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2016

Daryl McCann :Things Fall Apart

“Polyculturalism, as Emmanuel Todd insists, is a crock. The theme of Western civilisation—which is a high point in the upswing of civilisation in general, Walt Disney’s Pocahontas (I and II) notwithstanding—denotes the deliverance of the individual from tribal or feudal subjugation. In the West, at least, I am still free, whatever my ethnicity, class, religious inclination, gender (or transgender) and so on, to settle with humanity and the world as I find it. I am free to enjoy and explore the universe as far as I am humanly able. I do not have to blow up the Buddhas of Bamiyan to accommodate the lunacy of my millennialist madness. I do not have to believe that the Islamic State has nothing to do with Islam. I do not have to spend my university years in a “safe space”.”

Nothing can be more certain than that the tribalisation of Australia will lead to a backlash, just as the bohemian revolution might have expected when its advocates and warriors made the elevation of “culture” above civilisation a key element of their plan to re-make society
If a Cold Warrior who died a half-century ago were to return today he might be surprised. Two ideologies are currently at war with Western civilisation, but neither of them is Marxism-Leninism. It is the dictatorship of bohemia—not the dictatorship of the proletariat—that is upon us. And while we allow an unreconstructed bohemian-leftist ruling class to call the shots, the West will continue to appease the other great anti-bourgeois movement of our era, Islamic revivalism.

Roger Sandall’s seminal The Culture Cult: Designer Tribalism and Other Essays (2000) nominates Jean-Jacques Rousseau as bohemia’s “exemplary original”. According to Sandall, Rousseau’s rejection by French society instigated his hostility towards intellectual virtuosity and the greatest thinkers of the time. Whereas the sophisticated Parisians were false and perverse, asserted Rousseau, the mythical “Noble Savage” was natural and dignified. The revolt of the civilised against civilisation had begun.

Ressentiment also informed the views of the German philosopher and critic Johann Gottfried Herder. Many speak of Herder’s passion for “cultures” as a sign of the man’s open-mindedness and affection for humanity; but not Sandall, who draws the portrait of a provincial intimidated by the erudition of the French philosophes. Herder’s assertion that every last primitive clan has “its own irreplaceable contribution to make to the progress of the human race” was less a celebration of diversity than a tribal dagger aimed at the heart of civilisation. Sandall’s designation of Herder as “the father of multiculturalism” is not intended as a compliment.

SHARIA COMPLIANT HIPPOCRATIC OATH? ABOVE ALL, DO A LITTLE HARM- APPALLING!

Western states should legally permit immigrant communities to surgically “nick” young girls’ vaginas as an alternative to genital mutilation, a pair of US gynaecologists argued in a hotly-challenged paper Tuesday.
Such a “compromise” could allow groups to honour cultural or religious prescripts while saving millions of girls from invasive and disfiguring genital slashing practised in some African and Middle Eastern cultures, the two doctors stated in the Journal of Medical Ethics.
“We are not arguing that any procedure on the female genitalia is desirable,” said Kavita Arora of the Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and Allan Jacobs of Stony Brook University in New York state.
“Rather, we only argue that certain procedures ought to be tolerated by liberal societies”, which have outlawed such practices but host immigrants for whom it is part of their culture.
Efforts to enforce an outright ban on female genital mutilation (FGM) have often had the opposite effect — driving the practice underground and putting women at even greater risk, said the duo.
But many peers immediately dismissed the idea.

SENATE REPUBLICANS UNLIKELY TO APPROVE OBAMA NOMINEE FOR SUPREME COURT BY DANIEL MANDEL

History and recent trends are on their side without question.

There has been a large volume of contradictory statements by Democrats and Republicans on nominating a successor to Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

President Barack Obama has claimed that he is duty-bound to nominate a judge for the highest judicial court in the land, and that his nominee is entitled to an up-and down vote. Conversely, several Republicans have been arguing that tradition dictates that a presidential nomination and Senate confirmation for a Supreme Court nominee do not take place in an election year.

As it happens, none of these claims hold water.

Election year Supreme Court vacancies have been filled by Senate-approved nominees in all six occurrences since 1900. The President certainly has the right to put forward a Supreme Court nominee in his final year, but he has no obligation to do so. And the Senate is not duty-bound to confirm, or even vote upon, his nominee, election year or not.

President Obama’s push to obtain a vote on his eventual nominee also puts him at odds with a Democratic tradition of thwarting Republican judicial nominees.

In asserting that Republicans need to vote on his eventual nominee, President Obama has been compelled to publicly “regret” via his spokesman his own efforts, as senator from Illinois, to filibuster Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.’s nomination in 2005.

Similarly, Vice President Joe Biden must be regretting his public assertion in the 1992 election year (which can be seen here) that the then-Democratic-controlled Senate should refuse consideration, let alone a vote, on a hypothetical George H.W. Bush Supreme Court nominee before that year’s presidential elections. The fact that Mr. Biden was then Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman makes it all the more difficult for Democrats to shrug off.

So what is the history regarding Supreme Court nominees?

Donald Trump’s Honesty Problem : Max Boot

“It is hard to think of another major party presidential candidate in our history as ignorant, mendacious, and offensive as Trump. And yet a significant share of the GOP electorate, amounting to roughly a third of early state voters, has been supporting him in no small part because they think he is telling it “like it is.” No, he isn’t. What he is saying bears no relation to basic truth or common decency”

Donald Trump, the undoubted Republican front-runner after winning the New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries, is — there is no way to sugarcoat this — a liar, an ignoramus, and a moral abomination. I have never previously described any presidential candidates in such harsh terms — not even close — but there is no other way to accurately describe him. There simply isn’t. This past week, the week culminating in his big South Carolina win, provided yet more evidence, as if any were needed, of the validity of all these words to describe him.

Start with the lying. Trump has consistently claimed that he was the “only” Republican candidate who opposed the Iraq War from the start. Until recently, commentators could do no more than note there was no evidence of his opposition. Now we can go further because, thanks to the ground-breaking work of BuzzFeed reporter Andrew Kaczyinski, we know that Trump actually supported the invasion.

On September 11, 2002, Trump told Howard Stern “yeah I guess so” when asked if he supported an invasion of Iraq. Why his hesitation? Only because he thought it should have happened sooner. As he said: “I wish the first time it was done correctly,” suggesting, as he had previously written, that George H.W. Bush should have toppled Saddam in 1991.

After the invasion started, on March 21, 2003, Trump called it a “tremendous success from a military standpoint.” He did not come out in bull-blown opposition until April, 2004, calling it a “terrible mistake,” by which time the Abu Ghraib excesses had been revealed and the U.S. was suffering battlefield reverses in Fallujah and elsewhere.

Asked now to explain his quotations from 2002-2003, Trump can only say: “I really don’t even know what I mean.” That’s a pretty weak way to explain away a blatant lie, and one that has been at the core of his claim to possess the kind of foreign policy judgment we need in a president.

JED BABBIN: IRAN’S SHOPPING SPREE IN THE WEAPONS MARKET

Russia is eager to arm the ayatollahs

Implementing President Obama’s nuclear weapons deal with Iran has provided about $150 billion for the ayatollahs’ coffers since international sanctions were lifted. By January, even Secretary of State John Kerry had to concede that some of the money would be used to sponsor terrorists.

That shouldn’t have come as a shock even to Mr. Kerry. Iran is the world’s principal state sponsor of terrorism. It also shouldn’t have shocked him that Iran is spending at least $8 billion on arms purchases designed to prevent any nation from successfully attacking its nuclear weapons facilities as well as to strengthen its conventional forces.

About two weeks ago, Gen. Hossein Dehqan, Iran’s defense minister, met with Russian President Vladimir Putin to arrange delivery of Russian S-300 missiles Iran purchased previously. Gen. Dehqan also sought to buy new Su-30 “Flanker” fighter jets and T-90 tanks, Russia’s most advanced tanks. (Mr. Putin had no qualms about dealing with Gen. Dehqan, believed to have been the architect of the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon that killed 220 Marines and 21 other servicemen.)

There’s no reason for Mr. Putin to deny these purchases, especially now that Iran has so much money to spend and because Iran has been a key Russian ally for decades. (There’s a U.N. Security Council resolution that supposedly bars Iran from purchasing weapons, such as military aircraft without U.N. approval. Good luck enforcing that.)

Marine vet banned from daughter’s graduation after he questioned pro-Islam curriculum

A Marine veteran has filed a lawsuit after being banned from his daughter’s school for more than a year after he raised objections to the school’s pro-Islam curriculum.

John Kevin Wood is asking a judge to remove the ban so he can watch his daughter graduate from La Plata High School in Charles County, Maryland.

“She’s in the final semester of her senior year, and as it stands right now, she’s going to have to go through that life experience without her dad there,” said Kate Oliveri, a lawyer from the Michigan-based Thomas More Law Center who is representing the Wood family.

In October 2014, Wood’s daughter showed him several assignments for her 11th grade World History class in which she was required to memorize the Five Pillars of Islam and to write and recite the shahada, the Muslim statement of faith that says “there is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.”

According to school papers submitted to federal court, the curriculum said that most Muslims’ faith is “stronger than the average Christian.”

Wood, who lost two friends in combat during Operation Desert Storm, said the school wasn’t just teaching Islam but was promoting it in a way that amounted to an assault on his family’s Christian faith.

Funding Palestinian Terrorism By Rachel Ehrenfeld

Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon announcement of large financial rewards to Palestinians attacking Israel was made possible by the tens of billions of dollars released to the Islamic terrorist regime in Iran. Accordingly, the family of each Palestinian killed while attacking Israelis will receive $7,000, and those whose house is demolished by the IDF, will be awarded $30,000 each.
It is unlikely that Iran’s latest inducement to terrorism against Israel surprised U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, or President Obama, since both have acknowledged that some of the billions of dollars released to Iran, “will end up in the hands of the IRGC or of other entities, some of which are labeled terrorists.” Indeed, both should be held accountable for knowingly funding terrorism in violation of the Patriot Act. That, however, is not going to happen. Instead, growing Palestinians attacks on Israel will be seen by the Obama administration, as an opportunity to increase its pressure on Israel to agree to a Palestinian terrorist state.
Sadly, like Iran, the U.S. also helps fund the terrorist Palestinian Authority with at least $500 million annually. This is given to the PA in complete disregard to their incitement to and support of terrorist attacks against the Jewish State. And the PA, like Iran, does not hide its sponsorship of terrorist attacks on Israel. Palestinians killed while attacking Israelis are glorified and honored by the PA. Their families receive stipends and other benefits from the PA coffers, which are annually replenished by the U.S. The Obama administration is well aware of this. However, instead of demanding a stop to the PA’s hostilities towards Israel, cutting their aid, or even threatening to do so, Kerry had “urged” Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas last week, for “calm and a decrease in violence, incitement and inflammatory rhetoric,” according to State Department spokesman John Kirby.

Facts or Arab myths By Victor Sharpe

There is much confusion in the minds of politicians, journalists, educators, religious leaders and the proverbial “man in the street” about the conflicts and origins of the many wars in the Middle East.

Foremost among these disputes is the seemingly endless Arab-Israel conflict, or what should more realistically be called the Islam-Israel conflict.

This is not a dispute over territory but a war of genocide by followers of Islam against a Jewish state, Israel, and a people who are non-Muslim.

The Arab and Islamic world will never accept the Jewish state even though its historic and ancestral roots in the land precede the 7th century beginnings of Islam by well over 3,000 years. Just read the Bible.

But to better understand the modern origins of the conflict we have to return to the emerging years after the First World War.

The victorious powers, primarily Britain, France and the United States, met in San Remo to carve up the corpse of the defeated Ottoman Turkish Empire, which had occupied the Middle East for 400 years. In so doing, they created artificial borders, which obliterated ancestral, religious and ethnic boundaries and have plagued the area ever since.

On April 25, 1920, one such cartographic invention was the Mandate of Palestine. This included the geographical territory stretching from the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea up to the border of the then Mandate of Mesopotamia; later to be renamed Iraq.

No independent or sovereign state called Palestine had ever existed in that territory, nor does one exist today, although a hostile and terrorist entity calling itself the Palestinian Authority occupies land in what is called the West Bank, while the terrorist and junior branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, occupies Gaza. But more of that later.

The name, Palestine, was merely applied to a geographical area; just like other non-state territories in the world – such as Siberia or Patagonia.

Cornell Students: the Word ‘Plantation’ Is Always Racist By Katherine Timpf

A group of students at Cornell University is demanding that the school change the name of its botanical garden from “Cornell Plantations” because apparently, the word “plantation” is always racist.

The idea behind the protest is that the word evokes images of slavery. The demand to change it is just one of many demands in a seven-page document sent to the administration by Cornell Black Students United in November.

And it’s one that’s reportedly actually being considered:

“Our staff and Advisory Council have been considering all aspects of our identity, our name, our mission and how our identity can best reflect what Cornell Plantations is — and does,” Christopher Dunn, director of the gardens, wrote in a piece for the Cornell Daily Sun.

The garden was named “Cornell Plantations” all the way back in 1944, according to a piece in Verdant Views, the plantations’ magazine. But according to Cornell Black Students United, it must be changed now. After all, the group claims that its demands must be met in order for the campus to be “conducive to the overall success of students of color.”

The New Ivy League Lynch Mobs By Brendan O’Neill

It’s the darkest irony of the year so far. Last week, feminists, alongside many others, were praising the recently deceased Harper Lee and her extraordinary literary achievement. Yet just hours later, they were behaving like Lee’s literary villains, the outraged mob in To Kill a Mockingbird, who are driven by an ugly, singular conviction: that if enough angry people believe a man is guilty of rape, then he is guilty of rape, and to hell with due process.

In their outpouring of belief in pop star Kesha, who claims to have been sexually assaulted but has never had those claims tested or proven, these Lee-celebrating feminists did precisely what Lee’s most immoral characters did: They assumed that a man was guilty of rape on the basis of nothing more than accusation and suspicion.

The Kesha story reveals the irrational rot that has set in within much of modern feminism. Kesha spent months trying to wriggle free from her contract with Sony, on the basis that her producer, Dr. Luke, had previously sexually assaulted her. She said that continuing to work with Sony would cause her “irreparable harm.” But there’s a small problem for Kesha: These claims of rape have never been brought to criminal trial and thus remain unproven. So it’s her word against Dr. Luke’s, and he says her claims are “outright lies.” Understandably, the Manhattan Supreme Court in New York City, which presumably works from the understanding that Dr. Luke, like everyone else, is innocent until proven guilty, has rejected Kesha’s request to be released from her contract.

Feminists don’t think this is understandable. For them, the Kesha-contract lock is a crime against womankind. They’ve got the hashtag #FreeKesha trending on Twitter. And, most strikingly, they’ve rallied around Kesha as a victim of sexual abuse who has now been abused further by the court system. They casually, tyrannically assume that Kesha was sexually assaulted, which of course also has the effect of branding Dr. Luke an assaulter, despite the fact that he has never been tried or convicted of this offense.