Displaying posts published in

January 2019

Egypt Tips for Serious Travelers By:Srdja Trifkovic

https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/egypt-tips-for-serious-travelers/

My “Letter from Egypt,” with a comprehensive analysis of the country’s political, economic and social situation is coming in a few days’ time. For starters, let me present our readers with a few practical tips on how to make the most of this incredible country without spending many thousands of dollars/euros and without being herded around with thousands of others.

Preliminary remarks: You don’t need to apply for a visa before traveling, they will issue one at the airport upon arrival for $25. Make sure to get an international driving license. Never pay the initial asking price for anything, and always assume that 50% or less is probably realistic. Carry enough cash at all times, as ATMs may be hard to find and are often out of service. Have plenty of small notes, 5 and 10 Egyptian Pounds (LE) for baksheesh — one LE is around 6 cents, $1 is ca. 17 LE. One dollar bills are more than welcome for heftier tips (bar tenders, pool attendants). Drink only bottled water, which is available everywhere and cheap. Start taking probiotics a week before leaving, and don’t stop until returning home. Get a prepaid SIM card from Orange EG when you arrive. Bring your own GPS with Egypt uploaded, better than Google Maps.

1. Make Hurgadha your holiday destination and base camp for a two-week, all-inclusive package tour in winter. It is on the Red Sea, away from the Nile Valley, but it It is the most economical and comfortable take-off point for ventures into central and southern Egypt, inc. Luxor, southern Nile Valley and Aswan. (For Cairo, Alexandria and their environs you’ll need another trip, or to relocate to a northern base after a fortnight at Hurghada.) Plan to go between early January and late February, when the prices are low, the temperature ideal (74-78F during the day, dropping to well below 50 at night), sunshine pleasant but not oppressive, and last-minute all-inclusive prices ridiculously low. (From mid-March on you risk dust storms.) My two-week package from Belgrade was 500 euros ($600). It’s truly All-Inclusive, inc. a three-hour return flight on Air Cairo’s new Airbus 320, a spacious room (more like a mini-suite, really) in a well-tended complex, and unlimited food, wine, beer and cocktails, 24/7. The Long Beach Resort is comfortable, safe, and clean; it’s pretty much the same with all other hotel complexes in Egypt’s premium Red Sea resort. The food is not Cordon Bleu, but it is wholesome, fresh and honest. For all three main meals it comes in the form of multiple table spreads (which included roast duck last Thursday, pan-fried sole Friday, filet mignon last night). The substantial Smörgåsbord of European and Middle Eastern delicacies contains something for every taste. In the morning the spread includes fresh eggs on demand (any style) that taste free-range, freshly squeezed juices, and an array of fresh salads and fruit. To burn the calories, a well-equipped gym is open 24/7, while two of the five pools are heated and mostly deserted.

The Democrats’ Stealth jihad By Amil Imani

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/01/the_democrats_stealth_jihad.html

For decades, the Democrat Party has shown by both words and deeds that they despise the U.S. Constitution while they bend over backward to embrace Islamists, illegal aliens, and anyone who hates America. The left is interested only in power and nothing else – even if it means to sacrifice our national security and advocate open borders.

The liaison between American Muslims and the Democratic Party is frequently described as a marriage of convenience, where Muslims will ally with leftist politicians, who will gladly cede some of their power to this group of enforcers so conservative politicians and Christians who advocate self-defense and sane social policies are kept out of office.

While America is in hibernation, Muslim organizations with the help of Democrats have been busy, working “stealthily” to change America in what is called “soft jihad.” Soft jihad is practiced where Muslims are not strong enough to unsheathe the sword of jihad, where the true nature of Islam is exposed and when the public would likely stamp them out. A critical tool of soft jihad involves penetration of the American educational system, such as Da’wa, the religious duty of each Muslim to convert non-Muslims and strengthen the Islamic Ummah.

Reading ‘Lolita’ in the West written by Zachary Snowdon Smith

https://quillette.com/2019/01/26/

In 1955, when a flushing toilet was still considered too offensive for the eyes of the movie-going public, it’s no surprise that a blackly comic novel about sex with children would cause a stir. Enter Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, the effusively written story of a 37-year-old literature professor who marries a widow in order to gain access to Lolita, her 12-year-old daughter. The star of Lolita is not Lolita herself, but Humbert Humbert, who hides his obsession with adolescent girls under a mask of tweedy old-world erudition. Humbert uses his position as narrator to lecture the reader on the many noble aspects of adult-on-child romance, and to extol his love for his adopted daughter/concubine. To many, Nabokov remains “the guy who wrote that book about pedophilia.”

Following its publication, Lolita was ignored, and then banned. Britain led the way, confiscating all copies of the novel entering the country, and France followed suit. Only months after its release did Lolita receive its first positive review from a respectable paper, the Sunday Times.

Responding to the Sunday Times, John Gordon, editor of the Sunday Express, spoke for Lolita’s moral critics: “Without doubt it is the filthiest book I have ever read. Sheer unrestrained pornography… Anyone who published it or sold it here would certainly go to prison. I am sure the Sunday Times would approve, even though it abhors censorship as much as I do.”

The first edition of Lolita was printed by Olympia Press, a publishing house where the pornographic bumped elbows with the merely provocative. Nabokov was not the first serious writer to take refuge with the seedy publisher: William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, Samuel Beckett’s Molloy and Robert Kaufman’s exposé Inside Scientology all had their first editions at Olympia. The Olympia imprint, however, did little to improve Lolita’s credibility.

In the 2010s, as hand-wringing over the moral effects of art has grown fashionable once more, Lolita has been subjected to fresh scrutiny. In Russia, an ascendant religious Right has sought to discredit Nabokov as an un-Russian cosmopolitan and purveyor of deviance. The Nabokov Museum in St. Petersburg has suffered particular abuse, ranging from graffiti accusing Nabokov of pedophilia to having vodka bottles containing Bible verses thrown through its windows.

Attack of the Techno-Lynch Mob By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2019/01/27/attack-

The Covington Lie offered the perfect occasion for the electronic mob to pounce—after temporarily licking its wounds following the BuzzFeed fake news hysteria. And it did so without shame or even much regret after the fact, as Jason Leopold, the BuzzFeed fabulist, ceded center stage to a kindred serial prevaricator, Nathan Phillips. The latter in his 15 minutes of fame did not make a major statement that was not contradicted by an earlier statement or by the facts.

The entire psychodrama boiled down not to what the facts on the ground showed, but rather who each party was perceived innately to be.

On the one side, the suspects were seen as rambunctious teenage kids (thus easy targets not especially schooled in the arts of rhetoric or repartee).

They were white (enough said) and smiling (indicative of their smirking privilege and lack of victim status).

They also were doctrinaire religious (the current upsurge in left-wing Catholic bigotry is our updated version of the “whore of Babylon” smear wave of the 19th century).

They were mostly male (toxic masculinity, Gillette just reminded, is the font et origio of our sins).

They were pro-life, and anti-abortion (insensitive to the reality that an ascendant Planned Parenthood just announced record annual income of $1.67 billion and its highest annual profit in history with $244.8 million).

Some were wearing red Trump MAGA hats (or as Joy Behar justified the lynch mob frenzy, “Because we’re desperate to get Trump out of office. That’s why.”)

America’s Latest “Historic” Political Icons Radical Democrats Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar join the U.S. Congress.John Perazzo

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272668/americas-latest-historic-political-icons-john-perazzo

“Historic” political figures may be well worth celebrating, but only if they are something other than ignorant and ill-tempered human wrecking balls. “Historic” doesn’t necessarily mean “good.” Barack Obama’s “historic” tenure as our nation’s first black president, for instance, was tainted by the somewhat inconvenient fact that he is a lifelong Marxist who has spent all of his adult years allying himself with America-hating revolutionaries like Bill Ayers and Berhardine Dohrn, and with bilious Jew-haters like Jeremiah Wright, Rashid Khalidi, and Al Sharpton. When Hillary Clinton made her own “historic” attempt to become our first female president, her campaign was tarnished by the similarly unpleasant fact that she was the most corrupt presidential candidate who ever breathed. And when Keith Ellison “historically” became the first Muslim elected to Congress, he brought with him a long history of allegiance to the most prolific Jew-hater in living memory, Louis Farrakhan.

And now, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, the first two Muslim women ever elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, have stepped forth to become our latest “historic” icons.

Tlaib, who served in the Michigan state legislature from 2009-15, has cultivated noteworthy ties to a number of radical Islamist organizations. In 2009, for instance, she received a Community Service Award from the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a group she has praised for its “invaluable” and “vital” “advocacy efforts” on behalf of “those who don’t have the resources to defend themselves.” Moreover, Tlaib has spoken at banquets and conferences hosted by CAIR, the Muslim American Society, and the Islamic Circle of North America. She also has received numerous financial donations from individuals affiliated with CAIR, the Islamic Society of North America, the Muslim Students Association, and the Muslim Public Affairs Council. Most of these entities are affiliated with the notorious Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamic supremacist organization and a fountainhead of extremism/terrorism.

Robert Spencer “Scholar of Religions” Says Allah is “More Merciful” Than the God of the Bible The Western intelligentsia just can’t get enough of hating Western civilization.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272685/scholar-religions-says-allah-more-merciful-god-robert-spencer

The Western intelligentsia’s capacity for self-flagellation and self-hatred seems to be endless. Jack Miles, Religion News Service tell us, is “author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning ‘God: A Biography’ and a retired professor of religion at the University of California Irvine, now offers an erudite and highly readable close reading of Allah’s real nature.”

Miles’ “erudite” take on Allah is that the god of the Qur’an is “more merciful” and “more moral” than the God of the Bible. Miles is, of course, being feted and celebrated for this in all the right places by all the right people, those who know that teaching the people of Western Europe and North America to despise their own culture and heritage, and to love that of Islam, is a good and noble endeavor.

Miles’ claims, however, are completely wrong. In the first place, there is the evidence of present-day reality. There have been well over 30,000 jihad terror attacks worldwide since 9/11; virtually all of them carried out by Muslims acting upon Qur’anic dictates, many of them screaming “Allahu akbar.” There have been no terror attacks committed by Jews screaming the Shema or Christians screaming “Jesus is Lord.” No doubt Christians have behaved violently in the name of Christ throughout the history of Christianity, but in doing so they never invoked the violent passages of the Bible as justification for their acts.

Bad Ideas Are Born in Bad Universities How our academies are enabling the instruments of tyranny. Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272697/bad-ideas-are-born-bad-universities-bruce-thornton

In 1726 Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels gave us a brilliant satire of the folly of research divorced from common sense, practicality, and reality. When Gulliver visits the Grand Academy of Lagado, he finds “Projectors” busy with research projects like extracting sunbeams from cucumbers, building houses from the roof down, and converting excrement back to food.

It’s hard not to think about Swift’s Projectors when you consider today’s loony ideas driving our social mores and even laws. And for that we can thank our universities, where most of these preposterous notions have their genesis. Multiple “gender” identities, “toxic masculinity,” “microaggressions,” and occult “racism” are just a few examples of speculative nonsense that have escaped the university asylum and now roil our politics and infect our laws.

Like most social and political dysfunctions, this degradation of the university is a product of the Sixties. Professors always have had political and ideological preferences, but in the Sixties, universities institutionalized left-wing identity politics in various “studies” departments and programs. Yet faced with aggressive public complaints that women and minorities had been ignored in academic research and teaching, administrators did not address the alleged shortcomings in their curricula from within the protocols of university disciplines like English or history. For example, the topics of black or female history, literature, or social history should be studied with the same professional methodologies and protocols that govern those disciplines. Training in those professional standards could then become the foundation of research and teaching, subject to the professional oversight and judgment of similarly trained peers.

Rather than adjusting and correcting curricula within the framework of existing disciplines, however, universities simply created separate but equal academic sandboxes to quiet noisy activists and buy (they thought) some peace and quiet. Nor did they consider the consequences of sacrificing professional standards in order to display their political correctness.

The Left’s Embrace of Antisemitism by Rachel Riley

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2019/01/the-lefts-embrace-of-antisemitism/

Until she spoke out against the plague of Jew hatred that has infected the British Labor Party of Jeremy Corbyn, Channel 4 game show hostess Rachel Riley was known chiefly for high heels and short skirts. Now, as detailed in a recent address, she is a designated target of the Left.

If you told me this time last year that, come January 2019, I’d be standing in Parliament, addressing a room full of people at a Holocaust memorial event, describing the hideous abuse I’ve been receiving daily since I started speaking about the growing problem of antisemitism in the UK, I wouldn’t know where to begin with my incredulity.

My own identity as a Jew has been a confusing one. As I often joke, my mum’s Jewish and my dad’s Man United, and we’ve worshipped far more often at the Theatre of Dreams than I’ve ever been to shul. As a child, I knew not to sing the Jesus bit in the assembly hymns but the bacon sandwiches mum would feed us meant I didn’t quite know where we fit into all of this.

But one part of my Jewish identity, that forms part of my very being, is the deep and irreparable sorrow I feel in relation to the Holocaust.

I’ve always known that having just one Jewish grandparent, in the lifetime of my own Jewish grandparents, was enough for some to feel justified in carrying out unspeakable acts of inhumanity against them, like ripping babies out of mothers’ arms and smashing them against walls.

The Palestinian Jihad Against Peace by Bassam Tawil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13631/palestinians-jihad-against-peace

According to US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, an upcoming US-sponsored global summit to discuss the Middle East and Iran will “bring together dozens of countries from all around the world, from Asia, from Africa, from Western Hemisphere countries, Europe too, the Middle East of course.”

The Palestinian strategy is now based on inciting Arabs against their leaders. This is the message that Abbas and his officials are sending to the Arabs: “You need to join us in our campaign to stop our leaders from making peace with Israel. You must condemn any leader who seeks normalization with Israel as a traitor.”

Other senior Palestinian officials have gone further by warning the Arab countries that any form of normalization with Israel would be considered an act of treason

It now remains to be seen whether the Arab countries will surrender to the latest campaign of Palestinian incitement and intimidation.

Palestinian leaders have recently stepped up their efforts to stop Arab countries from normalizing their relations — or even signing peace agreements — with Israel.

The campaign comes against a backdrop of reports about the warming of relations between Israel and some Arab countries, including a recent visit to Oman by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The specter of peace between the Arab countries and Israel has become a nightmare for Palestinian leaders. Instead of worrying about building a better future — which the Palestinians desperately need — Palestinian leaders are feverishly working to thwart any attempt to bring the Arab countries closer to Israel.

As part of the “anti-normalization” campaign, the Palestinian leaders in the West Bank are now putting pressure on the Arab countries to boycott a US-sponsored global summit to discuss the Middle East and Iran, which is scheduled for next month in Poland.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a televised interview that the meeting would “focus on Middle East stability and peace and freedom and security here in this region, and that includes an important element of making sure that Iran is not a destabilizing influence.”

The meeting, Pompeo said, will “bring together dozens of countries from all around the world, from Asia, from Africa, from Western Hemisphere countries, Europe too, the Middle East of course.”

Palestinian leaders are apparently convinced that the upcoming conference is part of a US effort to normalize relations between the Arab countries and Israel. Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas and his senior officials and spokesmen in Ramallah consider anything the US Administration does or says as a “conspiracy designed to liquidate the Palestinian cause and national rights.”

Turkey: Imprisoning Dissidents while Bidding for EU Membership by Uzay Bulut

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13607/turkey-imprisoning-dissidents

Erdogan did not hide the fact that his statements promising “freedom of faith, freedom of thought and freedom of opinion” were part of his “preparations for the 2019 local elections.” The Turkish president did, however, hide the fact that his words were completely false.

On December 19, Prof. Şebnem Korur Fincancı, president of the Human Rights Foundation of Turkey (TIHV), was sentenced to two and a half years in prison for being one of 2,212 signatories to an “Academics for Peace” petition in 2016. The petition called on the Turkish government to cease its violence against the Kurds in southeastern Turkey. Fincancı is one of 429 academics who, as of December 19, have stood on trial since December 5.

Erdoğan was not telling the truth when he declared that everyone in Turkey would enjoy “freedom of faith, freedom of thought and freedom of opinion.” In fact, Turkish jails and prisons are so packed with people imprisoned for expressing their beliefs, that the government just announced it will be building 228 more prisons over the next five years to accommodate the overflow.

Simultaneously, Turkey is stepping up its decades-long bid to become a member of the European Union. As part of this bid, Turkish Justice Minister Abdulhamit Gul announced on December 11 that he would be unveiling a new strategy for judicial reform. Under no circumstances should the EU allow itself to be duped by such a transparently deceptive and deceitful move.

At a rally in Ankara over the summer, held by the women’s branch of Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced:

“From now on, there will be no fight for freedom of faith, freedom of thought and freedom of opinion. Everyone will be free in their own faith [and] be free to live accordingly. [Everyone will be at liberty to] say whatever he [or she] believes in.”