Disney princes in 'Snow White,' 'Sleeping Beauty' are sex offenders, nutty professor says

A kiss is sexual assault? It may be unwelcome and it could be an assault but is it a sexual assault?

Disney’s fairytale princes are sexual predators, according to a Japanese gender studies and sociology professor.

Kazue Muta, an Osaka University professor and author of “Sir, That Love is Sexual Harassment!” a book on workplace sexual harassment, argued in December that princes from “Snow White” and “Sleeping Beauty” portray “quasi-compulsive obscene sexual acts on an unconscious partner.”

In other words, the feminist academic activist argues such fairytales allow sexual violence.

In a Dec. 11 tweet, Muta accused the princes of sexual assault with a link to a news story of a real case where a man was arrested for kissing a sleeping woman on a train en route to Osaka.

The translation reads: “When you think rationally about 'Snow White' and 'Sleeping Beauty,' that tell of a ‘princess being woken up by the kiss of a prince,’ they are describing sexual assault on an unconscious person. You might think I’m ruining the fantasy of it all, but these stories are promoting sexual violence and I would like everyone to be aware of it.”

Muta’s comment brought a firestorm of reaction – support and criticism.

In the Disney versions of “Sleeping Beauty” the prince is led to kiss Princess Aurora by the fairies with the belief that he can cure her of her napping curse, “not motivated by his own pervy will,” SoraNews24 pointed out in Japan Today.

While the “Snow White” version features a prince kissing an unconscious Snow White, SoraNews24 argues, Disney tries to “soften the act by establishing a prior relationship between them in which she and the prince fall in love at first sight.” (Also, Snow White had eaten a cursed apple and the prince's kiss wakes her from a "sleeping death.")

After the criticism was picked up by Yahoo! Japan, Muta responded with an article for the Women’s Action Network.

Muta argues that if someone doesn’t look at the fairytales critically, they are essentially saying sexual harassment is permissible.

“There were many critical replies that state ‘Because the princess and prince lived happily ever after in the end, there is a presumptive consent regarding the kiss, so there’s no problem,’” Muta wrote. “However, this understanding of it is actually dangerous. This kind of thinking fabricates the mindset of ‘the ends justify the means,’ and to what extent does this allow sexual violence to occur?”

She expounded on the tweet, arguing that beyond the Disney versions, and within Japanese fairytales, the male figures kiss “without confirming consent,” so they’re actually committing sexual crimes.

Muta adds that many violent sexual crimes seem as if they “mimicked” the actions of male protagonists in fairytales and connected her argument to the #MeToo hashtag, highlighting sexual harassment which has been found to be especially rampant in Hollywood.

“Under such circumstances, changing society's recognition of sexual violence is not an easy thing to do," Muta said. "However, we must say these things loudly and boldly."

SOURCE





Farmers' markets are racist, more nutcase professors say

Two California professors are criticizing farmers’ markets for causing “environmental gentrification” in which “habits of white people are normalized.”

San Diego State University geography professors Pascale Joassart-Marcelli and Fernando J. Bosco contend that farmers’ markets are “white spaces” oppressing minorities in a chapter for "Just Green Enough," an environmental anthology focused on urban development.

Environmental gentrification is defined as a process where “environmental improvements lead to … the displacement of long-term residents,” according to the anthology.

The professors, as reported by Campus Reform, say farmers’ markets are “exclusionary” because locals cannot “afford the food and/or feel excluded from these new spaces.”

The SDSU professors, who teach classes like “Geography of Food” and “Food Justice,” argue that “farmers’ markets are often white spaces where the food consumption habits of white people are normalized.”

While such markets are typically set up to help combat “food deserts” in low-income and minority communities, the academics argue that they instead “attract households from higher socio-economic backgrounds, raising property values and displacing low-income residents and people of color.”

“The most insidious part of this gentrification process is that alternative food initiatives work against the community activists and residents who first mobilized to fight environmental injustices and provide these amenities but have significantly less political and economic clout than developers and real estate professionals,” the professors argue.

They claim that, while “curbing gentrification is a vexing task,” the negative externalities of “white habitus” formed at farmers’ markets can be managed through “slow and inclusive steps that balance new initiatives and neighborhood stability to make cities ‘just green enough.’”

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Another media double standard -- on sexual misconduct

Bill Donahue

On December 8th, the Boston Globe published an article citing some past and recent examples of sexual misconduct among its employees. There were two curious things about the piece: the timing and the content.

The article was posted online after work on a Friday, around 6:00 p.m. This was no mistake: bleeding out bad news late on a Friday is done purposely so few readers will notice it. The next day the article appeared in the newspaper; Saturday is known for having the lowest circulation of the week.

The content was just as cute: Boston Globe editor Brian McGrory refused to name names—he protected the "privacy" of the sexual predators, thus adopting a "confidentiality policy" for the Globe that his newspaper found unconscionable when invoked by the Boston archdiocese.

On December 12th, I wrote a news release blasting McGrory for his duplicity; we provided our subscribers with email contact information at the Globe. On December 18, I struck again, detailing many examples of Globe editorials savaging the Catholic Church for following the same policy it had adopted all along as its own. We sent my statement to over 100 editors and reporters at the newspaper.

That same day, I discussed this matter with Laura Ingraham on her Fox News Show, "The Ingraham Angle." That was a Monday.

Late on the following Thursday, McGrory apologized online for not saying who the most recent sexual abuser was. He identified the man and then tried to walk away from the issue. He never fingered all of the other predators known to him, nor did he identify the guilty who worked at the Globe before his time. Surely the Globe keeps personnel records—it demanded the Boston archdiocese turn over its files. So why not the Globe's?

Why were none of these abusers reported to the authorities? Sexual harassment in the workplace is illegal in Massachusetts, and that includes verbal, as well as physical, offenses. Oh, yes, McGrory's apology to readers of the newspaper's edition appeared on Friday, December 22, the last workday—many were off—before Christmas.

The Catholic Church has long been trashed for the way it handled the problem of sexual misconduct, but the media have said virtually nothing about the Boston Globe's duplicity. Is that because its competitors do not want to open up a can of worms?

We normally call it a cover up when those who work in a company fail to come clean about wrongdoing. What do we call it when almost an entire profession covers for its own? Journalism?

SOURCE






PBS Broadcasts Crusade Myths for the Holiday Season

That the crusades were a RESPONSE to the invasion of ancient Christian lands by Muslims no Leftist or Muslim seems able to admit

"The advertising for the new film" The Sultan and the Saint "suggests it presents revisionist history in line with the modernist ecumenical agenda," wrote in 2016 Dr. Benjamin J. Vail (OFS), an American Secular Franciscan.

The finished film, shown to this author and others last April, thoroughly vindicated Vail, and is now offering hackneyed Crusade myths to the public via PBS, which broadcast the film December 26 and now offers it for online viewing.

Focusing on the 1219 encounter between St. Francis of Assisi and Sultan Al-Malik al-Kamil during the Fifth Crusade, the film reflects popular falsehoods about the Crusades accepted even by President Barack Obama.

Ignoring reality, the PBS film website declares that the "film sheds light on the crusades origins of dehumanizing rhetoric towards non-Europeans and non-Christians" that "resulted in four generations of escalating conflict." Falsely suggesting that current global hostilities involving Muslims result from insufficient dialogue, the website declares that the film "inspires solutions for the negative atmosphere we find ourselves in today."

PBS' online portrayal of Fifth Crusade historical figures is equally fallacious, such as in the statement that St. Francis wanted "to oppose the bloodshed of the Fifth Crusade." Meanwhile, crusader commander John of Brienne has base motives in PBS' description: "Like many who were motivated to join the Crusades, John might have thought he could improve his lot and gain land, nobility and fame in the Holy Land." At the website of the film's pro-Islam producer, Unity Productions Foundation (UPF), Cardiff University professor and film expert Helen Nicholson cynically states that "for these people, the Crusade is a gift from God."

Nicholson appears in the film alongside journalist Paul Moses, author of The Saint and the Sultan:  The Crusades, Islam, and Francis of Assisi's Mission of Peace, and his prior statements clearly show his influence upon the film. In various 2013 book presentations, he presented Francis as a pacifist, as someone who "quietly opposed the Crusade," and as someone who "never spoke in a disparaging way about Islam or Muslims." By contrast, Francis' era was a "time when the church had become corrupt and violent" and knew how to "cherry pick through scripture" in order to find "supposed Biblical grounds" for the Crusades.

While Francis appears in Moses' book presentations as out of character for a crusading Christendom, supposedly al-Kamil's "actions show him to be a good Muslim." The sultan "reflected Islamic traditions, including respect for Christian holiness, and also his constant pursuit of alternatives to war." Referencing Saladin, the famed Muslim leader during the Third Crusade, Moses argued in a December 20 interview that the sultan's benign behavior "came straight out of Islamic teachings, which the sultan, a nephew of Saladin, knew well."

The film confirms the 2016 suspicions of Vail, who noted that the "film's advertising implies that the crusades were evil both in intent and in practice," a "common misconception used as a slur against the Church." Leading Crusades historian Thomas F. Madden, for example, has contradicted Nicholson.  The "crusading knights were generally wealthy men with plenty of their own land in Europe," and the "Crusades were notoriously bad for plunder."

As Madden elaborates, the Crusades were not the brainchild of an ambitious pope or rapacious knights but a response to more than four centuries of conquests in which Muslims had already captured two-thirds of the old Christian world.  At some point, Christianity as a faith and a culture had to defend itself or be subsumed by Islam.

The Crusades were a Christian reaction to centuries of Islamic jihadist aggression that directly targeted the Catholic Church and Francis' followers. Frank M. Rega, a Secular Franciscan and author of Francis of Assisi and the Conversion of the Muslims, has noted that an army of 11,000 Muslims sacked Rome itself in 846 and desecrated the tombs of saints Peter and Paul. Rega's fellow Secular Franciscan Vail noted that Muslims later in 1240 attacked the Franciscan Poor Clare monastery in Assisi, which the order's founder herself, St. Clare, successfully defended.

Contrary to Moses' claims, Rega has observed that "unreserved support of the crusade had become normative in the Order" of St. Francis. Rega's book noted Francis' praise for "holy martyrs died fighting for the Faith of Christ." Vail also observed that "one leader of later crusades was St. Louis IX, the king of France, a Franciscan tertiary who is now patron saint of the Secular Franciscan Order."

Francis personally reflected such sentiments when he crossed the front between the Christians and Muslims fighting around Damietta, Egypt, on a personal evangelization mission to the sultan. Rega noted Francis' words to the sultan: "It is just that Christians invade the land you inhabit, for you blaspheme the name of Christ and alienate everyone you can from His worship."

Francis' frank words reflect that he "was fully prepared for martyrdom" and initially experienced rough treatment in Muslim hands, as the film portrays. As Rega's book has noted, al-Kamil had vowed that "anyone who brought him the head of a Christian should be awarded with a Byzantine gold piece."

Contrary to Moses' assertions, Francis' behavior exemplified the common practice of his order in which friars often sought martyrdom by direct rhetorical challenges to Islam. Reflecting the negative judgment of Catholic saints upon Islam throughout history, Francis in Rega's book tells the sultan that "if you die while holding to your law [sharia], you will be lost; God will not accept your soul."

As Notre Dame University Professor Lawrence Cunningham has observed, Francis "saw himself and his friars as Knights of the Round Table fighting a spiritual crusade."

Meanwhile the film juxtaposes Crusader atrocities like the 1099 sack of Jerusalem with al-Kamil's often tolerant behavior in yet another cinematic distortion of the past. Following Moses' lead, the film presents such tolerance as the logical result of Islamic doctrine, but the biography of Moses' hero Saladin tells a different story. As Crusades historian Andrew Holt has noted, "[o]ften Saladin could be just as brutal as the less noble minded military rulers of his era, but those actions are typically not highlighted in modern accounts."

Saladin's atrocities include the 1169 slaughter of 50,000 disarmed Sudanese soldiers in Cairo, Egypt, in breach of a surrender agreement after he had suppressed their rebellion. Following his 1187 decisive defeat of Crusaders in the Holy Land at the Battle of Hattin, Saladin had executed with religious ritual some 230 captured Knights Templar and Knights of St. John Hospitallers. After Hattin, Saladin considered sacking Jerusalem like the Crusaders before him, but its desperate defenders warned him that without a pardon guarantee they would fight to the bitter end and destroy the city's Muslim holy sites. He therefore relented and ransomed the city's population, but an estimated 8,000 could not pay and became slaves, among whom the women suffered mass rape, a practice common among armies of the era.

The film simply offers no context for its portrayal of a brutal era in which warfare rules held that besieged cities that did not surrender like Jerusalem in 1099 were subject to massacre and pillage. Muslims later repaid the Crusaders in kind during the 1291 sack of Acre, and the era's Muslim armies often committed atrocities against surrendered city populations in violation of pledged mercy. By contrast, some evidence suggests to Holt that crusaders during the First Crusade that captured Jerusalem refrained from the common medieval practice of raping captive women.

In the midst of such violence, al-Kamil presents an appealing figure in the film, yet he might not have been an ordinary Muslim. Concurring with Moses, Cunningham has noted that when Francis went to al-Kamil, ultimately the "caliph did receive him kindly; he may have been a Sufi - a Muslim mystic - who want to identify mystically with the love of Allah." Al-Kamil "may have had an instinctual sympathy for Francis, whom he probably saw as a holy man." Al-Kamil also had a history of tolerance toward his Coptic Christian subjects in Egypt, although even this leniency had its limits under repressive Islamic dhimmi norms for non-Muslims.

The attention given by Catholics like Moses to Sufis like al-Kamil has a tradition, the Catholic writer and former academic William Kilpatrick has observed: "To the extent that they are interested in Islam, Catholic thinkers tend to be focused on its mystical, Sufi manifestations rather than on its mainstream, legalistic, and supremacist side." Many Catholics like Francis' namesake, the current Pope Francis, want "to put a Christian face on Islam."

Yet Catholic writer John Zmirak has analyzed respectively the doctrines of Islam and Christianity's founders to demonstrate that "ISIS Are to Muhammad What Franciscans Are to Jesus." No celluloid interfaith, multicultural agitprop from PBS can change these facts by repackaging shopworn canards about Christianity for the Christmas season. The question remains for a forthcoming article, what is the nature of the people at UPF and its associates who helped produce the delusion of The Sultan and the Saint?

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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