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2016

CONFERENCE: IS ISLAMOPHOBIA ACCELERATING GLOBAL WARMING? (NOT A SPOOF)….SEE NOTE

Jan Poller, my trusted friend and e-pal brought this to my attention….rsk
The Ecology and Justice Forum In Global Studies And Languages Presents: Is Islamophobia accelerating Global Warming?
Sponsored by Global Studies and Laguages, Global Borders Research Collaboration, MIT Anthropology

Ghassan Hage Ghassan Hage is Future Generation Professor in the School of Philosophy, Anthropology and Social Inquiry, University of Melbourne Introduced By Bettina Stoetzer, Global Studies And Languages

Mon. May 9

This talk examines the relation between Islamophobia as the dominant form of racism today and the ecological crisis. It looks at the three common ways in which the two phenomena are seen to be linked: as an entanglement of two crises, metaphorically related with one being a source of imagery for the other and both originating in colonial forms of capitalist accumulation. The talk proposes a fourth way of linking the two: an argument that they are both emanating from a similar mode of being, or enmeshment, in the world, what is referred to as ‘generalised domestication.’ Ghassan Hage has held many visting positions across the world including in Harvard, University of Copenhagen, Ecoles des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and American University of Beirut. He works in the comparative anthropology of nationalism, multiculturalism, diaspora and racism and on the relation between anthropology, philosophy and social and political theory. His most well-known work is White Nation: Fantasies of white supremacy in a multicultural society (Routledge 2000). His is also the author of Alter-Politics: Critical Anthropology and the Radical Imaginary (Melbourne University Press 2015). He is currently working on a book titled Is Islamophobia Accelerating Global Warming? and has most recently published a piece in American Ethnologist, titled: “Etat de Siege. A Dying Domesticating Colonialism?” (2016) that engages with the contemporary “refugee crisis” in Europe and beyond.

The talk is free and open to the public.

Silencing Bukovsky by Diana West Must read…..

If a tree falls in the forest — no, if a legendary Soviet dissident goes on a hunger strike, and there is no media there to report on it, will it ever crash into world consciousness?

Not so far. I find myself in some numbing degree of disbelief at the general silence over the fact that Vladimir Bukovsky is now 20 days into a hunger strike — his impasse with the British justice system becoming a life and death struggle in a frighteningly literal sense — amid scant news coverage and even less discernible sense of public urgency. Thank goodness for Claire Berlinski’s powerfully human cri de commentary that came out today at Ricchochet.

When Bukovsky, 72, who lives in Cambridge, UK, began his hunger strike on April 20, there was an initial flurry in the British press. It tapered off, and especially after the draconian measure taken on May 3 by the British High Court. The court went to the unusual and unusually totalitarian length of imposing a “reporting ban” on recent developments in Bukovsky’s libel suit against the Crown Prosecution Service, as explained here.

Another greatly disturbing development is that should Bukovsky be medically unfit for his separate criminal trial on May 16, the court has reportedly threatened to try him in absentia.

What is going on?

It all started on April 27, 2015, when the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) announced in an unusual manner — no, a unique manner, as I will show below — that it would be prosecuting Bukovsky for “making” and “possessing” child pornography, five charges each, plus one charge of possessing a “forbidden image.”

I have to pause for a moment to ask, incredulously: Is there a sentient person, naturally revolted by the thought of child pornography, even five or six images’ worth, going to believe for one minute that the British state, for decades having turned the blindest and hardest and most craven of eyes against the sexual despoilment and prostitution of generations of little British girls at risk at the hands of criminal Islamic “grooming” gangs, has suddenly developed some compelling interest in protecting the welfare of children, and thus turned its avenging sword on … Vladimir Bukovsky? The context, at least, is all wrong from the get-go.

Is it possible that this all really started on March 17, 2015, the day Bukovsky, the greatest enemy of the old Kremlin extant, testified in the inquiry into the 2006 assassination of Putin-era defector Alexander Litvinenko, poisoned by polonium, probably at the behest of Vladimir Putin? Or did it start on whatever day it was that British prosecutors determined it was in the public interest to investigate Bukovsky — or perhaps on the day before that?

We don’t know the answers to such questions; but asking them, thinking about them, is incumbent upon us. They take us to the larger and ghoulish dimension in which these legal machinations are playing out, and which Berlinski highlights in her essay. When these charges were first brought against Bukovsky in April 2015, she writes, Bukovsky couldn’t attend the initial hearing due to illness. She explains: “He was having complex heart surgery, after which he was in a medically-induced coma and hospitalized for four months. He survived, but was not expected to do so at the time.”

She continues: “So the point of the exercise wasn’t just to shut him up. He would soon be dead anyway. The point was to nullify his life, It was to prove to him, and to anyone tempted to emulate him, that the Kremlin will punish you for defying it even after your death. It will turn you, in the eyes of the world and of history into a child molester. These charges, even if he is acquitted, as he expects to be, would tarnish any man with an ineradicable stain. No one will believe there could be that kind of smoke without fire. They call into doubt Bukovsky’s entire life, testimony, and legacy. He is all too aware of this.

Pamela Geller: Immediately After Muslim Mayor Elected, London’s Iconic Buses Proclaim “Glory To Allah”

The Islamization of Britain made an immense advance this week, as a Muslim with extensive ties to jihadis and Islamic supremacists, Sadiq Khan, was elected mayor of London, just as London buses are set to carry ads proclaiming the “glory of Allah.”

It’s a sign of the times – and a sign of things to come. Is anyone really surprised? That a man such as Sadiq Khan, who has shared a platform with open Jew-haters, could still be elected mayor of London, is an indication of how far gone Britain already is. In Sadiq Khan’s campaign, his opponents brought up his close ties to jihadis, Islamic supremacists and Islamic Jew-haters as a blot on his record. Soon enough in Britain, however, that sort of thing will be a selling point for candidates appealing to an increasingly Muslim electorate.

The UK banned me from the country. It is already acting like a de facto Islamic state. Did anyone really think that the notoriously anti-Semitic UK would vote for Khan’s opponent, Zac Goldsmith — a Jew? London has already been overrun – voter fraud in Muslim precincts is rampant. Not that they will really needed it soon. London’s Muslim population is 1.3 million and growing.

The Muslims who voted for Sadiq Khan did not reject his extremist ties and supremacist rhetoric, dispelling the notion that most Muslims are moderates and do not adhere to the Sharia, or support extremism. Apparently, they are not “Uncle Toms,” as Sadiq likes to call moderate Muslims.

At the same time, many Jews were prohibited from voting. Even the Chief Rabbi of London was turned away – leading to the Chief Executive of one London borough having to resign. Innumerable voters throughout the London Borough of Barnet – where much of the British Jewish community lives today – were prevented from voting by a suspicious and never-explained “error” at the area’s polling stations.

The Ben Rhodes Blow-up by Lee Smith

Man, Ben Rhodes had an excellent weekend. The 38-year-old Mets’ fan who serves as President Barack Obama’s deputy national security adviser for strategic communications got to watch the press tear itself apart in rabid confusion, which proves one of his essential points—the U.S. media is a pile of dung.

After a New York Times Magazine profile of Rhodes hit newsstands Saturday night—it was posted on the Times website Thursday—the media split: The article was a hit job by author David Samuels, a crypto-neocon sent by the Mossad who opposed the Iranian nuclear deal from the outset. Or it was a gross puff piece by David Samuels, a Brooklyn liberal who was in the bag for Rhodes even before he was gifted with a box of M&M’s with the presidential seal.

Lots of people don’t know why the administration let Rhodes pull back the curtain. Because the White House won the Iran Deal is why. They wanted to take a victory lap. Obama campaigned as the anti-Iraq candidate. Bush lied and got us into a stupid war, the White House would invariably argue. And yes, as president Obama lied to sell the Iran deal—BUT to keep America out of a stupid war with Iran. Do you want American passion and innovation tied down in a severely damaged part of the world like the Middle East for the next hundred years? This is how a very large number of New York Times readers understood the piece. And as Rhodes knew, it’s how virtually everyone outside of media circles in Washington and New York would read the article.

Lots of media people can’t figure out why Rhodes spoke to Samuels, of all people. As evidence of Samuels’ pre-existing hostility to the White House, some in the Twitter-sphere posted a video of a panel at Hudson Institute I hosted where Samuels appeared with Matthew Kroenig and Michael Doran, both of whom, like me, are outspoken critics of the deal. Samuels wasn’t there to discuss the deal as such. I invited him because because I know him, and because he writes stuff I like. He said yes and maybe regrets it now, or not.

He’s not part of what Ben Rhodes calls the blob and his boss calls the Washington, D.C. foreign policy establishment. I know him from New York, when I edited the Village Voice Literary Supplement. He was a Brooklyn neighbor, and a baseball fan, and we still hung out even though our political views were often not in synch. I read his 2008 New Yorker article about a truck driver who built a nuclear bomb—a story that highlights the difference between nuclear knowledge, which is easy to come by, and the industrial infrastructure to support the manufacture of nuclear weapons, which is very difficult and costly to build and maintain. For instance, as Samuels told me over the phone for a Weekly Standard article, he said he has the blueprint to make a nuclear bomb in his desk at home—thankfully, no one has given him tens of billions of dollars to build the infrastructure that would allow him to proliferate.

The Obama Administration Provokes a Legal Crisis — the War against North Carolina By David French

The state of North Carolina and the federal government are now in a state of declared legal war. On Wednesday afternoon, the Obama administration sent a letter to North Carolina governor Pat McCrory demanding that the state “not comply with or enforce H.B. 2,” its so-called transgender bathroom law. According to the letter, a state requirement that people use the bathrooms reserved for their biological sex violates Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Department of Justice gave the state until today, May 9, to assure the federal government that men can use women’s restrooms and showers in state facilities.

Today, the state answered the Department of Justice — with a lawsuit. In its complaint, filed in federal court, North Carolina accuses the DOJ of engaging in a “baseless and blatant overreach,” an “attempt to rewrite long-established federal civil rights laws in a manner that is wholly inconsistent with the intent of Congress and disregards decades of statutory interpretation by the courts.” Simply put, Title VII does not establish “transgender status” as a protected class, and any effort to do so by executive fiat violates the law.

Then the DOJ escalated again. At an afternoon news conference, Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced a “significant law enforcement” action — its own lawsuit. At the same time, Lynch indicated that the DOJ retained the authority to federal funding to key state entities, issuing a not-so-veiled threat of dramatic action before the courts issue a definitive ruling. At the same time, she preposterously compared the act of preserving bathrooms for people of the same sex to, of course, “Jim Crow” and hearkened back to the days of segregated water fountains.

The EU’s Kiss of Death by Judith Bergman

The European Union may yet come to realize that this latest ill-concealed jab at the Central- and Eastern European members of the European Union may signal the beginning of the unraveling of the European Union, an event which, considering the authoritarian structure of the organization, might be a good thing. The EU’s authority comes, undemocratically, from the top down, rather than from the bottom up; it is non-transparent, unaccountable and there is no mechanism for removing European Commission representatives.

“We especially do not like it when people who have never lived in Hungary try to give us lectures on how we should cope with our own problems. Calling us racists or xenophobes is the cheapest argument. It’s used just to dodge the issues.” — Zoltán Kovács, spokesman for Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

By persisting in pushing their agendas on European Union member states that still consider themselves sovereign and not merely provinces of the EU, Timmermans and his European Commission bureaucrats may just have given the European Union its kiss of death.

The European Union is hell-bent on forcing member states to take “their share” of migrants. To this end, the European Commission has proposed reforms to EU asylum rules that would see enormous financial penalties imposed on members refusing to take in what it deems a sufficient number of asylum seekers, apparently even if this means placing those states at a severe financial disadvantage.

The European Commission is planning sanctions of an incredible $290,000 for every migrant that recalcitrant EU member states refuse to receive. Given that EU countries such as Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Austria have closed their borders to migrants or are in the process of doing so, it is not difficult to discern at whom the EU is aiming its planned penalties.

The EU may yet come to realize, however, that this latest ill-concealed jab at the Central- and Eastern European members of the European Union — if it passes muster by most member states and members of the European parliament — may just signal the beginning of the unraveling of the European Union, an event which, considering the authoritarian structure of the organization, might be a good thing. The EU’s authority comes, undemocratically, from the top down, rather than from the bottom up; it is non-transparent, unaccountable and there is no mechanism for removing European Commission representatives.

The migrant crisis has revealed a deep and seemingly irreconcilable rift between those countries that roughly two decades ago still found themselves on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain and have not forgotten it, and Western European countries spared from a merciless Soviet totalitarianism. The soft Western Europeans, instead, developed politically correct credos of “diversity” and “multiculturalism,” which they intractably push down the throats of those recently released from captivity, refusing to show the tolerance of which they themselves purport to be high priests.

In September, European Commission Vice President Frans Timmermans said,

“We should know more about Central European history. Knowing that they were isolated for generations, that they were under oppression by Moscow for so long, that they have no experience with diversity in their society, and it creates fear in the society.

“Any society, anywhere in the world, will be diverse in the future — that’s the future of the world. So [Central European countries] will have to get used to that. They need political leaders who have the courage to explain that to their population instead of playing into the fears as I’ve seen Mr Orbán doing in the last couple of months.”

Exactly because central Europeans were subjected to a totalitarian ideology for half a century, they are rather unenthusiastic about submitting to a new, increasingly totalitarian ideology, especially one which seeks to impose itself as the “only truth,” and in its intolerance is averse to any nonconformity — as Timmermans’ comments make condescendingly clear.

The European Union’s vision of an ideal “multicultural” and “diverse” society seems to be viewed by the central Europeans as humbug, perhaps because they have correctly observed that the “multiculturalism” on display in Western Europe is largely a monoculture of the Islamic variety.

If there is anything at which the Central Europeans became experts during their Soviet internment, it was deciphering the doublespeak of communist apparatchiks, which may account for their adeptness at deciphering the doublespeak coming from Eurocrats such as Timmermans. As the Hungarian Prime Minister’s spokesman, Zoltán Kovács, said in September, “… multi-culturalism in Western Europe has not been a success in our view. We want to avoid making the same mistakes ourselves.”

Ben Rhodes’s Fiction Behind the “Iran Deal” by A.J. Caschetta

Rhodes even acknowledges that there is nothing “moderate” about Rouhani, Zarif or Khamenei.

The dates and facts conflicted with the narrative, so they were finessed, rewritten and sold to the public with different plot-lines and different themes. Outside Washington, D.C. this behavior is sometimes called lying.

At best Ben Rhodes is the author of a Pyrrhic victory, ensuring that the next president will face the same choice Obama faced but against an Iran armed with nuclear bombs.

This is what happens to foreign policy when it is entrusted to the unqualified and undereducated.

That the Obama administration’s Iran deal is a work of fiction has been known all along, but now Ben Rhodes, Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications, is taking credit as its author. In a long interview with New York Times reporter David Samuels on Sunday, the world learned that Rhodes is “the master shaper and retailer of Obama’s foreign policy narratives” who “strategized and ran the successful Iran-deal messaging campaign.” Samuels lauds Rhodes as “a storyteller who uses a writer’s tools to advance an agenda packaged as politics.”

Welcome to the post-modern techno-presidency where everything is a text, easily manipulated by skilled writers and disseminated in 140 or fewer characters. Don’t like the facts? Change the narrative. What really counts is “the optics.”

In the midst of his fawning profile, Samuels exposes a number of lies behind the Iran narrative, or rather quotes Rhodes himself doing so. For instance, the first outreach to Iran came 2012, not in 2013. I’d bet it came even earlier. Rhodes even acknowledges that there is nothing “moderate” about Iranian leaders Rouhani, Zarif or Khamenei. But these dates and facts conflicted with the narrative, so they were finessed, rewritten and sold to the public with different plot-lines and different themes. Outside Washington, D.C. this behavior is sometimes called lying.

The Rhodes narrative, at its core, is a simple tale in which a hero, armed with special skills and weapons, goes on a quest that requires a fight against the forces of evil. It incorporates elements of the ancient epic, the medieval romance and the eighteenth-century novel, with elements of drama splashed in here and there.

The hero, of course, is Rhodes’s real-life hero, Barack Obama (with whom he “mind melds,” as he apparently tells anyone who will listen). The hero’s special weapon is diplomacy — in the case of Iran, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), a.k.a., “Iran Deal.” But Rhodes himself is also the hero of his tale. As he tells Samuels in one particularly dewy-eyed moment: “I don’t know anymore where I begin and Obama ends.”

Israel’s Anti-Israel Elites and Their Hatred of Israelis The truly sick society is that of the left. Daniel Greenfield

Last year, Israeli President Rivlin denounced Israel as a “sick society” and accused Jews of having “forgotten how to be decent human beings.” Now Major General Yair Golan, the military’s deputy chief of staff, accused Israel of resembling Nazi Germany in a speech delivered on the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Israel is a sick society only to the extent that, like a fish, it rots from the heads of men like Rivlin and Golan. It is a sickness comes from members of the political elite whose views are fundamentally at odds with those of the people. The hatred that Rivlin and Golan, the beneficiaries of privilege and protektsia, feel for ordinary Israelis is unrelenting in its ugliness.

The Jewish State is fundamentally divided between two groups, its people and its leaders. Israel’s population is defined by a diverse mix of Middle Eastern and Russian Jewish refugees along with large numbers of Orthodox Jews. These groups tend to have more conservative views and their influence makes it very difficult for the left to win elections the way that it once used to.

Rather than adapting to Israel’s changing demographics, its elites have poured on the hate. From Dudu Topaz to Yair Garbuz, a Labor rally can’t seem to pass by without slurs aimed at Middle Eastern Jews. At last year’s election, Garbuz ranted, “How did this handful quietly become a majority?”

There was nothing quiet about it. But inside a leftist bubble of power and privilege the revelation that the majority of Israelis have very different views than they do has been deeply traumatic and shocking. Prime Minister Netanyahu is on his third straight term, but the Deep State of the elites is unwilling to be dislodged by mere democratic elections. And the Deep State controls leadership roles across the government from the military through the judiciary, not to mention academia, non-profits and culture.

It’s been a long time since this elite has been optimistic. Instead its rhetoric is divisive and nasty; it’s marked by paranoid suspicions about the ordinary Israelis who have left them behind. Hostile remarks, like those by Rivlin and Golan, express an undemocratic distaste toward the average Israeli.

The majority of Israel’s Jewish population now consists of refugees from the Middle East. This is a population with fundamentally different views when it comes to fighting back against the Islamic supremacism which they and their ancestors had lived under and eventually fled. It feels no guilt over the death of terrorists. It does not mourn the Jihadists of the Nakba who headed for the border in the expectation that the Jews in Israel would meet with a final Holocaust at the hands of the five invading Muslim armies, not to mention the forces of the Muslim Brotherhood. Instead it feels a moral pride.

Trump and the Republican Drama Obscures the Real Crisis The most important issue the new president will face continues to be sidelined. Bruce Thornton

The Republican caterwauling over Donald Trump reminds me of the lyric from “That’s Entertainment”: “There’s no ordeal/like the end of Camille.” Jeb Bush, Lyndsey Graham, and Mitt Romney have announced that they will snub the GOP convention. GOP big donors are closing their wallets. Some pundits and politicians are contemplating a third-party candidate to prove the purity of their conservative principles, even if it means Hillary Clinton will end up appointing 2-3 Supreme Court Justices. The litany of Trump’s sins is recited over and over, with the implication that such a vulgar blowhard is an unprecedented blot on American history.

Meanwhile, the country’s looming fiscal disaster, the most important issue the new president will face, continues to be sidelined.

But first I can’t resist one last reminder to the angry Republicans about how they played a role in creating Donald Trump. Why weren’t the party pundits and politicians as aggressive and vociferous when Barack Obama burst on the scene? I wish the McCain campaign had as loudly hounded Obama over the gaps in his biography, the fictions in his “memoirs,” his obvious lack of experience and achievements, his pastor Jeremiah “Goddam America” Wright, his terrorist buddy Bill “free as a bird” Ayres, and his jail-bird real-estate facilitator Tony Rezko. I wish the Republicans had exposed, emphasized, and publicized, as relentlessly as they did Donald’s coarse bluster and policy incoherence, Obama’s long record of leftist ideology. Instead they were buffaloed by Obama’s “unifier” rhetoric during the campaign. Sure, all those troubling connections were mentioned and tut-tutted, but then were quickly buried in policy sound-bites coupled with obligatory encomia to Obama’s brilliant oratory, his “gifted” writing, his lovely family, exotic upbringing, and the perfect crease in his trousers.

Why? We all know why. Because Obama is “black.” Fearful of being branded racist, the Republicans pulled their punches. They ignored the Jeremiah Wright scandal and Obama’s blatant lies about his relationship to the racist pastor, pretending they were too high-minded for such bare-knuckle politics. They weakened themselves by accepting the Democrats’ old double standard that allowed them to demonize Republicans as racist for raising concerns that would have buried a Republican. The McCain campaign should have known that the “post-racial” rhetoric was a lie, and that no matter how faithfully they played by the Dems’ rules, they would get bludgeoned by accusations of racism anyway. And so it went in 2012 too, when Romney allowed the Dems to portray him as a heartless capitalist pirate, even as Obama lived it up in 1% splendor, far from the mayhem and disorder millions of blacks have to endure every day. This caving in to political correctness helped make Trump’s attack on it so successful.

To Spite Israel, France Hosting Mideast ‘Peace’ Talks Without Inviting Pro-Israel Voice By P. David Hornik

They’re at it again — an Israeli-Palestinian peace conference is taking place in Paris on May 30.

But there’s a catch: neither Israelis nor Palestinians will be there. They weren’t invited, and this was not France’s attempt to be “evenhanded.” In fact, French President François Hollande’s Socialist government has the exact opposite intentions.

Hollande knows that the Palestinian Authority wants the conference to occur, while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu strongly opposes it. Inviting neither party is France’s tactic for sidestepping Israel’s decided lack of eagerness.

Not hiding Israel’s disgust, Israeli ambassador to the UN Danny Danon says that Israel is in “a state of emergency,” and that:

… each country that Israel succeeds in preventing from attending the conference will be considered an achievement.

Uri Savir, a veteran Israeli “peacenik” who sees only goodwill in diplomatic machinations, reports approvingly on France’s move:

The French are inviting the Middle East Quartet representatives (United States, European Union, Russia and the United Nations), the Arab League and approximately 20 foreign ministers.

The EU, Russia, the UN, the Arab League … and the Obama administration.

Each of the invitees tilt against Israel’s current position. The Hollande government, by the way, received overwhelming Muslim support in France’s 2012 election and is dependent on that demographic. Secretary of State John Kerry has not yet announced if either he or a lower-level U.S. diplomat will be attending.

Going forward with such a conference at such a time represents a triumph of cynicism over experience, especially considering recent Mideast events:

— Islamic governments have been imploding, especially in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Libya. There is additional violent instability in many others. The old saw that the region’s agitations all stem from the Israeli-Palestinian issue has been exposed as nonsense. There is no rational basis for believing the proverbial “Palestinian state living beside Israel in peace and security” is possible now.

— The Palestinians are divided into two political entities: Hamas-run Gaza, and Fatah-run Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. They’re at each other’s throats; by all accounts, the only thing preventing a Hamas takeover of the PA is Israel’s military presence. What sort of unified, coherent, or constructive Palestinian state could be fashioned from these two bitterly antagonistic entities — one of them run by a group the U.S. officially designates a terror organization? CONTINUE AT SITE