Brace yourselves! Tomorrow will elicit caterwauling tears from the left, the Eurotrash, and politicians and pundits. Even in bonny England, which contributed so mightily to the extermination of the Jews by closing the gates of Palestine in 1939, there will be a lot of tut-tutting. And, I predict, those nations which participated in the infamous Evian Conference of 1938 at which only the Dominican Republic offered to take desperate Jewish immigrants, will puff their chests and pontificate against racism and genocide.
Well, spare me. During the Holocaust one in every three Jews in the world were killed. The rough total of victims is 6,000,000 souls. Only three years after the end of World War 2, Israel became a state. It is a democracy with advanced institutions, with start-ups, tech companies and scientific and medical advances that contribute to the health and advancement of the entire world.
And today, 6.333,000 Jews live in Israel…..the largest Jewish population in the world- and growing, thanks to the rampant anti-Semitism in Europe.
Only unconditional support for Israel- its moral, historical, religious, and legitimate rights- is the correct tribute to the Holocaust victims who died with the words “Hear Oh Israel” in their last moment.
rsk
There’s a cancer growing at the World Health Organization (WHO), and it happens to be their very own cancer agency.
IARC — the International Agency for Research on Cancer — is under the purview of WHO and tasked with classifying whether certain foods, chemicals, and lifestyle choices cause cancer. Of the nearly 1,000 hazards IARC has reviewed, only one (caprolactam) has been deemed non-carcinogenic. But one recent decision is raising suspicions that the agency is more of an activist group than a scientific one.
In March 2015, IARC surprised the international regulatory and scientific community by classifying the widely used herbicide glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic.” Because it is extensively used with crops that have been genetically modified, anti-GMO and environmental groups have long had glyphosate in their crosshairs (mostly because the herbicide is sold by their bête noire, Monsanto, and marketed here as Roundup), and they cheered IARC’s decision. Over the past year, the glyphosate-causes-cancer story has been repeated by the media, environmental NGOs, and pro-GMO labeling groups to promote the false narrative that GMOs are unsafe (although glyphosate is also used in non-GM farming).
The ruling contradicted most analyses of glyphosate, which is widely viewed as the aspirin of weed killers, hugely beneficial with few risks. It massively improves crop yields while largely eliminating the need for tillage, thereby slashing carbon dioxide emissions and soil erosion. Thousands of highly regarded studies demonstrate its lack of cancer-causing potential, and official reviews by government regulatory agencies around the world and in the U.S. have universally determined that it is safe for humans.
(In an interesting twist, over the weekend, the EPA posted a report labeled “final” from its own cancer-review committee that found glyphosate is “not likely to be carcinogenic to humans.” The report, dated October 2015, strongly questioned IARC’s flawed process. Late Monday, the agency pulled the report from its website, saying it had been inadvertently posted. “The documents are still in development,” the EPA told us. “Our assessment will be peer-reviewed and completed by the end of 2016.”)
Across the pond, some agencies are challenging IARC head-on. The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), a scientific review body of the European Union, also examined IARC’s claims and determined that glyphosate was probably not carcinogenic. EFSA charged that IARC had ignored the vast number of higher-quality studies that issued glyphosate a clean bill of health, and that it had focused on a handful of cherry-picked studies.
Then details about the IARC’s process started to come to light. A key person behind IARC’s move was an American environmental activist, Christopher Portier. IARC insiders quietly inserted him as the technical adviser to the agency’s glyphosate-review panel (he also served on the advisory panel that recommended a review of glyphosate the year prior). The agency did not reveal that Portier had a massive conflict of interest: His employer is the Environmental Defense Fund, a group well known for its opposition to GMOs and pesticides.
Columnists assured us that Donald Trump’s campaign would implode after he cheaply besmirched war hero John McCain. They assured us again after he crudely dismissed Fox News’s star anchor and heartthrob, Megyn Kelly. And again after his schoolboy rumor-mongering about Senator Ted Cruz’s wife. And on and on.
Yet such nonstop insults and gaffes have had little effect on the Trump candidacy. Actually, they have had no effect at all. Zero. Zilch.
Political operatives insisted that Trump would fade, given that he had no real organization on the ground. My God, they said, he has no handlers, and not a position paper in sight. Where is his internal polling? Where are the senior Wise Men to advise him on the demographics of state primaries? Yet Trump garnered more free publicity, interviews, and attention from the liberal media than did any well-handled candidate, Democrat or Republican.
The commentators on the weekend talk shows employed adverbs like “finally” and “at last” to characterize each of the latest outrages likely to end Trump’s campaign. Trump broke his promise about releasing his income-tax returns (was he hiding a whittled-down 13 percent tax rate in Bernie Sanders fashion?). He fibs nonstop about opposing the Iraq war from the beginning. And he continuously exaggerates his net worth, as if the public were a lender that he was conning.
Each of those fudgings earned pronouncements from the experts about a “turning point” in his fate. How many times has someone on a Sunday-morning show pronounced, in somber tones, “Trump has gone too far this time” — without defining “too far”?
These periodic Trump obituaries were often instead followed by upticks in Trump’s popularity. A Trump orgasm is to have someone in a suit and makeup, or with a title before his name, pontificate that Trump should be and is through — a Trump pleasure surpassed only by a shouting young anti-Trump disrupter shown on the news with a placard, “Make America Mexico Again.”
The so-called “mainstream” national media has developed a penchant for focusing on violence originating from certain quarters while all but ignoring hooliganism emanating from others. The disparity in treatment is due primarily to an agenda being pushed by leftist elements within the media establishment, including, but not limited to, MSNBC and the New York Times.
Violence emanating from Trump supporters buttresses a false narrative that many within the establishment media wish to propagate; namely that Trump’s immigration and border policies are laced with racist undertones. The issue is not framed within the context of securing borders, protecting U.S. citizens from crime and terrorism and curtailing an already overburdened entitlement system for illegals. Rather, Trump’s opponents and their allies in the media have succeeded in framing the issue as one involving racial divisiveness and incitement.
That narrative, displayed over and over again in print as well as social media has succeeded in fueling extreme left-wing violence at Trump rallies far outweighing the violence exhibited by a very limited number of Trump supporters. Yet violence by Trump supporters is still given prominence despite its limited scope and scale. Isolated incidents involving violence at Trump gatherings are given disproportionate coverage far beyond their importance.
Consider the side-by-side contrast of media coverage in two separate instances of violence at Trump rallies. On March 10, a 78-year old senior citizen punched an anti-Trump demonstrator in the face at a Trump rally in Fayetteville, North Carolina. The action was inexcusable and the perpetrator was arrested and rightfully charged with misdemeanor assault while his victim required no medical attention.
On Thursday and Friday, a large unruly mob of anti-Trump hooligans, some of whom displayed Mexican flags, assembled at the Orange County Fairgrounds in California where a pro-Trump rally was held. The mob quickly resorted to violence, blocking traffic, throwing bricks, ransacking police cars and attacking policemen. One bystander, who had the misfortune of wearing a Trump T-shirt was slugged in the face, knocked to the ground and required several unsightly stitches to close his wound. Several police cars were damaged and a police horse was injured. The resulting damage will reportedly cost the fairgrounds tens of thousands of dollars.
The 9/11 Commission came to regard immigration fraud and visa fraud as the key means by which international terrorists enter the United States and embed themselves. Yet, these issues are seldom, if ever, discussed or reported on by the media or politicians- especially those politicians who are determined to foist a massive legalization program involving unknown millions of illegal aliens on the United States.
Immigration fraud and visa fraud have long been of great concern where issues of national security are concerned. In point of fact, on May 20, 1997 I participated in a hearing conducted by the House Subcommittee on Immigration and Claims on the topic, “Visa Fraud And Immigration Benefits Application Fraud.”
That hearing was predicated on two terror attacks carried out in 1993 by terrorists from the Middle East including those who had engaged in visa fraud and also filed fraud-laden applications for immigration benefits.
In January 1993 a Pakistani national, Mir Aimal Kansi, stood outside CIA Headquarters with an AK-47 and opened fire on the vehicles of CIA officials reporting for work on that cold January morning in Virginia. He killed two CIA officers and wounded three others.
Just one month later, on February 26, 1993 a bomb-laden truck was parked in the garage under the World Trade Center complex and detonated. The blast nearly brought one of the 110 story towers down sideways. Six innocent people were killed, over one thousand people were injured and an estimated one-half billion dollars in damages were inflicted on that iconic complex of buildings located just blocks from Wall Street.
The Clinton administration abjected refused the learn the lessons that should have been learned from those attacks thereby literally and figuratively leaving the door wide open for the terrror attacks of 9/11.
Since the attacks of 9/11 we have witnessed a long list of terror attacks and attempted terror attacks that involved foreign nationals who gamed the visa process and/or the immigration benefits program.
When it was announced that Harriet Tubman would displace President Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill, there were two sets of dramatically different reactions among Republicans on social media.
One group passed around links to a National Review piece celebrating the decision to “tell the story of a deeply-religious, gun-toting Republican who fought for freedom in defiance of the laws of a government that refused to recognize her rights.”
“If it was political correctness that drove this decision, who cares?” it asked.
Much of the Republican base, the other group, cared. Donald Trump noticed and denounced the move as “pure political correctness”.
Political correctness is the defining element of the culture war today. It’s also one of the driving forces of Trump’s candidacy. Republicans and conservatives who ignore the backlash to it do so at their own peril.
When the left exploited the Charleston church shooting to begin a purge of Confederate flags that extended all the way into reruns of the Dukes of Hazzard, Republicans failed to defy the lynch mobs and even cheered the takedowns, some of which took place under Republican governors, as progress. Congresswoman Candice Miller, a Republican, announced recently that state flags in the Capitol featuring confederate insignia will be taken down due to the “controversy surrounding Confederate imagery”. The “controversy” is another term for the left’s manufactured political correctness.
There are legitimate positions on both sides when it comes to the Confederate flag, but the historical debate is not the issue. Just as it doesn’t matter very much that Harriet Tubman was a Republican. It matters far more that both moves were driven by the social media mobs of political correctness.
Culture wars are not about actual historical facts, but a tribal conflict over culture between clashing groups. This is a conflict in which it mattered a great deal that northeastern elites were lining up to get $400 tickets to see Hamilton, a hip-hop musical praised by many of the same Republicans who wouldn’t be caught dead watching reruns of the Dukes of Hazzard. That New York theater trend led to Southerner Andrew Jackson being displaced on the currency instead of New York’s own Alexander Hamilton.
Some conservatives would argue that Andrew Jackson founded the Democratic Party while Hamilton, a longtime foe of its political forebears, would likely have aligned with the modern Republican Party. And like Tubman on the $20 bill, they would be completely missing the forest for the factoid.
Susan Mulcahy remembers the 1980s, when she was writing for and editing the New York Post’s Page Six gossip column:
Trump seemed an ideal subject for us, as apt a symbol of the gaudy 1980s as a Christian Lacroix pouf skirt—and just as shiny and inflated. Lacroix at least used excellent materials. Trump turned out to be the king of ersatz. Not just fake, but false. He lied about everything, with gusto. But that was not immediately apparent. Not to me, anyway.
…
It should be simple to write about publicity hounds, and often it is, because they’ll do anything to earn the attention they crave. Trump had a different way of doing things. He wanted attention, but he could not control his pathological lying. Which made him, as story subjects go, a lot of work. Every statement he uttered required more than the usual amount of fact-checking. If Trump said, “Good morning,” you could be pretty sure it was five o’clock in the afternoon.
I once received a tip that Trump and Richard Nixon had had a lengthy meeting in Trump’s office. Trump said he knew nothing about it. I ran the story, not only because I had an excellent source, but also because a Nixon aide confirmed it. Nixon, who was shopping for a condo the day he met with Trump, may have had issues with credibility in his time, but over Trump, I’d have believed him any day. Trump was such a pretender he even used to fake being his own spokesman, as I learned recently, though I never heard from the faux flack he called John Barron. My Trump items came from all over the place—never Trump himself—and when I called to check on something, he usually lied to me directly.
Denying facts was almost a sport for Trump, and extended even to mundane matters.
Read the whole thing, although this next bit is far more depressing than any of Trump’s endless lies: CONTINUE AT SITE
Chinese Ambassador Liu Jieyi, who held the April UN Security Council presidency, announced last week that the status of the Golan Heights “remains unchanged.” That is, of course, true — like the old “Saturday Night Live” running gag, “Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.”
He meant it belongs to Syria, and he was responding to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who told a meeting of the Israeli Cabinet on the Golan, “The Golan Heights have been an integral part of the land of Israel since ancient times; the dozens of ancient synagogues in the area around us attest to that. And the Golan is an integral part of the state of Israel in the new era. I told [Secretary of State John Kerry] that I doubt that Syria will ever return to what it was.”
That is, of course, also true and entirely unremarkable. But thus begins another round of UN condemnation of Israel resting on silly propositions. In this case:
That Syria — ruled by a war criminal in the midst of a civil war with other groups that include war criminals — has a valid claim to anything; and
That Israel is wrong because the UN is miffed.
A bit of relatively recent history is useful here.
An Israeli was raised in the Galilee sleeping every night in a bunker to avoid Syrian shelling from the Golan Heights — Hamas and Hizb’allah are latecomers to the war crime of indiscriminately firing at civilians. As a child, he helped on the family farm. While riding the tractor, his father couldn’t hear the mortars fired by the Syrians down into the fields. The child’s job was to be within eyesight of the tractor along the edge of the field near some trees. When the mortars began, he would wave a large red flag to catch his father’s attention, at which his father would slip off the tractor and hasten for shelter. Not exactly milking the cow.
Lafcadio Hearn is a writer unusually hard to classify, certainly in terms of the conventional, institutionalised categories of genealogy, geography or language. Hearn could be claimed as a major American, Japanese, Irish or Greek author, or all of these at once, as well as being a notable translator into English of French, Japanese and Chinese.
Long before globalisation became a word in common use and “world literature” was established as a field of academic study, Hearn was a genuine writer-without-borders, making him a singular figure from the past who is our contemporary, or perhaps the future. He ranged widely, and wherever he went in the world he transformed it into text. A true literary adventurer, Lafcadio Hearn lived, and travelled, by the word. It seems he could have lived anywhere and written about anything.
Born in 1850 in the Ionian Islands to a Greek mother and Irish father, Hearn grew up mostly in Ireland, France and England and lived his adult life in parts of the world which were much more remote from one other in physical terms and in shared understanding than is the case today. Among Anglophone writers, Hearn was even more widely travelled than the likes of Joseph Conrad, Robert Louis Stevenson and, for that matter, Mark Twain, who met Hearn in New Orleans in 1882 and with whom he toured.
In the English-speaking world, Hearn today perhaps is best known as a member of the generation of writers—another was George Washington Cable—that put New Orleans on the literary map. Hearn lived in the city for a decade before settling in Japan, where he was to spend the rest of his life, becoming a citizen and taking a Japanese name in 1895. Today, Yakumo Koizumi, as Hearn became known, is regarded as the nearest thing to a major Japanese writer that a non-native could have become.
Before his arrival in New Orleans in 1877 Hearn wrote extensively about places as various as Martinique, China and the United States. While working as a journalist in Cincinnati in the early 1870s, Hearn married a former slave, Aletha Foley, in defiance of the law at that time in Ohio forbidding so-called miscegenation, and lived illegally with her and her child from a previous relationship. The union, the revelation of which resulted in Hearn being fired from his job at the Cincinnati Daily Enquirer on the grounds of “deplorable moral habits”, ended in separation after three years.
Many years later, in 1891, while living in Japan, Hearn married a much younger woman, the daughter of a samurai family in Matsue. The couple had a son and a daughter. Hearn died in Tokyo in 1904 at the age of fifty-four.
There are permanent memorials to Hearn in four countries: Greece, Ireland, Japan and the United States. A museum at his birthplace in Lefkada opened in 2014, the same year that the Lafcadio Hearn Gardens opened in County Waterford. In Japan, a Lafcadio Hearn Memorial Museum maintained in his former residence in Kumamoto attracts around 150,000 visitors a year, according to the museum website.
There is also a house in New Orleans in Cleveland Avenue not far from the St Louis Cemetery, a nineteenth-century townhouse in a now isolated spot in what I was told by locals, when I expressed a wish to visit it, is a tricky part of town on the fringe of the CBD. The Lafcadio Hearn House, in which Hearn took a room (though it is not known for sure which he occupied), was added to the US National Register of Historic Places in 2006 after recognition of its significance by the City Council of New Orleans in 2004. (The Cleveland Avenue house was saved from destruction and restored by Pat Swilling, a property developer and former linebacker for the New Orleans Saints NFL team who became a Louisiana state legislator after retiring from professional football. Only in New Orleans.)
The internecine strife in Fatah no longer appears restricted to the loyalists of Dahlan and Abbas. It is threatening to erupt into an all-out war between contesting camps. Some Palestinians see the internal strife as the most serious challenge to Abbas’s rule over Fatah and the Palestinian Authority, especially in wake of growing criticism among Palestinians against Abbas’s policies and autocratic regime.
The criticism has escalated following last week’s humiliating defeat of Fatah to Hamas at the student council election of Bir Zeit University, near Ramallah.
Hamas is thriving on the mayhem among the top brass of Fatah and disgust with Abbas and the Palestinian leadership in the West Bank. Rather than striving to improve the lives of Palestinians, Fatah leaders spend their time playing at being gangsters, settling scores. Meanwhile Abbas continues his charade of lies with the international community that he and his Fatah faction are ready for a sovereign state.
Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas’s ruling Fatah faction is supposed to be preparing its people for statehood. But it seems to be busy with other business.
According to sources in the Gaza Strip, Hamas security forces recently uncovered a scheme to assassinate a number of senior Fatah officials living there.
The sources claimed that ousted Fatah operative Mohamed Dahlan, who has been living in the United Arab Emirates for the past five years, was the mastermind of the alleged scheme. Dahlan’s men in the Gaza Strip were planning to assassinate Fatah officials closely associated with his rival, Abbas, the sources revealed.
Dahlan’s hit list included Ahmed Abu Nasr, Jamal Kayed, Emad al-Agha and Mamoun Sweidan.
After the alleged plot was uncovered, Hamas summoned a number of top Fatah officials in the Gaza Strip and asked them to take precautionary measures to ensure their safety.
Abbas and Dahlan have, for the past five years, been at each other’s throats. The two were once close allies and had worked together to undermine the former Palestinian Authority president, Yasser Arafat.
