RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/can-ilhan-omar-overcome-her-prejudice-11562970265

Oh puleez! I appreciate Hirsi Ali’s unique biography and valor, but Ilhan Omar is programmed and won election because she represents the faith driven hatred of her constituents. Why should she alter her hatreds? Her fellow Democrats give her a pass, fearing that they would be tarred as Islamophobes….rsk

I once opened a speech by confessing to a crowd of Jews that I used to hate them. It was 2006 and I was a young native of Somalia who’d been elected to the Dutch Parliament. The American Jewish Committee was giving me its Moral Courage Award. I felt honored and humbled, but a little dishonest if I didn’t own up to my anti-Semitic past. So I told them how I’d learned to blame the Jews for everything.

Fast-forward to 2019. A freshman congresswoman from Minnesota has been infuriating the Jewish community and discomfiting the Democratic leadership with her expressions of anti-Semitism. Like me, Ilhan Omar was born in Somalia and exposed at an early age to Muslim anti-Semitism.

Some of the members of my 2006 AJC audience have asked me to explain and respond to Ms. Omar’s comments, including her equivocal apologies. Their main question is whether it is possible for Ms. Omar to unlearn her evident hatred of Jews—and if so, how to help.

In my experience it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to unlearn hate without coming to terms with how you learned to hate. Most Americans are familiar with the classic Western flavors of anti-Semitism: the Christian, European, white-supremacist and Communist types. But little attention has been paid to the special case of Muslim anti-Semitism. That is a pity because today it is anti-Semitism’s most zealous, most potent and most underestimated form.

https://www.steynonline.com/9542/the-empire-wokes-back

The Empire Wokes Back by Mark Steyn

The internal contradictions of wokeness: Gender is totally fluid, and, if you’re unpersuaded that a six-foot man with a beard is a woman, you’ll lose your job. Whereas race is a social construct, but not that social. From my old friends at Slate:

“Kamala Harris is *not* an American Black. She is half Indian and half Jamaican,” read one of a dozen similar tweets questioning Harris’ identity sent in the moments after she, while confronting Joe Biden’s record of opposing desegregation, recalled being bused to school as a little girl. Another read, “KAMALA HARRIS IS NOT BLACK” and featured a photo of Harris with a “Kamala Dolezal” emblazoned across her face, referencing Rachel Dolezal, a white woman who claims to be “transracially” black. Yet another read, “Kamala Harris is implying she is descended from American Black Slaves. She’s not. She comes from Jamaican Slave Owners. That’s fine. She’s not an American Black. Period.”

Senator Harris is half-Jamaican and half-Indian (dot not Warren). If she were to prevail in next November’s election, she would be the second black president to come from entirely outside the African-American experience – after Barack Obama, who was half-Kenyan and half-white. I can sort of understand why, if I were the Reverend Al Sharpton or the Reverend Jesse Jackson, I’d be irked by what seems to be becoming a pattern.

As I wrote over a decade ago, Barack Obama was the first US president to be born a British subject since Andrew Jackson. Kamala Harris would be the second. What’s up with that? In my book The [Un]documented Mark Steyn I quote another man born a British subject, General Colin Powell, from 1995, back when he was doing his to-run-or-not-to-run routine:

After the British ended slavery, they told my ancestors that they were now British citizens with all the rights of any subject of the Crown. That was an exaggeration; still, the British did establish good schools and made attendance mandatory. They filled the lower ranks of the civil service with blacks. Consequently, West Indians had an opportunity to develop attitudes of inde- pendence, self-responsibility and self- worth. They did not have their individual dignity beaten down for three hundred years.

Like Kamala’s, General Powell’s identity was bluntly questioned: After he said his favorite composer was Andrew Lloyd Webber, Jesse Jackson wondered, “Is this guy even black?”

If you’re looking for an alternative, there’s always Mayor Pete, who I suggested the other day was in a somewhat Obamaesque position – and whaddaya know, just like Barack he was born a British subject, too. Buttigieg is a Maltese surname, and Mayor Pete makes the cut by eleven-and-a-half months: He entered the world in January 1982, and the new British Nationality Act came into effect in January 1983, making British-subject status inheritable only if you’re stateless. So another couple of election cycles and a non-imperial gay or black might have a shot.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/07/11/jilted-again-the-nevertrump-left-alliance-crumbles/

The political misfits known as NeverTrumpers are begging for allies ahead of next year’s presidential election—and, as usual, they aren’t looking to the Right.

This collection of failed magazine editors, Iraq War propagandists, washed-up columnists, Russian collusion pimps, and losing campaign consultants have dogged Donald Trump and his supporters for three years. While some anti-Trump “conservatives” who contributed to National Review’s infamous “Against Trump” issue in early 2016 have become supporters of the president, others cannot let go—but their obstinance is less about principle and more about grift: Acting as the useful conservative idiot for the Washington Post or MSNBC has breathed new life into once stale careers and burned reputations.

Despite making repeated threats and floating the names of several potential candidates, they have failed to produce a legitimate primary challenger to Trump. (Bill Kristol, the de facto head of NeverTrump Inc., last year claimed he was building a “war machine” to take on Trump in 2020, making this yet another war Kristol waged from the sidelines and lost.)

NeverTrumpers also failed to help Democrats run Trump out of the Oval Office, whether it was by promoting the egregious special counsel investigation into imaginary Russian collusion or supporting any and all empty calls for impeachment. They have not produced a detailed policy agenda to offer an alternative to Trumpism, only bromides about vague “principles.”

Now, armed with the same unjustified hubris and political fecklessness that turned once-influential conservatives into a punchline, NeverTrumpers are warning Democrats that they need to find some imaginary center so they can join forces to Dump Trump in 2020.