Displaying posts published in

May 2017

MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

Norman – A Review By Marilyn Penn

By on May 3rd, 2017

Count the derogatory characteristics stereotypically applied to Jews and confirmed by this scathing film: pushy, two-faced, greedy, power-hungry, untrustworthy, social-climbing, controlling, puppet-masters of the government – there are more but let’s start with these. Under the guise of being a soft-spoken, gentle schlemiel – the kind of man who knows how to manipulate an invite to a billionaire’s dinner party but shows up wearing a newsboy’s cap that signals why he doesn’t belong – Richard Gere plays Norman, a man who lives by connecting people to other people who can do them important favors. By tailing an Israeli minister as he meanders back to his NY hotel after an important meeting, Norman eventually introduces himself in an elegant men’s shop and promises to get the minister an invitation to the billionaire’s dinner that night. To establish his credibility, he insists on paying for the minister’s exorbitantly expensive shoes – previously tried on and rejected for their extravagance. The greedy minister accepts the offer, and if adjusted for inflation, probably sells out for less than Judas did. Jews have always loved both shekels and beautiful menswear – think of Joseph and that rainbow coat.

There’s a lot more plot concerning a potty-mouthed rabbi who needs to raise money to save his temple (Steve Buscemi); a successful lawyer/nephew who needs a rabbi who will marry him to his Korean love (Michael Sheen); an Israeli prime-minister who needs to get his son accepted to Harvard (Lior Ashkenazi) – a chad gadya of the interlocking needs and wants of Israeli and American Jewry. And there are the un-subtle references to names and types to arouse a nod and smile from viewers who pick up on them – a Korean rabbi at Central Synagogue, the names Alfred Taub and Henry Kavisch. There’s the brief scene showing Norman eating pickled herring from a jar while miles away, the prime-minister is slurping oysters and the soundtrack of glorious cantorial chanting of prayers offers the spirituality that Judaism used to represent. As a movie for home-consumption in Israel, one could make the argument that Norman is an over-extended SNL sketch that skewers its leaders, movers and shakers. As a film sent out for international distribution to an increasingly anti-semitic world, its a misguided attempt at satire that will only re-enforce and inflame existing prejudice.

The writer/director of this film is Joseph Cedar who proves one point about Jewish fixers – he succeeded in rounding up an international cast of movie stars from Hollywood, Israel, England and France. As a footnote to this review, I must add my own amazement that the man who created one of the cleverest and most insightful Israeli films of recent years (FOOTNOTE) is the same man who takes attribution for this pile of lethal ammunition. The auditorium was half-full when I saw this – I can only hope that word of mouth gets this film off the circuit as quickly as you can say “it’s bad for the Jews.”

Continue reading →
ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, MEDIA Comments turned off

Bret Stephens Is Surprised When The Mob He Fed Turned On Him Julie Kelly

By on May 3rd, 2017

On the eve of the Climate March, the New York Times ran Stephens’s first column for them, and it sent the climate mob on a virtual stampede with torches ablaze.

The day before activists took to the streets to blame humankind for causing climate change, a federal court granted President Trump’s request to essentially freeze the Clean Power Plan, President Obama’s signature climate policy. Trump signed an executive order in March that instructed the Environmental Protection Agency to review the plan (already tied up in the courts), which sought to reduce carbon emissions by 32 percent of 2005 levels by 2050. It’s expected that EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt will gut if not entirely rescind it.

That same day, the EPA announced its website is “undergoing changes that reflect the agency’s new direction under President Donald Trump and Administrator Scott Pruitt” and specifically mentions “content related to climate.” This is kinda like when your boss tells you the company is going in a new direction right before she fires you. Happy marching!

But the real knife in the back came in the form of a column posted by Bret Stephens, a new columnist for The New York Times. On the eve of the Climate March, the Times ran Stephens’s first column since it poached him from the Wall Street Journal, and it sent the climate mob on a virtual stampede to the Times’ headquarters with torches ablaze. The Times hired Stephens, a neoconservative, for his virulent anti-Trump stance. As Byron York noted after the announcement, “seeking diversity, NYT editorial page wants anti-Trump opinion from left, right, and center.”

But the move backfired. Stephens has been labeled a climate denier for his past comments on the issue, such as calling global warming a “mass neurosis” and a “sick-souled religion.” Since the Times announced their hire, people have been demanding Stephens’s ouster; a petition on Change.org to fire him earned more than 28,000 signatures and many more threatened to cancel their subscriptions.
Rain on the Climate Parade Produces Hissing Steam

His April 28 column is a partial retort, if not a slight olive branch, to the climate congregation outraged that a heretic is now singing from their climate hymnal. (The Times just opened an entire bureau dedicated to climate change, brooding that “as the earth’s temperature continues to break records, climate and environmental reporting is taking on new urgency.”)

Stephens makes the wholly logical point that “claiming total certainty about the science traduces the spirit of science and creates openings for doubt whenever a climate claim proves wrong.” He writes how the extremism and arrogance of climate leaders have fueled doubt if not total indifference about manmade climate change among the general public: “Censoriously asserting one’s moral superiority and treating skeptics as imbeciles and deplorables wins few converts,” he wrote. Irony alert here; keep reading.

If Stephens was trying to advise — if not appease — the climate mob, it didn’t work. The climate Twitterverse imploded Friday afternoon. California billionaire Tom Steyer, whose deep pockets fund climate activism around the world, tweeted that Stephens’s column “is straight out of Exxon playbook” and that it was “no different than a columnist arguing that tobacco use might not cause cancer. Dangerous.”

Continue reading →
EDUCATION Comments turned off

Sorry, College Kids, There’s No Such Thing As Hate Speech By John Daniel Davidson

By on May 3rd, 2017

For the sake of campus protestors and their professors across the country, it’s time to make something clear: there’s no such thing as hate speech.

That should go without saying, since freedom of speech and free inquiry is supposed to be what college is all about. But the recent spate of violent student protests, from the University of California at Berkeley to Middlebury College in Vermont, have been met with a collective shrug from an alarming number of college students, professors, and administrators who seem to be under the impression that violence is okay so long as its purpose is to silence “hate speech.”
By hate speech, they mean ideas and opinions that run afoul of progressive pieties. Do you believe abortion is the taking of human life? That’s hate speech. Think transgenderism is a form of mental illness? Hate speech. Concerned about illegal immigration? Believe in the right to bear arms? Support President Donald Trump? All hate speech.

But in fact, there is no “hate speech” exception to the First Amendment. The answer to the question, “Where does free speech stop and hate speech begin?” is this: nowhere. For the purposes of the First Amendment, there is no difference between free speech and hate speech. Ideas and opinions that progressive students and professors find offensive or “hateful” are just as protected by the Bill of Rights as anti-Trump slogans chanted at a campus protest.
‘Fighting Words’ Are Not Hate Speech

There are, of course, certain kinds of speech that are not protected by the First Amendment. But those have nothing to do with hate speech, which has no legal definition. For example, there’s an exception for “fighting words,” which the courts have defined as a face-to-face insult directed at a specific person for the purpose of provoking a fight.

But fighting words can’t be expanded to mean hate speech—or even bigoted speech. In the early 1990s, the city of St. Paul tried to do just that, by punishing what it considered bigoted fighting words under its Bias-Motivated Crime Ordinance. The case, which involved a white teenager burning a cross made from taped-together broken chair legs in the front yard of a black family that lived across the street, went to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The court ruled the city’s ordinance was facially unconstitutional (which means a statute is always unconstitutional and hence void) and that it constituted viewpoint-based discrimination. Writing for the majority in R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul (1992), Justice Antonin Scalia explained that, as written,

the ordinance applies only to ‘fighting words’ that insult, or provoke violence, ‘on the basis of race, color, creed, religion or gender.’ Displays containing abusive invective, no matter how vicious or severe, are permissible unless they are addressed to one of the specified disfavored topics. Those who wish to use ‘fighting words’ in connection with other ideas—to express hostility, for example, on the basis of political affiliation, union membership, or homosexuality—are not covered. The First Amendment does not permit St. Paul to impose special prohibitions on those speakers who express views on disfavored subjects.

As for discriminating against certain viewpoints, Scalia noted that fighting words are excluded from First Amendment protection not because they communicate a particular idea but because “their content embodies a particularly intolerable (and socially unnecessary) mode of expressing whatever idea the speaker wishes to convey.” The city’s ordinance, he wrote, simply didn’t fit the definition of fighting words:

Continue reading →
ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Israeli-Palestinian Peace Perspectives By Lawrence J. Haas

By on May 3rd, 2017

The “moderate” Palestinian Authority, which runs the West Bank, continues to provide generous lifetime stipends, lump-sum payments, health care, tuition and other benefits to Israeli-killing terrorists and their families.

At the same time, that same entity is threatening to sue Britain’s government for rejecting its request that London apologize for issuing the Balfour Declaration in 1917, paving the way for Israel’s creation.

Meanwhile, facing pressure from the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, the terrorist group that runs Gaza, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East recently backed off its plans to revise the curricula of its schools in the West Bank and Gaza – which means that Palestinian children will continue to see maps that erase the Jewish state, thus defining an aspirational Palestine to include all land “from the [Jordan] river to the [Mediterranean] sea.”

Those developments, along with the ongoing vows by Palestinian leaders to destroy Israel and the hero worship that they provide to Jew-killing “martyrs,” make clear that Palestinian society maintains its broad-scale “rejectionism” of Israel: denying its right to exist as a Jewish state and dreaming of replacing it with a Palestine that would encompass all of what’s now Israel and the Palestinian territories.

That’s the backdrop to a controversial new idea for resolving the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict that Israel’s government surely won’t pursue but that, nevertheless, could contribute usefully to the stale debate over how to achieve peace. The idea: Rather than push for more negotiations as part of the “peace process,” push instead for Israeli victory over Palestinian terror as a predicate for negotiations.

This new approach is the joint product of the Middle East Forum as well as a handful of Republican House members who, late last week, officially launched the House’s new Israel Victory Caucus.

Continue reading →
ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

SIX KNOCKS AND A SEVENTH: MOSHE DANN

By on May 3rd, 2017

Today, when Jews in Israel are threatened by many enemies throughout the world, even assisted by some Jews, the Rav urges us to ignore their message of despair, self-doubt and defeatism. On Independence Day, 1956, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “the Rav,” wrote Kol Dodi Dofek (“Listen – My Beloved Knocks”) in which he sought to place the Jews’ return to their homeland into perspective; it could not have been, he concluded, the result of coincidence or luck.

The Rav referred to a tragic parable in the Song of Songs in which a lover knocks on his beloved’s door one night, but she tells him she is tired and he should come back the next day. When he does not return, she searches for him but realizes that he is gone forever and that she has missed her chance for love. Today, when Jews in Israel are threatened by many enemies throughout the world, even assisted by some Jews, the Rav urges us to ignore their message of despair, self-doubt and defeatism.
When published, the Rav’s essay ran to 60 pages. I have highlighted its main points, added a few contemporary details, and included an additional “knock” to make the sound clearer.

1. The first knock of the Beloved (God) was when, despite the antagonism between the West and the Soviet Union, both recognized the legitimacy of a Jewish state. The United Nations came into being solely in order to facilitate that right, on November 29, 1947, and confirmed it by recognizing the State of Israel in May, 1948. A year later, Israel was accepted as a member of the United Nations.

2. Following the establishment of the State of Israel, the second knock was on the battlefield, when the small IDF defeated the mighty armies of five Arab countries.

Using the analogy of the Exodus from Egypt – when Pharaoh hardened his heart and ended up with a worse deal than was originally offered to him – the Rav considers the Arab attack a blessing in disguise. Had the Arabs accepted the UN partition plan and not attacked, Israel would have had to settle for a state which excluded Jerusalem, half of the Galilee and part of the Negev including Beersheba. It could not have survived.

Continue reading →