BOOKS Comments turned off

Orwell and the Anti-Totalitarian Left in the Age of Trump written by Matt Johnson

Posted By on December 11th, 2018

https://quillette.com/2018/12/09/orwell-and-the-anti-totalitarian-left

In his review of Pascal Bruckner’s new book, An Imaginary Racism: Islamophobia and Guilt, Nick Cohen begins with a denunciation of the contemporary Left’s obsession with identity politics and “willingness to excuse antisemitism, misogyny, tyranny, and obscurantism, as long as the antisemitic, misogynistic, tyrannical obscurantists are anti-Western.” Cohen acknowledges that Bruckner has been among the most penetrating analysts of the Left’s moral and intellectual decline in the twenty-first century, recalling that he described Bruckner’s The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism as a “brilliant defence of liberalism and a deservedly contemptuous assault on all those intellectuals who have betrayed its best values.”

However, Cohen now thinks Bruckner’s animus toward the Left has propelled him to the Right, arguing that he fails to “extend his opposition to Islamism to cover the purveyors of anti-Muslim bigotry,” uses the “language of demagogues and civil war,” and displays the “ethnic favouritism and intellectual double-standards of the counter-Enlightenment.” Cohen also laments Bruckner’s sparse commentary on right-wing populist and nationalist movements in Europe and the United States:

At no point would the uninformed reader [of An Imaginary Racism] guess that Law and Justice controls Poland, Fidesz controls Hungary, the Northern League is in power in Italy, and Donald Trump is president of the United States. Meanwhile, if Bruckner shows his concern about Marine le Pen making it to the final round of the French presidential election I must have missed the reference.

In his response to Cohen’s “caustic” and “intemperate” review, Bruckner explains that he doesn’t criticize the Left out of sympathy for the Right—he does so because he expects “more of a Left that was traditionally critical of religion and has now retreated into moral relativity.” Bruckner also points out that it’s possible to be an opponent of right-wing populism and Islamism at the same time: “To believe that we can combat one danger while surrendering to another is to nurse an illusion—this is not the first time in history that we have had to fight enemies on multiple fronts.” But he notes that “my new monograph is not about the rise of European neo-populism … Cohen’s complaint seems to be that I didn’t write a different book entirely.”

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

SAD RADICALS: BY CONOR BARNES

Posted By on December 11th, 2018

https://quillette.com/2018/12/11/sad

“Most of all, radicals should learn to abandon false truths. The only way to escape dogmatism is to resist the calcification and sanctification of values, and to learn from the wisdom of different perspectives. As Haidt argues, there are grains of truth in opposing political positions. Radicals do themselves a disservice by seeing the world of thought outside the radical monoculture as tainted with reaction and evil. There is a rich diversity of thought awaiting them if they would only open their minds to it.”

…..When I became an anarchist I was 18, depressed, anxious, and ready to save the world. I moved in with other anarchists and worked at a vegetarian co-op cafe. I protested against student tuition, prison privatization, and pipeline extensions. I had lawyer’s numbers sharpied on my ankle and I assisted friends who were pepper-sprayed at demos. I tabled zines, lived with my “chosen family,” and performed slam poems about the end of the world. While my radical community was deconstructing gender, monogamy, and mental health, we lived and breathed concepts and tools like call-outs, intersectionality, cultural appropriation, trigger warnings, safe spaces, privilege theory, and rape culture.

What is a radical community? For the purposes of this article, I will define it as a community that shares both an ideology of complete dissatisfaction with existing society due to its oppressive nature and a desire to radically alter or destroy that society because it cannot be redeemed by its own means. I eventually fell out with my own radical community. The ideology and the people within it had left me a burned and disillusioned wreck. As I deprogrammed, I watched a diluted version of my radical ideology explode out of academia and become fashionable: I watched the Left become woke.

Commentators have skewered social justice activists on the toxicity of the woke mindset. This is something that many radicals across North America are aware of and are trying to understand. Nicholas Montgomery and Carla Bergman’s Joyful Militancy (JM), published last year, is the most thorough look at radical toxicity from a radical perspective (full disclosure: I very briefly met Nick Montgomery years ago. My anarchist clique did not like his anarchist clique). As they say, “there is a mild totalitarian undercurrent not just in call-out culture but also in how progressive communities police and define the bounds of who’s in and who’s out.”

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Indivisible Jerusalem belongs to Israel by Peter Smith *****

Posted By on December 11th, 2018

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/12/indivisible-jerusalem-belongs-to-israel/

Jewish Jerusalem is a shining symbol of our Judeo-Christian civilisation’s origin. Out of it has flowed individual freedom, a culture of tolerance and decency, science, technology, capitalism and prosperity. Nothing matches it — except in the inverse, the refusal to recognise the city as Israel’s rightful capital.

O come, O come, Emmanuel
And ransom captive Israel

These are the first two lines of a well-known hymn which opened the service at my local Anglican church on Sunday last. It is apparently taken from a 9th-century Latin hymn. I assume it is no accident that Muslim invaders were occupying Jerusalem at the time. But it doesn’t matter whether that linkage is historically true, it is incidental to my theme which is that Israel and the people of Israel — to wit the Jews, distinctly not Palestinian Arabs — figure prominently in Christianity and in Western civilisation.

Jesus, the Apostles, Saint Paul were part of a Jewish population long occupying the land to the west of the Jordan River, including Jerusalem. They were not interlopers. The interlopers came later via conquest. Imams did not go barefoot into the unknown carrying copies of the Koran to proselytize by sweet reason.

But step back. Conquest was the name of the game for much of the history of mankind. It is useless to attach blame based on recent norms. That leaves us to make a judgment call. Who should ‘we’ recognise as being the rightful owners of the city of Jerusalem. Leave aside the broader question of the rightful geographical boundaries of Israel; though it has strong historical claims to all of Judaea and Samaria (the West Bank), which it currently occupies.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Airbnb unfairly sides with Palestinians in West Bank BY Lawrence J. Haas

Posted By on December 11th, 2018

https://www.sacbee.com/news/news-services/article222709440.html

“We are most certainly not the experts when it comes to the historical disputes in this region,” Airbnb stated in announcing that it would no longer list rentals by Israeli citizens in the West Bank. Arbnb’s modesty is commendable, but its ignorance is insidious.

Its policy for the West Bank subjects Israel to a singular global standard and reflects an all-too-common narrative about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. By empowering one-sided Israel-haters, it also makes peace less likely, not more.

The West Bank is obviously disputed territory, but Airbnb sees the dispute only through Palestinian eyes.

After all, it isn’t leaving the West Bank. If you want a place to rent there, you can use Airbnb to find one that’s owned by a Christian or a Muslim. You just can’t find any of the 200 or so owned by an Israeli Jew.

Airbnb concluded that “Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank” are “at the core of the dispute between Israelis and Palestinians.”

So, Airbnb believes, what’s not “at the core of the dispute” is the rejection of Israel’s right to exist that’s broadly shared among Palestinians and their leaders; or the incitement to violence against Jews on Palestinian TV and social media; or textbooks that teach Palestinian school children that a future Palestine should encompass all of what’s now Israel; or Palestinian claims that Jews have no historical ties to key religious sites in Jerusalem.

MEDIA, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Guardian, Tommy Robinson, and Me Britain’s top rag uncovers a nonexisent “global network”. Bruce Bawer

Posted By on December 11th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272200/guardian-tommy-robinson-and-me-bruce-bawer

Damn it, the Guardian is on to us. On Friday, Britain’s most important, or rather self-important, newspaper ran a piece headlined “Revealed: the hidden global network behind Tommy Robinson.”

Move over, Pentagon Papers.

Clearly, this is Pulitzer Prize-level journalism – although, unfortunately, Brits are ineligible for that particular distinction. Obviously, the Guardian reporters in question – Josh Halliday, Lois Beckett, and Caelainn Barr – have stumbled upon that obscure and highly sophisticated research tool known as Google. And through Google, they’ve uncovered the sensational, previously unnoticed fact that two “US thinktanks…have published a succession of articles in support of Robinson,” while a third U.S. think tank has – gasp! – helped pay for Tommy’s legal fees.

These three think tanks, the Guardian scribes assert, “have been repeatedly accused of stoking anti-Islam sentiment in the west and spreading false information about Muslim refugees in Europe.” (Among the institutions that have been in the forefront of making these baseless accusations, unsurprisingly, is the Guardian itself.) The Guardian writers further contend that Tommy’s support from these “prominent and well-financed groups undermines Robinson’s self-styled image of a far-right populist underdog whose anti-Islam agenda is being silenced by the British establishment.”

Hold on a second and take a look at that last sentence. Has Tommy really sought to style an image for himself as a “far-right” activist? Who on earth would do that? Or has he constantly denied, quite correctly, that there’s anything “far-right” about him? This is journalism at its shabbiest. As for his being “silenced by the British establishment” – no, he hasn’t exactly been silenced. This Guardian article itself is a perfect illustration of the fact that he has, rather, been smeared, maligned, defamed, vilified, calumniated, misquoted, misinterpreted, and misrepresented by that establishment. Consistently.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Brexit Retreat Opens Door For BoJo Boris Johnson, our diarist reckons, has earned the chance to try to bring home a Brexit deal. by Stephen MacLean

Posted By on December 11th, 2018

https://www.nysun.com/foreign/brexit-retreat-opens-door-for-bojo/90492/

Prime Minister Theresa May’s retreat on Brexit is best seen as an opening for her former foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, who is the last contender for prime minister to have seen the European Union question clearly from the start. What Mrs. May is doing, after all, is what Mr. Johnson proposed, once it became so clear to so many that she had been snookered in Brussels.

What Mrs. May did in the Commons this afternoon was to announce that she was postponing Tuesday’s vote on the Government’s Withdrawal Agreement bill with the European Union. “While there is broad support for many of the key aspects of the deal,” Mrs. May confessed, “there remains widespread and deep concern.”

The Prime Minister made it clear she comprehends that had she proceeded, “the deal would be rejected by a significant margin.” In the context, it is a breath-taking admission by a leader who’d seemed almost willfully blind on the point. Now, she said, the Government “will therefore defer the vote scheduled for tomorrow and not proceed to divide the House at this time.”

It is easy to see why Mrs. May is vote-shy. Just last week, after all, the government lost three votes. Two were in relation to the legal advice the government had received on the agreement. Parliament had asked for the advice in November but, when only a summary was provided, the Commons demanded the full report.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Report: Women’s March Leaders Spread Anti-Semitic Trope During Inaugural Meeting By Jack Crowe

Posted By on December 11th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/report-womens-march-leaders-spread-anti-semitic-trope-during-inaugural-meeting/

Women’s March leaders Tamikah Mallory and Carmen Perez endorsed an infamous anti-Semitic trope during the group’s first meeting in November 2016, according to a wide-ranging report published by Tablet on Tuesday

Mallory and Perez “asserted that Jewish people bore a special collective responsibility as exploiters of black and brown people — and even, according to a close secondhand source, claimed that Jews were proven to have been leaders of the American slave trade,” the report says.

Mallory and Perez, who were invited to join the Women’s March soon after Trump’s election because the movement’s white founders felt they needed greater diversity among their leadership, deny discussing Jewish people in any capacity during the meeting in question.

As the report notes, the thoroughly debunked notion that Jewish people organized and profited from American chattel slavery was popularized by the Nation of Islam’s book, The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, which casts Jews as a historic oppressor of black people.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Britain’s Brexit Self-Abasement By Rich Lowry

Posted By on December 11th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/12/theresa-may-brexit-plan-haphazard-provisional/

May’s Brexit is becoming increasingly haphazard and provisional.

Shakespeare famously wrote of the “sceptered isle” of Britain acting as a moat “against the envy of less happier lands.”

Lately, the less happier lands are winning in a rout.

Britain is suffering a political meltdown as it struggles to make good on a historic vote in 2016 to leave the European Union. The decision for a so-called Brexit was a stirring statement of independence and self-government by a people who have defined themselves down the centuries by their stiff-necked resistance to anyone — whether overweening monarchs or continental tyrants — who would threaten either.

That was before London ran up against the bureaucracy of the would-be European super state based in Brussels, and before it was led, if that’s the right word, by Tory Prime Minister Theresa May.

Presiding over a divided party, facing a pro-Remain British establishment and negotiating with a hostile EU, May never had an easy task. She has nonetheless not only failed to rise to the occasion but been crushed by it.

May has just pulled her Brexit deal from a parliamentary vote that she was going to lose in an embarrassing drubbing that might have loosed her increasingly precarious grip on power.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Fighting Democrats’ Dirty Politics By Karin McQuillan

Posted By on December 11th, 2018

https://amgreatness.com/2018/12/10/fighting

The midterms are in the rearview mirror and the chattering classes are back to debating fake collusion with Russia and a looming indictment of the president. Before the midterms, Republican voters were told this election was consequential. After the midterms, we’re told it is just one more split-government election, move along.

I’m not moving along so easily, and neither is my circle of patriotic MAGA friends.

Losing the House of Representatives was a crippling blow on immigration, the cornerstone of the Democrats’ drive to permanent domination. Any hopes of Democrats accepting Trump’s 2016 victory as normal politics is dead, and now they have Congress from which to harry and hobble the president.

Democrats have dehumanized Trump and all his supporters as white supremacists, in order to justify violence against our republican foundations. Since inauguration day they have undermined respect for the presidential election, the Supreme Court, the electoral college, freedom of speech and religion and the right to bear arms. Democrats claim these hallowed institutions are bringing on fascism.

Danger lights should be going off in every decent person’s mind. We are not in a terrain of politics as usual, but in a new and terrifying world of the hard Left.

Democrats justify their crossing every line of normal political behavior in America by manufacturing a Russian crisis out of thin air. The only “crisis” is that Republicans won an election, fair and square.

The Three Rules of Democrat Dirty Politics 101

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Terrorism Charges: Coming Soon for New Mexico Jihadists? Feds say a superseding indictment is on the way. Matthew Vadum

Posted By on December 11th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272207/terrorism-charges-coming-soon-new-mexico-jihadists-matthew-vadum

The five accused Muslim terrorists arrested at a jihadist training facility in New Mexico this summer will soon be charged with “terrorism and or kidnapping” in addition to the current firearms charges already pending, according to federal prosecutors.

This is the case in which five adults, including Siraj Ibn Wahhaj, were arrested after authorities found 11 hungry, filthy children living in squalid conditions in a terrorist training compound in Amalia, Taos County, a remote part of New Mexico on Aug. 3. The children were reportedly being trained to commit school shootings.

The remains of a three-year-old disabled boy, since identified as Wahhaj’s son, Abdul-Ghani Wahhaj, were discovered on the property which was filled with weapons. Authorities also found a manual explaining how to carry out terrorist attacks and fight hand-to-hand.

According to investigators, Abdul-Ghani died during a ruqyah, which is an Islamic rite of exorcism, in early 2018, after the boy’s father, Siraj Ibn Wahhaj and Leveille refused to give him epilepsy medication, which they claimed caused him to become “possessed.” He reportedly cried and foamed at the mouth during the ritual which was performed for hours each day until he died.