DANIEL GREENFIELD: THE WEEK THAT WAS PART ONE
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
FEEL THE HATE?
A great deal of attention has been paid to hate-filled protests in front of synagogues by the Westboro Baptist Church or school protests in Beit Shemesh, but in Ann Arbor hate-filled left-wing protests have taken place in front of a synagogue every Sabbath for a decade.
What you are seeing is one of a few photos from Ann Arbor’s Beth Israel Congregation and some of the photos get uglier than this. There has been astoundingly little media commentary on this, though if a right-wing group had been harassing a synagogue every Shabbat for a decade, there would have been four documentaries and eight books out on it by now.
The FEH site dedicated to exposing the protesters is a disturbing look into the mindset of the twisted mentally ill left. Liberal Jewish groups would like you to believe that harassment like this comes only from Neo-Nazis, but the Ann Arbor situation demonstrates that it is at least as likely to come from their own fellow travelers.
Aimee Smith of the Huron Valley Greens Party amplifies her objections to Celebrate Israel Day outside the JCC on May 17, 2009. Though not Muslim, Smith who wears a hijab, scolded the crowd, “Stop pretending you’re from Arabia. Be proud of your European roots.” At a previous JCC event she chanted, “Defecating on children’s drawings will not bring peace.” Smith, who brought her daughter to help shout down the Jewish community event, was her party’s candidate for Congress.
What exactly is the difference between this woman and the loons from the Westboro Baptist Church? Aimee Smith appears to have been wearing the hijab since at least 2003 when she began running for office as a candidate of the Green-Rainbow Party on a platform of protecting Cambridge from the Patriot Act and COINTELPRO.
Despite being endorsed by the Mystic Green Rainbow Coalition, the Palestinian American Congress and Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation, her campaign was sidelined when her campaign manager, Amer Jubran faced deportation for a fake marriage, terrorist ties and assault.
The media studiously ignores people like this or even praises them. You don’t hear the Green Party being classed with Neo-Nazis, even if their members insist on acting the same way.
Or this woman?
One told him, “Jewish prayers should be disrupted. You pray for genocide.” A white-haired woman holding a sign denouncing Israel rushed over to add, “It’s true! It’s true!”
Or this one?
Gloria Harb said she participates because she believes the United States’ political system is corrupted by Jews intent on furthering Israel’s agenda before America’s.
“I’m just one member of the group, and I focus on the American public and breaking the silence,” she said. “I know there are some of us who hold out hope of reaching some of those people in the synagogue, but not me.”
Fun fact. Harb means sword in Arabic. There’s also this tragic story.
On most Saturdays, congregants and passersby will also see Marcia Federbush holding signs. Though the smallest in height and the oldest at 75, Federbush brings some noteworthy stature to the group. In 1988 she was inducted into the Michigan Women’s Hall of Fame for her pioneering work battling gender discrimination in education. She divorced her husband before their 32nd anniversary about a year later. Until about a year ago, her daughter, Laurel, was a mainstay at the Shabbat protests and staunch defender in local media and blogs.
However, she no longer joins them and is now a member of Beth Israel Congregation herself.
“She had an epiphany, of sorts, I guess,” Herskovitz said. “Laurel’s gone to the dark side. She quit the vigils, and voted for McCain.”
Then there is this class act. Sol Metz.
His long white hair and frothy, prolonged beard make Metz hard to miss, and he isn’t hiding from anybody. Somewhat of a throwback from Ann Arbor’s counter-culture and anti-war movements, Metz often spoke his mind on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through frequent letters to the editor submissions to the Ann Arbor News…
Decades later, his own journeys to disputed territories after the second Intifada solidified his desire to take his ex-hippie wares to a new cause.
Though he is now a Quaker, Metz—after a long pause—acknowledges that two of his four children are practicing Jews today and don’t have much respect for his efforts.
It was right before and during that period of transition through the divorce that finances became a stiff challenge, he said. He insists that at Rosemary’s urging, he turned to the local Jewish Federation for help with clothing and other needs for his family.
He said groups like the Federation are what need to be stopped because of the money they raise for Israel. He is convinced the majority goes to military projects and settlements rather than humanitarian causes, despite his own experience with them.
He’s aware of the hypocrisy, but remains unfazed by it.
“That’s fair to say, but I don’t see a big problem with it,” Metz, 66, explained. “The U.S. government helps me too, but I don’t have any problem criticizing them either. I didn’t want the (Federation’s) help and I didn’t think they [his children] needed it.”
I’ve seen these types of people locally. They’re a mix of elderly ex-Commies, professional leftist activists and the fourth wave of college graduates with useless degrees who majored in gender studies and critical race theory. Many of them are mentally ill. Most of them are filled with hate.
During the Bush years, the media embraced these people and their rallies. Just like they embraced OWS which attracts the same type of loons. Except they’re not loons. They’re mainstream figures on the left.
Going back through the years takes us to Aimee Smith’s original appearance at a 2003 rally. Also there was Michael A. Gould-Wartofsky seen here embodying the best of 90’s douchebag fashion.
“There is a war going on in Iraq and a war going on here,” Gould-Wartofsky said. “Harvard is a colony that needs to be liberated.”
The pair protested in song, with Gould-Wartofsky rapping “Drop beats, not bombs” to the rhythm of Ogunnaike’s drum.”
Many Americans might agree that Harvard is a colony that needs to be liberated… but from the likes of Gould-Wartofsky. Today Gould-Wartofsky has improved his fashion sense to the best of 00’s hipster fashion and blogs at the Huffington Post. According to his bio
Michael is an award-winning author from New York City and a MacCracken Fellow in Sociology at New York University. In addition to The Huffington Post, his work has appeared in The Nation, Salon, The Harvard Crimson, Monthly Review, Jewish Currents, and the books Poets Against the War (Nation Books, 2003) and Making War: English Literature and the Invasion of Iraq (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). His writing has received Harvard’s James Gordon Bennett Prize and the New York Times James B. Reston Award. He has also won recognition for his work as an activist, photojournalist, violinist and fiddler. He is currently writing a book about Occupy Wall Street.
…of course he is. And yes The Wart hates Israel. Of course he does. And so I leave you with these deep thoughts from The Wart of Harvard.
Like the other artists, Gould-Wartofsky focused his readings on the topic of homelessness “just like you might write a love poem and get a girl to think of you in a deeper way. You can write a poem about, say, homelessness, and get people to think about that in a deeper way.”
Similarly you can spend a decade harassing a synagogue to get people to think about what the hell is wrong with the left in a deeper way.
The Ann Arbor hate group has apparently managed to disgust even one of its own members so badly that she joined a synagogue and began voting for McCain. Imagine how much it has “radicalized” the people actually in the synagogue.
Now that’s deep.
BORDERLINES
A post at VDare makes the correct point that continuing immigration and a shift in the demographic balance of the country will mean the end of the electability of the Democratic Party. But VDare’s racial focus is also missing an important component that I discussed in my article, “How the Left Wins Elections by Transforming Nations.” I used a similar metaphor, but I pointed out that the transformation isn’t a simple racial one, it’s a cultural one.
The left is creating splinter demographic groups that favor them. These groups include the college educated, single women, gay men and other demos that aren’t immigration based. Stopping or reworking immigration is an important goal, as I discussed in, “Toward a Sustainable Immigration Policy“, but it won’t the war. So long as the left can build coalitions of fragmented groups and use its cultural influences to dramatically reshape minds, higher education being the most obvious example, then there is no single solution.
The only serious counter to the demographic deluge facing Republicans: the Sailer Strategy—which is basically that the GOP should rally to its white base by appealing to its interests. Central to the Sailer Strategy: a time-out on immigration to stop the demographic displacement of whites.
But suppose the GOP takes that racialist approach. It would have to become a whole other kind of party. There are templates for that kind of party already in Europe and the United States, whether it’s Oswald Mosley or Charles Coughlin, and it’s a party with some serious socialism. A free enterprise Republican Party already exists. This would be a party that imposed tariffs, had a ton of a state industries and targeted social benefits. It would in essence be a racialist Democratic Party.
The idea that our choices lie between a Republican Party that exists only to make it easier for China to sell cheap shoddy products at Wal-Mart and a Republican Party that exists only to maintain a hold on its gerrymandered white districts where cheap shoddy products are made by state industries and 40 percent of the population lives on welfare… is not exactly optimistic.
ON THE OTHER HAND
…meet the new Republican. The new New Republican.
A New Republican accepts that our world has changed. He sees America moving from the top-down industrial age of the factory to the bottom-up communications age of the Internet. He sees a more diverse America, with more ingredients in the great racial and ethnic melting pot, women with increasing economic and cultural power, and 4.5 million new “millennial” voters under age 30 annually.
A New Republican sees a more complex, fast-moving society in which we are more highly leveraged, our lives are more intricately structured, and our social institutions are both more sophisticated and more vulnerable. He sees the promise and peril of globalization. He knows we must compete and win in a global economy whose overall wealth is expected to double within the lifetimes of Americans under age 40. A New Republican understands that the global economic frontier stretching before us is exactly the kind of opportunity that American excels at making the most of.
I don’t want to be insulting here, but I imagine that the New Republican reads a lot of Alvin Toffler, has a Twitter account, TED talks on his favorites, and well… what?
Old, top-down, industrial-age schemes, still popular in Washington, excel at enforcing discipline and uniformity, but not at achieving growth or innovation. Assembly lines produce cars, not miraculous cures. Armies march, they don’t invent the iPhone or eBay.
No, major companies invent iPhones. And the iPhone was invented with rigid discipline and uniformity by Apple engineers and designers from Steve Jobs out of plants where rigid discipline is the order of the day and suicide is common.
Let’s not kid ourselves. This isn’t a new age because we get Facebook updates on our iPhones. The factory model still applies. Products are made in factories and even when they’re made in a garage, the garage eventually becomes a factory. Innovation transforms and then becomes routine. And we need to win at that routine, not just in the brilliant engineers who ride ceramic bikes to work, listen to world music and spent their days listening to Steve Jobs yelling that the shape of the iPhone was still wrong.
Don’t get me wrong. I appreciate the invocation of the distributed intelligence of the free market and the greater appeal of such arguments in the era of Wikipedia and Twitter. Those are arguments that we should be making. But it’s also best not to forget that a giant chunk of the Web 2.0 Utopia floats on Wall Street fraud and many of its participants contribute time for free because their other needs are subsidized by the government… one way or another.
Many Americans had hoped President Obama would move the Democratic party into the future. At times, in style and language, candidate Obama seemed to augur a new era — one in which government looked more like the open-source movement and less like the top-down command structure of the Army.
The Obama administration, however, seems to be incapable of promoting any change that diminishes its own power and importance:
I’m all for the reemergence of a libertarian left, but the web isn’t really free and it’s a poor metaphor. For all the romance of the crowd, the internet is slowly becoming more centralized and regulated.
Obama isn’t out of step with the trend, he is in step with the trend. The internet is more Google than it is open source. The key players in it don’t promote any change that diminish their power and importance. If you doubt that, how many of you are using an open source browser. Oh Chrome and Safari piggyback on open source, but that’s it. The only major open source browser, Firefox, has been sinking for a while.
10 years from now the internet as we know it, the one where people can be anonymous, where all sorts of sites that are out of step with world speech codes can thrive, and where it seems like the old hacker ethos still lives, will be much more endangered than it is today. 20 years from now it will be gone along with the computer and any sense of control over the system.
A New Republican might tell young, jobless millennial voters, “I think the best way to grow the economy is bottom-up and organically like Facebook. My opponent, like most Washington insiders, thinks it is top-down like an assembly-line or the army. What do you think?”
Young jobless millennial hate both the government and Facebook, but if they haven’t been paying taxes yet, they probably hate Facebook more. Again, the metaphor is nice, but to young people, both Facebook and the government are creepy institutions that violate their privacy and try to pump them dry while restricting their freedom.
This could cost Democrats the most valuable political real estate they gained in the 2008 election. Without a doubt, the millennial generation Obama inspired is the most empowered generation of Americans in history. They have never been told what to do by anybody.
And this is where the tragic misunderstanding concludes.
People who have never been told what to do by anyone want someone to tell them what to do. There’s a reason why fascism follows anarchy.
And the millennial isn’t empowered. He or she has less empowerment than any previous generation. The millennial school is so rigid and authoritarian that it makes the educational systems of the last 70 years seem like hippie paradise. The millennial has grown up under a government that is in more control of his life than that of any American since the end of slavery.
The millennial has nearly no freedom, but isn’t aware of it, because the word has very little meaning to him. Freedom is an abstract thing that he doesn’t relate to the restrictions imposed on him. The internet is one of the few places where he has freedom and like all citizens of a totalitarian state, when given freedom, he lashes out violently against social norms and grasps for power through makeshift social groups.
The millennial is not the golden hippie child of the open source movement. The open source movement is just hackers doing what hackers have always done. Explore and make neat things that are then exploited by corporations. The millennial lives in the world of the TSA and Zero Tolerance, he still has the right to be angry, but not much else. Like most teenagers in the past, he rebels by conforming to the socially approved rebellion, he believes in easy black and white solutions, and he still wants someone to take care of him. With the collapse of the family, that someone is likely to be the government.
All the proposals in the article will probably play well in Silicon Valley, which has a sizable libertarian contingent, especially among engineers and a few who made it big by betting on their instincts, but Silicon Valley is just an outpost of corporate America. And Corp America loves big government. Many of them don’t like Obama, but they are not fans of bottom up organic solutions or open source systems. They want someone to be in charge and in control of everything.
THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO REASON TO BOMB IRAN, BUT IF WE DO IRAN WILL DESTROY US ALL
Demented leftist Bradley Burston has penned an article so schizophrenic it should be grounds for some kind of diagnosis.
First Burston insists that bombing Iran will usher in armageddon.
Mr. Netanyahu, before you bomb Iran, say goodbye to everyone you know. Say goodbye to everyone you love. You know you won’t be able to protect all of them from the retaliation that will surely come. Everyone you know is a target. Everyone you love is in range.
Some of the rockets with high explosive warheads will get through the missile shield. And even if you and a few of your loved ones are sealed into the most sophisticated shelter yet devised, not one of you is immune. When it’s over, when you get back to the surface, this will be a different country
I’m not sure whether that part was written by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Bradley Burston, but his thesis is that Iran is horrifyingly dangerous. Which is clearly why Netanyahu is absolutely crazy for not wanting Iran to have nuclear weapons.
It won’t matter then, all these arguments we have over why you insist on pursuing this. Whether it was a bluff that went ballistic, or a tragic thirst for a place in history.
After writing 700 words on how Israel will suffer at the hands of Iran’s Mullahs, Burston then acts as if the decision to do something about Iran’s nuclear program is so wholly and incomprehensibly irrational that he can’t even begin to understand it. Cognitive dissonance, you have met your match.
THE QATARI LONG GAME
Unlike European soccer officialdom, Al-Jazeera has a long-term strategy. Indeed, its soccer TV “takeover” is part of a larger trend. Qatar, where Al-Jazeera is based, beat out the U.S. two years ago in bidding to host the 2022 World Cup. As a result, the World Cup will be played during the summer in the desert. As I wrote at the time, the decision to hold play the world championship in Qatar is perhaps the most appalling and corrupt in the history of sports.
Recently, the Qatar Investment Authority took control of Paris Saint-Germain. It has already spent roughly $200 million in transfer fees for players to strengthen its roster, an ungodly amount in any league but especially in the relatively low-rent French Ligue 1. And in Spain, Barcelona agreed to a five-year, 170 million euro (then $225 million) sponsorship deal to wear the Qatar Foundation logo on its famous blue and red jerseys.
…that’s an excerpt from Power Line’s Paul Mirengoff and it’s part of some much bigger developments. Qatar is becoming the new Saudi Arabia. It played a major role in orchestrating the so-called Arab Spring, in pressuring the West into attacking Libya and is pushing hard for an upcoming war on Syria.
Sports is war by other means and it’s a vehicle for power and propaganda. Here’s more of the long game.
A Qatari government investment fund on Friday said it had reached a deal with Spanish company Ferrovial to buy 20 percent of the company that operates London’s Heathrow, Stansted and other British airports.
And still more…
Qatar was the top sovereign wealth buyer of European property in the last 12 months, spending 3.5 billion euros ($4.3 billion) on eight deals including the London Olympic athlete’s village and a mall on Paris’ Champs Elysees, data from a research firm showed.
For Qatar, the world’s biggest exporter of liquefied natural gas (LNG), that spending during the year to mid-August equals only about six weeks of revenue from its LNG exports, according to Reuters calculations.
And guess who is subsidizing the Muslim Brotherhood state of Egypt that it helped bring to power.
With a plan to deposit $2 billion in Egypt’s central bank, Qatar is becoming one of the top financial backers of the struggling country
…while plotting to do the same thing in Syria. But back to soccer…
Qatar’s Mohamed bin Hammam has insisted he will clear his name after FIFA’s ethics committee opened investigation proceedings against him. The former Asian Football Confederation president was handed a lifetime ban from football last year after being found guilty of bribery by a FIFA ethics committee panel during his campaign for the presidency of the sport’s world governing body.
.
LIBERALS ARE HEROES, NAVY SEALS ARE COWARDS
Media Matters’ Eric Boehlert called the Navy SEALS objecting to Obama’s leakapalooza, cowards. Clearly the SEALS are cowards. They don’t have the guts to do what Media Matters and its man, Zero Hussein have done, like sit in a room, watch while Navy SEALS go into Pakistan and then take credit for it.
We all know who the real heroes are. They’re the guys manufacturing talking points for six figure salaries at Media Matters.
AN UNFORGIVABLE SIN
Muslim groups expressed outrage on Thursday over plans to hold a wine festival in the Israeli city of Beer Sheva, which is due to take place next month in a courtyard outside a building formerly used as a mosque.
The southern branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel has said the festival constitutes an “unforgiveable sin” and is “a harsh blow to Muslim sensitivities,” according to Israeli media reports.
… the Islamic Movement in 48 Palestine is just the local version of Hamas which is just the local version of the Muslim Brotherhood, which considers mass murder fine, but a wine festival in a courtyard outside a building which was once a mosque… now that’s an unforgivable sin.
Speaking as a Jew, I’m no religiously offended by a pork festival in a courtyard next to someplace that once used to be a synagogue. I am offended by mass murderers. That is an unforgivable sin.
MATTER OVER MIND
Look, take a revolution that puts the Communists in charge, follow that up with the compulsive wiping out of the intellectual classes in their millions by Stalin, add in the massive losses in WWII, and then pile on the slow seepage of brains to the West during the Cold War…. What have you got left? A nation of increasingly stupid people whose gene pool is about two inches deep.
…also add on a system where the only line of work that rewards ingenuity and innovation is the criminal profession. Russia has been a totalitarian state for 99 percent of the time. It also has some of the most lethal, innovative and organized criminals anywhere. And some of the most passionate dissidents.
In Russia, intelligence means that you are either a vital but unrecognized part of the machinery that keeps everything from collapsing, one of the dissidents who oppose the system or one of the criminal classes who feed on everyone. Mostly the odds are good that you left the country sometime between 1981 and 2011. If you came back, it was with a second passport from the UK, Canada or Sweden and you spend as little time in the country as possible. If you’re really smart then you got out in the last few years. If you aren’t, then you’re still investing in construction companies that aren’t building anything and hoping your kids don’t end up at one of those flash mobs protesting Putin.
America and Europe are full of Russians. People rarely leave a country in such numbers because the country is a good place to be. Mass immigration is a warning sign that there’s something wrong with the country. Sometimes it’s relatively benign things,sometimes it’s big things.
Comments are closed.
