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Ruth King

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Populist Revolt Against Climate Change Yellow Jackets may take on UN Migration Pact next. Rael Jean Isaac

By on December 12th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272168/populist-revolt-against-climate-change-rael-jean-isaac

President Emanuel Macron’s agreement to scrap the gas tax due to take effect in January marks the first round in the populist revolt against European elites on the issue of climate change. It is all but certain to be followed by more such confrontations in the years ahead, not just in France but throughout the EU.

While the broad populist revolt on immigration has been widely reported, if usually in a tone of moral disapproval, the emergence in France of a new front directed against the obsession with climate change by the political class is in danger of being missed altogether by many in the mainstream media. The New York Times described the movement as “among the most serious challenges yet to President Emanuel Macron’s pro-business government.” Even the news pages of The Wall Street Journal (Dec. 4) depict an “essentially leaderless movement, which has voiced opposition to Mr. Macron’s pro-business agenda.” To describe Macron’s war on fossil fuels as a “pro-business agenda” is Orwellian.

Yes, in the way typical of social movements, this one has widened its scope, embracing other discontents, but there is no doubt about its origins. The protests began on November 17 explicitly to demand the roll back of an additional 30 cents a gallon tax on diesel fuel (less for regular gas) scheduled to go into effect in January. A gallon of gas already costs over $7, over 60% in green taxes. Initially doubling down, Macron called the taxes essential to fighting climate change. Adopting the high-flying rhetoric of global warming zealots, he promised to create a “high council for the climate” with the aim of saving the planet and avoiding “the end of the world.” When the Yellow Jackets (named after the neon vests French drivers must wear in roadside emergencies) were undeterred and public support for them remained stubbornly strong, Macron first agreed to postpone implementing the taxes for six months, then to abandon them when one of the movement’s emerging leaders insisted “The French do not want crumbs. They want the entire baguette.” In his December 10 speech seeking to defuse the movement the climate all but disappeared. Macron promised minimum wage hikes and lower taxes on pensions. There was no mention of a “high council for the climate.” He devoted a mere eleven words to the subject: dealing with climate change was a question of the day.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

‘Anti-Zionism’ Threatens Europe’s Jews We keep hearing it isn’t the same as anti-Semitism. Even the EU knows better.By Daniel Schwammenthal

By on December 12th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/anti-zionism-threatens-europes-jews-11544573627

‘Anti-Zionism isn’t the same as anti-Semitism,” we keep hearing. A new study suggests that for Jewish Europeans, the distinction is without a difference.

The European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights polled some 16,500 Jews in 12 countries that account for 90% of the EU’s Jewish population. Eighty-five percent say anti-Semitism is a problem in their country, and 28% report having experienced anti-Semitic harassment in the preceding 12 months—including 37% of those “who wear, carry or display items in public that could identify them as Jewish.” As a result, 34% avoid visiting Jewish events or sites, and 38% have considered emigrating.

Those who reported being harassed were asked to describe the perpetrator of the most serious incident. Only 13% said it was “someone with a right-wing political view,” compared with 30% who cited extremist Muslim views and 21% left-wing political views.

Respondents were asked about anti-Semitic statements they heard online, in other media and at political events. The most common one, which 51% said they hear “frequently” or “all the time,” was “Israelis behave ‘like Nazis’ towards the Palestinians”—a claim that demonizes the Jewish state while diminishing the crimes of real Nazis.

The leftist counterargument is that anti-Zionism is a legitimate political position that has nothing to do with anti-Semitism. But anti-Zionists discriminate against the Jews alone among the peoples of the world and call for the Jewish state’s economic, cultural and academic boycott. What sense would it make to say: “I don’t think Ireland has a right to exist, but I’m not anti-Irish”?

Anti-Semitism has been likened to a virus that adapts to changes in society. What may have started with the accusation of “Christ-killer” morphed to socioeconomic “justifications” for Jew-hatred. In the late 19th century, racial theories provided pseudoscientific “evidence” of Jewish inferiority. The medieval libel of “Jews poisoning the wells” turned into “Zionists poison Palestinian water.” The 19th-century German politician Heinrich von Treitschke said “the Jews are our misfortune,” which the Nazis later picked up. The sentiment finds its modern equivalent in, “The world would be a better a better place without Israel.” A third of the respondents in the EU poll said they hear that frequently or all the time. CONTINUE AT SITE

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

The Real Border Crisis Is About Foreigners Gaming America’s Asylum Laws We need a wall, but we also need the resources to defend the wall: judges to convict violators, court officers to manage detention centers, etc. By Lyman Stone

By on December 11th, 2018

http://thefederalist.com/2018/12/11/real-border-crisis-foreigners-gaming-americas-asylum-laws/

Late last month, frustrated migrants rioted just beyond the U.S. border crossing in Tijuana, and were dispersed with tear gas. The images were genuinely fear-inducing — crowds of immigrants surging against the wall, scaling it, many breaking through, some retreating. It was exactly the kind of chaos that conservatives have been predicting for years. Perhaps in response, the military presence on the U.S. border has been extended through January.

But what’s really going on? Is there really a crisis at the border? Is illegal immigration totally out of control? A look at the data suggests there is indeed an unprecedented surge in one specific kind of migrant, which may be cause for some concern, but that, overall, the situation at the border remains well in hand. Conservatives and progressives both would do well to calm down, address the limited, real problems, and stop fearmongering about a widespread crisis that does not actually exist.
A Real Surge in Asylum Claims

Many of the largely Central American migrants arriving at the U.S. border nowadays have a more sophisticated strategy than Mexican migrants from decades past. Today’s immigrants make heavier use of legal, or potentially legal, strategies for entry. This is partly thanks to improved physical security of the border, but has other causes as well.

A key channel for obtaining legal stay in the United States is to apply for asylum. The right of asylum is enshrined in U.S. law, and is recognized by virtually every country in the world. Basically, the idea is that if a person faces “credible fear” that he or she will be subjected to violence or other serious discrimination based on various protected categories like race, religion, or political affiliation, countries aren’t supposed to deport that person.

Deportation is not supposed to be a death sentence. As such, pretty much all countries offer various forms of asylum to people who might not otherwise have a legal right to be in a country.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Corbyn waves the flag of anti-Semitism Daniel Johnson

By on December 11th, 2018

http://standpointmag.co.uk/text-lecture-december-2018-daniel-johnson-corbyn-anti-semitism

Jews in Britain, and more widely across Europe, are confronted by a new mutation of the oldest hatred: the anti-Semitic alliance of the Left and radical Islam. As Dave Rich argues in his new book The Left’s Jewish Problem: Jeremy Corbyn, Israel and Anti-Semitism (Biteback, £12.99), the impact of the Leftist and Islamist nexus on the Labour Party during the three years of Corbyn’s leadership has been toxic.

It was Standpoint, the magazine of which I am the founding editor, that brought the Labour Party’s “Jewish problem” to wider attention in 2014, when the well-known actress Maureen Lipman, a lifelong Labour supporter, declared that she could no longer vote for the party because of its extreme hostility to Israel and its intolerance of any other views. She castigated the then leader of the party, Ed Miliband, as a secular Jew for ignoring the problem and, indeed, being part of it. Her protest had a wide resonance, but the scale of the Left’s Jewish problem emerged only after Corbyn came to office in 2015 following Miliband’s defeat in the general election.

I too come from a family for whom this problem is personal. My father, Paul Johnson, was the editor of the New Statesman from 1965 to 1970 and one of the Left’s strongest voices in support of Israel. I still recall our jubilation at the outcome of the Six Day War and the boxes of Jaffa oranges that would arrive from the Israeli embassy when my father had written a particularly trenchant essay in Israel’s defence. (I suppose those oranges would be enough to land us in trouble under a future Prime Minister Corbyn, or even be used as evidence of the imaginary Israeli conspiracy to control British politics that he regularly demands should be investigated.) My father left the Labour Party to join Margaret Thatcher in 1977 while I was in Israel; I vividly remember the front-page news item about him in The Times and wondering where this bold move, fraught with professional risk, would lead.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Silence Over UN Anti-Israel Votes Exposes Disingenuous Concern for Anti-Semitism By Ben Weingarten

By on December 11th, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/trending/silence-over-un-anti-israel-votes-exposes-disingenuous-concern-for-anti-semitism/

Was the concern for anti-Semitism in the wake of the Pittsburgh Tree of Life Synagogue massacre among the media and political establishment heartfelt and genuine, or, sadly, more cynical and calculating?

Are white nationalists the primary drivers of a growing scourge of Jew-hatred, or are its purveyors largely to be found elsewhere?

Both of these propositions were put to the test recently at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). The results are sobering, and challenge the prevailing chattering class narrative.

At the 73rd session of the UNGA, the vast majority of its 193 member states voted to share a rotten early Chanukah gift with the Jewish people: Six blatantly anti-Israel resolutions.

These resolutions collectively cast the New Jersey-sized, most liberal, democratic and prosperous nation in the Middle East – faced with existential threats from all sides on a daily basis – as a deplorable, illegitimate “occupying Power.”

Beyond leveling the usual calumnies at the Jewish state, among other things, the resolutions: (i) deem invalid any Israeli control over its own capital of Jerusalem; (ii) suggest that the Jerusalem-based Temple Mount, the holiest site in Judaism – yet where Jews are perversely forbidden from praying — is solely the domain of Muslims, referring to it by its Arabic name “Haram al-Sharif;” and (iii) cast as illegal all Israeli development in Judea and Samaria — also religiously and historically vital Jewish lands, seized in Arab wars of aggression and reclaimed by Israel in the Six-Day War — for which too, Israel’s legal claims under international law are robust. CONTINUE AT SITE

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BOOKS Comments turned off

Orwell and the Anti-Totalitarian Left in the Age of Trump written by Matt Johnson

By on December 11th, 2018

https://quillette.com/2018/12/09/orwell-and-the-anti-totalitarian-left

In his review of Pascal Bruckner’s new book, An Imaginary Racism: Islamophobia and Guilt, Nick Cohen begins with a denunciation of the contemporary Left’s obsession with identity politics and “willingness to excuse antisemitism, misogyny, tyranny, and obscurantism, as long as the antisemitic, misogynistic, tyrannical obscurantists are anti-Western.” Cohen acknowledges that Bruckner has been among the most penetrating analysts of the Left’s moral and intellectual decline in the twenty-first century, recalling that he described Bruckner’s The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism as a “brilliant defence of liberalism and a deservedly contemptuous assault on all those intellectuals who have betrayed its best values.”

However, Cohen now thinks Bruckner’s animus toward the Left has propelled him to the Right, arguing that he fails to “extend his opposition to Islamism to cover the purveyors of anti-Muslim bigotry,” uses the “language of demagogues and civil war,” and displays the “ethnic favouritism and intellectual double-standards of the counter-Enlightenment.” Cohen also laments Bruckner’s sparse commentary on right-wing populist and nationalist movements in Europe and the United States:

At no point would the uninformed reader [of An Imaginary Racism] guess that Law and Justice controls Poland, Fidesz controls Hungary, the Northern League is in power in Italy, and Donald Trump is president of the United States. Meanwhile, if Bruckner shows his concern about Marine le Pen making it to the final round of the French presidential election I must have missed the reference.

In his response to Cohen’s “caustic” and “intemperate” review, Bruckner explains that he doesn’t criticize the Left out of sympathy for the Right—he does so because he expects “more of a Left that was traditionally critical of religion and has now retreated into moral relativity.” Bruckner also points out that it’s possible to be an opponent of right-wing populism and Islamism at the same time: “To believe that we can combat one danger while surrendering to another is to nurse an illusion—this is not the first time in history that we have had to fight enemies on multiple fronts.” But he notes that “my new monograph is not about the rise of European neo-populism … Cohen’s complaint seems to be that I didn’t write a different book entirely.”

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

SAD RADICALS: BY CONOR BARNES

By on December 11th, 2018

https://quillette.com/2018/12/11/sad

“Most of all, radicals should learn to abandon false truths. The only way to escape dogmatism is to resist the calcification and sanctification of values, and to learn from the wisdom of different perspectives. As Haidt argues, there are grains of truth in opposing political positions. Radicals do themselves a disservice by seeing the world of thought outside the radical monoculture as tainted with reaction and evil. There is a rich diversity of thought awaiting them if they would only open their minds to it.”

…..When I became an anarchist I was 18, depressed, anxious, and ready to save the world. I moved in with other anarchists and worked at a vegetarian co-op cafe. I protested against student tuition, prison privatization, and pipeline extensions. I had lawyer’s numbers sharpied on my ankle and I assisted friends who were pepper-sprayed at demos. I tabled zines, lived with my “chosen family,” and performed slam poems about the end of the world. While my radical community was deconstructing gender, monogamy, and mental health, we lived and breathed concepts and tools like call-outs, intersectionality, cultural appropriation, trigger warnings, safe spaces, privilege theory, and rape culture.

What is a radical community? For the purposes of this article, I will define it as a community that shares both an ideology of complete dissatisfaction with existing society due to its oppressive nature and a desire to radically alter or destroy that society because it cannot be redeemed by its own means. I eventually fell out with my own radical community. The ideology and the people within it had left me a burned and disillusioned wreck. As I deprogrammed, I watched a diluted version of my radical ideology explode out of academia and become fashionable: I watched the Left become woke.

Commentators have skewered social justice activists on the toxicity of the woke mindset. This is something that many radicals across North America are aware of and are trying to understand. Nicholas Montgomery and Carla Bergman’s Joyful Militancy (JM), published last year, is the most thorough look at radical toxicity from a radical perspective (full disclosure: I very briefly met Nick Montgomery years ago. My anarchist clique did not like his anarchist clique). As they say, “there is a mild totalitarian undercurrent not just in call-out culture but also in how progressive communities police and define the bounds of who’s in and who’s out.”

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Indivisible Jerusalem belongs to Israel by Peter Smith *****

By on December 11th, 2018

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/12/indivisible-jerusalem-belongs-to-israel/

Jewish Jerusalem is a shining symbol of our Judeo-Christian civilisation’s origin. Out of it has flowed individual freedom, a culture of tolerance and decency, science, technology, capitalism and prosperity. Nothing matches it — except in the inverse, the refusal to recognise the city as Israel’s rightful capital.

O come, O come, Emmanuel
And ransom captive Israel

These are the first two lines of a well-known hymn which opened the service at my local Anglican church on Sunday last. It is apparently taken from a 9th-century Latin hymn. I assume it is no accident that Muslim invaders were occupying Jerusalem at the time. But it doesn’t matter whether that linkage is historically true, it is incidental to my theme which is that Israel and the people of Israel — to wit the Jews, distinctly not Palestinian Arabs — figure prominently in Christianity and in Western civilisation.

Jesus, the Apostles, Saint Paul were part of a Jewish population long occupying the land to the west of the Jordan River, including Jerusalem. They were not interlopers. The interlopers came later via conquest. Imams did not go barefoot into the unknown carrying copies of the Koran to proselytize by sweet reason.

But step back. Conquest was the name of the game for much of the history of mankind. It is useless to attach blame based on recent norms. That leaves us to make a judgment call. Who should ‘we’ recognise as being the rightful owners of the city of Jerusalem. Leave aside the broader question of the rightful geographical boundaries of Israel; though it has strong historical claims to all of Judaea and Samaria (the West Bank), which it currently occupies.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Airbnb unfairly sides with Palestinians in West Bank BY Lawrence J. Haas

By on December 11th, 2018

https://www.sacbee.com/news/news-services/article222709440.html

“We are most certainly not the experts when it comes to the historical disputes in this region,” Airbnb stated in announcing that it would no longer list rentals by Israeli citizens in the West Bank. Arbnb’s modesty is commendable, but its ignorance is insidious.

Its policy for the West Bank subjects Israel to a singular global standard and reflects an all-too-common narrative about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. By empowering one-sided Israel-haters, it also makes peace less likely, not more.

The West Bank is obviously disputed territory, but Airbnb sees the dispute only through Palestinian eyes.

After all, it isn’t leaving the West Bank. If you want a place to rent there, you can use Airbnb to find one that’s owned by a Christian or a Muslim. You just can’t find any of the 200 or so owned by an Israeli Jew.

Airbnb concluded that “Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank” are “at the core of the dispute between Israelis and Palestinians.”

So, Airbnb believes, what’s not “at the core of the dispute” is the rejection of Israel’s right to exist that’s broadly shared among Palestinians and their leaders; or the incitement to violence against Jews on Palestinian TV and social media; or textbooks that teach Palestinian school children that a future Palestine should encompass all of what’s now Israel; or Palestinian claims that Jews have no historical ties to key religious sites in Jerusalem.

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MEDIA, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Guardian, Tommy Robinson, and Me Britain’s top rag uncovers a nonexisent “global network”. Bruce Bawer

By on December 11th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272200/guardian-tommy-robinson-and-me-bruce-bawer

Damn it, the Guardian is on to us. On Friday, Britain’s most important, or rather self-important, newspaper ran a piece headlined “Revealed: the hidden global network behind Tommy Robinson.”

Move over, Pentagon Papers.

Clearly, this is Pulitzer Prize-level journalism – although, unfortunately, Brits are ineligible for that particular distinction. Obviously, the Guardian reporters in question – Josh Halliday, Lois Beckett, and Caelainn Barr – have stumbled upon that obscure and highly sophisticated research tool known as Google. And through Google, they’ve uncovered the sensational, previously unnoticed fact that two “US thinktanks…have published a succession of articles in support of Robinson,” while a third U.S. think tank has – gasp! – helped pay for Tommy’s legal fees.

These three think tanks, the Guardian scribes assert, “have been repeatedly accused of stoking anti-Islam sentiment in the west and spreading false information about Muslim refugees in Europe.” (Among the institutions that have been in the forefront of making these baseless accusations, unsurprisingly, is the Guardian itself.) The Guardian writers further contend that Tommy’s support from these “prominent and well-financed groups undermines Robinson’s self-styled image of a far-right populist underdog whose anti-Islam agenda is being silenced by the British establishment.”

Hold on a second and take a look at that last sentence. Has Tommy really sought to style an image for himself as a “far-right” activist? Who on earth would do that? Or has he constantly denied, quite correctly, that there’s anything “far-right” about him? This is journalism at its shabbiest. As for his being “silenced by the British establishment” – no, he hasn’t exactly been silenced. This Guardian article itself is a perfect illustration of the fact that he has, rather, been smeared, maligned, defamed, vilified, calumniated, misquoted, misinterpreted, and misrepresented by that establishment. Consistently.

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