In yesterday’s New York Times “Style” section Hillary Clinton was interviewed about her book and why she lost.
Her lament: ” This has to be called out for what it is: a cultural, political, economic game that’s being played to keep women in their place”
This from the lady that really kept women in “their place” by calling all her husband’s bimbo eruptions “nuts and sluts” and who played a political and economic game by lying, profiteering, and peddling uranium and other favors to adversaries.
Last decade, Ronald and Penelope Jones were being feted for their work as foster parents. Now their suburban Surrey home was raided in an investigation into the train bombing in London.
The Joneses had won praise for fostering hundreds of children. But their growing interest in taking in refugees from Muslim countries turned their pleasant home with its wooden fences and green backyard into a ticking time bomb.
And that bomb may have gone off at the Parsons Green station leaving behind flash burns and horror.
Earlier, the Joneses had admitted that, “We’ve had a real mix of children from Iraq, Eritrea, Syria, Albania and Afghanistan.” The tidal wave of refugees from these countries has swept across Europe bringing terror and death.
Ronald Jones, 88, and Penelope Jones, 71, like so many well-meaning Westerners, had no idea what they were letting themselves in for until the police were hammering at their door. Now they themselves have been turned into refugees, seeking shelters with relatives, while the police search for clues to the latest terror attack.
The couple became interested in fostering “refugees” when the media barraged helpless listeners with sob stories of Syrian suffering. But while they spoke often of children, the actual migrants are adults.
At the center of the case is Yahyah Farroukh, a Syrian, in his twenties. Farroukh was no child.
Neighbors described a constant flow of traffic to the Jones home. The visitors wore the traditional Islamic clothing often associated with the Jihadists who are the core of the European terror threat.
Prayer mats were set out in the garden. And there were constant cell phone conversations.
Farroukh allegedly invaded Europe by taking a migrant boat from Egypt to Italy.
Another of the alleged Jones “refugees” is an 18-year-old Iraqi from Baghdad who had apparently been monitored by law enforcement. And may have even been previously arrested. A refugee charity allegedly helped bring him to the UK. And arranged to have him placed with the Joneses.
The Iraqi had overloaded even the endless generosity of the Joneses who reportedly found him troublesome and dangerous. And that must have taken some doing.
It was this Iraqi whom police may suspect planted the bomb at Parsons Green station. And when the bomb went off on a crowded train on Friday, the holiest day in the Islamic religion, the manhunt began.
The Iraqi refugee was arrested trying to buy a ticket to Calais.
Calais to Dover is the route that refugees take to penetrate the UK. The Joneses had spoken of one “boy” in their care who had “managed to get in a lorry travelling through Calais.”
The Iraqi refugee suspect had originally come through Calais, but now he was headed the other way.
The vandalization of a statute of University of Virginia founder Thomas Jefferson by students and Black Lives Matter rioters suggests the Left is escalating the ugly Cultural Revolution-style upheaval that President Obama encouraged in office.
This iconoclastic insurrectionism is spreading, as angry left-wing mobs topple statues of figures from the past they dislike. In Chicago, Bishop James Dukes of Liberation Christian Center is demanding that the names and statues of George Washington and Andrew Jackson be removed from parks. Others want Woodrow Wilson’s name excised from buildings and schools because he supported racial segregation. The list goes on and on.
The disorder in Charlottesville comes as a monument in Baltimore honoring Francis Scott Key, who wrote the words to “The Star-Spangled Banner,” was spray-painted with the words “racist anthem.” Leftist writer Jefferson Morley suggested on Tucker Carlson’s TV show that the vandalism was justified, but more on that in a moment.
As about a hundred students chanted “No Trump, no KKK, no racist UVA,” the Jefferson monument on the school’s main quad was draped in black and adorned with signs reading, “Black Lives Matter,” “TJ is a racist,” and “Fuck white supremacy.”
The assault on September 12 came a month after the deadly, misnamed, abortive “Unite the Right” rally in the same town. The campus event was organized by the Black Student Alliance after UVA turned down its demand to suspend the First Amendment by banishing white-supremacists from campus and taking out various Confederate plaques.
“One month ago, we stood on the front lines in downtown Charlottesville as all manner of white supremacists, neo-Nazis and neo-fascists swarmed the area,” one speaker told the crowd. “Two months ago, the Ku Klux Klan rallied in their safe space, fully robed and fully protected by multiple law enforcement agencies who brutalized and tear-gassed peaceful counter-protesters.”
“We can and must condemn the violence of one month ago and simultaneously recognize Jefferson as a rapist, racist, and slave owner,” said the speaker, who could just as easily have been describing the Muslim prophet Muhammad.
“The visibility of physical violence from white supremacists should not take our attention away from condemning and disrupting more ‘respectable’ racists that continue to control the structures that perpetuate institutional racism.”
This shameful attack on Jefferson, a Founding Father and intellectual leading light of the republic, as well as author of the Declaration of Independence, U.S. president, and Virginia governor, comes weeks after racial arsonist Al Sharpton demanded the federal government shut down the Jefferson Memorial in the nation’s capital because the long-dead president owned slaves.
“When you look at the fact that public monuments are supported by public funds you’re asking me to subsidize the insult of my family,” Sharpton said.
“I would repeat that the public should not be paying to uphold somebody who has had that kind of background,” Sharpton said. “You have private museums, you have other things that you may want to do there.”
Jefferson “had slaves and children with his slaves,” he continued. “And it does matter.”
Actually, not so much. Jefferson’s political enemies began circulating the story that he fathered children with his slave Sally Hemings. Jefferson, or any of two dozen of his male relatives, may have fathered the children of Hemings, according to DNA testing.
I have not posted anything lately, because Hurricane Irma was imminent and on my mind, and then I was without power and the Internet for days. Yes, I live somewhere in Florida, in a region of the state that was relentlessly baptized by an outer band of the storm, rich in rain and howling winds.
Now that I’m back in business, and able to catch up on the news, I see that a new hurricane is imminent, that is, the storm of censorship and the enforcement of politically correct thought, speech, and writing. It promises to wreck destruction not just on Florida, but on the whole of Western civilization. The storm has been collecting strength for decades as it approaches the mainland of Freedom of Speech.
When to date the origins of the storm? Let’s say in 1995, with the publication of a fussy, snarky book, addressed mostly to academics. I quote from the article I wrote about it, “The Ghouls of Grammatical Egalitarianism.”
A small, innocuous-looking book appeared in bookstores recently, published under the auspices of the Association of American University Presses (AAUP), an organization which claims to be devoted to the dissemination of knowledge and scholarly research. Its title is Guidelines for Bias-Free Writing, by Marilyn Schwartz and the Task Force on Bias-Free Language (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). It is little more than 100 pages long, weighs less than a pound, yet its contents are more potent than the Oklahoma City bomb. Its ingredients are politically correct jargon, multiculturalism, and the phenomenon of what may be called “grammatical egalitarianism.”
It is important to note at the start that the Association boasts a membership of 114 institutions, mostly university presses, but includes such diverse organizations as the National Academy Press, the National Gallery of Art, the Modern Language Association, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the J. Paul Getty Trust. Its membership includes all major American and Canadian universities, plus Oxford University Press and presses in Tokyo, South America, and Scandinavia. This is an organization with significant cultural clout.
Guidelines promotes and encourages “grammatical egalitarianism,” which in practice serves to stifle the dissemination of knowledge and scholarly research.
Presciently, Guidelines, in 1995, covered virtually every issue now at large in 2017, including feminism, “social justice,” and race. Feelings have replaced language as a mode of expression.
Guidelines includes the disclaimer, “there is no such thing as a truly bias-free language” and stresses that the advice it offers is only “that of white, North American (specifically U.S.), feminist publishing professionals.” The Task Force, which is composed of 21 university press editors (two of them men), recommends euphemistic proxies for all of the terms on its “hit list.” [Brackets mine]
This is true. There is no such thing as a truly bias-free language, but Marilyn Schwartz and her team resisted that truism anyway. A truly bias-free language would be no language at all, except for grunts, gesticulations, and facial expressions. But even those would not be free of bias. Looking through an atomic microscope, without a bias-loaded language, how would a scientist otherwise say that an atom’s valence of electrons is abnormal? How would one say that “this is a very good (or bad) painting”? How would one say, “I love you.”? I leave it to your biasedimagination. Because language is governed by values – that is, by “bias” – such as objective truth, it enables precise communication. Without bias, language, communication, and the formation of concepts would be impossible to men.
Have Islamic terrorism and violence – in Muslim and non-Muslim countries – been extrinsic or intrinsic elements of Islam?http://bit.ly/2wooego
Since September 11, 2001, there have been 31,722 Islamic terrorist attacks, mostly hitting Muslims. In August, 2017, there were 180 Islamic terrorist attacks in 32 countries, resulting in 1,014 murdered and 1,090 injured.
Christianity is on the verge of extinction in the Middle East. In the past century, over 50% of Middle East Christians emigrated or were killed. According to the May 13, 2015 US House Foreign Affairs Committee testimony, “Christianity could be eradicated from large swaths of the Middle East in the next five years…. In the last decade, the Christian community in Iraq has plummeted from 1.5 million to under 300,000, half of whom are displaced…. [In Muslim countries], there is also real persecution of [Muslim] Yazidis, Turkomen, Shia and Sunni….”
The New York Times reported: “Nearly every day seems to bring a new horror to the streets of Western Europe…. Death and injury have been dealt out by truck, ax, handgun, kebab knife and bomb….”
11 million Muslims have been killed since 1948, of which 35,000 (0.3%) were killed during Arab-Israeli wars. Over 90% were killed by fellow Muslims.
This background – which is consistent with inter-Muslim relations since the rise of Islam in the seventh century – begs the following questions:
1. Is it logical to assume that dramatic concessions to rogue Muslim regimes would convince them to accord “the infidel” that which they have denied their fellow-“believers” for 1,400 years: peaceful-coexistence and tolerance?
2. What are the roots of Muslim aggression against “believers” and “infidels”?
3. Is Muslim contempt toward Western culture extrinsic or intrinsic to Islam?
4. Has the absence of democracy and civil liberties, in all Arab countries, been consistent or at variance with Islam?
5. Why is Muslim violence intensifying in Europe – as Muslim immigration to Europe is expanding – despite the goodwill showered upon the Muslim world and Muslim immigrants by most European governments and societies?
6. Why has there been an expansion of no-go zones in European cities – forbidden to Christian “infidels” – simultaneously with the proliferation of Muslim organizations, in Europe, calling for Jihad (holy war against the “infidel”)?
7. Is the motto of the Muslim Brotherhood – the largest Islamic transnational terror organization – consistent or at variance with Islam: “Allah is our objective, Muhammad is our leader, the Quran is our constitution, Jihad (holy war) is our venue and Shuhada (martyrdom) on behalf of Allah is our wish”?
8. Why has the US – which has never ruled Muslim societies – been targeted by Islamic violence/terrorism, while the USSR/Russia – which has aggressively ruled over millions of Muslims – enjoyed preferential Arab/Muslim treatment?
Barletta is very pro-Israel for which he gets a -3 from the Arab American Institute…..rsk
It’s not an invasion, but for some in Hazleton, Pa., it feels like one. The northern Pennsylvania town is the home of Republican congressman Lou Barletta, whose 2018 campaign for Senate against incumbent Bob Casey has just begun. Barletta, the polished Italian American, looks the ambitious type in both style and CV: He served as mayor of Hazleton from 1998 to 2010 and ran for Congress thrice over that span. He finally won in 2010 and has been the representative for Pennsylvania’s eleventh district — which stretches from Luzerne County all the way down to Carlisle — ever since. But while some ambitious politicians are determined to leave their towns behind and enter the world of Washington, what animates Barletta is something quite different. Barletta is concerned about what, apparently, plagues his hometown and the rest of his beloved state: illegal immigration.
“They get it,” Barletta tells National Review. “Pennsylvanians understand that illegal immigration depresses wages, puts their jobs at risk, makes it harder at schools or to receive care from hospitals. They understand what it means.” In Barletta’s telling, it carries a mortal risk, too. In 2015, at a panel discussion hosted by the Center for Immigration Studies, he asked: “How many innocent people need to be murdered before we stop the [soft] policies dealing with illegal immigration?” Politically speaking, whether illegal immigration is the chief problem facing Pennsylvanians is less important than whether Pennsylvanians think it is. The question, in other words, is whether Barletta understands the Pennsylvanian mind. That, he certainly does.
Pennsylvania is a big state. The Commonwealth, as inhabitants call it with faint pride, is large enough to have a hinterland. Agriculture is a key business.
It’s also an old one. Entire industries have been born, grown, shrunk, died, and been reclaimed by the forest. One of them is coal, and Hazleton, an old coal town, has gone the way coal towns do. The veins of anthracite running through central and eastern Pennsylvania, and their proximity to ports across the eastern seaboard, caused European immigrants to migrate there during the 19th century. But as Simon Bronner, a professor at Penn State Harrisburg and the founding director of the Center for Pennsylvania Culture Studies, tells National Review, economic progress in the early 20th century “displaced the coal towns and deindustrialized much of the state.” And while western Pennsylvania replaced anthracite with bituminous, and then replaced coal with steel, the central and eastern parts of the state struggled to find a new mainstay industry once their mining days were done.
In their heyday, these coal towns were diverse in the 19th-century fashion, full of Lithuanian, Ukrainian, Dutch, and Irish immigrants. Their churches — Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox — still dominate local architecture. Standing on the main drag in Ashland, which curves elegantly down a mountainside with houses lining the edge, one gets a sense of the past. Traditions die hard here: In the winter holidays, families still make “boilo,” a concoction of steeped fruit and Lithuanian spirits. Outsiders gawk at the bags of coal that remain for sale outside convenience stores.
But mining is now strictly a niche business in what some have christened “Coal Cracker” country, and with economic dislocation come social consequences. There are tourist attractions focusing on the old days, but things are changing. With the end of mining, “Mexican and Puerto Rican immigrants,” Bronner says, entered the state “for work in agriculture, construction, or services. At the same time, young descendants of the European immigrants left for faraway colleges. This migration helped these towns,” Bronner insists. “But there’s definitely a view that things are not what they were. There’s a reaction that these people are taking away jobs that were there previously. Families that had immigrated in the late 19th century don’t want to relocate, but they suddenly faced social change.”
The news that Hillary Clinton was writing a 2016 memoir called “What Happened” caused rare bipartisan joy: Everyone, left and right, was eager to hear what she had to say. What’s it like to think you’re about to poke through that glass ceiling and instead have it come crashing down on your head? What’s the deal with Trump? Would she throw shade at Bernie? What would she say about presiding over a campaign whose failure was catastrophic to her and, to liberals anyway, to the country? What was the inside dirt? A joke made the rounds that the book’s working title was What the F*** Happened?
But the book only makes sense when you realize that What Happened is a fake title, a P. T. Barnum–style ruse to draw in the suckers. The real subject of this 500-page chunk of self-congratulation and blame-shifting — its real title — is “Why I Should Have Won.” If Hollywood is a place where you peel off the fake tinsel only to find the real tinsel underneath, Hillary Clinton is homo politicus all the way through. It’s all she has. It’s all she is. She earned the Oval Office, dammit, and she wants you to know it. Peel off the phony, power-addled political hack, and all you’ll find is the real, power-addled political hack underneath.
Sure, Clinton does give us a few stray morsels of what we’re looking for, mostly at the very beginning, when she describes what must have been an agony for the ages in tightly controlled, supremely measured tones. She tells us about the pain and the Chardonnay and how surreal it felt to concede on Election Night, given that she had never imagined what she might say if she lost. “I just didn’t think about it,” she writes. Also, she took a nap that evening and was asleep when the news broke that she’d lost Florida, North Carolina, Iowa, and Ohio. But it’s all fairly bloodless — she give no explanation, for instance, of why she withheld her concession speech until the next day. No doubt she cherishes her privacy, but guardedness is not what one wants in a memoir.
The reserve is likely to disappoint both those who cried on Election Night and those who spent the wee hours of November 9 spraying their homes with the contents of a case of Veuve Clicquot. Yet there is poignancy here: She had every expectation of becoming the most powerful woman in the history of the world. Instead she’ll go down in the books defined by three gigantic public humiliations: the Lewinsky scandal and two losing presidential campaigns in which she was the heavy favorite. She wasn’t even the first woman to be secretary of state. She wasn’t even the second woman to be secretary of state. History is unkind to losers — quick, ask the nearest Millennial who Geraldine Ferraro was.
As the book proceeds, though, the reader’s heart sinks. Why all this stupefying name-checking of campaign aides who never get mentioned again? Why two pages about her hairdressers, but only two clipped paragraphs about that time she collapsed on 9/11? Why is she still laying out the same policy proposals America rejected last year? Why does she keep teasing us with promises to tell us about her “mistakes,” without ever following through? Why all the ordinary-citizen tales from the Just-So Stories of Big Government, the ones along the lines of: “Then I met Jill Shlabotnik, a humble weasel rancher from Sarasota, Florida…Jill told me how [sorrow, tears, pain, injustice] . . . and that, ladies and gentlemen, is why we urgently need a 5.7 percent increase in deputy assistant EPA administrators!”
This is the norm for convention speeches, not for campaign autopsies, especially not one written from the point of view of the corpse. “In the past, for reasons I try to explain, I’ve often felt I had to be careful in public, like I was up on a wire without a net. Now I’m letting my guard down,” Clinton writes. Tantalizing! But there’s almost nothing she couldn’t or wouldn’t have said when she had to maintain her political viability, almost nothing she couldn’t or wouldn’t have said in one of those eyeball-glazers she called speeches, almost no instances where she takes stock of her flaws, except in the disingenuous manner of a job interviewee — “My biggest failing? I guess it’s just that I’m so focused that sometimes I can’t let work go, you know?” In Hillary’s case? “I had been unable to connect with the deep anger so many Americans felt,” “I was running a traditional presidential campaign with carefully thought-out positions. . . . Trump was running a reality TV show,” and (my favorite): “It’s true that I’ve always been more comfortable talking about others rather than myself. . . . I had to actively try to use the word I more.” Her big flaws are that she’s so even-tempered, thoughtful, substantive, and humble.
Tuvia Tenenbom, that most acute and incendiary observer of what’s festering beneath the surface of polite society, has turned his attention to Germany’s “refugees”. To his surprise and no little dismay, what he has found out is not so much about these migrants but about Germany itself, and it isn’t pretty at all.http://www.melaniephillips.com/hello-refugees/
In his new book Hello Refugees, he adopts his now familiar but no less devastating tactic of trading on his blond hair, Falstaffian girth and indeterminate accent to conceal the fact that he was born and brought up in an ultra-orthodox family in Israel. He derives his unique insights from the fact that many of those to whom he addresses his faux-naïf but devastatingly direct questions assume he is an antisemite — just like them. And so they open up to him in a uniquely frank manner.
In Hello Refugees “Toby the German”, his previous persona, has become “Toby the Jordanian”. Posing as the son of Jordanian and European parentage, he uses his fluent Arabic to gain access to refugee camps in Germany where access is routinely denied to the media.
What he discovers shocks him deeply. He finds migrants effectively warehoused in wholly inadequate conditions, housed twelve to a “room” in what are no more than, and indeed described as, “containers”. Existing on disgusting food, jobless and with no apparent means of emerging from these holding pens, these migrants have in effect been abandoned by the German state.
Everywhere he goes, people tell him the same thing: that Chancellor Angela Merkel famously invited in more than one million migrants in order to erase the moral stain of Germany’s Nazi past. He concludes that this was not an act of conscience. How could it have been when these people have been left so abandoned? It was instead a move to show the world — and themselves — that this former Nazi state has become the world’s conscience. In other words, it was a cynical move that evacuates the word conscience of all meaning.
Worse than that, Tenenbom also discovers that this public advertisement of collective “conscience” has legitimised and provoked open antisemitism. Repeatedly and gratuitously, Germans tell him that they are now morally superior to the Jews and to the State of Israel which is described as uniquely racist and murderous.
He doesn’t get any of this from the Syrian refugees or other migrants. He gets it only from the Germans. He finds that “anti-racist”, “human rights” activists extolling Germany’s humanitarian gesture and calling for yet more refugees to be allowed in are in fact deep-dyed racists and antisemites.
Tenenbom knew already that Germany is still teeming with Jew-hatred; he has remorselessly chronicled this dismal finding in his previous work. But now, he tells me, it’s much more open and brazen. And that, he says, is because the act of taking in the migrants has allowed Germany to feel it has finally shaken off the stigma of its past. Now it is free to hate Jews again.
In 2002, on the BBC TV show Question Time, I was accused of dual loyalty in front of a jeering studio audience. My crime had been to defend Israel against demonization and double standards by both the audience and other members of the panel.http://www.melaniephillips.com/britains-alarming-antisemitism-problem/
At that time I had visited Israel only twice in my life, two years previously. No matter. A British Jew defending Israel was – and is – immediately accused in some quarters of incipient treachery toward Britain, just as throughout history antisemites have accused Diaspora Jews of dual loyalty or treachery merely because they are Jews.
I thought of my own experience, of course, when I read the report on antisemitism in the UK published this week by the Institute for Jewish Policy Research.
There is currently much disquiet over the Labour Party’s conspicuous failure to address significant antisemitism within its ranks. But there has long been far wider concern among many British Jews about the antisemitic discourse, harassment and physical attacks which have become sickeningly commonplace in Britain over the past few years.
The report’s author, Daniel Staetsky, describes a situation which is complex.
Only around 5% of the population are out-and-out antisemites holding multiple anti-Jewish attitudes. Nevertheless, about 30% subscribe to some kind of antisemitic views.
The key is Staetsky’s distinction between antisemites and antisemitism. For while the number of antisemites is very small, the amount of antisemitism diffused throughout British society is much greater.
That’s because, while people may not feel personal hostility toward Jews, they may believe certain things which are in themselves antisemitic. As Staetsky says: “Antisemitic ideas are not as marginal in Great Britain as some measures of antisemitism suggest, and they can be held with and without open dislike of Jews.”
As a result, the probability for a British Jew of encountering “potentially offensive or, at the very least, uncomfortable” views is about one in three. That’s high.
Staetsky states, however, that 70% of British people hold a “favorable” attitude toward Jews. He reaches that optimistic figure, though, only by reducing respondents’ options to categorize their attitudes. When offered more options, the scenario for British Jews becomes less rosy: only around 39% have “somewhat” or “very” favorable opinions of Jews, more than 5% are classed as “somewhat” or “very” unfavorable and nearly 56% are classed as neither favorable nor unfavorable or as “didn’t know.”
Two groups are shown to be principally responsible for problematic attitudes: Muslims and the Left.
While “significant proportions of Muslims reject all such prejudice,” antisemitism and anti-Israel attitudes are two to four times higher among Muslims than in the general population.
And contrary to the claim by those on the Left that they can’t be antisemitic because they are opposed to racism and fascism, the report says levels of antisemitism on the Left are “indistinguishable” from in the rest of the population.
When it comes to Israel, however, the Left is worse. Even those who are “slightly left-of-center” or “fairly left-wing” are more anti-Israel than the general population, while the more left-wing people are the more they hate Israel. You don’t say!
Moreover, says Staetsky, while only 12% of the population are out-and-out Israel-bashers, close to a quarter of Britons believe, to some extent at least, that Israel is deliberately trying to wipe out the Palestinian population, and about one in five that Israel is an apartheid state.
These are huge numbers for such poisonous lies. And no fewer than 56% hold at least one anti-Israel attitude.
So as Staetsky says, the feeling among so many Jews that they encounter anti-Israel positions all the time becomes immediately comprehensible.
The true extent of antisemitism has, of course, been masked by claims that being anti-Israel is not the same as being anti-Jew. Staetsky, however, states: “The existence of an association between the antisemitic and the anti-Israel attitudes tested is unambiguous.”
Moreover, the stronger the hostility to Israel the more likely it is to be accompanied by antisemitic attitudes such as that “Jews exploit Holocaust victimhood for their own purposes.” And that correlation puts left-wing Israel-bashers squarely in the antisemitism camp.
Staetsky makes the link solely through a statistical overlap between anti-Israel and antisemitic attitudes. I’d go further. Anti-Israel discourse has exactly the same unique characteristics as antisemitism.
The New York Review of Books was founded during a newspaper strike in 1963 and was edited by Barbara Epstein and Robert Silvers until her death in 2006, then edited solely by Silvers until he died earlier this year. Throughout its existence, it’s been the object of obsequious praise. I never got it. From the time I was in college, wandering the aisles of the library’s periodicals section and excitedly perusing one literary journal after another, I couldn’t work up any enthusiasm for the NYRB. It somehow managed to make everything dull: with few exceptions (Gore Vidal, Joan Didion), the articles all read as if they were written by some fusty old Oxbridge don who was also what the Brits call a champagne socialist.
Tom Wolfe, in his famous 1970 essay “Radical Chic,” called the NYRB “[t]he chief theoretical organ of Radical Chic.” In 1967, it printed a diagram showing how to make a Molotov cocktail. Later it spun off a sister rag, the London Review of Books, which after 9/11 published what must have been one of the most reprehensible issues of a magazine ever to see print: the contributors all sought to outdo one another in blaming the terrorist attacks on U.S. imperialism and capitalism.
In The Last Intellectuals (1987), Russell Jaboby described the NYRB as a closed shop that kept publishing the same big-name leftists (Noam Chomsky, Susan Sontag, I.F. Stone, Tony Judt) and that ran so many British professors that it was redolent more of “Oxford teas rather than New York delis.” Also, it had no interest in developing younger talent. (I must have sensed that, because when I left grad school and started writing for New York literary journals, I don’t think I even tried the NYRB.) In a 2014 article, Jacoby raised a question: although Silvers, then eighty-four, had been “unwilling or unable to groom successors,” eventually “he will have to give up the reins, but when and who will take over?”
The answer came this year. Silvers died, presenting an opportunity to open the NYRB up to non-academic – and even non-leftist! – writers living on the far side of the Hudson. No such luck: it was soon announced that Silvers’s job would be filled by Ian Buruma, a Dutch-born Oxford fellow who is sixty-five and has been a NYRB writer since 1987. For me, above all, he’s the man who wrote Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance (2006), pretty much the only book about the Islamization of Europe to receive the imprimatur of the New York literary establishment.
Buruma had been critical of Islam. But in Murder in Amsterdam, a survey of Dutch critics and defenders of Islam, he fell into total PC lockstep on the subject. It was a disgraceful display. As I put it in my own book Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom (2009), he strove “to make the supporters of jihadist butchery look sensitive, reflective, and reasonable, and to make people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali – who saw that butchery for what it was and who had no interest in trying to finesse it away – look inflexible, hard-nosed, and egoistic.”
He wrote about Hirsi Ali’s devotion to freedom as if it were a psychological disorder; for his part, he believed that the Netherlands should tacitly allow behavior on the part of Muslims – such as the oppression of Muslim women by Muslim men – that it would never accept from non-Muslims.
That book wasn’t the end of it: in 2007, the New York Times Magazine published a glowing profile by Buruma of Tariq Ramadan, the slippery champion of so-called “Euro-Islam.”
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