussion of Christmas repression, does have some useful information - for instance noting Focus on the Family’s enterprising store-rating StandForChristmas.com.

But this effort to dictate to the friends of Christmas how they should observe the occasion must be forthrightly rejected. The Christmas season is a broad cultural, social and (dare one say?) ethnic event. Details differ. There have always been Christian leaders complaining about this. But when they join in the repression efforts, whatever their motives, how different are they from the famed Kapos of the Concentration Camps?

Peter Brimelow will discuss “The War Against Christmas” Sunday night at 10:30 p.m. ET on the nationally syndicated Bill Cunningham Show. The program can be streamed here.

In London, a Muslim chef who had sued his employers for forcing him to handle “unclean” pork products was smacked down when he was discovered to be a willing bacon chomper himself. Hasanali Khoja thought he could get on the often lucrative gravy train of lawyering up with Islo-lawsuits for big money shakedowns (e.g. the bogus flying imams case).

[Muslim police chef defeated in 'bacon roll' tribunal faces £75,000 legal bill, Daily Mail, December 20, 2009]

A Muslim chef who lost a claim of religious discrimination against Scotland Yard after complaining he was forced to cook sausages and bacon faces a legal bill of more than £75,000.

Hasanali Khoja accused the Metropolitan Police of failing to consider his Islamic beliefs when he was asked to handle pork products as a catering manager at a police station.

The £23,000-a-year chef claimed suggestions by his bosses that he should wear gloves and use tongs left him ’stressed and humiliated’. Muslims are banned from eating pork under Islamic law.

But Mr Khoja, 62, lost his claim in May after a police employee told an employment tribunal how she saw Mr Khoja eat bacon rolls and sausages.

The Metropolitan Police Authority (MPA) has now won a ruling ordering Mr Khoja to pay its costs, which total at least £76,200. In its costs claim, the Met said Mr Khoja ‘knew that he had asked for a bacon roll two or three times for personal consumption before bringing his claim and throughout the conduct of his claim’.

In fact, lying is part of Islamic culture. Not only do many Muslim immigrants hail from totalitarian countries (like Saudi Arabia) where occasional dissimulation is a wise strategy, Islam itself declares that lying to infidels is cool in the service of Allah (known as taqiyya). How easy for that attitude to slide over into the area of personal gain.

This case is yet another example that Muslim cultures are incompatible with our values, and Islamic immigration is therefore a big mistake. The Judeo-Christian scriptures condemn lying rather strongly.

Plus, we have plenty of homegrown thieves and liars (on display daily in Washington), and don’t need to import additional lying weasels from abroad.

The photograph below, courtesy of Brenda Walker’s post, comes from the LA Times story, California’s unemployment rate shrinks - but so does the number of jobs. It’s from the Glendale Unemployment Office, and I didn’t recognize the characters in the third line. I knew they weren’t Cyrillic, Arabic or Hmong, and it didn’t seem likely that they’d be Klingon.

What group, I asked myself, is large enough and unemployed enough in Glendale to merit this trilingualism? It turns out to be the Armenians.

While Armenians from before the 1924 pause are totally assimilated–consider Ara Parseghian, Aram Bakshian, and Mark Krikorian–the more recent Armenian immigrants aren’t assimilated at all.

William Saroyan’s parents weren’t demanding Armenian language signs in the unemployment office, because in 1908, there were no unemployment offices, and immigrants who were unable to support themselves could be deported as a public charge.

Now Glendale, CA, has the third largest Armenian population of any city outside Armenia itself, after Moscow and Los Angeles.

Tina, one of Larry Auster’s readers writes,

“I am a simple school bus driver. Here is a conversation I heard. Last year we had an Iranian girl who loudly proclaimed, when the school was in its Patriotic Songs Celebration (’This Land Is Your Land,’ etc.): ‘I am not an American, I am a Muslim.’

This was done on the bus so all could hear.

This is what they feel, deep down. They don’t think like us, they lie without compunction, they want us dead or out of the way, because they are not fools like the Propositional Nationalists….”

Muslims, Not Americans, View from the Right, December 19, 2009.

The New York Times Magazine’s December perennial, “The Year in Ideas,” had a bit of an off year in 2009. For example:

Black Quarterbacks Are Underpaid

When Rush Limbaugh tried and failed to join the clubby ranks of National Football League owners this year, his past comments came back to haunt him, none more so than his assessment of the Philadelphia Eagles star Donovan McNabb — namely that the news media overrated McNabb because he is black and that he was simply not “that good of a quarterback.” But according to the economists David J. Berri and Rob Simmons, Limbaugh might have been giving public voice to what the owners who spurned him think privately.

(more…)

Arnold Kling writes:

My position on breaking up banks generates questions from two groups. Libertarians ask, how can I justify breaking up private sector institutions? Naive liberals ask, why is this policy not embraced by our political leaders?

My answer to both relates to what I call the Harvard-Goldman filter.

The Harvard-Goldman filter works like this.

1. To get into a position of power, you have to pass through a filter. The easiest way to show that you can pass through the filter is to go to Harvard and then work for Goldman.

2. If you do not go to Harvard and work for Goldman, then you have to show that you can get along with people who did.

3. The best way to show that you can get along with people who pass the Harvard-Goldman filter is to show that you believe in applying the Harvard-Goldman filter.

Why was Tim Geithner regarded as such an obvious, in fact necessary, choice to be Treasury Secretary? Because he satisfies the Harvard-Goldman filter, particularly point (3). He is not going to bring people from the wrong social caste into the policymaking arena.

Kling says later:

A point that I keep making about higher education is that it is, like the Harvard-Goldman filter, a form of recursive credentialism. To get certain jobs, you need certain credentials. And the most important credential of all is that you must signal your support for credentialism.