The new Whitney Museum, located at the beginning of the High Line below 14th street, is a Renzo Piano creation that cost $422 million. The building has received glowing reviews from the Times and the WSJ, neither of which mentioned some oddly perverse absences in a museum intended for heavy traffic. The first is that there is no interior staircase from the 8th floor down to the 5th. Instead, there is an outdoor staircase from the terraces of those floors – something totally impractical in a city that gets very cold and snowy winters, that has rainy springs and that fronts the Hudson River, one of the windiest spots in lower Manhattan. If you check your coat in inclement weather, you would be forced to wait for the over-crowded elevators, of which there are only a handful to handle a very large number of visitors. It remains to be seen how many intrepid people will venture outdoors past November. From the 5th floor down, there is an enclosed staircase that feels too narrow for the mass of users.
The Islamic State’s attraction to young Muslim females and males continues to mystify Westerners, especially non-Muslims. They wonder, ”Why would educated and mostly well-off young Westerners be willing to join ISIS?” This follows by search for the ubiquitous “root-causes.” Thus lack of assimilation, alienation, religious piety, mental illness, boredom, and, of course, poverty and unemployment are mentioned. These, however, fail to explain why a young person would leave a family, the relative comfort and safety he or she enjoys in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Denmark or the United States, not to mention other places in favor of the repressive, violent ISIS.
Iran’s agenda is clear. It wishes to use its growing regional network to control the region, and use its proxies to indirectly attack any countries that stand in its way — all the while portraying itself as a reasonable partner for the U.S. and the West in the war against the Islamic State.
The Islamic Republic’s aggression goes largely ignored.
The international community is failing to respond to Iran’s weapons and terrorism networks.
In recent years, Iran’s networks have been expanding significantly, most often with deadly results for the region.
It is most important to keep on challenging these would-be censors, so that people with Kalashnikov rifles do not make our customs and laws.
One of the false presumptions of our time is that people on the political left are motivated by good intentions even when they do bad things, while people on the political right are motivated by bad intentions even when they do good things.
When people prefer to focus on the motives of the victims rather than on the motives of the attackers, they will ignore the single most important matter: that an art exhibition, or free speech, has been targeted.
It does not matter if you are right-wing or left-wing, or American, Danish, Dutch, Belgian or French. These particularities may matter greatly and be endlessly interesting to people in the countries in question. But they matter not a jot to ISIS or their fellow-travellers. What these people are trying to do is to enforce Islamic blasphemy laws across the entire world. That is all that matters.
When two terrorists in body armor and carrying assault rifles came for a roomful of cartoonists and fans of freedom of speech in Texas, the media took the side of the terrorists.
CAIR, a Muslim Brotherhood front group with ties to terrorists, spun the attack by claiming that the contest had been intended to “bait” the terrorists. The media quickly picked up the “bait” meme.
The New York Times, the Atlantic Journal Constitution, the Dallas Morning News, CNN and even FOX News all accused the cartoonists of “baiting” the poor Muslim terrorists into attacking them. The actual attempt at mass slaughter was dismissed as the terrorists “taking the bait” from the cartoonists who had been fiendishly plotting to be mass slaughtered by them for the publicity.
When he came to office, not unlike other politicians, Obama made many promises. Nearly every promise he made has remained unfulfilled — with one exception: The promise that “change has come to America.”
My dad used to tell me that nothing was so good it could not be better or be so bad it could not get worse. Things have indeed gotten worse, much worse, and it would appear that there is no bottom as to how far we may ultimately fall at the hands of an administration and politicians from both sides of the aisle, who only care about garnering huge campaign contributions and winning elections at any and all costs. America and Americans are, indeed, picking up that tab.
Cooling down the churning cauldron of mob violence that Baltimore has become is not on the agenda of the ACLU which is now preparing to turn up the heat in cities across America.
Following the suspicious death in police custody of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man with a long rap sheet, angry mobs and radical agitators have turned Maryland’s largest city into a Hobbesian jungle. They were already angry at the endlessly sensationalized deaths in recent years of black males such as Trayvon Martin (Sanford, Fla.), Michael Brown (Ferguson, Mo.), Eric Garner (Staten Island, N.Y.), and Tamir Rice (Cleveland, Ohio) at the hands of non-blacks, but the seemingly senseless death of Gray last month pushed them over the edge.
The diversity mania rages at most colleges and universities in America, but Brown University might be the “leader” in this regard. While officials at other institutions say the right things and make the right gestures to appease the diversity deities, at Brown they really mean it!
In today’s Pope Center Clarion Call, John Rosenberg examines the school’s recent record and concludes that Brown has “doubled down” on diversity.
The criticism leveled against the would-be victims, rather than the perpetrators, of Sunday night’s attempted terrorist attack in Garland, Texas, reveals how “morally inverted” America’s conception of free speech has become, Pamela Geller told CNN on Monday.
As if to prove her point, on Wednesday the Washington Post published the following headline:
Event organizer offers no apology after thwarted attack in Texas
Wrote the Post’s Sandhya Somashekhar: “If the contest was intended as bait, it worked.” And, “In an interview with the Washington Post, Geller said she and her fellow organizers were ‘prepared for violence’ this past weekend. In tweets immediately after the shooting, Geller appeared almost gleeful that she had been right.”
Here’s the sad and desperate tale of Nadir Soofi, one of two terrorists killed in Garland, Texas, before he could launch a Charlie Hebdo-style massacre:
Soofi studied at the $20,000-a-year International School of Islamabad from 1992 to 1998, where contemporaries said he was funny, popular and charming and showed no inclination towards extremism.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, one told AFP Soofi was “quite suave and charismatic” and something of a “ladies’ man” as a student . . . Soofi’s mother taught art at the heavily-guarded school, which is popular with diplomats and rich Pakistanis, several of his contemporaries said.
He took part in theatre productions, and another schoolmate said Soofi starred as the lead in “Bye Bye Birdie”, a musical inspired by Elvis Presley, transforming him from a sweet, shy boy into “a confident heartthrob”.
