Displaying posts published in

June 2018

The Muslim Authoritarian Mentality By Amil Imani

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/06/the_muslim_authoritarian_mentality.html

For thousands of years, Arabs lived in an authoritarian paternalistic culture. There was always a headman, a chief, a dictator, or a know-it-all who had the answers or resources who had to be followed and obeyed. This “follower mentality” had great heuristic value. It freed the masses from the often arduous task of thinking for themselves, taking responsibility, and tackling problems. It was always easier to let someone else do all those chores and simply follow his directives. This type of mentality was ideal for Muslims who did not want to think for themselves.

Authoritarian paternalistic culture ruled the Arabs for as far back as historical records show. Arabs were always headed by an autocratic man. At times, there were councils, all male and usually advisory in function with no or little executive power. The headman embodied in himself all authority: the legislative, the judiciary, and the executive.

The system was a top-down hierarchy, where all directives and decisions were dictated from the top, and all people were to serve the top and at the pleasure of the top.

A father in the family and a father figure of some kind in the larger group always ruled. The man on top, a father or a father figure, was adhered to as the authority, followed, and obeyed.

Islam is custom-made and perfectly suited for people who are accustomed to being treated like children. Being a Muslim is a bargain of sorts. The believer continues to remain in a child mentally while aging. His part of the bargain is the total surrender to Islam. In return, Islam promises to supply him surefire answers as well as a perfect roadmap for this life and guaranteed bliss in the afterlife.

Duke Erodes Liberal Education By Peter Berkowitz

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2018/06/02/duke_erodes_liberal_education_137167.html

On May 8, the Duke University student newspaper published a stirring letter addressed to the school community that was co-signed by 101 students and former students. The letter protested the decision of the university’s Sanford School of Public Policy to decline to renew the contract of Evan Charney, associate professor of the practice of public policy and political science, and called on the provost to reverse the decision.

To no avail. On May 23, incoming Sanford School Dean Judith Kelley informed Charney that Provost Sally Kornbluth rejected his appeal.

Duke’s termination of Charney, a productive scholar with wide-ranging interests in ethics and politics who has taught at Duke for 19 years (and with whom I worked in the 1990s when he was a graduate student at Harvard and I was an assistant professor), has all the earmarks of faculty and administration acquiescence to the swelling forces of campus intolerance and anti-intellectualism. At the same time, the legions of grateful students who have rallied around Charney show that a reservoir of love for learning survives at Duke — among the young.

“Professor Charney’s teaching style is wonderfully thought-provoking and challenging,” according to the Duke Chronicle letter. In his classes, the students explained, “ideas are vetted and sharpened through rigorous debate and discussion on issues ranging from physician assisted suicide to the legalization of sex work.” Charney treats all opinions equally: “No thought goes unexamined; no assertion goes unchecked.”

OBAMA: “MY ONLY FLAW IS BEING TOO GOOD:

THAT’S LINE FROM A PHILIP ROTH NOVEL….BUT HERE EVEN MAUREEN DOWD CRITICIZES HIS TERMINAL SELF RIGHTEOUSNESS. RSK
Obama – Just Too Good for Us By Maureen Dowd https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/02/opinion/sunday/obama-ben-rhodes-world-as-it-is.html

WASHINGTON — It was a moment of peak Spock.

Hours after the globe-rattling election of a man whom Barack Obama has total disdain for, a toon who would take a chain saw to the former president’s legacy on policy and decency, Obama sent a message to his adviser Ben Rhodes: “There are more stars in the sky than grains of sand on the earth.”

Perhaps Obama should have used a different line with a celestial theme by Shakespeare: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”

As president, Obama always found us wanting. We were constantly disappointing him. He would tell us the right thing to do and then sigh and purse his lips when his instructions were not followed.

Shortly after Donald Trump was elected, Rhodes writes in his new book, “The World as It Is,” Obama asked his aides, “What if we were wrong?”

But in his next breath, the president made it clear that what he meant was: What if we were wrong in being so right? What if we were too good for these people?

“Maybe we pushed too far,” the president continued. “Maybe people just want to fall back into their tribe.”

So really, he’s not acknowledging any flaws but simply wondering if we were even more benighted than he thought. He’s saying that, sadly, we were not enlightened enough for the momentous changes wrought by the smartest people in the world — or even evolved enough for the first African-American president.

“Sometimes I wonder whether I was 10 or 20 years too early,” Obama mused to aides.

We just weren’t ready for his amazing awesomeness.

The Papadopoulos Case Needs a Closer Look By Andrew C. McCarthy

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/george-papadopoulos-case-needs-closer-look/Is the former campaign adviser accused of misrepresenting his subjective state of mind, not objective reality?

Congress should be taking a very hard look at the prosecution of George Papadopoulos. To these eyes, the harder one looks, the more the Papadopoulos case appears to be much ado about nothing. That is no small thing: The “much ado” here is a purported Trump–Russia conspiracy to subvert a presidential election.

There has always been something fishy about the charge filed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller against Papadopoulos, who was a green-as-grass 28-year-old when he made the big primary-season move from Ben Carson–campaign novice to Trump-campaign novice. Peruse the “Statement of the Offense,” filed by Mueller’s lead prosecutor on the case, Jeannie S. Rhee (who is fresh from a stint representing the Clinton Foundation — and donating $5,400 to the Hillary Clinton campaign). You find that there is collusion with Russia pouring off every one of the document’s 13 pages — meetings with shadowy figures portrayed as Kremlin operatives, apparent schemes to undermine Mrs. Clinton, ambitious plans for pow-wows between candidate Trump and strongman Putin.

Yet . . . there is no charge having anything to do with “collusion” — in the criminal-law sense of conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin to commit “cyber-espionage” or otherwise sabotage the 2016 election.

Instead, after the big 13-page wind-up, Papadopoulos ends up pleading guilty to a minor false-statements charge — one that is convoluted and, in the scheme of things, trivial. In essence, Papadopoulos is said to have lied about the timing and scope of his contact with the Maltese academic Joseph Mifsud. Mueller, Rhee & Co. allege that Papadopoulos falsely claimed that the contacts started before he joined the Trump campaign. It turns out that they started on March 14, 2016; this was some time after he “learned he would be a foreign policy advisor for the campaign” (page 3, paragraph 4) but a week before the campaign’s March 21 announcement that he was a campaign “policy advisor” (page 4, paragraph 6).

UK: A New Drive for Islamic Blasphemy Laws? by Judith Bergman

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12270/uk-blasphemy-laws

It is reasonable to assume that the planned report and the ensuing work on finding a definition of “Islamophobia” is meant effectively to destroy the little that remains of free speech in the UK.

The Anti-Muslim Hatred Working Group has as its top priority “tackling the far right and counter jihadists”. It seems a peculiar government priority to “tackle” people who are opposed to jihad; one would assume that the British government is also against jihad.

According to British government logic, then, after Muslims stabbed and beheaded British Army soldier Lee Rigby in broad daylight in London, Muslim institutions needed protection — not British ones.

The All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on British Muslims[1] has formally begun work on the establishment of a “working definition of Islamophobia that can be widely accepted by Muslims, political parties and the government”.

The AAPG on British Muslims, according to its website, was established in July 2017. It is chaired by MPs Anna Soubry and Wes Streeting and is meant to build on the work of a former AAPG: the AAPG on Islamophobia. The latter came into existence as the result of a meeting at the House of Commons in March 2010, hosted by, among others, the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) — the largest Muslim organization in the UK, which claims to be representative of British Muslims — which is linked to the Muslim Brotherhood[2]. The purpose of the meeting was “to discuss the growing spate of attacks in all its forms against British Muslims”. The meeting, which was attended, among others, by parliamentarians, police and public servants called for the establishment of an APPG on Islamophobia. By November 2010, the AAPG on Islamophobia had been formed, and was described by its chairman, the Conservative Kris Hopkins, as a “momentous occasion” the purpose of which was to “propose considered, evidence based policies to tackle Islamophobia wherever it exists”. However, the newly established AAPG quickly ran into trouble. It turned out that the Muslim organization appointed as its secretariat was the Muslim extremist organization iENGAGE, which has since changed its name to MEND.[3]

Populist Government Takes Power in Italy “Populism is the new organizing principle.” by Soeren Kern

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12427/populist-government-takes-power-in-italy

The new government has pledged to pursue a host of populist policies, including reclaiming national sovereignty from the European Union over issues ranging from border protection and immigration to economics and finance. For now, however, it has abandoned previous plans to hold a referendum on whether Italy should abandon the euro.

“The EU Budget Commissioner the German Oettinger says the markets will show Italians the right way to vote. If that isn’t a threat…” — Matteo Salvini, leader of the Lega party

The continued patronizing by EU officials has contributed to the rise of populism in Italy and feeds popular support for the euroscepticism embraced by M5S and Lega.

Italy’s rival anti-establishment parties — the populist Five Star Movement (M5S) and the nationalist League (Lega) — have formed a “eurosceptic” coalition government.

The new government has pledged to pursue a host of populist policies, including reclaiming national sovereignty from the European Union over issues ranging from border protection and immigration to economics and finance. For now, however, it has abandoned previous plans to hold a referendum on whether Italy should abandon the euro.

The viability of a M5S/Lega government initially was thrown into doubt after Italian President Sergio Mattarella vetoed their eurosceptic choice for finance minister: Paolo Savona, an 81-year-old former industry minister who has called Italy’s entry into the euro a “historic mistake.”

M5S/Lega reached a compromised by nominating Giovanni Tria, an economics professor who holds politically correct views on the euro, to head the finance ministry. Fittingly, Savona will become Italy’s new Minister for European Affairs.

The new government, which was sworn in by Mattarella on June 1, will be headed by Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, a little-known law professor with no experience in politics, and two deputy prime ministers: M5S leader Luigi Di Maio, who also becomes minister for economic development and labor; and Lega leader Matteo Salvini, who also becomes minister of the interior. The cabinet will have 19 ministers in all.

British ‘Justice’: Poppycock by Bruce Bawer ****

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12428/british-justice-poppycock

Instead of arresting rapists, the police, in at least a couple of cases, actually arrested people who had done nothing other than to try to rescue their children from the clutches of rapists.

So much concern – legitimately so – about the sacred right of the rapists to a fair trial, including the presumption of innocence and an opportunity to retain the lawyers of their choice – but so much readiness to excuse the denial of the same right to Robinson.

These decades of cover-ups by British officials are themselves unspeakable crimes. How many of those who knew, but who did nothing, have faced anything remotely resembling justice? Apparently none.

As any viewer of British TV news knows, a “trained professional journalist” in Britain observes all kinds of rules of professional conduct: he calls Muslims “Asians,” he describes any critic of Islam, or anyone who attends a rally protesting the unjust incarceration of a critic of Islam, as a member of the “far right,” and he identifies far-left smear machines as “anti-racist groups.”

The coverage here during the last few days of the Tommy Robinson affair in Britain appears to be having at least a small impact in certain circles in Merrie Olde England. Dispatches have come in from some of the tonier addresses in the UK explaining, in that marvelous tone of condescension, which no one from beyond the shores of England can ever quite pull off, that those of us who sympathize with Robinson have got it all wrong; that we simply do not grasp the exquisite nuances of British jurisprudence, specifically the kingdom’s laws about the coverage of trials – for if we did understand, we would recognize that Robinson’s summary arrest and imprisonment did not represent an outrageous denial of his freedom of speech, his right to due process, and his right to an attorney of his own choosing, but were, in fact, thoroughly appropriate actions intended to ensure the integrity of the trial he was covering. Those of us outside the UK who think that British freedom has been compromised and that the British system of law has been cynically exploited for ignoble purposes are, apparently, entirely mistaken; on the contrary, we are instructed, Britain’s police are continuing to conduct themselves in a responsible matter, Britain’s courts are still models of probity, and Britain’s real journalists (not clumsy, activist amateurs like Robinson) persist in carrying out their role with extraordinary professionalism and propriety, obeying to the letter the eminently sensible rules that govern reportage about court cases in the land of Magna Carta.

“It is true,” acknowledged one correspondent, “that in previous years the UK police wrongly hesitated to prosecute Muslim grooming gangs. And it was a shocking scandal, which the Daily Mail did much to expose and excoriate. But that has changed.”

Hesitated? Changed? Talk about English understatement. For decades – not years – police, social workers, local politicians, and journalists all over Britain knew that thousands of non-Muslim girls throughout the country were being repeatedly raped by Muslim gangs. The perpetrators were not arrested – partly because police and others in authority were apparently terrified of being called racists.

Putin the Manager by Srdja Trifkovic

https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/putin-the-manager

On May 30, Russia Today (not to be confused with the RT television network) published an article by Srdja Trifkovic in Russian, “Putin is a manager rather than a far-seeing statesman who follows a long-term plan.” We bring you this piece in Dr. Trifkovic’s translation, a sequel to his article Putin’s Collapsing Credibility posted here a month ago.

It has been perfectly clear to me, since early spring of 2014 and Putin’s hesitating response to the crisis in Ukraine, that Russia does not have a serious strategy. An adequate response would have entailed prompt despatch of Russian forces to protect the Russian-speaking population, from Kharkov in the northeast to Nikolaev in the center and Odessa in the southwest, in accordance with the R2P doctrine. Instead, there was a consolation prize [Crimea], rather meager for the loss of 500 miles of strategic depth inhabited by a pro-Russian majority.

Russia experienced something similar with the regime-change operation in Tbilisi in 2003, when Shevardnadze was replaced by the unstable Mikhel Saakashvili. The Russians “protected” South Ossetia and Abkhasia, one-fifth of the country, but Georgia was lost to the pro-NATO regime. In Central Asia the Russians are losing ground to the Chinese. Their north-south geopolitical vector in the direction of Iran has been cut by the Chinese one, which extends from Xinjiang to the Caspian Sea. The Chinese are gaining ground with greater investment and soft power, which is also projected by Turkey throughout the region. This is aptly illustrated by the fact that Kazakhstan is replacing Cyrillic with Latin as its national language script.

In Belarus the situation is fluid. The relations between Moscow and Minsk are worse than at any time since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Poor personal rapport between [Belorussian president Alexander] Lukashenko and Putin has morphed into a very visible weakness of that alliance. In Armenia, the Russians were faced with a routine regime-change operation directly copied from Gene Sharp’s textbook. Unlike Georgia and Ukraine, let it be noted, Armenia is both a member of the Eurasian Economic Union and of the Collective Security Treaty Organization [ODKB, founded in Moscow in 1992].

Keith Windschuttle: The Second Coming of Karl Marx

http://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2018/06/second-coming-karl-marx/

One thing young people are very unlikely to learn—not from our education system anyway—is that no simple concept can ever hope to explain all of human history, or even most of it. Denied this insight, the notion that history has been determined by class struggles is an easy sell.

Most readers of Quadrant would have expected the 200th anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx on May 5, 1818, to go largely unnoticed. Today, most would think Marxism a philosophy that died at the end of the Cold War and is now well and truly relegated to the dustbin of history. However, our mainstream press still found adherents who not only marked the anniversary but took an upbeat position. Professor John Buchanan of the School of Business at the University of Sydney declared: “Marx was one of the greatest thinkers of all time. His work Das Kapital is still referred to and used in discussions of the modern economy.” In his interview, the Sunday Telegraph observed:

As Western democracies confront such global capital Goliaths as Facebook and Google, the Australian banking royal commission and business pressure to reduce wages by cutting penalty rates and employing casual labour, Buchanan says Marx’s complaints of social inequality under capitalism are increasingly relevant. Marx’s key arguments were that society was the history of class struggles, between property or capital owners, and those without capital.

In London and New York the anniversary was even more newsworthy. Some major newspapers responded as though Marxism was enjoying an intellectual revival, on the verge of the secular equivalent of a Second Coming.

The New York Times headlined: “Happy Birthday, Karl Marx. You Were Right”, and endorsed Marx’s alleged “originality and profound importance as a philosopher”, claiming:

Today the legacy would appear to be alive and well. Since the turn of the millennium countless books have appeared, from scholarly works to popular biographies, broadly endorsing Marx’s reading of capitalism and its enduring relevance to our neoliberal age … Educated liberal opinion is today more or less unanimous in its agreement that Marx’s basic thesis—that capitalism is driven by a deeply divisive class struggle in which the ruling-class minority appropriates the surplus labor of the working-class majority as profit—is correct.

In London, the Independent also declared Marxism was on the brink of something big: “The world is finally ready for Marxism as capitalism reaches the tipping point.” It said Marx had predicted that the centralisation inherent in globalised, capitalist economies would give birth to a post-capitalist society. Socialist ideas, the Independent asserted, remain celebrated throughout the world, especially among younger generations:

Socialism does not carry historical baggage for a younger generation left behind by the iniquities of capitalism. A Harvard study found that a majority of millennials reject capitalism and a third are in favour of socialism. This is what might be called the revenge of Marx; the rehabilitation of one of the world’s historical philosophers.

The notion of a Marxist revival explains the otherwise difficult to comprehend electoral appeal to young people of those two aged white male socialists, Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders.

Pope Will Meet with Oil Executives to Discuss Climate Change By Jack Crowe

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/pope-francis-climate-change-oil-executives-meeting/

Pope Francis will meet with a group of executives representing the largest oil producers and investment firms at the Vatican next week to discuss a coordinated response to climate change, Axios reported Friday.

News of the meeting, which will reportedly include representatives from BlackRock, BP, ExxonMobil, and others, comes exactly one year after President Trump withdrew from the Paris climate agreement, signaling that the U.S. would cede its position as a global leader on climate change to other nations as well as non-state actors.

Spurred by an increasingly robust clean-energy market and public pressure on corporations to fill the vacuum left by the Trump administration with respect to climate change, executives reportedly plan to embrace the message of Pope Francis’s encyclical on the environment, “On Care for Our Common Home,” in developing strategies.

The meeting was reportedly organized with assistance from the University of Notre Dame, which declined to comment on its involvement.

“All along the way, we have said that any energy-related meeting involving the Vatican and Notre Dame would be a private dialogue among the attendees,” Leo Burke, director of the Notre Dame business school’s climate-investing initiative, told Axios.