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Ruth King

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Islamic Socrates, or a Prankster? by Amir Taheri

By on December 4th, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19197/islamic-socrates-prankster

A new book published in Tehran and praised by officials as a “major philosophical treatise” may suggest yes as an answer. The book by Islamic academic Jalal Sobhani, and titled From the Day Before Yesterday to the Day After Tomorrow, is marketed as “a journey in the political thoughts of Ahmad Fardid.”
Fardid, who died in 1994, aged 85, had established himself as the ruling ayatollahs’ house philosopher with a series of television appearances and lectures in the 1980s about what he termed “preparations for the return of the Hidden Imam” at “the end of times”.
According to Sobhani, Fardid regarded “liberal democracy” as the most vicious enemy of the project to fulfill the “Islamic destiny of mankind”. This is why the Islamic Republic must face the Western powers with determination, always with “the finger on the trigger.” This is meant to justify the Islamic Republic’s growing closeness to Russia and Communist China which, though repressing their Muslim citizens, compensate for that misdeed by also combating the West and its liberal democracy.

Has the Islamic Republic of Iran fallen into a trap set by a prankster masquerading as a philosopher?

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MEDIA Comments turned off

The Meltdown over Elon Musk’s Covid-Misinformation Policy Nate Hochman

By on December 4th, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/12/the-meltdown-over-elon-musks-covid-misinformation-policy/

More free speech on Twitter ‘will literally kill people,’ cry the hysterics.

In September 2016, an Atlantic essay from Salena Zito introduced a line that would become one of the defining phrases of the Trump era: “The press,” Zito wrote of then-candidate Donald Trump’s propensity for exaggeration and embellishment, “take him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.”

The axiom, or some version of it, comes to mind amid the frenzied response to Elon Musk’s recent loosening of Twitter guidelines on Covid-related content. Last week, users noticed a curt message on Twitter’s “COVID-19 Misinformation” page: “Effective November 23, 2022, Twitter is no longer enforcing the COVID-19 misleading information policy.” What that means, the New York Daily News reported, is that “Twitter will no longer flag tweets containing misinformation about COVID-19 nor take action against the accounts that post them; the reversal of a longstanding policy implemented at the peak of the pandemic and the . . . latest major shift under new owner Elon Musk.” Since January 2020, some 11,000 accounts — including those of members of Congress such as Marjorie Taylor Greene (R., Ga.) — and nearly 100,000 posts have been removed under the auspices of that Vijaya Gadde–era policy.

Musk’s move was quickly denounced as literally homicidal by a chorus of “misinformation” “experts,” progressive think-tank scholars, journalists, public-health censors, and various other professional hysterics. “Twitter has quietly changed their policies to allow COVID-19 misinformation,” Columbia University “science communicator” Lucky Tran emoted. “This change will literally kill people.” The “consequences of not getting this right — of spreading that misinformation — is literally tens of thousands of people dying unnecessarily,” White House Covid coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha warned the Associated Press. “Misinformation is a life-or-death issue,” tech journalist Emily Dreyfuss told the Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz. “It’s certain to get many more people killed from covid than otherwise would,” added Johns Hopkins health sociologist Jon Shaffer.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Will we see justice? By Earick Ward

By on December 4th, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/12/will_we_see_justice.html

In January of 2021, I penned a blog post highlighting America’s transition from being a God-centered nation to becoming a Left-centered one.  I wrote:

Our [nation’s] existence was founded on: equal justice, freedom to speak, assemble and worship, freedom to redress grievances in our elected officials through the ballot box, freedom to own personal property, freedom to earn an honest living and provide for our families, freedom to defend ourselves against the rise of a tyrannical state, freedom from false imprisonment, freedom of conscience, and more. These freedoms are deemed inalienable rights. 

As Elon Musk follows through on his commitment to expose the underhanded and (now blatant) illegal nature of Twitter’s censorship of persons and facts surrounding the Hunter Biden laptop prior to the 2020 election, I am struck by this: by what measure shall these revelations be judged?

By our Constitution and Founding principles or by our new left-centered reality?

Sadly, I don’t hold much hope that “justice” will be meted in Twitter’s cover-up or, more pertinently, in Hunter (Joe) Biden’s blatant illegalities.

We live in a post-justice, post-righteous, left-centered reality.

Last week, the left denied wrongdoing.

Today, they will proclaim, “Yes, we censored speech.  So what?  What are you going to do about it?”

In a just society, this matter would be dealt with one way or another.  In our new left-centered society, the left will thumb its nose at our protestations and challenge us to use the systems that they now all but control (the courts, the media, the military, the police, social media) to seek justice.

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MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

DEI in the ER John Mac Ghlionn

By on December 4th, 2022

https://americanmind.org/salvo/dei-in-the-er/

Rising wokeness in medical schools is a problem for patients everywhere.  

Contrary to popular belief, the United States is no longer home to the best education system in the world. According to the World Top 20 Project, an international organization that gathers educational data from more than 200 countries, the U.S. lags well behind countries like Finland, Denmark, and South Korea. From elementary schools to colleges and universities, the U.S. education system is in crisis. Academic standards have drastically slipped, with a woke madness gripping classrooms across the country. And no school is immune—not even the most prestigious medical schools in America. 

In September, Stanley Goldfarb, a UPenn medical school professor, warned Americans that “anti-racism” policies have lowered admission and teaching standards, corrupting the world of medicine. Instead of focusing on recruiting the “best and brightest,” Goldfarb argued that an increasing number of medical schools are more interested in picking students based on their skin color. The blame for these recent shifts should be laid at the feet of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives.  

For the uninitiated, DEI focuses on building diverse workplaces and classrooms, on creating environments that are equitable and inclusive. To many, this sounds like progress. But on closer inspection, DEI is dangerous and unmeritocratic. Accidents of birth like race, sex, and ethnicity are the only things that matter in a world where DEI reigns supreme. As Goldfarb shows, these initiatives punish white and Asian applicants. Contrary to the ideology that underlies DEI, individual academic achievement and the ability to finance are the only things that should matter when applying for medical school. 

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FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Biden adopts the Palestinian cause The president’s team is intent on undoing everything Trump did — no matter how good it was. Jed Babbin

By on December 4th, 2022

https://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/dec/3/biden-adopts-palestinian-cause/?utm_campaign=shareaholic&utm_medium=

President Biden inherited a Middle East that posed the greatest opportunities for stability, if not peace, in almost six decades. Former President Donald Trump’s 2018 revocation of the Obama nuclear weapons deal with Iran and imposition of severe economic sanctions on it backfooted the terrorist state. The Arab nations, terrified by the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran, saw Mr. Trump’s Abraham Accords as the best chance to align themselves with the U.S. and Israel, the only regional power able to face up to Iran.

As this column has pointed out before, Mr. Biden and his team are intent on undoing everything Mr. Trump did, no matter how good it was. Mr. Biden’s attempt to negotiate a new version of the 2015 Iran deal has returned the Arab states to skepticism about our reliability as an ally. Mr. Biden’s new embrace of the Palestinians is a clear message to the Arabs that he is backing away from the Abraham Accords.

In September, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the United States was committed to “advancing and expanding” those accords. But actions and statements by himself and Mr. Biden, before and since, demonstrate commitment to the opposite policy.

It must take ingenuity to be as precisely wrong as Mr. Blinken often is. For example, he said in March that the Abraham Accords, through which four Arab states establish ties with Israel, are “not a substitute” for progress on resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

No, Hady Amr is not ‘our friend’ By Ruthie Blum

By on December 4th, 2022

https://www.jns.org/opinion/no-hady-amr-is-not-our-friend/

Mere hours after the announcement on Tuesday that the U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state for Israeli and Palestinian affairs had been promoted to a position that was tailor-made just for him, the American Jewish Committee jumped in to welcome the move.

“Congratulations to our friend @HadyAmr on being appointed Special Representative for Palestinian Affairs,” tweeted the self-described “staunchly non-partisan” organization. “AJC looks forward to our continued work with you to advance American engagement in the region and the cause of peace across the Middle East.”

The timing wasn’t the only thing disturbing about Amr’s “elevation” to a concocted new job—from whose title the word “Israel” is conspicuously absent—or about the AJC’s fawning response to it. But it was certainly symbolic, as it fell on Nov. 29.

On this date in 1947, the U.N. General Assembly passed Resolution 181, which called for the partition of British-ruled Mandatory Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab one. It was the precursor to the declaration of the birth of the State of Israel less than six months later, on May 14, 1948.
Referred to in Hebrew as Kaf Tet B’November, it is celebrated annually by Israelis and—like Yom Ha’atzmaut (Independence Day)—mourned by the Arabs who rejected the original partition plan and who continue to refuse coexistence with the “Zionist entity.” In a horrifying historical twist, the UNGA has joined the “Palestinians” who mark the nakba (catastrophe) of Israel’s birth by stressing and acting on their intention to eliminate it.

The international body even voted on Wednesday in favor of holding an official commemorative Nakba Day event to honor all those decrying the Jewish state’s upcoming 75th anniversary. The world couldn’t have found a more fitting way to champion the sharp rise in antisemitism that so many countries and NGOs claim to be attempting to combat.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Decline of Higher Education Thoughts on a generational takeover by the Left, and what options remain John M. Ellis

By on December 4th, 2022

https://www.city-journal.org/the-decline-of-higher-education

In the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties, academic-freedom disputes routinely took a particular shape. In a small town, somewhere in the heartland, there would be a college campus on which a young academic loudly voiced his opinions on controversial matters—mostly political, but sometimes also on sexual morality, or even on legalizing drugs. This would offend the sensitivities of some local townspeople.

Someone like the local mayor would lean on the college president (probably a personal friend), the president would then lean on the department chair, and the young professor was soon gone. The American Association of University Professors would then intervene, and the individual would be reinstated, because the AAUP would in effect threaten blacklisting. Reports of cases like this were reasonably common.

The AAUP would always insist that college campuses must be the one place with unfettered freedom to discuss and analyze issues of all kinds, no matter who might be offended. The analytical function of academia must never be shut down by a shallow local moralism. This was then the consensus of academic life.

If we fast forward to the present, one feature of what’s happening on the campuses looks similar: that crucial analytical function is still getting stifled whenever it offends an equally shallow local moralism. But there’s a startling difference: the actors have changed places. It’s now the professors who do what the small-minded small-town worthies used to do, shutting down analysis whenever it offends them, which is often.

In fact, they do it on a vastly larger scale. Those old AAUP cases were aberrations affecting a tiny minority of campuses, and the infractions were soon corrected. But today, the suppression of debate and analysis happens almost everywhere, and the perpetrators—both professors and administrators—represent a controlling majority of the campuses.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Art Museums and Impermanence Many art museums may still look like the marmoreal palaces of yore, but increasingly their goals are in tension with the calm solidity of their galleries and pavilions. By Roger Kimball

By on December 4th, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/12/03/art-museums-and-impermanence/

The biggest story as I write revolves around Elon Musk’s decision to reveal the truth about how Twitter, largely at the behest of Democrats, intervened in the 2020 presidential campaign to quash damaging news about Joe Biden and thus influence the course of the election. Twitter wasn’t the only entity to put its finger on the electoral scale, but it was a very prominent one. Remember, Twitter shut down the account of Donald Trump, a sitting president of the United States, as part of the media frenzy in the aftermath of the January 6 protests at the Capitol. Twitter shut down the accounts of many other prominent conservatives around the same time. The company also went to extraordinary lengths, ahead of the election, to bury the story, first aired by the New York Post, about Hunter Biden’s laptop. 

As I say, this whole story is the hottest thing going right now, and for those interested in pursuing it I recommend James Woods’ interview with Tucker Carlson and the long thread that the journalist Matt Taibbi has begun to publish at the request of Elon Musk. If prior to this you thought that the 2020 election was on the up-and-up, these revelations might well change your mind. 

But I am not going to say another word about that sordid subject today. Instead, I thought I would step back and consider a different sort of scandalous story, one that involves the fate of the art museum in an age of identity politics. 

I was recently asked to contribute an introduction to “The Museum of Art: Challenge and Response,” a conversation in Melbourne, Australia, between Gerard Vaughan, former Director of the National Gallery of Victoria, and David Bomford, former curator at several museums and now a Trustee of the Victoria and Albert in London. What follows is an adaptation of that introduction. 

Every age, I noted, has its architectural master projects, those programs that not only attract the signal architectural talent of the time but also, in the reach of their tentacles, seem to epitomize the civilizational ambitions of a culture. At one time in the West, that node of interest centered around the Church, at another the palace, at another the town square and attendant civil structures.

Today, there is a good argument to be made that for some time now the apogee of architectural ambition has centered around the art museum. 

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FOREIGN POLICY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Biden Administration Turns a Blind Eye to Iranian Regime’s Brutal Crackdown by Majid Rafizadeh

By on December 3rd, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19176/iran-brutal-crackdown

The Biden administration appears to be repeating Obama administration’s policy of choosing to be silent in the face of the Iranian regime’s bloodshed, human rights violations, and crackdowns that kill and wound peaceful protesters — and has the same policy regarding brave Chinese protestors as well.

One hospital staff member wrote in a message to CNN about a female detainee: “When she first came in, [the officers] said she was hemorrhaging from her rectum… due to repeated rape. The plainclothes men insisted that the doctor write it as rape prior to arrest….” — CNN Special Report, “How Iran’s security forces use rape to quell protests,” November 21, 2022.

Will the Biden administration ever stop appeasing the regime of Iran, called by the US Department of State “the world’s worst state sponsor of terrorism”?

Will the Biden administration ever start standing with Iranian — and Chinese, Brazilian and Venezuelan — men and women asking only for what we purport to care about — liberty and freedom — but who suffer brutality and suppression from their own governments?

When millions of citizens poured into the streets of Iran in June 2009 to protest against the country’s regime, the Obama administration was silent as many people in Iran cried out, “Are you with us, or are you with them [the ruling mullahs]?” Now, the Biden administration appears to be repeating Obama administration’s policy of choosing to be silent in the face of the Iranian regime’s bloodshed, human rights violations, and crackdowns that kill and wound peaceful protesters — and has the same policy regarding brave Chinese protestors as well.

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BOOKS Comments turned off

Prisoners of the Castle: An Epic Story of Survival and Escape from Colditz, the Nazis’ Fortress Prison by Ben Macintyre

By on December 3rd, 2022

“Not since Ian Fleming and John le Carré has a spy writer so captivated readers.”—The Hollywood Reporter

In this gripping narrative, Ben Macintyre tackles one of the most famous prison stories in history and makes it utterly his own. During World War II, the German army used the towering Colditz Castle to hold the most defiant Allied prisoners. For four years, these prisoners of the castle tested its walls and its guards with ingenious escape attempts that would become legend.

But as Macintyre shows, the story of Colditz was about much more than escape. Its population represented a society in miniature, full of heroes and traitors, class conflicts and secret alliances, and the full range of human joy and despair. In Macintyre’s telling, Colditz’s most famous names—like the indomitable Pat Reid—share glory with lesser known but equally remarkable characters like Indian doctor Birendranath Mazumdar whose ill treatment, hunger strike, and eventual escape read like fiction; Florimond Duke, America’s oldest paratrooper and least successful secret agent; and Christopher Clayton Hutton, the brilliant inventor employed by British intelligence to manufacture covert escape aids for POWs.

Prisoners of the Castle traces the war’s arc from within Colditz’s stone walls, where the stakes rose as Hitler’s war machine faltered and the men feared that liberation would not come soon enough to spare them a grisly fate at the hands of the Nazis. Bringing together the wartime intrigue of his acclaimed Operation Mincemeat and keen psychological portraits of his bestselling true-life spy stories, Macintyre has breathed new life into one of the greatest war stories ever told.

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