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Ruth King

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Abbas’s Lies and Palestinian Child Victims by Bassam Tawil

By on June 30th, 2017

Hamas and human rights groups hold Abbas personally responsible for the deaths of the children and the possible deaths of other patients in need of urgent medical treatment not available in Gaza Strip hospitals. One human rights group went so far as to call for the International Criminal Court in The Hague to launch an investigation against Abbas.

In a move of mind-bending irony, we are witnessing a Palestinian president waging war not only against Hamas, but also against the two million Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip — while Israel continues to provide the Palestinians living under Hamas with humanitarian aid.

That is the standard operating procedure of the man who lied straight to the face of President Donald Trump, by claiming that he had stopped incitement against Israel and was promoting a “culture of peace” among his people. Will the last sick Palestinian child please stand up?

Palestinian children are the latest victims of the power struggle between the two rival Palestinian factions, the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Hamas.

PA President Mahmoud Abbas has declared war on the Gaza Strip as part of his effort to prompt Palestinians living there to revolt against the ruling Hamas administration. It appears that Abbas and Hamas are determined to fight to the last ill Palestinian child.

Abbas is hoping that a series of punitive measures he has taken, which include reducing electricity and medical supplies and cutting off salaries to many Palestinians, will lead to the collapse of Hamas, paving the way for the return of his PA to the Gaza Strip. Abbas has had a grudge against Hamas ever since the Islamist movement expelled his PA and loyalists from the Gaza Strip ten years ago.

Abbas’s war on the Hamas may seem justified. Nonetheless, it smacks of hypocrisy and is accompanied by a smear campaign against Israel.

Instead of accepting responsibility for their punitive actions against Hamas and the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, Abbas and his PA are falsely trying to put the blame on Israel. They are telling their people and the rest of the world that Israel bears the full and sole responsibility for the humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip. This, of course, is a wide-eyed lie as well as another blood libel against Israel.

The attempt to put the blame on Israel should be seen in the context of Abbas’s ongoing incitement against Israel. Moreover, Abbas is trying to drag Israel into his continuing conflict with Hamas, which is a purely internal Palestinian affair. Israel had nothing to do with Hamas’s violent takeover of the Gaza Strip in the summer of 2007. Two years earlier, Israel had totally withdrawn from the Gaza Strip, leaving Abbas’s PA fully in control of the area. Within two years, Hamas had overthrown the PA and seized control of the Gaza Strip, including Abbas’s house.

Abbas’s loyalists in Gaza hardly resisted Hamas. Most of them simply surrendered to Hamas or fled to Israel and Egypt. It was thanks to Israel that many of Abbas’s senior officials were able to run from the Gaza Strip to the West Bank. Were it not for Israel, they would have been dragged to the streets of the Gaza Strip and publicly lynched. Many PA operatives were thrown from the top floors of buildings.

What, then, is spurring this switch? Why has Abbas suddenly decided to take a series of drastic measures against Hamas and his people in the Gaza Strip, ten years after the Islamist expulsion?

According to his aides, Abbas is fuming over Hamas’s recent decision to establish an “administrative body” to run the affairs of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Abbas seems to view the move as driving a nail into the coffin of any PA-Hamas reconciliation.

He is also apparently deeply worried that his political rival, Mohamed Dahlan, and Hamas are close to forming an alliance against him. In recent days there have been reports that Hamas may allow Dahlan to return to the Gaza Strip to head a new Palestinian government that would be funded and backed by some Gulf countries and Egypt, all of which are disillusioned with Abbas.

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The Islamist Minotaur by Victor Davis Hanson

By on June 30th, 2017

According to Greek myth, the Athenian hero Theseus sailed to Crete to stop the tribute of seven Athenian men and seven women sent every nine years to the distant carnivorous Minotaur in his haunt within the labyrinth beneath the palace of Knossos on Crete.

In various versions of the prehistorical myth, the Athenian King Aegeus had conceded earlier to the attacking Cretan King Minos to surrender the youths as tribute to prevent a wider war. Then his heroic son Theseus came of age and volunteered to stop the scripted slaughter, sailing to Crete, where he slew the Minotaur. And that was that.

The idea of harvesting people as part of some strange protocol to preclude a wider, far more destructive war is to not unknown in both history and popular myth.

Many of the thousands of human victims sacrificed to the various hungry gods of the Aztecs such as Huitzilopochtli and Tezcatlipoca often were delivered as a sort of human tribute forced from neighboring conquered cities and tribes. The subdued assumed that paying the smaller human toll was cheaper than waging a far bloodier and likely futile revolt against the Aztec Empire—at least until the arrival of Hernan Cortes and his conquistadors in 1519, who found restive conquered peoples eager for revolt, largely on promises to overthrow the Aztecs and stop their collection of human tribute.

A half-century ago, in the 1967 Star Trek episode “A Taste of Armageddon,” the starship Enterprise visits an imaginary planet Eminiar II, that was engaged in an existential—but virtual—war with the neighboring planet Vendikar. To avoid full-scale Armageddon, both sides far earlier had agreed to wage a computer-simulated war, in which electronically projected losses were reified by ordering selected “fatalities” to report to “disintegration” chambers—TV-land’s version of the Minotaur myth—to avoid a larger (and real) war. Captain Kirk plays a role somewhat analogous to Theseus and puts an end to the nightmarish nonsense.

Something akin to this trope is occurring in Europe and to a lesser extent in the United States. From Fort Hood to Manchester, we are witnessing such human harvests around the Western world. The script goes like this: A Middle-Eastern Muslim resident alien of a Western country, or a second-generation citizen or subject of Middle Eastern descent, is “radicalized”—either by the local Islamist immigrant community or through Internet sermonizing. Then, out his own sense of failure or unhappiness in the West, the failed youth seeks some sort of Islamist transcendence in terrorizing the very hosts who had welcomed his parents or himself.

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The Late, Great Russian Collusion Myth By Victor Davis Hanson

By on June 29th, 2017

Incoming elected administrations, especially the Obama transition team of 2008 in the case of Russia and Iran, seek contacts with foreign diplomats before formally entering office.https://amgreatness.com/2017/06/28/late-great-russian-collusion-myth/

Most presidential campaigns are staffed by at least a few free-lancing opportunists who see their candidate as a nexus for profiteering. There is no need for a reminder of the lucrative careers of Bill Clinton from 2009-2012, or of Hillary Clinton’s brother, or of the nature of some of John Podesta’s investments. And foreign governments, our own included as in the case of the Obama Administration’s entrance into the Israeli elections, are frequently accused of trying to sway or indeed interfere with another nation’s campaign cycles.

Yet what is strange about the charges of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government is that those landscapes were concocted into something supposedly criminal and uniquely applicable to Donald Trump’s election and presidency. Indeed, one of the strangest events in recent political history was the post-election false news narrative that Trump and the “Russians” had colluded during the campaign to rob Hillary Clinton of a sure victory.

The discredited concoction lingers to this day, despite the fact that former FBI Director James Comey on three occasions told Trump that he was not the subject of any investigation about collusion with the Russians.

Both the former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former CIA Director John Brennan (both foes of Trump) at various times admitted that there was no intelligence, to their knowledge, that implicated Trump as a colluder with Vladimir Putin to gain advantage over Clinton. Former Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson seconded that consensus by conceding there was no evidence of any Trump campaign effort to persuade the Russian to alter the elections. In a more general sense, Barack Obama (who had intelligence reports of Russian election-cycle hacking) three weeks before the election, and the assumed certain victory of Hillary Clinton, had dismissed entirely the idea that any party could taint a U.S. election. Obama went on to accuse Trump of whining for even suggesting that the impending election might be questioned by impropriety.

Even news producers at CNN, the chief engine that drove the collusion fairy tale, were caught on camera admitting that the entire story was mostly “bulls—t”. And one producer added, “And so I think the president is probably right to say, ‘Look, you are witch hunting me.’” Recently, three staffers, including a reporter and an executive editor, resigned from CNN in disgrace for peddling more fake news accounts of collusion between Trump and the Russians.

Who Really Blew the Election?

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‘Progressive’ Washington’s Obamacare Train Wreck: Andrew McCarthy

By on June 29th, 2017

Here’s my problem: I’m a Bill of Rights guy in what’s become a Second Bill of Rights country. That’s why I can’t work up much of a pulse over the intramural healthcare debate among Senate Republicans.https://amgreatness.com/2017/06/27/progressive-washingtons-obamacare-train-wreck/

The Democrats, the party of Obamacare and the dream of socialized medicine, has for Trump-deranged reasons become the Party of No on the matter of addressing the catastrophe they have wrought. So, the Senate debate, like the GOP-controlled House debate before it, is a family fight. The family is splitting up, though. The dynamic that led to Donald Trump’s election tells us why. The party no longer stands for what it has long purported to stand for: freedom, self-determination, and limited government. Nothing better illustrates this than its Janus-faced approach to Obamacare.

Republicans, of course, have campaigned full-throatedly on the imperative to “repeal and replace” Obamacare for seven years. They’ve never been serious about it for a moment.

To be trendily trite, I’m old enough to remember when “repeal and replace” was deceptive because it understated the party establishment’s commitment to the GOP’s conservative base. In the beginning, Republicans boldly beat their chests and bellowed that they’d repeal Obamacare root-and-branch. “Repeal and replace” was actually the first moving of the goalpost, the first implicit admission that, in principle, they were all for a government-managed health-insurance system. If you really want to move to the free market, you repeal statism. When you’re talking “and replace,” you’re just haggling over the price.

In a few short years, “repeal and replace” has gone from a subtle understatement of what Republicans conned voters into believing they’d do, to a gross overstatement of what they’re willing to try. No one who has been paying attention can be surprised by this regression.

Obamacare has always been sleight-of-hand, on both sides. From the beginning, Democrats lied about its feasibility: “Like your doctor, keep your doctor,” “like your plan, keep your plan,” plunging premiums, lower costs, etc. All the while, they knew it was unworkable. That was not a flaw, it was the design. The plan was to orchestrate a collapse of the private insurance market, blame the private insurers rather than the death-spiral regulations, and gradually inure people to the need for a complete government takeover—the panacea of “single payer.”

Equally patent is that, at most, Republicans wanted to slow the train down, not stop it. Many of them, after all, have been on it from the get-go. “Repeal!” and, then, “repeal and replace” made for great fundraising and electoral wedge issues. But when it got down to brass tacks, it was always “Maybe the Supreme Court will strike it down,” or “Maybe we can sue Obama over these waivers,” or “Maybe it will collapse of its own weight.”

Republicans have controlled the House, where all spending originates, since 2010, and the Senate since 2014. Not a dime for Obamacare could have been spent had they not approved it. Never did they use the power of the purse as the Framers intended: Congress’s decisive check against ruinous policy.

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Make federal pensions transparent by Rep. Ron DeSantis and Adam Andrzejewski

By on June 29th, 2017

Every year, the federal government pays $125 billion in tax dollars for federal pensions. In spite of this being such a large amount of money, there is a remarkable lack of transparency surrounding these funds.

Taxpayers deserve to know the details of the lucrative pensions of career bureaucrats and members of Congress. Basic questions deserve answers: How many years were worked, how much money was paid-in and by whom, how quickly did they break-even on their own contributions, and just how much did the taxpayers finance?

Releasing data on federal pensions will require an act of Congress, and we are leading the way. The Taxpayer Funded Pension Disclosure Act will empower citizens with the data and technologies to hold their government accountable like never before.

Today, pension data is not merely opaque; it is literally hidden in an undergroundcomplex in Pennsylvania. Federal employees hand-calculate federal pensions in a process that has not changed since the Cold War era. How many mistakes has the government made in that cavernous complex? No one knows because we’re all in the dark.

The case for greater federal pension transparency can easily be made by looking at the fraud that has already been exposed by non-profit organizations like Open The Books at the state level. In the 32 states that have pension transparency – including California, Illinois, New York and Oregon – citizens have exposed significant amounts of waste and mismanagement.

Auditors at Open the Books uncovered a pair of union bosses in Illinois who taught as substitutes for one day in public schools and then retired, in order to collect a pension that will amount to $1 million dollars over their lifetime.

At the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, data shows that a police lieutenant with a final salary of $129,000 received a starting pension of $172,000. An assistant airport operations manager retired with a final salary of $89,000, but soon began collecting a $103,000 pension. An electrician quit with a base salary of $76,000 and collected a pension of $79,000.

With relatively little transparency, we’ve found numerous examples of waste and abuse across the country. Consider what we’d find if we could see more at the federal level.

For instance, former IRS chief Lois Lerner used her authority to infringe the rights of American citizens and consistently obstructed congressional investigations. Wouldn’t it be nice to see her pension information? Her pension is estimated to equal nearly $2 million in lifetime payout.

According to the Office of Personnel Management, in 2012, 21,000 retired federal employees were collecting pensions exceeding $100,000. Since then, the number has likely doubled or tripled. Moody’s estimates federal employee pensions have a $3.5 trillion-dollar unfunded liability, with taxpayers on the hook to guarantee it all. All of this information should be posted online in real time.

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French Islam’s Radical Turn, and Its Ramifications for French Jews A new book shows the role played by anti-Semitism in the strengthening and consolidation of Islamism in France.Neil Rogachevsky

By on June 29th, 2017

Recent attacks in Paris, London, and Manchester have supplied horrifying evidence that “homegrown jihad” remains a potent force in Western countries, especially but not only in Europe. Yet a good understanding of the phenomenon remains elusive. Why are non-negligible numbers of young Muslim men, born often to quite secular parents and brought up in Western societies, transforming themselves into self-styled knights of jihad?

Of the many explanations that have been advanced, two may be regarded as serious. According to the first, this homegrown phenomenon is a fanatical reaction to, precisely, life in the modern West. That is, for young and newly devout Muslims, Islamism offers a substantive something as against the empty nihilism increasingly typifying Western culture. In this reading, the fairly common turn to Islamism, and by a smaller subset of the young to jihadist violence, is a symptom of the crisis of the contemporary West.

According to the second explanation, the problem originates within Islam itself and is related to the religion’s accumulating demographic strength in Europe, to its ideological vigor (and rigor), and to inflammatory geopolitical factors like today’s civil war in the Middle East. In this reading, it is to internal developments within Islam that we should look in grappling with the rise of sharia-friendly politics in Europe and the creation of environments hospitable to the jihadist impulse.

A principal promoter of the second view is Gilles Kepel, a political scientist at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. An expert less in Islamic theology than in the politics of Islam today, Kepel has written extensively on the Middle East and France, most recently on the deteriorating situation in the immigrant-heavy suburbs (banlieues) that surround many French cities. His latest book,Terror in France, first published in French as Terreur dans L’Hexagone, offers a concrete account of how Islamism, in both its more passive and more militant varieties, has gained ground in France over the last few decades.

As against big-think approaches to the problem of Islamism, Kepel’s politically-minded approach, with its cultivated indifference to more theoretical considerations, is rather refreshing. To be sure, one cannot altogether discount the more abstract explanations. Anyone who has become religious in our time can recognize the desire to replace what was previously lacking with the totality of whatever one has newly embraced. And who could now deny that a political and moral crisis afflicts the West?

Kepel’s central pointis that since the middle of the last decade, the former mainline (if not exactly moderate) Muslim organizations in France have lost control over Islam. In recent years, a new, more militant generation of imams, pamphleteers, and “Islamist entrepreneurs” has emerged, bearing sophisticated and technologically-adept strategies designed to promote “total Islam.” As signs of the deepening crisis, Kepel points to the extremely effective use of social media, new kinds of speech in mosques, and even an experiment in collective Islamist living in the south of France.

True, not all Islamic leaders have articulated the Islamist line or tolerated violence. In the 1990s and early 2000s, some important French institutions were influenced by Muslim Brotherhood activities and doctrines. As Kepel indicates, that influence was hardly benign. In particular, he attributes to it the zealous promotion and diffusion of the term Islamophobia to discredit any criticism of Islam as well as to stoke a sense of victimhood among European Muslims. But while Brotherhood-influenced preachers and institutions surely stood for a species of “total Islam,” they did not openly preach violence in the West

Beginning in the “pivotal” year of 2005, however, with street riots in Paris’s northern banlieues, things took a decisively more radical turn. Over the following years, the center of gravity of French Islam shifted from the centralized institutions to those neighborhoods, in which Saudi-trained imams have gained followings and accumulated significant authority. The easy diffusion of jihadist literature and videos through social media has fired the imagination of young Western Muslims; combined with the opportunity for jihadist study abroad, facilitated in turn by the decomposition of the Arab and Muslim Middle East, this has finally led to the perfect storm that now faces France and other European countries.

In France itself, Kepel notes in qualification, there is as yet no coherent Islamist political program. In fact, Islamist tendencies have been rather plural in character. Sometimes Islamists have sided with figures of the radical right in an alliance built on mutual antagonism toward Jews (a subject to which I’ll return shortly). At other times, Islamists have worked with the radical French left, inveterately open as ever to allies in its eternal combat against capitalist society.

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HAPPY BIRTHDAY “MITCH” FLINT- ONE OF ISRAEL’S ANGELS IN THE SKY IN 1948 FROM NURIT GREENGER

By on June 29th, 2017

Mitchel [Mitch] Flint is 94 year old. He is a frail 94 but strong and with all faculties. Mitch is a living legend. He is a member of a group of volunteer pilots, of foreign nationalities who were recruited by Israel to help her fight her Independence War when the nascent Jewish state found herself attacked by 5 Arab nations in 1948. Without these pilots Israel could have lost the war!

When I once asked Mitch why he took the risk he said, “Someone had to do it!”

Well, yesterday, at the Four Seasons Hotel, in Beverly Hills California, we, a small group of family and close friends, celebrated Mitch’s 94th birthday and we all look forward to celebrating his 95th birthday, in Israel, when Israel celebrates her 70th birthday, in 2018.

A book “Angels In The Sky”, about these brave pilots 140 in number, is about to be published and a film by the same name is being produced.
Angels in the Sky: The Birth of Israel Air Force (2017)

Product Details

Angels in the Sky: How a Band of Volunteer Airmen Saved the New State of Israel
Oct 3, 2017
by Robert Gandt

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In Syria, Trump’s Red Line May Be Holding Has the Assad regime stepped back from the chemical weapons precipice? Joseph Klein

By on June 29th, 2017

Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis claimed Wednesday that the Syrian regime has drawn back from plans to conduct another chemical attack, following a warning by the Trump administration of serious consequences if Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces followed through with their plans.

U.S. intelligence detected “active preparations for chemical weapons use” at the same air base from which the regime allegedly had launched its prior chemical attack last April that caused mass casualties. President Trump had responded to the April chemical attack with a barrage of cruise missiles targeting that air base. The White House issued its public warning to the Assad regime on Monday in unambiguous terms, declaring that Assad and his military would pay a “heavy price” if his regime conducted another chemical attack.

“It appears that they took the warning seriously. They didn’t do it,” Mattis told reporters.

Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, went even further in crediting the Trump administration for stopping Assad at least for now. “I can tell you that due to the President’s actions, we did not see an incident,” Ambassador Haley claimed at a House of Representatives foreign affairs committee hearing. “I would like to think that the President saved many innocent men, women and children.”

It is difficult to prove what may have actually motivated Assad. In any case, whether Assad holds back for good remains to be seen. But we do know the Trump administration is watching constantly for any moves by the Assad regime that could signal an imminent chemical attack and has military assets in place to swiftly respond to such an attack, if not prevent one in the first place.

President Trump not only demonstrated last April that he would follow through on his threats if certain red lines of his were crossed, unlike our previous president. In addition to its warning, the Trump administration may have sent some concrete signals to the Assad regime that it means business this time as well. According to Debkafile, “Signs were gathering in Washington and the Middle East Tuesday, June 26 that the Trump administration was preparing a substantial military operation against the Syrian army and Bashar Assad’s allies, such as the foreign pro-Iranian Shiite militias and Hizballah. Some US military sources suggested that an American preemptive strike was in store in the coming hours to prevent Assad’s army from again resorting to chemical warfare against his people.”

Assad may still decide to launch another chemical attack, figuring that his key allies, particularly Russia, will continue to back him. No doubt, he took note of Russia’s stern response to the U.S.’s downing of a Syrian warplane earlier this month, including a warning from the Russian Defense Ministry that “All kinds of airborne vehicles, including aircraft and UAVs of the international coalition detected to the west of the Euphrates River will be tracked by the Russian SAM systems as air targets.” The Syrian regime had also already taken some precautions by moving most of its operational aircraft to a Russian airbase in Syria after the April missile strike. The Russian airbase is protected by fairly advanced air defense systems. An American missile strike on Syrian aircraft located at a Russian air base would in all likelihood be seen as a major escalation of the war by the Russian government, risking a direct military confrontation between U.S. and Russia that the Trump administration may be loath to risk. As if to thumb his nose at the Trump administration’s latest threats by demonstrating the strength of his military alliance with Russia, Assad was seen strutting around a Russian air baseinspecting its aircraft and defense systems. He was even photographed sitting in the cockpit of a Russian fighter jet.

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Socialist Power Couple Under Investigation When leftists lawyer up. Matthew Vadum

By on June 29th, 2017

Feeling the prospective sting of accountability that socialist grifters rarely experience in their natural lives, Sen. Bernie Sanders is lashing out at those accusing his wife of an alleged financial fraud that caused Burlington College to collapse last year.

Media reports also indicate prosecutors could be investigating the Independent U.S. senator from Vermont for allegedly attempting to muscle the bank into approving the loan.

The leftist power couple lawyered up, reportedly hiring big-name defense attorneys. Rich Cassidy of Burlington, Vt., is representing Bernie, while Beltway insider Larry Robbins, who advised Lewis “Scooter” Libby, former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, is acting for Jane.

Sanders, who used to be mayor of Burlington, said it was “fairly pathetic” that his family was being attacked and seemed to hint that the allegations of fraud and undue influence materialized out of thin air. He described his wife as “about the most honest person I know.”

As the small college’s president from 2004 to 2011, Jane O’Meara Sanders apparently bankrupted the nontraditional institution of higher learning founded in 1972 through reckless spending – just as her husband promised to do to America if elected president of the United States. When it went under, the college sent out a press release blaming the “crushing weight of debt” Mrs. Sanders incurred for its demise.

The FBI is reportedly investigating Jane Sanders for allegedly misrepresenting donations to the college in a $10 million loan application to People’s United Bank in 2010. The money was to acquire 33 acres of land from a cash-strapped church to expand the college. The property was on the shores of Lake Champlain.

As a media outlet reported last year,

The purchase was huge—especially for a school whose annual budget didn’t crack $4 million. Jane Sanders plan was to bet big. To finance the deal, Burlington issued tax-free bonds, took a $3.5 million loan from the diocese, and received a $500,000 bridge loan from Tony Pomerleau, a wealthy local real-estate developer and close friend of the Sanderses.

Enrollment at the college and donations to it did go up but not enough to service the added levels of debt. After sowing the seeds of the school’s destruction, Mrs. Sanders grabbed her golden parachute and moved on.

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John J. Prineas The Age of Bullying Sociopaths

By on June 29th, 2017

The fluid-gendered-progressive world order has no use for ancient or modern myths of marriage, family, religion or the idea of ‘a man and a woman’. Consider the word ‘heterosexual’, which the academy has recast as ‘heteronormative’, as if we are sufferers of some category of paraphilia.

The phone rang. It was the psychiatrist, who was interrupting my lunchbreak with an update on a referred patient. I listened and sensed frustration in his voice.

“Your patient really drained me,” he sighed. “Her endogenous depression had stabilised but she’s going downhill again and all because of what her daughter brought home from school.”

The cause of the patient’s depressive relapse and the psychiatrist’s angst is the teacher of the daughter of the patient. The daughter’s new sex-education instructor had been telling the class that penises and vaginas don’t determine gender any more. The children were told that sexuality is what you make it. Yes! That’s what a teacher told a class of teenyboppers, schoolgirls going through the menarche, the most impressionable time of their lives …

“I went after that teacher on the net,” he continued, “and it seems that this person has some sort of borderline gender disorder which doesn’t appear in the DSM, maybe because the compilers of the DSM-5 couldn’t agree on whether they were dealing with a dysfunction, a misfortune, or a lifestyle. Nevertheless, this indistinctly gendered person whose anatomically ambiguous pudendum predisposes to idiosyncratic supratentorial symptomatology is accredited to take classes of pubescent schoolgirls and instruct them on their nascent sexuality, notwithstanding the muddled sexuality of the instructor.”

On hearing all that, my first thought was: What a lark it must be to be a psychiatrist and to have carte blanche to go fossicking about in the medical clouds. But then I realised that his poking about up there was not a happy romp, because he scampered back down to earth to deliver a blistering analysis of the ruinous impact that Progress was having on the Human Condition.

“Free floating anxiety, reactive depression and hysteria are rampant!” he yelled into the phone, and after catching half a breath: “It’s like a medieval plague!” He explained: “But the carriers of today’s epidemic are the dismal Marxist rats that have washed up into our universities from the rotten hulk of communism … legions of progressive ideologues have infiltrated and infested all the institutions of higher learning, they are brainwashing our uncritical youth and they are turning them into compliant PC teacher warriors like the one that is screwing up our patient through her daughter!”

That’s a very harsh analysis, Maurice. You make it sound as if the university has become a health hazard. Could it be that the teacher has been misunderstood because of poor communication?

“Teaching is about good and proper communication,” he insisted. “This person is talking sex to little kids in newspeak. In our day a school leaver needed a good pass mark to make it into a teachers’ college to learn how to teach—in English. These days a university will admit anybody from an open field of applicants and drum into her (occasionally it’s a he) gender studies, post-Freudian evolutionary psychology and all sorts of reconstituted neo-Marxist claptrap. The academics marinate her grey matter in social-science slime, season it with the latest teaching fads, and when she’s demonstrated a satisfactory level of Orwellian fluency, they send her out to teach. In this case, fashionable fantasies of sexual liberation at a school near Marrickville.”

That’s where that Christian community got spooked by the speed with which the Safe Schools caper came galloping up from Melbourne.

“Yes, sexologists from some social engineering university in Victoria started trickling their fluid-gender theory into the school just after a Stranger Danger campaign had passed through the district. No surprise then that the parents became wary about strangers interfering with their children or that they panicked when the kids started bringing home pearls like: ‘Sexual orientation is written in the DNA but sexual preference is written in the wind …’

“That’s what prompted your referral of the frantic mother. She unloaded onto me how the parent group rallied against the Safe Schools caper, how they were debunked by the teachers, ignored by the media and forced to abandon their protest. So now we have an anxious, depressed and hysterical mother to deal with.”

Gender dysphoria robs a mother of her daughter.

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