ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

What David French Gets Wrong About David French By Julie Kelly

Posted By on June 4th, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/06/03/what-david-french

The dust-up between New York Post op-ed editor Sohrab Ahmari and National Review author David French has offered an enlightening view into the chasm between Trump supporters and his detractors on the Right. For the past week, opinionists on both sides have weighed in on the broader and at times pedantic points of the dispute.

Here are some crib notes: Ahmari thoughtfully, and I think, accurately, argues that French is temperamentally and ideologically ill-equipped to effectively challenge the Left in this current scorched-earth climate of American politics and culture.

In what he defines as “David French-ism,” Ahmari essentially claims that French’s trust in traditional institutions, the good faith of the other side, and belief in neutral territory where everyone is respected not only is naïve but misguided to the extent of being destructive of the things conservatives believe are essential to a just society.

Further, French’s objections to fighting the Left’s winning rampage by deploying the same weapons they wield—power in the form of the law—is a prescription for continued defeat. French’s hollow tropes offer little in the way of a legitimate battle plan to ultimately prevail over the well-moneyed and vengeful interests who seek to irrevocably transform American society. Detailed policies or political tactics to mitigate the harmful outcomes of illegal immigration or Big Tech-imposed censorship or punitive trade deals are replaced with toothless platitudes. Ahmari mocks French’s cheesy bumper-sticker solutions:

How do we counter ideological mono-thought in universities, workplaces, and other institutions? Try promoting better work-life balance, says French. How do we promote the good of the family against the deracinating forces arrayed against it, some of them arising out of the free market (pornography) and others from the logic of maximal autonomy (no-fault divorce)? “We should reverse cultural messages that for too long have denigrated the fundamental place of marriage in public life.” Oh, OK.

HISTORY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Rashida Tlaib and That ‘Safe Haven’ for Jews Created by the Palestinians Real and unreal history. Hugh Fitzgerald

Posted By on June 4th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273909/rashida-tlaib-and-safe-haven-jews-created-hugh-fitzgerald

Appearing as a guest on the Yahoo News podcast “Skullduggery” in early May, Rashida Tlaib offered her own fantastical version of Israeli, and “Palestinian” history: 
“There’s always kind of a calming feeling, I tell folks, when I think of the Holocaust, and the tragedy of the Holocaust, and the fact that it was my ancestors — Palestinians — who lost their land and some lost their lives, their livelihood, their human dignity, their existence in many ways, have been wiped out, and some people’s [sic] passports,” Tlaib said on the podcast’s most recent episode, published Friday [May 11]. “And, just all of it was in the name of trying to create a safe haven for Jews, post-the Holocaust, post-the tragedy and the horrific persecution of Jews across the world at that time. And, I love the fact that it was my ancestors that provided that, right,[sic] in many ways, but they did it in a way that took their human dignity away and it  was forced on them.”
What kind of person, what kind of moral idiot, says that when she “thinks of the Holocaust” there “is always kind of a calming feeling”? We could stop right there, for that ought to be enough to permanently earn her universal scorn.  But let’s continue.
 
What she claims, in her confused and tortured English, is this:
Israel came into being to provide a “safe haven for Jews” after the Holocaust; it was the local population, the “Palestinians,” who “provided that safe haven” but in so doing, they lost “their land and some lost their lives, their livelihood, their human dignity, their existence in many ways.” You see, they were made to suffer for the crimes against the Jews committed by others, while being themselves guiltless.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Russiagate and the missing ducks By James V. DeLong

Posted By on June 4th, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/06/russiagate_and_the_missing_ducks.html

“In March 2018, the current [CIA] director, Gina Haspel, flatly lied to President Trump about an incident in the UK in order to persuade him to escalate measures against Moscow, which he then reluctantly did.  Several non–mainstream media outlets have reported the true story.  Typically, The New York Times, on April 17 of this year, reported it without correcting Haspel’s falsehood.”

Stephen Cohen of The Nation is consistently one of the best commentators on the Russiagate affair.

He just published another excellent piece analyzing “How Did Russiagate Begin?, which canvasses some possibilities and leans toward the explanation that it was (and is) an operation by U.S. intelligence agencies unhappy with the possibility that Trump will defuse our increasingly fractious relationship with Russia.

The whole article deserves attention, but one point he makes in passing is worth expanding.  Cohen notes:

In March 2018, the current [CIA] director, Gina Haspel, flatly lied to President Trump about an incident in the UK in order to persuade him to escalate measures against Moscow, which he then reluctantly did.  Several non–mainstream media outlets have reported the true story.  Typically, The New York Times, on April 17 of this year, reported it without correcting Haspel’s falsehood.

The reference is to the Skripal affair, in which the Russians, allegedly, used a nerve agent to poison a defector and his daughter.  The Brits responded with heavy sanctions, and the U.S., after some hesitation, did the same.  The story in the NYT said Trump agreed to the action only after Haspel showed him pictures, supposedly supplied to her by the British government, of collateral damage from the poisoning in the form of hospitalized children and dead ducks.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

In wake of Golan attack, Israel makes it clear Iran cannot hide in Syria by Yaakov Lappin

Posted By on June 4th, 2019

https://www.israelhayom.com/2019/06/04/after-golan-attack-israel-makes-it-clear-that-iran-cannot-hide-in-syria/

The Israeli strike on Iranian assets in Syria sends the message that the Islamic republic cannot hide behind its regional proxies, and that its activities remain highly exposed to Israeli intelligence and firepower.

At this time, no group has claimed responsibility for the firing of two rockets at Israel’s Mount Hermon on Saturday night from Syria, but it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to view Iran, or one of its proxies, as the prime suspects.

The Iranian radical axis possesses both the ability and the motivation to conduct such an attack.

Israel’s responses included a significant air strike on Iranian assets within the T-4 airbase, in central Syria, and deadly strikes on President Bashar Assad regime’s military.

Israel sent the message that Iran cannot hide behind its regional proxies and that its activities remain highly exposed to Israeli intelligence and firepower. It also reiterated that Assad will continue to pay a price for Iran’s aggression.

The Islamic republic has spent years creating proxy terrorist organizations throughout the Middle East, including in Syria. This gives it an ability to attack and pressure its enemies on their own doorstep, far from Iran’s own borders, while maintaining a facade of deniability. The “anonymous” firing of two rockets on Saturday appears to fit this pattern well.

HISTORY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

June 4: China’s Longest Night by Gordon G. Chang

Posted By on June 4th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14333/tiananmen-square-anniversary

The Chinese state has become a dangerous actor. It has, among other things, been dismembering neighbors, closing off the global commons, systematically violating international rules, supporting rogue regimes, proliferating weapons technologies, attacking democracy. Any attempt to stop such conduct is met with Beijing angrily claiming a violation of its sovereignty.

The Chinese Communist Party has resorted to intimidation and coercion to keep people in line. The world’s most sophisticated surveillance state is adept at oppression, especially as it adopts and perfects mechanisms of control. For instance, within months it plans to amalgamate local “social credit systems” into a national one, to give every Chinese person a constantly updated score based upon factors such as political obedience. Xi Jinping, the Communist Party’s general secretary, is creating what the Economist termed “the world’s first digital totalitarian state.”

The hope that China can liberalize itself starts with the Chinese people. And the conversation about liberalization begins, as a practical matter, in the only place on Chinese soil where Tiananmen is publicly discussed and mourned, where that coercion is least felt. That place is Hong Kong….

There was a semblance of liberty in the months before Tiananmen… But on June 3 and June 4, [Deng Xiaoping] made it clear the Communist Party would stop at nothing.

As June 3 passed into June 4 in Beijing in 1989, enraged citizens defended streets and neighborhoods as soldiers and armored vehicles of the murderous 27th Army, along with the 38th, moved from the western approaches of the Chinese capital to the heart of the city. It was China’s longest night.

By the morning of the 4th, the self-styled army of the Chinese people, the People’s Liberation Army, had viciously cleared Tiananmen Square, where more than a million people had gathered, talked, sung, and celebrated since the middle of April. The papier-mâché Goddess of Democracy, a monument to freedom that dominated the square, was smashed.

BOOKS, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Books He Loved but Others Shouldn’t Read by Amir Taheri

Posted By on June 4th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14325/ayatollah-khamenei-books

The new book, a sort of biography, was originally written in Arabic under the title “En Ma’a al-sabr fathan” (“Patience Leads to Victory”) but has just come out in Persian translation under a pseudo-poetical title, “The Drop of Blood That Became a Ruby”. The “Supreme Guide,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, recalls his “passion for reading famous Iranian and world novels” and insists on “the deep impact” that reading novels had on him.

Top of Khamenei’s list are 10 of the cloak-and-dagger novels written by Michel Zevaco, the Corsican-French writer who helped popularize what the English call “penny-dreadful” romances in France…. Zevaco’s world is a universe of sex, violence, conspiracy and betrayal. In Zevaco’s best-selling novel “Borgia,” the head of the dreadful Borgia family that dominated Florentine politics in the medieval times, rapes his own sister Lucrece, a seductive blonde. The novel “Nostradamus” is a fictionalized biography of a roaming charlatan who claimed to read the future to gain money, power, sex and fame.

Khamenei says he loved and cherished all those books. Ironically, however, all the novels he devoured with great appetite are on a blacklist of books that “corrupt public morality and violate religious values”, established under President Muhammad Khatami in 1999. Iranians who are today the same age as Khamenei was in his youth cannot read the books he loved.

“Tell me which books you read, and I’ll tell you who you are!” That was how the late Iranian literary critic Mohit Tabatabai used to tease Tehran’s glitterati in the “good old days.” To be sure, the claim wasn’t based on any scientific study but empirical evidence showed that it wasn’t quite off the mark either. Books do offer an insight into the soul of a reader, provided he has a soul.

Thus, those interested in all things Iranian, especially in these exciting times, wouldn’t want to miss a new book on the Islamic Republic’s “Supreme Guide” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, if only because it devotes a chapter to books that he loved as a young man.

The new book, a sort of biography, was originally written in Arabic under the title “En Ma’a al-sabr fathan” (“Patience Leads to Victory”) but has just come out in Persian translation under a pseudo-poetical title, “The Drop of Blood That Became a Ruby”. The “Supreme Guide” recalls his “passion for reading famous Iranian and world novels” and insists on “the deep impact” that reading novels had on him.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Trump’s Case Against Europe The president sees Brussels as too weak, too liberal, and anti-American on trade.By Walter Russell Mead

Posted By on June 4th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trumps-case-against-europe-11559602940

“Why does he hate us?” is the question American foreign-policy types often hear from European friends and colleagues when the subject of Donald Trump comes up—as it often does. With Mr. Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in Europe this week, it seems an auspicious time to attempt an answer.

The news isn’t all bad. When Mr. Trump and senior administration officials talk about China, they attack it for abusing the international system in a ruthless quest for global hegemony. Their reading of Europe is different: that a mix of dysfunctional policies, unrealistic ideas about world politics, and poor institutional arrangements has locked the Continent on a trajectory of decline. As Mr. Trump’s team sees it, they aren’t trying to weaken Europe; they are trying to save Europe from itself.

There are five elements of the Trump critique of the European Union. First, some of the “new nationalists” believe multinational entities like the EU are much weaker and less effective than the governments of nation-states—so much so that the development of the EU has weakened the Western alliance as a whole. In this view, cooperation between nation-states is good and through it countries can achieve things they couldn’t achieve on their own. But trying to overinstitutionalize that cooperation is a mistake. The resulting bureaucratic structures and Byzantine politics and decision-making processes paralyze policy, alienate public opinion, and create a whole significantly less than the sum of its parts.

A second concern—in the Trump view—is that the European Union is too German. As some on the president’s team see it, German preferences mean the Continent is too hawkish when it comes to monetary and fiscal policy, and too dovish when it comes to defense. A fiscal and monetary straitjacket has cramped Europe’s growth, while the refusal of Germany to live up to its NATO commitments weakens the alliance as a whole.

A third concern is that the EU is too liberal—in the American meaning of the term, which is to say too statist on economics and too progressive on social issues. Besides the common American conservative view that statist economic policy undermines European dynamism and growth, Mr. Trump seems to believe European migration policy—especially Chancellor Angela Merkel’s 2015 decision to welcome more than a million mostly Muslim migrants to Germany—is a tragic mistake.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Germany’s Coalition of the Dwindling Realignment is reshaping politics even in staid Berlin.

Posted By on June 4th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/germanys-coalition-of-the-dwindling-11559594595

Germans are said to love political stability, but apparently not too much. After delivering shock results in recent elections for the European Parliament and a state government in Bremen, Germans can now watch traditional parties decline before their eyes.

The crisis is most acute for the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), whose leader Andrea Nahles resigned Sunday. The SPD suffered a drubbing in the European vote last month, placing third with 16% compared to 2014’s close second-place finish of 27%. On the same day the party also lost control in Bremen for the first time since the war.

It’s the latest sign of the center-left identity crisis that’s set in during repeated stints in a left-right governing coalition with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s center-right Christian Democrats (the CDU and Bavarian CSU). Those coalitions prevent the SPD from acting as a true opposition party, leaving that task to others. The winners have been the Greens who increasingly capture urban, more prosperous former SPD voters, and the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) that appeals to parts of the SPD’s former blue-collar base.

Ms. Nahles is taking the fall for these poor showings, although it isn’t clear who could do better. The party is split on issues ranging from migration to labor reform. Many grass-roots members are still uneasy about the decision to form another “GroKo” (German shorthand for a grand coalition) after the party performed poorly in the 2017 national election. Yet those vying to replace her, such as Finance Minister Olaf Scholz, are conspicuously quiet about what they’d do differently on policy or politics.

HISTORY Comments turned off

The life of gay, Jewish bullfighter Sidney Franklin By Josefin Dolsten

Posted By on June 4th, 2019

https://www.jta.org/2019/06/03/culture/the-life-of-gay-jewish-bullfighter-sidney-franklin

Excerpts….

The bullfighting world of the 1920s and ’30s, Sidney Franklin was defined not only by his Americanness, elegance or tough-guy personality but also by his Jewishness. The first American to reach the status of a matador in Spain, he was nicknamed “El Torero de la Torah,” or “the Torah bullfighter.”

But Franklin had a complicated relationship with his Jewish identity. Born Sidney Frumkin in an Orthodox Jewish family in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood, the matador-to-be often clashed with his traditional father. The fact that he was gay (although not openly so) made him feel even more alienated from his religion.

At the age of 19, Franklin left Brooklyn for Mexico. It was there that he discovered his love for bullfighting, learning from the prominent torero Rodolfo Gaona. He seemed unfazed by the dangers of the bloody sport.

“If you’ve got guts,” Franklin once said, “you can do anything.”

Moving to Spain to pursue his passion, he rose to fame in part because of his bullfighting skills and the circles he frequented.

In 1929, Franklin met Ernest Hemingway. The celebrated author became a close friend and wrote about Franklin in his book “Death of the Afternoon,” which explores the bullfighting tradition.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Why Are America’s Socialists — and Democrats and Journalists — Always So Angry?

Posted By on June 3rd, 2019

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/06/03/why-are-americas-socialists-and-democrats-and-journalists-always-so-angry/

“The Left’s anger and seething resentment of the achievements of Western civilization is puzzling, especially when it’s directed toward America, and American institutions and traditions. To borrow the words of President Reagan in his first Inaugural address, no other nation has “achieved so much.” We have “prospered as no other people on Earth.” “Freedom and the dignity of the individual,” said the 40th president, “have been more available and assured here than in any other place on Earth.”

Bernie Sanders is mad. He fulminates about the abundance of consumer choices, such as “23 underarm spray deodorants” and “18 different pairs of sneakers.” He rails against credit card companies because he thinks their interest rates are too high. He thunders over the prices Americans pay for prescription drugs.

The Democratic senator from Vermont, who is truly a socialist, having campaigned for a Marxist group in the 1980s, is perpetually upset with the way private banks conduct their business, and forever enraged at corporations for making profits. When he speaks, he comes off as that bitter man who shakes his fist at those darned neighborhood kids. There’s a reason Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and others have called Sanders the “crazy uncle in the attic.” He’s mad because everyone won’t do as he says.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is another angry democratic socialist. She rages when her sophomoric Green New Deal is questioned. She was incensed when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announced he was going to let the Senate vote on her legislation. She’s annoyed that cauliflower is grown in urban gardens, apparently because it’s a “colonial” vegetable. Columnist Peggy Noonan said Ocasio-Cortez was “sullen, teenage and at a loss” during President Trump’s State of the Union address. Her very manner is that of someone who is mad at the world and is always just seconds away from lashing out.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren carries anger around with her like a purse — it’s always there within easy reach. She’s “mad as hell at the influence of money in Washington, D.C.,” and is equally venomous toward Wall Street. Other things that make her furious: Congress’ reluctance to “refinance student loan interest rates” (whatever they are); “billions of dollars” in private sector profits; billionaires in general; the minimum wage.