http://www.nationalreview.com/article/370095/progressivism-kills-kevin-d-williamson There are many horrific stories to be told about the implosion of Detroit, once the nation’s most prosperous city, today its poorest. There is the story of its corrupt public institutions, its feckless leaders, its poisonous racial politics, its practically nonexistent economy, the riots that have led to its thrice being occupied by federal […]
http://www.nationalreview.com/node/370056/print
Editor’s Note: The following is Jonah Goldberg’s weekly “news”letter, the G-File.
Dear Reader (Including the growing number of you who don’t want this “news”letter to be a safe place where you can share things),
Here’s something I don’t say everyday: Capitalism ain’t all that.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m still the artist behind the spoken-word album, Capitalism Is My Bag, Baby. But here’s the problem. Because most people on the right love and respect capitalism and pretty much everyone on the right feels the very real need to defend capitalism from the Occupiers, technocrats, sans-culottes, nudgers, equalizers, faux pragmatists, and other members of the Social Justice League, we don’t spend enough time focusing on the limitations of capitalism.
I say “limitations” rather than “faults,” because limitations aren’t necessarily faults. This is a really important distinction that is sometimes lost on people. A car that can’t go more than five miles per hour is faulty. A car that can’t drive through solid rock is simply a car. Water has no protein. But few would say that water isn’t essential or good. Water does what it does, but it can’t do things water can’t do. Air is awesome. I use it every day. I’m using it right now! But if ever there was a good illustration of how “necessary” and “sufficient” aren’t the same thing, air is it.
And so it is with capitalism. Okay, technically we don’t need capitalism the way we need air or water. Cavemen didn’t have it. And, as a result, they ate a lot of grubs, scraped their dangly bits on rocks while running away from large hungry animals, and usually died a violent or painful death at a young age. The North Koreans don’t have capitalism and many North Koreans would count themselves lucky to live like cavemen. In fact, much of the West didn’t have it, in a meaningful sense, until around 1700 at the earliest. And that’s why it stunk to live in 1700 — literally and figuratively — for a lot of people.
“Israel Hayom”, January 31, 2014, http://bit.ly/1dSaLHX
The assumption that Israel must accept the Kerry Plan as a basis for negotiations with the Palestinian Authority – lest it risk a rift with the US – should be assessed in light of the full context of US-Israel strategic cooperation, the imploding Arab Street, the unique foundations and nature of US-Israel ties, the US political system, the ineffectiveness of prior US plans and Israel’s own security requirements.
US-Israel strategic cooperation transcends the Palestinian issue. Thus, despite the 66-year-old disagreement, between the two Administrations, about the ways and means to resolve the Palestinian issue, strategic cooperation has catapulted to unprecedented heights.
Notwithstanding Arab talk – but based on the Arab walk – the Palestinian issue does not preoccupy the attention of Arab policy-makers, does not significantly impact vital US interests, and does not play a key role in destabilizing the Middle East, as reaffirmed by the tectonic Arab Tsunami, which is unrelated to Israel or the Palestinian issue.
Therefore, the Palestinian issue has been superseded by regional and global mutual threats, interests and benefits, shaping the increasingly two-way-street mutually-beneficial US-Israel agenda: the US supply of critical military systems to Israel; the Israeli battle-tested laboratory, which enhances the performance of US military systems and the US defense industries; the joint development of ballistic, space, UAV, cyber and other critical technologies; Israeli innovations upgrade the competitive edge of US high tech industries; Israel provides intelligence of Iran’s nuclear threat and Islamic terrorism on the US mainland and beyond; Israel trains US elite units in countering-terrorism and urban warfare, and shares battle lessons, shaping US battle tactics; Israel’s power-projection deters rogue regimes, which threaten pro-US Arab regimes such as Jordan and Saudi Arabia; etc..
Former Spanish Prime Minister, Jose Maria Aznar, at an HJS in the House of Commons on Thursday.
http://henryjacksonsociety.org/
“We in the EU will be unable to emerge from our present crises safe, prosperous, innovative and influential without strong state-to-state relations at home, and healthy alliances with strategic partners in our neighbourhood. We must start by acknowledging and enhancing our critical strategic relationship with the State of Israel.”
“The Surprising Case of Israel and the EU”
When Jose Maria Aznar founded the Friends of Israel (FOI) initiative in 2010 it was as a concerted effort by non-Jewish leaders to re-right the balance in world opinion towards Israel. At a time of boycotts, divestment, sanctions and general de-legitimisation of the Jewish state, FOI put together a group of high level leaders to argue the case for sanity and indeed morality.
The former Spanish Prime Minister was joined by Nobel Peace Prize winner and HJS Trustee, Lord Trimble, former Speaker of the Italian Parliament Marcello Pera, former US ambassador to the UN John Bolton as well as historian and HJS academic advisory board member Andrew Roberts among others. Their aim was to speak on a peer-to-peer level with European, South American and other world leaders in private as well as speak to all open-minded citizens of the world in order to right a great wrong.
http://politicalmavens.com/
So the Dalton School has decided that satire is not an acceptable form of comment in their rarified academic cloister. After getting some flak from students who watched “CSA: The Confederate State of America,” a pseudo-documentary of the U.S. had the south been victorious in the civil war – the administration immediately apologized for its insensitivity. Rather than using the opportunity to teach the unique, historic value of satire in the arts, the school chose to beg for mercy from the parents of those wounded students. How many of the parents and students have been to see “The Book of Mormon” and laughed comfortably through its skewering of Mormons? How many of the parents also went to see “The Producers,” making light of Hitler and the Nazis? Both of these plays were award-winning box-office mega-hits geared to the same demographic group that sends its children to New York’s elite private schools. Yet the doyens of our politically correct culture have deemed it ok to spoof certain topics but not others. Slavery is sacrosanct though genocide is not. Women and gays are; white men not. Palestinians and Muslims protected; Israelis and Jews – fair game.
Dalton is just a small speck in our politically correct world. Another guardian of our selective morality is Oxfam International, a collection of aid groups purporting to combat hunger and poverty everywhere – except the west bank of the Jordan river where an Israeli company operates a factory with 900 workers, 500 of whom are Palestinian. They work alongside Israelis, earn the same salary and receive the same benefits except for one extra – there is a mosque on the premises exclusively for their religious needs. The workers are happy to have well-paid jobs and by their reportage, get along well with each other. This integration is exactly what we westerners profess to value, and for some political thinkers, economic cooperation is the key to peace in the middle east. But for the holier than thou Oxfam, SodaStream is a business operating on occupied territory. Despite the enormous advantage of a company providing 500 workers with an excellent livelihood – Oxfam prefers that we boycott any Jewish employers operating from these disputed areas to the logical conclusion of unemployment for the very population they are pretending to help.
http://us2.campaign-archive1.com/?u=47498a2e1ad97dd3d09ae19c5&id=ad7b5f1eb5&e=ce445aaf82
The original of this article was published in the New English Review.
Presented at Ahavath Torah Synagogue, Stoughton, Massachusetts January 9, 2014 and at Children of Holocaust Survivors in Las Angeles, California, January 21,2014 (the video displayed here below)
Introduction The Abrahamic Fallacy is the belief that Abraham is a figure of unity for Islam, Christianity and Judaism. The phrase “Abrahamic Religions” has become very popular as a cover-term for these three faiths. It is particularly popular among Jewish and Christian progressives on the one hand, and Muslim apologists on the other. The term implies a kind of unity or brotherhood across the three faiths. More broadly, the term “Abrahamic religions” has become the standard term, both in comparative religions and popular parlance, to refer to the three monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, in contrast, for example, to Indian religions and East Asian religions. In essence the claim embodied by the expression is that Abraham is “shared” as a point of common origin by all three monotheistic religions, and naming him as their shared identity is meant to signal that these three faiths are linked together in some kind of theological continuity. The expression is in fact used in a variety of ways. Adam Dodds points out that for some, it is simply a cover term for the grouping of Islam, Christianity and Judaism, a kind of functional shorthand without any intended theological content. Others – perhaps the majority of writers – use the phrase to imply some degree of “historical and theological commonality,” perhaps unspecified. For still others the term implies an intimate unity, namely that it is one and the same God who has authored the Bible and the Qur’an, and the same eternal message is presented in both books. But is the construct of “Abrahamic religion” helpful, or quite the opposite, a bad idea? And specifically, is the multi-faith Abraham the same person found in the pages of the Torah, or is he merely a product of wishful thinking?
http://www.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/archives/001427.html * Brendan O’Neill, (London) Daily Telegraph: “Ever since she was signed up as the face of the Israeli company SodaStream, Scarlett Johansson has had a tsunami of flak from campaigners who think that buying Israeli stuff, working with Israeli academics or attending Israeli theatre performances is the very worst thing a human being could […]
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Into-the-Fray-My-prediction-coming-true-with-chilling-precision-339955
On Saturday night, the boycott of Israel gained an impressive new level of mainstream recognition in this country. Channel 2 News, easily the most watched, most influential news show here, ran a heavily promoted piece… on the boycott in its 8 p.m. primetime program. The piece was remarkable not only for its length and prominence, but even more so because it did not demonize the boycott movement, it didn’t blame the boycott on anti-Semitism. Instead, top-drawer reporter Dana Weiss treated the boycott as an established, rapidly growing presence that sprang up because of Israel’s settlement policy and whose only remedy is that policy’s reversal.
– Larry Derfner, Boycott goes primetime in Israel, January 19.
There is, in fact, a groundswell of “elite” (read: Leftist) opinion building in favor of unilateral Israeli withdrawal in the West Bank.
– David Weinberg, The Impatient Israeli Political Left, January 28.
Last June, I published a column, “My prediction: Please help prove it wrong,” in which I warned that “A determined domestic thrust is under way to compress Israel back into its precarious pre-1967 frontiers, imperiling the viability of Jewish sovereignty.”
Three emerging threats
Elaborating on my “strong premonition of dire things to come,” I predicted the emergence of three pernicious and interconnected processes, now materializing with alarming speed before our very eyes.
1. I forecast that the issue of anti-Israel sanctions would be raised with increasing intensity and frequency in the public discourse, and the threat, allegedly because of continued construction (indeed, existence) of Jewish communities across the pre-1967 lines (a.k.a., pejoratively, “settlements”), would be featured with increasing prominence in the mainstream media.
2. I then cautioned that, as a result of this, soon a wide-ranging campaign would be launched against the “settlers,” singling them out as the fundamental cause of the sanctions and casting blame on them for inflicting international isolation and economic pain on the rest of the country.
3. I warned that, as it becomes ever-more apparent that the impasse between Israel and Palestinian Arabs cannot be resolved consensually, Israel’s leaders will begin to capitulate under the perceived pressure of sanctions and embrace the idea of unilateral withdrawal from Judea-Samaria. Since coercive eviction of large numbers of Jews resident in the evacuated areas would be operationally infeasible and politically untenable, I foresaw the adoption of a policy of “benign” abandonment. This would mean that Jewish residents/communities would be left to the tender mercies of some prospective Palestinian regime.
Writing on the wall?
The following are selected predictive excerpts from my June column, which as I shall show later, are being borne out with eerie – and infuriating – accuracy:
http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=7205 When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was in Davos last week attending the World Economic Forum, he knew he was going to have to contend with some very hot topics. The Iranian nuclear threat, pooh-poohed by Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, was one. The framework for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, pushed by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, […]
http://swtotd.blogspot.com/.
Taped to my shaving mirror is a saying; “The best thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.” That simple homily is true, but its message has been lost in the narcissism of today’s world, and in the concept that social justice should not distinguish between the sexes. We see the absence of the former in the vapidity of Hollywood and in other displays of what Daniel Patrick Moynihan might have described as defining deviancy down. We see the promotion of the latter by those in Washington who see the state as the arbiter of equality and fairness.
Fifty years after President Johnson’s war on poverty, the poor are still with us. It is unrealistic to believe that poverty will ever be completely eradicated. For one, government statistics do change as a determinant. In fact, many of today’s “poor” would have been considered middle income fifty years ago. The important thing is allowing the poor the opportunity to advance. Apart from the eyes of the law and God, people are not equal. They never have been; they never will be. Despite primping for hours in front of the mirror, I will never look like Cary Grant, nor will I ever have the physique of Michael Jordan; I will never have the mind of Einstein, or the money of Warren Buffett. Not only are unlike in our inherited traits, we vary in our aspirations, work ethics and determination. We are who we are. But we can always work to improve.
Poverty remains a serious concern. One antidote is marriage. According to Census data, 41.3% of female-only households with children under 18 lived in poverty in 2011, while only 10.9% of married couples with children under 18 did so. In terms of unemployment, 6.6% of those married over the age of 18 were unemployed. At the same time 17.3% of those separated, divorced or widowed were unemployed. Of those never married, 17.7% were unemployed. Marriage is not always possible, but it should be encouraged, not dismissed. While correlation does not mean causation, those statistics cannot be ignored.
