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GAYS WHO DEFY BAN ON EUROVISION AND ISRAEL

Posted By on May 19th, 2019

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2019/05/fickle-fannys-down-under.html

The Iranians hang gays from cranes, and the hard men of Hamas have a habit of throwing gays off the roofs of buildings, but when the Eurovision Song Contest is held in Tel Aviv, a singularly misplaced hatred for Israel prods gay activists into turning their backs on the event.

Not all gays, of course.  Even the pompous “occasional Jew” (as somebody deliciously termed him) and gay icon Stephen Fry, who invokes his halachic Jewish status on occasions when to do so suits him (such as signing as-a-Jew statements inveighing against Israel) joined such staunch pro-Israel figures as Tracy Ann Oberman and Gene Simmons in signing a statement issued by the so-called Creative Community for Peace condemning calls for a boycott of this year’s Israel-based event:

“We, the undersigned, believe that music is our shared language, one that transcends boundaries and brings people together under a common bond.We believe that unifying events, such as singing competitions, are crucial to help bridge our cultural divides and bring people of all backgrounds together through their shared love of music.The annual Eurovision Song Contest embodies this unifying power. Every year, millions of people across Europe, and around the world, join together in a massive display of cultural exchange and celebration of music.Unfortunately, this year, the spirit of togetherness is under attack by those calling to boycott Eurovision 2019 because it is being held in Israel, subverting the spirit of the contest and turning it from a tool of unity into a weapon of division.We believe the cultural boycott movement is an affront to both Palestinians and Israelis who are working to advance peace through compromise, exchange, and mutual recognition.While we all may have differing opinions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the best path to peace, we all agree that a cultural boycott is not the answer.”

EDUCATION, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Jonathan S. Tobin Can academia make room for honest scholarship on Israel?

Posted By on May 19th, 2019

https://www.israelhayom.com/opinions/can-academia-make-room-for-hone

The smearing of scholars for publishing a journal that examined misleading attacks on the Jewish state exposes the intellectual dishonesty of academic Israel-bashers.

The old joke about academia is that the arguments in the faculty lounges are so nasty because the stakes involved are so small. That’s often true about most things that go on in the narrow world of intellectual specialists, who guard their university department fiefdoms with jealous ferocity. They conduct their scholarly wars with publications that are written in academic jargon that is virtually indecipherable to the general reader. Their feuds are epic in their bitterness, but happily of little concern to the rest of society, which can easily ignore the doings of this tribe of underpaid and generally disgruntled people who have earned the right to have the letters Ph.D. after their names.

But there are some academic arguments about which the rest of us would do well to pay attention. One such is the brawl that has started among the members of the Association for Israel Studies, in which a number of members are outraged that some AIS scholars have published a journal devoted to the topic of how language is used to delegitimize Zionism and the State of Israel. The special issue of the Summer 2019 edition of Israel Studies was titled “Word Crimes: Reclaiming the Language of the Israel-Palestinian Conflict.”

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Bomb hits tourist bus near Egypt’s Giza Pyramids, at least 17 wounded

Posted By on May 19th, 2019

https://www.israelhayom.com/2019/05/19/bomb-hits-tourist-bus-near-egypts-giza-pyramids-at-least-16-wounded/

Blast detonates near new museum being built nearby Egypt’s famed pyramids, most of the wounded are foreign nationals, sources report.

A roadside bomb hit a tourist bus on Sunday near the Giza Pyramids, wounding at least 17 people including tourists, Egyptian officials said.

The officials said the bus was travelling on a road close to the under-construction Grand Egyptian Museum, which is located adjacent to the Giza Pyramids but is not yet open to tourists.

The bus was carrying at least 25 people, mostly from South Africa, officials added.

The attack comes as Egypt’s vital tourism industry is showing signs of recovery after years in the doldrums because of the political turmoil and violence that followed a 2011 uprising that toppled former leader Hosni Mubarak.

The officials said security forces cordoned off the site of the explosion and the wounded were taken to a nearby hospital.

ISRAEL, MEDIA Comments turned off

Al Jazeera Pulls Video Claiming Holocaust Was ‘Different From How the Jews Tell It’

Posted By on May 19th, 2019

https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/al-jazeera-pulls-video-claiming-holocaust-was-different-from-how-the-jews-tell-it-1.7255111

Video posted to AJ+ Arabic’s social media pages says Jews skewed Holocaust facts and statistics to get reparations from Germany, and that the establishment of Israel was derived from Nazi ideology.

Al-Jazeera’s AJ+ Arabic channel pulled a video it posted to its social media channels Friday night that claimed Jews exploit the Holocaust and that Israel is the genocide’s “greatest beneficiary.”The seven minute-long, Arabic-language video asserted that though the Holocaust did occur, “it’s different from how the Jews tell it,” Israeli media reported.

AJ+ Arabic, the youth-focused, online current-events channel of Qatar’s official Al Jazeera Media Network, posted the video on its social media platforms with the caption “The gas chambers killed millions of Jews…So the story says. How true is the #Holocaust and how did the Zionists benefit from it?”Before its removal from the platforms on Saturday, the post reportedly gained 1.1 million views on Facebook and Twitter. After it was deleted, Al Jazeera said the piece violated the network’s editorial standards.

MEDIA, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Notes on the Great Realignment By Roger Kimball

Posted By on May 19th, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/05/18/notes-on-the-great-realignment/

One of these days, I would like to cadge an invitation to a strategy meeting of #TheResistance. Not the pussy-behatted feminoid Hollywood chapter of #TheResistance. Nothing could be more boring, or more depressing, than that.But I would like to get a glimpse into the engine room of the more-moral-than-thou rancid-Right confraternity.

How are their troops dispatched? Whence do they receive their marching orders? Is it via the internet, or from some even more deliquescent medium of communication, that Pete Wehner and Parson David French and the rest of that fraternity receive the codebook of this week’s virtue signaling? I sometimes imagine Bill Kristol reposed among the debris of his machinations, like Marlon Brando in “Apocalypse Now,” muttering terrible imprecations to his mesmerized if batty acolytes.

I’ll probably never know, but it’s clear that they do employ some effective means of getting the message out. I was reminded of this over the last couple of days when I noticed that Anne Applebaum, Max Boot, and Gabriel Schoenfeld all showed up with essentially the same homework assignment.

Applebaum, writing for the Orange-Man-Bad Post, weighed in with a column taking the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán to task for “overt racism and covert anti-Semitism,” for mounting “an all-out assault on his country’s legal and judicial institutions, on independent media, on academia and on culture,” and for supporting Christianity against “the Muslim hordes (who don’t exist).”

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The Merit of Merit-Based Immigration By Kevin D. Williamson

Posted By on May 19th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/merit-based-immigration-plan-serves-us-interests/

The general idea is a good one: The U.S. has interests of its own, and immigration should serve them first and foremost.

Having chain-migrated his way into the White House and a little bit of political power, Donald Trump’s son-in-law is shopping around an immigration plan. And if you can get past the hilarious juxtaposition of the words “merit-based” and “Jared Kushner,” it’s a pretty good one.

As things stand, the majority of immigrants to the United States (the majority of legal immigrants, anyway) qualify for entry on the basis of having a family member legally present in the United States. This is the mechanism behind what is known as “chain migration,” in which one member of a family provides entry to another, who provides entry to another, who provides entry to another, and so on.

In contrast, a small share of immigrants — about 12 percent — enter the country on the basis of a job offer or the possession of certain skills or education that make them desirable to employers. (Others enter as investors, coming in as potential employers rather than potential employees.) These are everything from doctors to software developers.

Kushner’s agenda is to reverse those proportions, reducing the number of entrants through family-based immigration and loosening up restrictions on highly skilled workers. The plan would also eliminate the “lottery,” the visa system under which 50,000 applicants are selected randomly (almost randomly, anyway) in the name of diversity, albeit a kind of diversity that excludes Canadians, Englishmen, Indians, Brazilians, Nigerians, and many others. It is difficult to think of a worse criterion for the admission of new Americans than randomness.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Pete Buttigieg takes aim at … Thomas JeffersonBy Monica Showalter

Posted By on May 19th, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/05/pete_buttigieg_takes_aim_at_thomas_jefferson.html

With few Confederate statues left to topple, Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg thinks it’s now time to take out Thomas Jefferson.

Look at the jackassery he displays in this interview with Hugh Hewitt, reported by the Daily Caller:

Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg says Americans should not be honoring Thomas Jefferson by naming events and places after the founding father.

The mayor of South Bend, Indiana, was on “The Hugh Hewitt Show” Friday and said he believes removing — not celebrating — Jefferson is “the right thing to do.”

The subject came up when Buttigieg was asked about the name of the annual Indiana Democratic dinner that used to commemorate the statues of Jefferson and Andrew Jackson within the party, the Washington Free Beacon reported.

“Well, let’s go to policy now—a very blunt question because you talk about going to every Jefferson-Jackson Dinner in Indiana when you were running statewide. Should Jefferson-Jackson dinners be renamed everywhere because both were holders of slaves?” Hewitt asked.

“Yeah, we’re doing that in Indiana. I think it’s the right thing to do,” Buttigieg said. “Over time, you develop and evolve on the things you choose to honor … Jefferson is more problematic. There’s a lot of course to admire in his thinking and his philosophy, but then again if you plunge into his writings, especially the notes on the state of Virginia, you know that he knew slavery was wrong.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

A Climate-Change Drubbing in Australia Down in the polls for months, the center-right rallies to win on taxes and energy.

Posted By on May 19th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-climate-change-drubbing-in-australia-11558283558

If American Democrats want a warning about the consequences of embracing the Green New Deal, look no further than Saturday’s election shocker in Australia. The opposition center-left Labor Party had led in the polls for months but lost as voters rejected its move left on taxes, spending and above all on climate change.

The ruling Liberal-National Coalition had been divided and tossed out two prime ministers during its nearly six years in power. Scott Morrison, the compromise choice as Prime Minister last year, managed to unite conservatives around a platform that stressed economic growth, tax cuts and support for the country’s energy producers.

Labor leader Bill Shorten promised to raise taxes on the “wealthy,” but his main theme was curbing climate change. Labor promised to cut carbon emissions nearly in half by 2030 compared to 2005 levels while subsidizing wind and solar. Mr. Shorten and Labor refused to support a job-producing coal mine in Queensland, and their candidates were routed in the resource-rich province.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

MY SAY: PRONOUNS FOR DUMMIES

Posted By on May 19th, 2019

As I was taught, commonly used  pronouns include I, me, mine, she, he, it, we, they, us, his, hers, theirs.

Yesterday at a delightful lunch in bucolic Connecticut one of the guests announced that he was a “pronoun warrior”-determined to wipe out gender in pronouns.

I asked what injustices, challenges, hurts, offenses, prejudices would be ameliorated by altering pronouns. His response was that I am old and not “woke” enough.

I gently accused him of ageism but he won the argument by denying that he was an ageist….after all, he explained, he voted for Bernie Sanders and would do so again.

We ended lunch on very good terms when I gave him my creme brulee, proving that food is the way to a “they’s” heart.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

‘Bombshell’ News for Joe Biden From Australia

Posted By on May 19th, 2019

https://www.nysun.com/editorials/australias-bombshell-news-for-joe-biden/90692/

Look at this, mates. From Down Under comes news that the incumbent prime minister of Australia has been returned to office in the wires a calling a “sensational” result. The “bombshell triumph,” says a leading news site, comes after “repeated polls” placed the Australian Labor party ahead of the ruling conservatives, who Down Under are called the Liberal Party.

No doubt it would be a mistake for us Yanks to make too much of this. Gravity pulls in the opposite direction on this side of the globe. Then again, too, to make too much from this. Then again, too, it might be a mistake to ignore this portent altogether, since we are entering an election in which the more liberal figure, Jos. Biden, is polling ahead of the incumbent, more conservative, president.

Particularly because Labor “scrutineers,” in the phrase of the the Australian Web site news.com.au, reckon that “older voters have punished the party for its higher-taxing agenda.” The wire reports that “states where the economy is not thriving” have backed the backed the more conservative party’s agenda “focused on the economy and jobs.”