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Ruth King

Flight from the Deplorables By Charles C. W. Cooke- Review of Max Boot’s Book

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2018/12/03/corrosion-of-conservatism-book-review/

The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right, by Max Boot (Liveright, 288 pp., $24.95)

Those who have been left unsated by the multipart series that the Washington Post is currently running on Max Boot’s evolving voting preferences will be overjoyed to learn that Boot has spun his thoughts into a full-length book, The Corrosion of Conservatism, in which he switches away from his usual topic, foreign policy, and reflects at length on the question of whether he can still use the same words to describe himself as he once did. If that sort of thing appeals to you, the book will too. If you can think of nothing less interesting than the endless auto-examination that is the hallmark of journalists in our age, it will not. I am unabashedly in the latter camp.

Unlike, say, his colleague Jennifer Rubin, Max Boot has not actually changed his mind about the core political questions of our era. Rather, he has decided that most of the people with whom he has historically teamed up are appalling, that they are defective in some way, and that this reflects so badly upon their party that it must be de­stroyed. Alas, this renders the book rather dull — more a treatise on personality than an exploration of ideas. Throughout, Boot insists that he is on an “ideological journey” that has led him to sort out “what makes sense and what doesn’t in the conservative Weltanschauung.” And yet, in the final chapter, he reveals that he still believes almost everything that he believed before. What’s changed is that he doesn’t like the GOP anymore.

A more accurate title for the book would be “I Don’t Like the Republican Party at the Moment,” but I suspect that nobody would have published that. And so, in an attempt to ram yet another “I hate Trump” book into the ideas category, we are treated to a tale of “conversion” that is almost entirely semantic. There is only so much that even gifted and intelligent writers can spin out of a story that begins and ends with “I changed my party registration last year . . . ”

As political analysts, we are drawn to people who argue “against interest” — or, more prosaically put, who “swing” in their partisan preferences. Boot, who likes to button his declarations with the reminder that he Used to Be a Repub­lican!, clearly wants us to see him in this light, and wants us to take his admonitions seriously as a result. But the tactic falls flat in the execution, for, by the end of his book, it has become painfully clear that Boot has sacrificed very little by walking away from the GOP. As he was before his great awakening, Boot remains a non-religious, pro-choice, pro-gay-marriage, socially liberal, pro–New Deal “Eisenhower Republican” who considers that climate change requires harsh government action; hopes for strict gun control, including a ban on “assault weapons”; remains warm toward markets and trade; and favors an aggressive and interventionist foreign policy. Which . . . well, makes him precisely the sort of the person who would have been able to weather a Hillary Clinton presidency without too much fear — or, given her more hawkish instincts and views on abortion, guns, religious liberty, and welfare spending, would have arguably preferred it.

The Fracturing of France by Giulio Meotti

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13335/fracturing-france

In a new program, Macron’s government is offering Arabic lessons in France’s public schools to children as young as six years old, purportedly to facilitate integration.

French authorities seem to ignore that the vast majority of terrorists from France have been French citizens, who spoke a perfect French and, unlike their parents, were born in France. They were perfectly “integrated”. They rejected it.

US President Donald Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron engaged in a public diplomatic clash just days before Trump visited France this month. The spat began when, in a radio interview, Macron suggested that Europe needed an army to protect itself from the US. “We have to protect ourselves with respect to China, Russia and even the United States of America,” said Macron.

Protecting France from the United States? In a November 11 speech commemorating World War I, Macron in a diplomatic welcome to his guest, attacked “nationalism”. President Trump had proudly called himself a “nationalist” less than three weeks before.

Macron, it seems, was using the armistice signed in 1918 to forget what is going on in France in 2018.

Gérard Collomb, France’s Interior Minister until last month and currently Mayor of Lyon, is apparently pessimistic about the situation in his country, according to comments reported by Valeurs Actuelles. “People do not want to live together,” Collomb lamented, continuing that the responsibility for security during the recent immigration has been “huge.” Collomb also warned that there is only a “little time” to improve the situation. “It’s difficult to estimate but I would say that in five years the situation could become irreversible. Yes, we have five, six years to avoid the worst,” he added.

And the worst will be a “secession”, or as Gilles Kepel, the French specialist on Islam, called it: “La fracture.”

Macron, however, does not seem particularly receptive to Collomb’s warning. A man reportedly shouting “Allahu Akbar” stabbed a police officer in Brussels this week, during a state visit by Macron to the Belgian capital — the first for a French president since Mitterrand visited there in the 80s. Macron also went to Brussels’ Molenbeek district, which he defined “a territory marked by the image of the terrorist drama and also a place of initiatives, sharing and integration”. Sharing and integration?

A.J. Caschetta: Columbia University’s Center for Palestine Studies: Ramallah on the Hudson Welcome to the PLO’s American academic wing.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272033/columbia-universitys-center-palestine-studies-aj-caschetta

http://www.thetower.org/6865-columbia-universitys-center-for-palestine-studies-ramallah-on-the-hudson/

The Trump administration may have closed the PLO’s Mission in Washington, D.C., but its Morningside Heights Mission is open for business. I refer to Columbia University’s Center for Palestine Studies (CPS), an Ivy League clearinghouse for PLO propaganda and the demonization of Israel. Call it the PLO’s American academic wing.

When the CPS opened more than eight years ago, founding co-director Rashid Khalidi promised that it would avoid doing “anything that’s directly related to any political activism.” This is laughable. What Khalidi meant is that the CSP would not participate in anti-Israel activism, but this is a lie. The faculty members who comprise the center’s experts are rivaled only by the faculty of Birzeit University for their anti-Israel advocacy.

It might, in fact, take a Center for Palestine Studies to examine thoroughly the history of Palestinian organizations devoted to political violence. But instead, Columbia has assembled the anti-Israel all-stars of academia, such as Joseph Massad, who has called for “the continuing resistance of Palestinians in Israel and the Occupied Territories to all the civil and military institutions that uphold Jewish supremacy.” Another member of CPS is Hamid Dabashi, who wrote that Israel is a “key actor” in “every dirty treacherous ugly and pernicious act happening in the world.”

In addition to being a professor at Columbia’s Middle East Institute and co-director of the CPS, Khalidi also happens to be a former member of the PLO, as Martin Kramer has shown. Not since Columbia hired former Weather Underground member Kathy Boudinat its School of Social Work has it given a platform to “reformed” terrorists. At least Boudin expressed remorse, even if it was insincere. Not so Khalidi, a Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS ) advocate whose views have remained consistent since his PLO days, though they are now masked in the academic patois of post-colonialism.

Brinkley Messick, the CPS’s other founding co-director, hyped it as the first academic center devoted to the study of Palestinian Arabs. “Very simply,” he gushed, “there’s never been a dedicated space … for this kind of research.” He was partly right. Columbia already had one called the Middle East Institute, which has an anti-Israel bent, but the CPS brought together faculty from beyond Middle East Studies, all dedicated to delegitimizing Israel and whitewashing Palestinian violence. Several of them have even been immortalized in The David Project’s documentary Columbia Unbecoming (2004) where their purported reluctance to be political is exposed as fraudulent.

The Reboot of Hillary Clinton By Christopher Gage

https://amgreatness.com/2018/11/23/the-reboot

Hillary Clinton’s latest software update is a slight improvement on the previous version. Gone is the simpering sachet of Frank’s Red Hot. Remarkably, engineers have patched the many bugs plaguing the two-time presidential malfunction.

In an interview with The Guardian this week, Hillary sacrificed a sacred cow of the modern progressive Left, imploring beleaguered European leaders firmly to grip an issue verboten among the fashionable and open-minded.

“I think Europe needs to get a handle on migration because that is what lit the flame,” she said, before nodding toward Angela Merkel’s disastrous decision to open German borders to 1.5 million Syrian migrants.

“I admire the very generous and compassionate approaches that were taken particularly by leaders like Angela Merkel, but I think it is fair to say Europe has done its part, and must send a very clear message—‘we are not going to be able to continue provide refuge and support’—because if we don’t deal with the migration issue it will continue to roil the body politic.”

Her remarks are likely to rock a boat already lapped at by the forces of immigration woe. Europe is riven with political conflict. Most of the tumult, hitherto whispered among the Left, stems from voters’ anger toward lawless and seemingly naïve immigration policies.

After all, Merkel’s immigration whimsy killed her. And it serves as a case study for populist parties vying for the votes of concerned Europeans anxious at being branded “racist” for possessing opinions held by a majority of their peers.

Immigration: The Kingmaker
The interview, part of a series of cursory glances The Guardian is taking toward the hoi polloi, reveals Hillary’s understanding of why Donald Trump is president. Finally.

It is not misogyny. Not self-hating women. Not the electoral college. Not James Comey. Not Bernie Sanders. Not low-information voters. Not Russia. Not the DNC. Not Jill Stein.

Universal Censorship by Edward Cline

https://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/

Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch posted an interesting article about how a Pakistani UN member is proposing that a war on “islamophobia” be waged to eradicate this form of “hate speech” for good and forever and ever.

Make no mistake: by “defamation of religions,” the Pakistanis mean “criticism of Islam,” as neither they nor anyone else care when Judaism, Christianity, or any other religion is criticized. And make no mistake about another point as well: once anything — anything at all — is established as off-limits to criticism, you are not living in a free society, but in a tyranny, for those who adhere to the ideology that cannot be criticized can do anything they want to you and others, and you won’t be able to say a word about it. So what Pakistan is trying to do with this initiative is establish over the entire world the tyranny of Sharia and its blasphemy laws that forbid criticism of Islam.

Make no mistake: by “defamation of religions,” the Pakistanis mean “criticism of Islam,” as neither they nor anyone else care when Judaism, Christianity, or any other religion is criticized. And make no mistake about another point as well: once anything — anything at all — is established as off-limits to criticism, you are not living in a free society, but in a tyranny, for those who adhere to the ideology that cannot be criticized can do anything they want to you and others, and you won’t be able to say a word about it. So what Pakistan is trying to do with this initiative is establish over the entire world the tyranny of Sharia and its blasphemy laws that forbid criticism of Islam.

She also stressed the importance of countering “Islamophobia” and incitement to violence and hatred that is being witnessed in some parts of the western world by the negative depiction of Muslims.

One must ask oneself: Where and when have the “denigrators” of Islam run riot, attacked mosques, beaten up Muslims, raped Muslim women, or otherwise incited anti-Islam and anti-Muslim violence?

Of hatred of Islam there is aplenty, especially when individuals grasp the totalitarian nature of Islam and Sharia law; naturally they would hate Islam as much as they would Nazism and Communism. They do not want to live under it, nor do they want it next door in a submissive country like Canada. “Peace and harmony” are not analogous or equivalent to Islam’s 1400 year record, as Robert Spencer writes in detail in The History of Jihad.

Ambassador Lodhi also called for greater respect for each other’s religious beliefs, symbols and revered personalities.

A Sharia Victory in the Netherlands By Daniel A. Brubaker

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/11/a_sharia_victory_in_the_netherlands.html

This November was meant to be the month for MP Geert Wilders’ second “Draw Muhammad” contest, but Islamic law won a de facto victory over Dutch law mere weeks ago as Wilders announced the contest’s cancellation. When — among many other threats similar attacks — a 19-year-old Afghan stabbed two American tourists in Amsterdam, citing the planned contest as motive, Wilders canceled the event out of concern about further violence.

The Islamists had made their point: “Having the law on your side makes no difference. Do what we want, or somebody is going to get hurt.”

Such antics by Islamist Muslims are not new to Wilders and other speech and conscience advocates. In retribution for his firm and outspoken stance on this subject, he has “spent 15 years living in safe houses and escorted by a security detail due to constant death threats.” These are the tactics, of course, of any common mafia.

In securing Wilders’ retreat, the terrorists established Sharia’s authority for now in the Netherlands on the issue of speech.

The first “Draw Muhammad” contest, organized by Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer, was held on May 3, 2015 in Garland, Texas. The purpose of Geller and Spencer, and the purpose of Wilders in organizing another this year, was to preserve space for free speech in the face of known supremacist Muslim intentions to forcefully diminish that space.

During the 2015 event, two Muslim men — one a convert but both American-born — armed with multiple rifles and handguns and 1500 rounds of ammunition, began shooting their way into the venue. Both were killed. The purpose of “the Islamist mob” is to assert authority for Islam over all other legal authorities, to become dominant.

What is going on, in other words, are tests of national sovereignty, a battle of civilizations. In this most recent round, I regret to report, the winner was not Western civilization, but rather the Islamist mob.

The Betrayal of Asia Bibi written by Hardeep Singh

https://quillette.com/2018/11/21/the-betrayal-of-asia

Among the string of resignations triggered by the draft Brexit agreement with the European Union (EU), one stood out. In a double whammy for an embattled Prime Minister, Rehman Chishti the MP for Gillingham and Rainham resigned as both Vice Chairman of the Conservative Party as well as the PM’s Trade Envoy to Pakistan. Aside from citing Theresa May’s shambolic handling of Brexit negotiations, Chishti said the British government’s failure to give Asia Bibi asylum had been a motivating factor in his decision.

Bibi’s case is a cause célèbre. She is a Christian who had been languishing on death row for nine years in Pakistan for blasphemy charges. To Christians worldwide, Bibi is a symbol of fortitude, faith, and unflinching commitment. After all, a conversion to Islam would have exonerated her, but she refused to recant her faith. She was imprisoned after fetching drinking water for fellow berry pickers on a Punjab farm in Pakistan in 2009. Her Muslim co-workers accused her of contaminating the water, because she was Christian. Following a verbal dispute, a complaint was lodged with a local Imam, alleging that Bibi had blasphemed against the Prophet—a capital offense under sections 295B/295C of the Pakistan Penal Code, introduced under the military regime of General Zia-ul-Haq. Earlier this month, the Supreme Court of Pakistan acquitted her of the charges and said the accusations levelled against her were “concoction incarnate.”

Regardless of the Supreme Court decision, Muslim extremists believe Bibi must still be executed. They staged mass protests in major cities like Islamabad and Karachi threatening to kill the judges who acquitted her. A cursory look online reveals a palpable sense of anger among a section of Pakistan’s public with a petition entitled: “#Hang_Asia_Msih No Compromise on dignity of MUHAMMAD SAWW; We Support Khadim Hussain Rizvi.” Others have dedicated a song against Bibi, and uploaded it to YouTube, the lyrics of which roughly translate from Punjabi to “Don’t give electricity, don’t give water, just hang Asia.” This poisonous indoctrination is seemingly infiltrating more impressionable minds too—another video on YouTube rather depressingly shows children with a doll revelling in a mock execution of Bibi. There’s a fear that Pakistan’s Christian communities will now be targeted by Islamists in retribution for Bibi’s acquittal, and have requested the Pakistani authorities “beef up” security with military assistance to protect churches and properties.

Jews Revolutionized the Universities. Will Asians Do the Same? written by Barbara Kay

https://quillette.com/2018/11/23/jews-revolutionized-the

In 1905, Harvard College adopted the College Entrance Examination Board tests as the principal basis for student admission, a blind test that favored intelligent applicants even if they lacked poise or polish. By 1908, Jews—most the children of immigrants—constituted 7% of the school’s student population—double the percentage of Jews in the U.S. general population. By 1916, Jewish enrolment was 15%, and by 1922 it was more than 21%.

Harvard’s president, Abbot Lawrence Lowell, became alarmed by what he perceived as a serious problem. This was not because (or not only because ) Lowell harbored anti-Semitic views. As he wrote to a colleague in 1922, “The summer hotel that is ruined by admitting Jews meets its fate, not because the Jews it admits are of bad character, but because they drive away the Gentiles.” (His observation was not incorrect—although he was wrong to assume that Jews in universities would have the same off-putting effect as in hotels.)

Today, we are watching what may well be a reprise of this scenario, with Asian-Americans as the targeted group: Harvard stands accused of “racial balancing” by keeping Asian-American admissions at or under a 20% threshold, and of using a bogus “personal rating” as a back-door method of keeping out Asian applicants who are stereotyped as bland workaholics.

For its part, Harvard does not deny that it weighs its entrance scales to favor groups it considers more disadvantaged than whites or Asian-Americans—namely blacks and Hispanics—but defends such measures on the grounds that “colleges and universities must have the freedom and flexibility to create the diverse communities that are vital to the learning experience of every student.”

The historical parallel between Jews and Asians is striking for a number of reasons—including the fact that both cases involve an explicit rejection of the idea that academic merit alone could be a tenable basis for admission. Like today’s affirmative-action supporters at Harvard, the gentiles of a century ago also started poking into applicants’ personal lives to discover what their “character” might be. And what a weasel word that turned out to be.

Republicans and Trump Failed in FISAgate Probe By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2018/11/23/republicans-and-trump

Pause for a moment and imagine you are so gullible that you believe one of the biggest political stunts of all time—that your mind is so incurious and facile that you’ve fallen for a crackpot conspiracy theory force-fed to you by fabulists in the media for two solid years. Still bitter about the defeat of your presidential candidate, you hallucinate about why your side lost, and convince yourself that the current occupant of the Oval Office is there as a result of some illegitimate or nefarious scheme.

That isn’t an imaginary scenario. Sadly—or laughably, take your pick—it’s a state of mind shared by tens of millions of your countrymen.

According to a recent poll, nearly 70 percent of Democrats actually admitted out loud they think the Russians helped sway the 2016 presidential election in favor of Donald Trump.

When asked if it was true that “Russians tampered with vote tallies to in order to get Donald Trump elected,” 67 percent of Democrats replied that yes, it was true. Eighty-five percent of Democrats think Russia hacked the emails of Democrats to help Trump; nearly 90 percent of Democrats think Russia “created and spread fake news stories to help Donald Trump win the election.”

Whoa.

The active imaginations of those on the Left are guided by one overriding delusion: That the Trump presidential campaign conspired with the Kremlin to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. No villain is too improbable, no CNN-sourced story is too far fetched for this crowd to believe. “Without evidence!” they wail at Trump as they cling to an evidence-free Trump-Russia chimera that pollutes their thoughts and consumes their time.

An Outrage Meter for the Trump Era By Roger Kimball

https://amgreatness.com/2018/11/22/an-outrage-meter

There was a daytime television show I remember from my youth called “Queen for a Day.” It had three essential features. Hard luck stories from a handful of women. Loot in the form of kitchen appliances, nights on the town, fashionable clothes, etc. And the central gimmick: the applause meter, through which the studio audience would register its enthusiasm for its favored candidate. The contestant who attracted the loudest response won the title and collected the pelf.

Someone should tweak the applause meter for the internet age, recalibrating it to record the chief entertainment of our day: the serial ginned-up outrage against things that President Trump says.

There is certainly a lot of that going around. And while it is about as sincere as the cataract of sentimentality that greeted the Diane-Arbus-like hard-luck stories on Queen for a Day, it is undeniably intense. A few enterprising souls have made video compilations of the skirling media announcing that now, at last, Donald Trump had reached a “turning point” and would shortly be escorted out of the White House, preferably in shackles, in the wake of the latest “bombshell” revelation.

Those compilations are good fun and remind us of just how ridiculous and unhinged are the president’s more doctrinaire critics. What I want, however, is a real-time Presidential Geiger Counter so that the public can predict just how foolish Rachel Maddow or Jim Acosta, or Anderson Cooper—and let’s not forget Bill Kristol, Max Boot, and Jennifer Rubin—are going to be following some statement made or initiative undertaken by the Trump Administration.

This past week featured at least two promising candidates for the Outrage Meter: first, the back-and-forth between the president and Chief Justice John Roberts about the ruling of Jon S. Tigar, an Obama-appointed judge on the infamously left-leaning Ninth Circuit, that blocked the president’s executive order halting asylum claims at our Southern border, and second, the president’s statement on our relations with Saudi Arabia in the aftermath of the murder of the Muslim Brotherhood propagandist and Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.