The eminent Russian conductor Valery Gergiev, artistic and general director of St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theater and principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, who is presently touring the United States is being hounded by Ukrainian protesters.
In March of 2014 Gergiev added his name to an open letter which stated: “ We firmly state support for the position of the president of the Russian Federation.” Furthermore, it is alleged that he supports harsh anti gay legislation- an accusation he rebuts in an interview with the New York Times.
The protests culminated on January 29th 2015, when a man carrying a sign criticizing the policies of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia climbed over the orchestra pit and onto the stage at the Metropolitan Opera just as the soprano Anna Netrebko was bowing and accepting applause and flowers after her performance in the opera Iolanta, conducted by Maestro Gergiev. The protester unfurled a poster with a a flag and pictures of Gergiev, Netrebko and Putin with a Hitler mustache which was shown to the audience and performers before he was escorted offstage.
My first thought was of the appalling lax security of an Opera House where such an act could occur .
I am a great believer in protests. I strongly supported the protest against the Klinghoffer Opera, and I have sympathy for the people of Ukraine. But, here is a bit of unsolicited advice. Choose your protests wisely. Hounding and harassing a great conductor is fatuous. Furthermore, putting a Hitler mustache on Putin is questionable. Russia has its own poster boy for genocidal cruelty in Stalin.
In Russia, performers and musicians can have careers ruined by state funders and censors. In America performers are free to criticize and dabble in politics.
In 2008 the late conductor Lorin Maazel took the New York Philharmonic Orchestra to Pyongyang, North Korea. Before departing, he wrote a self-congratulatory editorial for the Wall Street Journal (http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB120347076630878735) in which he stated: “If we are to be effective in bringing succor to the oppressed, many languishing in foreign gulags, the U.S. must claim an authority based on an immaculate ethical record, toughened by economic clout. Woe to the people we are trying to help if we end up in a glass house.”
He liked that glass house image and repeated it again:” “People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw bricks, should they? Is our reputation all that clean when it comes to prisoners and the way they are treated? Have we set an example to be emulated all over the world?”
Actually Pyongyang played the New York Philharmonic – not the other way around and Maazel played useful idiot to one of the most brutal regimes in the world. The “Supreme Leader” Kim Jong-il, did not attend the concert .He was busy implementing his pastime of torture, murder and starvation and speeding up development of nuclear weapons which continues to this day.
No protests greeted Mr. Maazel on his return to the podium in America, and he continued a celebrated music career until 2014 when he died.
Maestro Gergiev is an artist and arguably one of the finest conductors in the world- not a politician with any influence on Putin whose admittedly harsh policies have been enabled in this country by our hapless State Department and administration.
Hillary Clinton who recently reinvented herself as a hawk on Russia, cannot airbrush her record as Secretary of State. In 2009, she “reset” relations with Russia that included an arms treaty. She may run for the White House in 2016. Now, there is a protest for Ukrainian Americans.
In his National Prayer Breakfast speech last week, President Barack Obama said:
And lest we get on our high horse and think that this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ. . . . So this is not unique to one group or one religion.
It is important to analyze these words — because the president of the United States spoke them in a major forum, and because what he said is said by all those who defend Islam against any criticism.
Referring to Islamic violence, the president accuses anyone who implies that such religious violence “is unique to some other place” — meaning outside the Christian West — as getting on a “high horse.”
Is this true? Of course not.
In our time, major religious violence is in fact “unique to some other place,” namely the Islamic world. What other religious group is engaged in mass murder, systematic rape, slavery, beheading innocents, bombing public events, shooting up school children, wiping out whole religious communities, and other such atrocities?
Defending Islam in front of our religious leaders last week, our president not only invoked the Crusades but seized the opportunity to excoriate the United States for formerly justifying chattel slavery in Christian terms, his tone suggesting that chains are rattling still. Indeed, along with the treatment of American Indians, slavery remains a horrid blot on our past, one that not even the blood that 750,000 Americans shed in the war ending the “peculiar institution” washed away (forget that we are the only nation that fought a civil war to free its slaves).
We’re guilty. Forever. And nothing can lessen our shame.
But in support of the Left’s current vogue for “fairness,” I now expect our president to follow up by convening a special meeting of Muslim clerics to chastise them for the 14 centuries of slavery under Islam that, in its scope, scale, duration, and cruelty, exceeded the outrages of any other slave-based civilization.
In seizing non-Muslims as slaves, the human beasts of the Islamic State caliphate are only carrying on an honored tradition. That is Islam, Mr. President. And it always has been.
Snark is a popular word used for a particular sort of off-putting sarcasm. Snarkiness can manifest itself as adolescent cheap shots, snide condescension, or simple ad hominem patronizing — a sort of “I know you are, but what am I?” schoolyard name-calling. Its incessant use is typically connected with a peevishness born out of juvenile insecurity, and sometimes fed by an embarrassing envy. All politicians are snarky at times; but few obsessively so, given the wages of monotony and insecurity that the snark earns.
President Obama is well known both for ad hominem dismissals of his supposed enemies — everyone from Fox News to the Tea Party to Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity — and for his evocations of nefarious straw men who, he claims, if left unchecked, would uninsure the poor, pollute the environment, hurt the illegal immigrant, and wage perpetual war abroad. But Obama’s snarky putdowns and condescending afterthoughts are a particularly disturbing subset of these rhetorical devices, used by him in the grand world of diplomacy as well as in often petty domestic contexts.
Wuppertal’s synagogues had been destroyed on Kristallnacht. By the time the war was over, the 3,000 Jews living in this German city had been reduced to a community of 60. 75 years after Kristallnacht, the Bergische Synagogue began to burn after three Muslim men had thrown six Molotov cocktails at it.
The Jews of Wuppertal however have nothing to worry about. Judge Jörg Sturm found that the attack was not anti-Semitic, but had only been a way of bringing “attention to the Gaza conflict”.
It wasn’t anti-Semitism, but anti-Zionism.
The three Muslim men, two named Mohammed and one named Ismail, received suspended sentences and 200 hours of community service. In their defense, they claimed that they wanted to “send a signal”, but had not intended to set a synagogue on fire when they threw firebombs at it.
On February 4, 2015 the head of the FBI’s counterterrorism division, Michael Steinbach said that the FBI has seen children as young as 15 recruited by the Islamic State aka ISIS, ISIL. Two days later FBI Director James Comey said there are open cases looking into individuals who may be connected to ISIS in every state in the Union except Alaska. Evidence of the Islamic State’s successful recruiting efforts in America is literally written on the walls. Islamic State graffiti has appeared in Minneapolis, MN, Houston, TX, La Vegas, Nevada, Phoenix, AZ, Bakersfield, Ca, Washington, DC , Brooklyn, NY, and in many cities around the world. Followers of the U.S. designated terrorist group are showing their support in every form of graffiti from full color pieces to the graffiti genre of stickers; aka labels or slaps.
On October 2, 2014 in the Lyndale neighborhood of Minneapolis, graffiti was reported via neighborhood watch mobile app. The graffiti depicted the words ISIS in bubble letters with the phrase ‘will remain’ underneath, next to an accurate line drawing of the black ISIS flag with Arabic writing and the Prophets seal. The phrase ‘ISIS will remain’ is a reference to the terrorist groups motto ‘Remaining and Expanding’. The level of detailed knowledge of the Islamic States symbolism in this graffiti is clearly indicative of an ISIS sympathizer. This should not be surprising since at least a dozen young American Muslims from Minneapolis and St. Paul have left their homes to join and fight alongside ISIS in Syria. Two U.S. citizens from Minnesota were killed in Syria fighting beside ISIS.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/frontpagemag-com/sleeper-cells-in-america-on-the-glazov-gang/
This week’s Glazov Gang was joined by Michael Cutler, former Senior INS Special Agent.
Mr. Cutler discussed Sleeper Cells in America, analyzing the immigration component of the threat — and what our government isn’t doing about it.
Israeli polling published Friday seems to indicate that the Obama administration’s push to remove Binyamin Netanyahu from power and to replace him with the more pliable Yitzhak (“Buji”) Herzog is backfiring. The intervention was first reported by the left-leaning newspaper Haaretz just over a week ago.
This is how the numbers look as of Friday:
zarmi_israel_poll_numbers_2-9-15-1
This is the most significant lead either of the front-runners has had since this election cycle began. Previously, Likud or HaMachane haTziyoni had led the other by only one or two seats. If the final election results look like this, the most likely governing coalition will involve Likud, HaBayit haYehudi, Yahadut haTorah, Kulanu, Shas, and Yachad (64 seats out of a total 120).
The United States can be quite an incoherent place at times. Here are a few examples.
Diversity
Sometime in the 1990s the growing contradictions of affirmative action in a multiracial society became problematic. Ethnic ancestry was often neither easily identifiable nor readily commensurate with class status, and so gave way to a more popular term: “diversity.”
Under diversity, it no longer mattered so much how wealthy or poor one was. Nor was it a concern exactly who one’s grandparents had been — at long as, in some vague way, one was non-“white.” If so, one was diverse. That was deemed in and of itself a good thing. We no longer worried as much whether someone enjoying affirmative action status was upper middle-class or the child of a surgeon.
Nor did it matter that one was only one-quarter “Latino” or, in fact, took the rarer Elizabeth Warren or Ward Churchill route of fabricating ethnic ancestry out of whole cloth. Those were written off as the bothersome details used by reactionaries to jeopardize the noble objectives of affirmative action.
“Barbra Streisand tells Axelrod that the president needs to talk to people in simpler terms: ‘I hate to say it, but people are stupid.’
The Obama presidency doesn’t arrive in David Axelrod ’s 500-page memoir, “Believer: My Forty Years in Politics,” until the book is about two-thirds over. But it is worth the wait, or at least the wading.
President Obama is in the middle of his fight to pass the Affordable Care Act. This is the book’s most politically compelling chapter, though the word “ObamaCare” is entirely absent. Some in the White House, such as chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, worry that the stumbling, unpopular effort to pass the ACA will damage Democrats in the 2010 midterm elections. “Rahm recommended scaling back to a plan that would cover fewer people, but garner more votes,” Mr. Axelrod writes.
When President Obama asks what the odds are of passing the most ambitious bill possible, his congressional liaison, Phil Schiliro, replies, “Depends how lucky you feel, Mr. President.”
Mr. Obama smiles and says: “Can I say this? I always feel lucky. Let’s go all in. When your name is Barack Obama and you’re the president of the United States, how can you not feel lucky?”
