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Ruth King

The Rot Is Irreversible: A perverse alliance. Abe Greenwald

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/author/abe-greenwald/

Disease is reversible—rot isn’t. Representatives Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib brought the disease of anti-Semitism into the upper echelons of the Democratic Party when they were elected in November. The party could have fought the disease. It chose instead to nurture it. And that’s when the irreversible rot set in.

The rot explains why Democrats, from Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi on down, are vigorously defending Tlaib’s recent lies about Arabs welcoming Jews after the Holocaust. It doesn’t matter what Tlaib or Omar say, how blunt their Jew-hatred is, or how often it’s aired. A defense pact is already in place that covers all calumnies against the Jews. Both the Democratic leadership and the liberal media establishment will back these bigots against any and all charges of anti-Semitism in return for smooth relations with the social-justice left. It’s a monstrous deal made by people too weak to defend their party and speak the truth.

During a Yahoo podcast over the weekend, Tlaib said that she gets a “calming feeling” when she thinks about the Holocaust because “it was my ancestors, Palestinians, who lost their land and some lost their lives, their livelihood, their human dignity . . . in the name of trying to create a safe haven for Jews, post-Holocaust, post-tragedy. . . And, I love the fact that it was my ancestors that provided that, right?”

Wrong. At the time, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, was a supporter and ally of Hitler. When the two met, al-Husseini told Hitler that they shared the same enemies: “the English, the Jews, and the Communists.” The two went on to scheme about how best to set upon and destroy the Jews of the Middle East. What’s more, the Arabs regularly massacred Jews in Mandatory Palestine.

Seventy-five Years Later, Hungary Still Hasn’t Come to Terms with its Role in the Holocaust written by Anna Porter

https://quillette.com/2019/05/15/seventy-five-years

On the 75th anniversary of the extermination of most of Hungary’s Jews—including the Auschwitz deportations, which began in May, 1944—we should also take note of the Hungarian government’s apparent determination to distort the country’s historical record. In some circles, this effort includes even the rehabilitation of Miklós Horthy, the longtime Hungarian Regent who governed Hungary during the Holocaust.

A former admiral and adjutant to the Habsburg Emperor-King, Horthy entered Budapest in dramatic style with his army on November 16, 1919, astride a white horse. His army defeated the ragtag Bolshevik forces that had imposed 133 days of “Red Terror” upon the country, but also inflicted its own “White Terror,” in some ways more brutal than its communist predecessor. Early during Horthy’s rule, Hungary enacted some of Europe’s first 20th-century anti-Jewish laws. Jews were capped at 6% of university admissions, and subsequent measures limited Jewish participation in elite professions to the same benchmark.

MAY CONFIRMS PLAN FOR DEPARTURE

Theresa May has confirmed she will announce a date for her departure next month – regardless of whether she has delivered Brexit or not.

The Prime Minister has agreed to meet with the executive of the 1922 committee, the powerful backbench committee of Tory MPs, at the beginning of June, when they will “agree a timetable for the election of a new leader”.

In a joint statement issued this afternoon, the committee and Mrs May announced that they will meet again in the week beginning 3 June, following the second reading of the Withdrawal Agreement Bill in the House of Commons.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/05/16/brexit-latest-news-theresa-may-set-showdown-meeting-senior-tories/

It comes after Mrs May was told last night that she would face a vote of no confidence unless she agreed to set out a clear timetable for her departure.

The Justice System and Cardinal Pell: Peter Smith

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2019/05/the-justice-system-and-cardinal-pell/

While recently away in the UK I read the “best-selling” book The Secret Barrister (2018) authored by, well, a secret barrister. The barrister in question is apparently a junior barrister specialising in criminal law in England and Wales. I figure it’s a man (and will use ‘he’ where applicable) but the forward blurb disguises this by disconcertingly using the pronouns ‘they’ and ‘their’ for a singular person. Most annoying. Why not use the awkward ‘he or she’ rather than butcher the language? Just asking.

The book is a damning indictment of the British criminal justice system, at least as it applies in England and Wales. From amateur magistrates to sloppy gathering of evidence to missing evidence to poorly-funded legal aid and much, much more, the secret barrister provides an alarming picture of the law gone wrong and justice at grave risk. The Observer described the account of the justice sytem as “terrifying.”

My impression is that the situation simply can’t be as shambolic as described. Nevertheless, if you were falsely accused of a criminal offence (providing, perhaps, it is not child abuse) it might be best to be in Australia rather than in Britain; I hope anyway. On the other hand, the guilty might have a better chance of the incriminating evidence being mislaid in Britain. So, it evens out in an Alice in Wonderland kind of way.

Heroes and Villains: A Talk with Vladimir Bukovsky, Part IV By Jay Nordlinger

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/heroes-and-villains-a-talk-with-vladimir-bukovsky-part-iv/

We are talking over the waterfront — or a good deal of the waterfront — here on the back patio in Cambridge. But, as I’ve mentioned, I also talked by phone with Vladimir Bukovsky last September. At that time, I asked him about Crimea: Putin’s swallowing of.

He said that Putin “did it for his own internal reasons.” He wanted to show Russians, along with the world, that “he doesn’t care about anyone or international law.” He is a big, strong man. He is “playing on people’s emotions.”

Crimea is a test, said Bukovsky. There has long been a principle about the changing of international borders. Putin has broken a taboo. He rubbed the nose of the West in the annexation of Crimea, to show that he is a criminal and that he can do whatever he wants, without anyone standing in his way.

From here on out, instability — including the changing of borders — becomes easier. That’s the game.

Feel the Excitement: Bill de Blasio Is Running for President Too By Jim Treacher

https://pjmedia.com/trending/feel-the-excitement-bill-de-blasio-is-running-for-president-too/

If the mayor of the fourth-largest city in Indiana can run for president, why can’t the mayor of the biggest city in America? With Bill de Blasio’s entry in the 2020 race, we now have 24 Democrats trying to save us from Trump. Twenty. Four. Considering the public’s reaction to these candidates so far, you could call it an entire case of cold ones.

“The good thing about New Yorkers is they look the same whether they’re really pissed off at you or they like you.” I’m not sure how Mayor Wilhelm de Blasio can determine that. When has he ever met somebody who likes him?

It’s amazing how much pandering a guy can pack into three minutes: Promise to redistribute wealth, #FightFor15, claim health care is a human right (it isn’t, nor is the product of anybody else’s labor), push for “free” this and “free” that, throw in phrases like “working families” and “a decent wage,” blame Trump for Obama’s immigration policies, stoke fear about global warming killing everybody… and do it all while riding around in your taxpayer-funded limo.

Washington WhodunIt: Who Pushed the Dossier, Brennan or Comey? By Debra Heine

https://pjmedia.com/trending/washington-whodunit-who-pushed-the-dossier-brennan-or-comey/

Former FBI Director James Comey and former CIA Director John Brennan continue to be at odds over whose idea it was to include the unverified Steele dossier in the Intelligence Community Assessment of January 2017 (ICA).

The high-level dispute erupted after news broke that Attorney General William Barr appointed a U.S. attorney to examine the origins of the Russia investigation and to determine whether the FBI and DOJ’s actions were “lawful and appropriate.”

“This is very serious business and for the first time, I now believe that some of these guys are going to go to prison,” Washington attorney Joe diGenova told Fox News host Laura Ingraham on Tuesday.

According to Fox News’ Catherine Herridge, sources familiar with the records say that “a late-2016 email chain indicated then-FBI Director James Comey told bureau subordinates that then-CIA Director John Brennan insisted the dossier be included in the intelligence community assessment on Russian interference, known as the ICA.”

This would be the same email chain former congressman Trey Gowdy referred to in a Fox News interview with Martha MacCallum on Tuesday, when he said, “In 2016, well after it [the Steele dossier] had been used, it was still unverified and the people responsible for it were referring to it as unverified and one or the other demanded that it be included in the intelligence assessment …”

Our Modern ‘Satyricon’ By Victor Davis Hanson

https://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/our-modern-satyricon/

“Petronius also argues that with too much rapid material progress comes moral regress. His final warning might be especially troubling for the current generation of Western Europeans and Americans. Even as we brag of globalizing the world and enriching the West materially and culturally, we are losing our soul in the process.”

Sometime around A.D. 60, in the age of Emperor Nero, a Roman court insider named Gaius Petronius wrote a satirical Latin novel, “The Satyricon,” about moral corruption in Imperial Rome. The novel’s general landscape was Rome’s transition from an agrarian republic to a globalized multicultural superpower.

The novel survives only in a series of extended fragments. But there are enough chapters for critics to agree that the high-living Petronius, nicknamed the “Judge of Elegance,” was a brilliant cynic. He often mocked the cultural consequences of the sudden and disruptive influx of money and strangers from elsewhere in the Mediterranean region into a once-traditional Roman society.

The novel plots the wandering odyssey of three lazy, overeducated and mostly underemployed single young Greeks: Encolpius, Ascyltos and Giton. They aimlessly mosey around southern Italy. They panhandle and mooch off the nouveau riche. They mock traditional Roman customs. The three and their friends live it up amid the culinary, cultural and sexual excesses in the age of Nero.

U.S. Democrats Follow U.K. Labour Party Down The Anti-Semitism Rat Hole By Erielle Davidson

https://thefederalist.com/2019/05/16/u-s-democrats-follow-u-k-labour-party-anti-semitism-rat-hole/

What level of Holocaust revisionism or Farrakhan-cavorting might it take for Democrats to realize their party is sick with racism?

This past Tuesday, yet another Labour member of the United Kingdom’s Parliament resigned from the party. After 45 years, Bridget Prentice, a former member of Parliament (MP) for Lewisham East, called it quits in a letter to the acting general secretary of the Labour Party.

Prentice’s letter offered a stinging rebuke of the devolution of the Labour Party under the auspices of Jeremy Corbyn. Unsurprisingly, among Prentice’s top concerns, in addition to the party’s anti-Europe swivel, was Labour’s inability to address concerns about anti-Semitism. Prentice’s letter is a dark omen of what the future may portend for the American Democratic Party, which, similar to the Labour Party, has been reeling from accusations of anti-Semitism.

Prentice writes, “Over the past three years I have watched in horror as Jewish members have begged for support against the growth of anti-Semitism both within and out with the Party.” She criticizes Labour’s “slow, reluctant and inadequate” response to claims of anti-Semitism and the mere “slap on the wrist” that was supposed to reprimand such bigotry.

Luciana Berger was a prominent Jewish MP who left Labour earlier this year due to repeated and unpunished harassment. In reference to her departure, Prentice censures the general secretary, “For a pregnant woman MP to [be] bullied out of the party is shameful and embarrassing.”

CUNY College Disgraces Itself By Giving Honorary Degree To Al Sharpton Craig Traiinor

https://thefederalist.com/2019/05/16/cuny-college-disgraces-giving-honorary-degree-al-sharpton/

The indictment against Al Sharpton is public record. For more than 35 years of public life, he has proven himself a charlatan and a race hustler. The evidence is irrefutable.

The City University of New York is a lifeline to the examined life and the middle class for generations of poor and working-class students, from Irving Kristol to Colin Powell to me. Medgar Evers College, a senior college within the City University of New York system, intends to confer an honorary degree on Al Sharpton at its June 5, 2019, commencement. Sharpton is many things; a doctor of humane letters is not one of them.

Medgar Evers was a World War II veteran who organized fellow Mississippi NAACP members to obtain the civil rights being denied to black Americans in the 1950s and ’60s. As dangerous as it was noble, he coordinated voter registration drives and boycotts of segregated businesses. Thurgood Marshall said Evers had “more courage than anybody I’ve ever ran across.” Evers gave his life for the advancement of black Americans when a Klansman shot and killed him in his driveway in Jackson, Mississippi, on June 12, 1963.

By contrast, Sharpton’s greatest achievement has been avoiding criminal prosecution. Sharpton has spent a public career enriching himself under the banner of advancing civil rights. He didn’t calm racial tensions; he inflamed them. He didn’t work for racial healing; he rubbed the wounds raw. Evers was a genuine civil rights leader; Sharpton played one on TV. Simply put, Sharpton is not a good man. He is unworthy of this honor.