RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://gatesofvienna.net/2014/01/hostility-to-truth-telling/

What follows is a New Year’s present to Diana West and a tardy acknowledgement of the work of two more writers who rose to her defense. (Our donors are well-acquainted with my particular brand of ‘tardy’ — its forms are usually just as long as this one will prove to be.)

Here are two reviews of Diana West’s book American Betrayal by people who actually read it with care and give the book its proper historical context.

[‘American Betrayal’ by Diana West] These reviews would have been re-posted here sooner, but when I heard The Bully Boys would be gathering once again in another futile attempt to quash and/or disqualify American Betrayal, it seemed wiser to hold these two arrows and release them at the right moment. Thus I waited until after their pile-on went public to present these authentic responses.

I’m told the essays are a “seminar” or a “symposium”. Do esteemed historians hold symposia in which the author who will be the center of their attention is not invited or notified? Seriously? This tale wanders on, and the levels of bizarre accumulate. Anyone got a Geiger counter handy?

This beat down is far past customary and usual. We have entered some strange country by now. Surely Ms. West must feel like a shank of bone being chewed to death by the neighborhood’s pesky dogs. Sniffing and growling, they are worrying the subject of Diana West’s book to death. Obviously they’ve failed to grasp that each new gnaw and growl simply shows them up more certainly as beyond reason…or Reason. After this regression, they will need to be house-trained all over again.

To change metaphors a bit, think of prepubescent boys who fall all over themselves to pull the pretty girl’s pigtails while denying the truth — i.e., they’re bewitched by her charms. Each new protestation and hair-pull underlines this fatal attraction. It’s obvious to everyone but themselves.

http://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/2013/12/31/an-ecofeminist-does-milk/

The American Studies Association has been much in the news lately for backing an “academic boycott [1]” of Israel. That disgusting display of politically correct, anti-Semitic grandstanding has garnered the ASA some small portion of the obloquy it deserves. As my PJM colleague Ronald Radosh pointed out [2] here, the ASA picked on “the Middle East’s only existing democracy to protest.” The ASA’s obtuse and juvenile leftism has even embarrassed other elements of the academy: MIT recently joined [3] Yale, Harvard, Brown, Brandeis, and other elite institutions [4] in condemning the boycott, which, as MIT President L. Rafael Reif noted, “fundamentally violates the principles of academic freedom that are central to the excellence of MIT and American higher education.”

You may not know much about the American Studies Association. The small (5000-member) organization is known to many outside the academy as the “Anti-American Studies Association” because of its reliably backwater, reflexive leftism. In that, it hardly differs from many, perhaps most, other academic organizations in the humanities (or perhaps I should say the “humanities,” since such organizations are antithetic to the spirit of humanism in any normal sense). The Modern Language Association, to take one obvious example, has long been a virulent redoubt of politically correct, leftwing attitudinizing [5].

I have to admit that is has beem quite a while since I have given such rancid, misbegotten products of wayward affluence much thought. Having labored in that repellent vineyard long enough to write Tenured Radicals [6] and The Rape of the Masters [7], I have “supped full with horrors” and figure I have done my bit for the cause of academic forensic pathology.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/andrew-harrod/ibn-warraq-takes-on-fact-fiction-and-freedom/print/ The world’s free peoples “risk losing all to Islamist thuggery,” the pseudonymous Islam scholar Ibn Warraq warns in his latest book, Sir Walter Scott’s Crusades and Other Fantasies, a collection of essays previously published online.  Analyzing past Jewish-Christian-Muslim relations, the Muslim apostate Warraq insightfully separates historical fact from popular fiction before defending the freedom […]

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/2014-year-of-decision/print/ This year we will see if America is still a center-right country, or if Obama’s two terms will mark a historic shift to the left. History and recent events give cause for optimism, subject, of course, to unforeseen events. The champions of big government, wealth redistribution through taxation and entitlement transfers, and a coercive, […]

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/andrew-harrod/danish-muslim-apostate-faces-hate-speech-charges/print/ “Muslims love to take advantage of” free speech, Danish-Palestinian poet Yahya Hassan says, “and as soon as there is someone else saying something critical against them, they want to restrict it.”  In an action previously indicated by this writer, Hassan is now personally facing this double standard in Danish “hate speech” charges for his anti-Islam […]

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/the-muslim-suicide-convert/print/ Both of the suicide bombers who struck in Russia were Muslim converts. They follow a long string of Muslim terrorist converts, including the murderers of British soldier Lee Rigby, who were sentenced last month, and Terry Lee Loewen, who plotted to car bomb the Wichita Mid-Continent Airport that same month. Muslim converts engage in […]

AND THREE CHEERS FOR JUDGE SOTOMAYOR TOO!!!RSK http://pjmedia.com/andrewmccarthy/2014/01/01/an-eleventh-hour-new-years-eve-victory-for-religious-liberty/ Congratulations and thanks to my friends Rob Muise and Dave Yerushalmi at the American Freedom Law Center (on whose advisory board I am proud to sit, along with several distinguished Americans). They worked tirelessly and down to the 2013 wire to persuade the DC Circuit to issue a […]

De Blasio’s inauguration was a left-wing celebration.

THE CLINTONS WERE THERE AND THAT SHOULD SPEAK VOLUMES ABOUT HER PUTATIVE CAMPAIGN FOR AMERICAN CZARINA…..RSK

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/367374/print

We all knew we were in for something completely different when the inauguration of self-described “progressive” Bill de Blasio as New York’s mayor began with a keynote from pro-Communist activist Harry Belafonte.

The 86-year-old singer has a history of extremism. He has been an infamous house guest of Fidel Castro, called Colin Powell and Condi Rice “house slaves” of the Bush administration, and last year compared the free-market Koch brothers to the Ku Klux Klan.

“We will be no longer a divided city,” he proclaimed as he compared today’s New York to a “Dickensian” nightmare, as departing mayor Mike Bloomberg looked on stone-faced. “We can become America’s DNA for the future.”

He was followed by the Reverend Fred Lucas Jr., whose talk was dominated by slavery metaphors and analogies. He compared New York’s five boroughs to a “plantation” and managed to cram into his short speech other references to slavery, such as “shackles,” “bondage,” “auction blocks,” “the Emancipation Proclamation,” the “Civil War,” and the “Reconstruction Era.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/01/jamal-al-jamal-dead-dies_n_4527782.html

PRAGUE (AP) — Police say an explosion in Prague has killed the Palestinian ambassador in the Czech Republic.

Ambassador Jamel al-Jamal was in his apartment with his family at the time of the explosion on Wednesday, according to Palestinian Embassy spokesman Nabil El-Fahel. Al-Jamal was seriously injured and rushed to a hospital, where he died, according to police spokeswoman Andrea Zoulova.

The Palestinian Foreign Ministry said the blast occurred when the 56-year-old diplomat was moving an old office safe box. It was not immediately clear how the explosives got there, and the ministry said the blast was being investigated.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304591604579292611684898656?mod=Opinion_newsreel_4 Reporting on the environmental movement has always required a certain sense of humor. And now we have an expedition launched in part to study the melting of Antarctic ice sheets that has been trapped since Christmas in ice so thick that rescue attempts have failed to reach the frozen vessel. Enlarge Image In this […]