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December 2021

Ireland: Still No Room at the Inn Not a Welcoming Environment for Jews by Lawrence A. Franklin

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18011/ireland-antisemitism

Ostensibly, the BDS movement’s goal is to shift world opinion to declare that Jewish settlements in the historically-named areas of Judea and Samaria are supposedly illegal seizures of Palestinian Arab land. In truth, the principal and outspoken objective of Palestinian organizers of the BDS movement is the destruction of Israel.

In Ireland, Jew-hatred does not well up from the general public but seems clearly driven from the top down. These Goebbels-like attacks on Israel include salvos from several Sinn Fein members of parliament. One of them, Martin Browne, represents Tipperary and claims, falsely, that Israel created ISIS. Another, Matt Carthy representing Cavan-Monahan, has stated that Israel is the worst human rights offender on earth — presumably dwarfing China, North Korea, Venezuela and Iran.

There is understandably some sympathetic sentiment among the Irish people for the plight of Palestinians, as there is also among Israelis, saddened to see people suffer unnecessarily under a brutal and corrupt Palestinian leadership, which has full autonomy over much the territory under dispute. The Palestinians long ago agreed, in the Oslo Accords of 1993, to settle those disputes by direct negotiation, not by external fiat.

All Israelis — about 20% of whom are Muslims, along with Christians and Druze — have identical rights under the law. Israeli Arabs can vote, have political parties and prominent job opportunities, and are members of Israel’s parliament. The one exception is that Arabs are not required to serve in the Israeli military; in the event of possible conflicts with Arab states, Israelis did not want brother fighting brother.

Even more shocking was that fully a third of Irish members of parliament of voted to expel Israeli diplomats from Ireland.

The Irish Parliament, on the night of May 25, 2021, staged a “legal Kristallnacht” against the nation of Israel. Following an avalanche of vituperative anti-Israel and anti-Semitic diatribes by members of the Dáil Éireann (lower house of Parliament), its members voted unanimously to discuss a motion on whether or not Ireland should support BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) legislation to try to strangle Israel economically. Ostensibly, the BDS movement’s goal is to shift world opinion to declare that Jewish settlements in the historically-named areas of Judea and Samaria are supposedly illegal seizures of Palestinian Arab land. In truth, the principal and outspoken objective of Palestinian organizers of the BDS movement is the destruction of Israel.

Merry Christmas, America — the veterans are coming By Ed Timperlake

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/12/merry_christmas_america__the_veterans_are_coming.html

America is soon facing a great Christmas present. A record number of veterans, from all services are trying to enter our real revolutionary political process the 2022 mid-term elections.

Recently, three US Army pensioners took to a fainting couch while even perhaps symbolically clutching their pearls to issue a dire warning about the 2024 election:

“In short: We are chilled to our bones at the thought of a coup succeeding next time.”

The insightful Victor David Hanson nailed such a thumb sucking article;

The column seemed strangely timed to coincide with a storm of recent Democratic talking points that a re-elected Trump, or even a Republican sweep of the 2022 midterms, would spell a virtual end of democracy.

In fact, one quip about such Democrat coup porn is it gives porn a bad name. The other more salient point was a statement made by my often co-author Robbin Laird when he correctly pointed out then when writing about any future events a bit of humility is called for, “Not a single person in America in 2019 could have predicted the events of 2020”

Project Veritas scores a significant victory over the New York Times By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/12/project_veritas_scores_a_significant_victory_over_the_new_york_times.html

After the DOJ authorized the FBI to conduct dawn raids on Project Veritas’s people because they briefly possessed, but neither stole nor published, the diary of Joe Biden’s drug-addicted daughter, Ashley, the New York Times “coincidentally” received and published copies of memos that Project Veritas’s attorneys had written regarding legal standards for investigative reporting—while Project Veritas was already involved in litigation with the Times. On Friday, a New York judge ordered that the Times must return every document and destroy every electronic file. It’s a huge victory for Project Veritas and an appropriate rebuke to the Times, which acts more sleazily than any supermarket tabloid ever has.

You can read more details about the back story here. If you don’t want the long version, the short version is best summarized in Michael Cernovich’s tweet on the subject:

Project Veritas sued the Times to recover the stolen material, and the Times promptly sought shelter behind (a) the First Amendment and (b) New York Times Company v. United States, 403 U.S. 713 (1971), which concerned the Times’s decision to publish the Pentagon Papers. Without even reading that Supreme Court decision, one of the things that’s immediately obvious is that the 1971 case involved government documents that the Supreme Court concluded revealed matters of the utmost interest to the American public.

China is Building 150 Nuclear Reactors While Biden Demands More Solar Panels Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/12/china-building-150-nuclear-reactors-while-biden-daniel-greenfield/

In his end of the year roundup, Dave Barry joked that, “Inflation continues to be a pesky problem, with food prices soaring and gasoline approaching $4 per gallon everywhere in the nation except California, where, for environmental reasons, it is $137.50.”

He’s not far off the mark. It’s easy to find $6 and $7 a gallon gas. And you can see gas stations like that even in the sight of drilling going on. 

Home and business energy costs are even more insane. Surviving a summer in Southern California means almost certainly having to go into the dreaded Tier 3 at which point “the prizes double” and the costs can be utterly horrifying when you look at your power bill.

The Green special interests based out of California love nothing more than the idea of making their setup into the model for the country. 

The Biden administration had to sign a China ban on slave labor despite lobbying over the impact on solar panels. But while Democrats build solar panels, China is building 150 nuclear reactors. It’s phasing out a lot of its old dams and it’s going to what works.

The inhumanity of identity politics In 2021, we witnessed just how ruthless, racist and anti-human wokeness can be. Brendan O’Neill

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/12/22/the-inhumanity-of-identity-politics/

To see how twisted identity politics has become, how morally bereft, just consider this: in 2021, the woke set shed more tears over a convicted child molester who was shot than they did over a much-loved ‘dancing granny’ who was killed by a man wielding his SUV as a weapon.

They wept and tweeted and protested more for Joseph Rosenbaum, the 36-year-old molester of children who was shot by Kyle Rittenhouse in Kenosha in 2020, than they did for Virginia Sorensen, the 79-year-old family woman and member of the Milwaukee Dancing Grannies who was mown down by Darrell E Brooks at the Waukesha Christmas parade in November this year.

And the reason for this disparity in political grief, this chasm-sized contrast between the explosion of concern for Rittenhouse’s victims and the shameful, snivelling silence that greeted the Waukesha atrocity, is as straightforward as it is chilling. It’s because of the identity of the killers.

It’s because Rosenbaum was killed by a white man – by the archetypal Bad White Man, if the feverish media hatred for Rittenhouse is to be believed – while Soresen was killed by a black man. By a member of the woke set’s favourite victim group. By someone who hails from one of the sanctified identities.

Which means Rosenbaum’s death fit the woke narrative, seeming to confirm that any one of us could be a victim of the violent privilege of the white male, and therefore we were encouraged to talk about it, ceaselessly. Whereas Sorensen’s death, and the deaths of five others at that bloodied parade, grated against the woke narrative. It had a black perpetrator and white victims. It didn’t compute. It wasn’t useful. So it was hushed. Nothing to see here. Move on. ‘Waukesha feels abandoned after tragic parade attack’, said the New York Post this month, after four solid weeks of muteness over that horrific event from the normally hyper-virtuous hand-wringers of the celebrity and political sets.

The tyranny of public health Technocrats are taking control of nearly every aspect of our lives. Frank Furedi

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/12/21/the-tyranny-of-public-health/

Public health dominates political discussion today. Masks, vaccines, social distancing – these are the issues about which we now argue daily. Not economics or the increasingly volatile geopolitical situation, but public health.

And I’m not just talking about the Covid pandemic. Indeed, virtually all aspects of social and political life today are now framed through the idiom of public health. Problems we used to treat as political and social questions are now often presented as medical issues.

So critics of prime minister Boris Johnson do not simply question his political record – they also brand him a public-health problem. As one article puts it, ‘Boris Johnson’s dwindling authority [is] becoming a “public-health issue”’. Likewise, Donald Trump was labelled a ‘public-health threat’ by his opponents while in office.

Public health has become a principal means to attack a political opponent or a set of political ideas. In 2019, a group of medics even wrote a letter to the Guardian calling a No Deal Brexit a ‘threat to public health’. Other critics of Brexit called it a ‘confused concept that threatens public health’. As public health has become politicised, politics has become medicalised.

The pandemic has intensified this medicalisation of politics. There is now virtually nothing that cannot be conceived of as a public-health issue. Take racism. Writing in the Lancet earlier this year, identitarian academic Kehinde Andrews insisted that ‘racism is a public-health crisis’. In the US, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Rochelle Walensky, made a similar claim earlier this year. ‘Racism is a serious public-health threat that directly affects the wellbeing of millions of Americans’, she said. The CDC has since launched a new ‘Racism and Health’ web portal.

All this changes the very meaning of racism. Racial oppression used to be understood in terms of political, social and economic domination. Now it is understood in terms of ill-health. The racially oppressed are now as likely to be seen as patients in need of medical intervention as they are victims of political injustice. ‘Racism isn’t just unfair. It’s making us ill’, complains a Guardian contributor.

Likewise, anti-racist campaigners portray racism as a mental-health problem. Student supporters of the Rhodes Must Fall movement at Oxford University have claimed that they feel traumatised by the presence of the Cecil Rhodes statue.

Increasingly, the presentation of a social problem as a supposed threat to public health is a means to draw attention to it. That is why President Biden recently chose to condemn gun violence as a public-health epidemic. Unable to present a critique of violence and crime in moral terms, he decided to offer one through the language of medicine.

Frank Furedi: The fightback against wokeness has begun The classroom will be the key battleground in the 21st-century culture wars.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/12/24/the-fightback-against-wokeness-has-begun/

One of the most significant events of 2021 was the revolt of frustrated and angry parents in Virginia, against the teaching of so-called critical race theory in local schools.

The revolt precipitated the shock defeat of a one-time Virginia governor, Democrat Terry McAuliffe, at the hands of Republican Glenn Youngkin in November’s gubernatorial elections. This was not just a serious setback for the Biden presidency, in a state the Democrats won easily in 2020; it also demonstrated, perhaps for the first time in the current phase of the culture wars, that the social-engineering efforts of America’s cultural elites can be contained – and perhaps even defeated.

The parents’ revolt certainly laid bare the arrogance of the cultural elites. This was personified by McAuliffe himself, who responded to parents’ concerns about their children’s education with undisguised contempt. ‘I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach’, he declared during a televised debate.

McAuliffe wasn’t alone in this. As the parents’ revolt spread throughout the United States, the National School Boards Association (NSBA) wrote a letter to the president demanding that parents’ protests at school-board meetings be treated as ‘domestic terrorism’. US attorney general Merrick Garland seemingly agreed with the NSBA, and called on the FBI to act against those parents threatening ‘school administrators, board members, teachers and staff’.

Others attempted to dismiss this parents-led rejection of woke pedagogy as a Republican stunt. Former US president Barack Obama told Virginia voters to ignore what he called ‘trumped-up culture wars’, and dismissed parental concerns as ‘fake outrage’.

These attempts to denigrate or dismiss the protests ignore their main driver – parents’ concern about the academic and moral education of their children. Many adults may silently put up with manifestations of woke culture in everyday life, but they will react when they realise their child is being encouraged to adopt values antithetical to their own.

This is not confined to the US. Parents in Great Britain and other parts of the Western world are also confronted by similar attempts to inculcate a woke worldview in their children.

Kamala’s bad press isn’t ‘racist’ or ‘sexist’ Vice President Harris is a terrible politician and voters know it. Charles Lipson

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/kamala-harris-bad-press-racist-sexist/

Vice President Kamala Harris has been quoted as saying her media coverage would be better if she were a white man. She is absolutely right. She wouldn’t have bad coverage. She wouldn’t have any coverage at all. That’s because she would still be a minor senator from a big state, not the second-highest official in the Executive Branch. She was selected only because she has the identity-politics markers so important to Democrats.

It should be obvious by now that Harris is a terrible politician. When friendly reporters toss her softballs, she swings, misses and blames them. When she is given hard policy assignments, she swings and misses those, too. (In her defense, her main assignment, immigration, is President Biden’s failure, not her’s.) She refuses to visit the US-Mexican border, aside from one brief stop a thousand miles from the crisis. When she was asked about it, she noted that she hadn’t been to Europe, either. That PR blunder was widely noted but she soon corrected it: she visited Europe.

Why was this clunker picked for such an important office? We still don’t know the full answer. Part of the answer surely lies in Trump’s weakness with women voters and the Democrats’ goal of motivating high turnout among them and among African Americans, who are crucial to any Democratic victory. Candidate Biden first promised to pick a woman for his ticket and then faced intense pressure to pick an African American. The list wasn’t a long one.

Stretched Thin Hiring more cops won’t just reduce crime; done right, it can also improve the quality of policing. Graham Factor

https://www.city-journal.org/police-forces-stretched-thin

One night, when I was still a big-city cop, I was called to a business where a young woman, heavily intoxicated, had been caught drawing graffiti with a Sharpie. The business owner was irate because of the pervasive graffiti problem in the area, but the woman had no criminal record. The graffiti in question amounted to about $20 worth of damage. I spoke to the woman and the business owner, and we came to an arrangement. We would trade contact information, and she would return tomorrow to clean up the graffiti. If she did not, the business owner would contact me, and I would ask prosecutors to file a misdemeanor charge against her.

As far as I know, this agreement worked, and it was a win for everyone. The business owner got some justice, and his property got cleaned up. The young woman avoided an arrest and criminal record. And taxpayers didn’t have to spend thousands of dollars prosecuting a drunk, first-time offender over $20 in graffiti. I think the median criminal justice “reformer” would say that this is the kind of thing they would like police to do more often.

Here’s the catch: this “diversion agreement” (which I made up on the spot) took time. My back-up officer and I had to detain the woman, check her criminal history, and identify everyone. We had to complete a criminal investigation that would hold up in court, if necessary. We had to speak to the parties and find a mutually acceptable arrangement. We had to document everything in the appropriate required reports. And I had to take the time to follow up with the business owner, in case the woman failed to hold up her end of the agreement. Booking her into jail and forgetting about the whole thing probably would have been faster.