HISTORY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

‘Asabiyah…Or, Another Prolonged Wandering In The Desert? by Gerald A. Honigman

Posted By on November 12th, 2018

http://www.geraldahonigman.com/blog/
Spend some time on many-to-most university campuses these days; read or listen to numerous Jewish commentators and editorialists in the mainstream media dealing with Israel and the Middle East.

With rare exceptions, you’ll be hard pressed finding Jews (let alone others) who have not succumbed to the pressure to adopt one set of standards by which Israel and Zionism is studied and judged, and another entirely different set by which the rest of the Middle East and North Africa—indeed, the rest of the world–is scrutinized.

Frequently, Jewish organizations (J Street U, Jewish Voice For Peace, and too many others–including Hillel, at times) are prominent, or at least collaborative, in partaking in the one-sided Israel and Zionism-bashing goings on of other groups like Students for Justice in Palestine, the Muslim Students Association, radical Leftists, and so forth https://ekurd.net/students-justice-palestine-2018-07-05.

While starry-eyed, naïve students learn about the admittedly imperfect quest of Jews to cast off their millennial victim, scapegoat, and whipping post status, they’ll neither hear nor read anything about the plights of scores of millions of other non-Arab peoples in the region. They won’t find, for example, a local chapter of Students for Justice in Kurdistan or for the Kabyle or Amazigh (Berber”) people, whose programs they can attend. And they won’t find a post-Zionist, “Progressive” Hebrew or other professor mentioning anything about them either https://kabylia.wordpress.com/2017/09/19/berber-autumn/.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Clueless Alert: Macron Says He Needs An Army To Defend France From The United States By Douglas V. Mastriano

Posted By on November 12th, 2018

http://thefederalist.com/2018/11/12/clueless-alert-macron-says-needs-army-defend-france-united-states/
The idea that Europe needs an army to defend itself against the United States demonstrates a hitherto unknown level of hostility by an ‘allied’ leader.

Displaying a dazzling lack of connection with reality and utter contempt for the United States, last week French President Emmanuel Macron called for creating an independent European army.

“We have to protect ourselves with respect to China, Russia, and even the United States of America,” he said. Such a thought is not new in France. However, the idea that Europe needs an army to defend itself against the United States demonstrates a hitherto unknown level of hostility by an “allied” leader.

The timing of Macron’s remarks is also baffling. He said this just days before the centennial commemoration of the end of the First World War. One hundred years ago, the United States of America deployed 2.1 million men to Europe to expel the German Imperial Army from France, Belgium, and Luxembourg. The war was nearly lost to the Germans in 1917 after the French army mutinied and Czarist Russia quit the war as a result of the Bolshevik (Communist) Revolution.
Thousands of Americans Died to Save France

After the bloody losses of Verdun and the blunders at the Somme in 1916, there was no way the Allies could win the war without the might and power of the United States. One of America’s largest and bloodiest campaigns in its history was the Meuse Argonne Offensive, which began on September 26, 1918 and lasted until the Germans signed an armistice to end the war on November 11, 1918.

The American Expeditionary Forces, under the command of Gen. John “Blackjack” Pershing, were asked to attack the most heavily fortified and thickly defended part of the Western Front between the Meuse River and the ancient Argonne Forest. This would threaten German supply lines and thereby draw off their strategic reserve divisions.

The Americans attacked and paid dearly in blood, suffering 20,000 casualties a week so that the British and French armies further to the north could break through. What Macron conveniently forgets is that without the United States giving so generously of its sons and treasure, Paris would have been captured by Imperial Germany and the war lost. Today, more than 30,000 American men rest in six military cemeteries as silent witnesses to the sacrifice the United States paid to deliver France from Germany in 1918.

POLITICS Comments turned off

The Dan Crenshaw Moment By David French

Posted By on November 12th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/11/dan-crenshaw-forgives-pete-davidson-saturday-night-live/There’s a market for grace in American politics.

Given the spirit of our times, things could have gone so differently. On November 3, when Saturday Night Live comic Pete Davidson mocked Texas Republican Dan Crenshaw’s eye patch, saying he looked like a “hit man in a porno movie” — then adding, “I know he lost his eye in war or whatever” — it was a gift from the partisan gods.

A liberal comic had gone too far. He had mocked a man who was maimed in a horrific IED attack, an attack that had taken the life of his interpreter and nearly blinded him for life. He mocked a courageous man’s pain. And thus Crenshaw had attained the rarest position for a Republican politician: aggrieved-victim status. He was free to swing away.

Instead, he refused to be offended. He noted that the joke was bad, but his handling of the whole affair was — as the Washington Post described him — “cool as a cucumber.” Then Saturday Night Live called. The show wanted to apologize, and they wanted Crenshaw on-air. He said yes, and this happened:

It was the act of grace heard ’round the nation. Davidson came on the “Weekend Update” set and offered his apology, and then Crenshaw joined. He took some good-natured shots at Davidson — Crenshaw’s phone had an Ariana Grande ringtone (Grande recently broke her engagement with Davidson), and he mocked Davidson’s appearance — but then things took a more serious turn.

MEDIA Comments turned off

Vogue Claims ‘White Women’ Are Voting ‘Against Their Own Interests’ by Voting Republican By Faith Moore…See note please

Posted By on November 12th, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/trending/vogue-claims-white-women-are-voting-against-their-own-interests-by-voting-republican/

“In February, 2012 Vogue magazine published, for the benefit of its 11.7 million readers, an article titled “A Rose in the Desert” about the first lady of Syria. Asma al-Assad has British roots, wears designer fashion, worked for years in banking, and is married to the dictator Bashar al-Assad, whose regime has killed over 5,000 civilians and hundreds of children this year. The glowing article praised the Assads as a “wildly democratic” family-focused couple who vacation in Europe, foster Christianity, are at ease with American celebrities, made theirs the “safest country in the Middle East,” and want to give Syria a “brand essence.”

If you want to know how out of touch progressives have become, look no further than Vogue magazine. In an article for the magazine published last week, contributing editor Michelle Ruiz asks this mind-numbingly obtuse question: “Why do white women keep voting for the GOP and against their own interests?” How, Ruiz wants to know, could women possibly vote for candidates who are “passionately pro-life” over candidates who are “staunch protector[s] of women’s reproductive rights”? Surely, Ruiz laments, all women ought to be in favor of “a right to health care, to choose what’s best for our bodies, [and] that our children should be safe at school” (in other words, abortion rights and gun control). Voting against these things, Ruiz says, is “unsisterly.”

The complete and utter refusal of progressives to understand that there might be other legitimate viewpoints than their own would be fascinating if it wasn’t so infuriating. Do Vogue, and Vox, and Cargle, and Eltahawy, and countless others who share their views truly not understand that people might disagree with them? Do they really not know that some women believe that a pro-life stance (or support for the Second Amendment) is pro-woman? Or even that, for many women, a vagina isn’t actually their defining feature? It seems like they actually don’t understand this.

In her article, Ruiz tries to come up with reasons why white women would vote for GOP candidates. “Are they so invested in their own white privilege that they simply don’t care about other women? Are they parroting their Republican husbands and/or brainwashed by Fox & Friends?” Or are they simply “protecting their own power and status”? That’s it, according to Ruiz, those are the choices. White women are either uncaring evil trolls hell-bent on hoarding their own privilege and power, or they’re oppressed victims brainwashed by the patriarchy. Ruiz doesn’t even entertain a third option — doesn’t mention it in her article at all — that these women might just disagree. Tolerance, it seems, does not extend to those who think differently.

MEDIA Comments turned off

The Voice of the ‘Intellectual Dark Web’ Claire Lehmann’s online magazine, Quillette, prides itself on publishing ‘dangerous’ ideas other outlets won’t touch. How far is it willing to go? By AMELIA LESTER

Posted By on November 12th, 2018

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/11/11/intellectual-dark-web-quillette-claire-lehmann-221917

One evening this fall at a house in West Hollywood, the Australian editor and writer Claire Lehmann had dinner with the neuroscientist Sam Harris and Eric Weinstein, the managing director of tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel’s investment firm. Joe Rogan, the podcast host, joined later on, when the group decamped to a comedy club.

You could think of the gathering as a board meeting of sorts for the “intellectual dark web,” or IDW, a loose cadre of academics, journalists and tech entrepreneurs who view themselves as standing up to the knee-jerk left-leaning politics of academia and the media. Over the past year, the IDW has arisen as a puzzling political force, made up of thinkers who support “Enlightenment values” and accuse the left of setting dangerously illiberal limits on acceptable thought. The IDW has defined itself mainly by diving into third-rail topics like the genetics of gender and racial difference—territory that seems even more fraught in the era of #MeToo and the Trump resistance. But part of the attraction of the IDW is the sense that many more people agree with its principles than can come forward publicly: The dinner host on this night, Lehmann says, was a famous person she would prefer not to name.

Over steaks, Lehmann recalls, the conversation revolved around a brewing academic scandal, a prank engineered by friends of hers. They had successfully placed seven nonsensical research papers in various academic journals devoted to what they characterized as “grievance studies.” One of the papers included a lengthy passage from Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, rewritten to focus on feminism and intersectionality. Another was about rape culture in dog parks. Absurd as the papers were, they had been accepted by expert editors and published as serious research. For those in attendance, it was a ringing confirmation of just how politicized academia had become, and how blindly devoted to fashionable moralities.

It was also a big story for Quillette, the online magazine Lehmann runs and the unofficial digest of the IDW. Lehmann had known about the prank before the Wall Street Journal broke the news, and she had some time to formulate a response that would fan the flames. “I wanted the public to be aware that there are many people within the academy who are fed up with grievance studies scholarship,” says Lehmann, who went on to publish responses from five like-minded academics—one of whom called the incident “a Cultural Revolution in our own backyard.”

POLITICS Comments turned off

Mike Allen Democrats load “subpoena cannon” with 85+ Trump targets

Posted By on November 12th, 2018

https://www.axios.com/house-democrats-subpoenas-trump-administration-cf3ed351-ff11-4498-89f4-cee588145198.html

House Democrats plan to probe every aspect of President Trump’s life and work, from family business dealings, the Space Force and his tax returns to possible “leverage” by Russia, top Democrats tell us.

What they’re saying: One senior Democratic source said the new majority, which takes power in January, is preparing a “subpoena cannon,” like an arena T-shirt cannon.

Based on our reporting and other public sources, Axios’ Zach Basu has assembled a list of at least 85 potential Trump-related investigation and subpoena targets for the new majority. (See the list.)

Incoming House Intelligence chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) told “Axios on HBO” that he expects Trump to resist the committees’ requests, demands and subpoenas — likely pushing fights over documents and testimony as far as the Supreme Court.

Why it matters: The fight will test the power of the presidency, Congress and the Supreme Court.

Top Democrats, who had largely avoided the subject during the campaign, now tell us they plan to almost immediately begin exploring possible grounds for impeachment. A public report by Robert Mueller would ignite the kindling.

Tom Steyer, the liberal activist who spent more than $100 million during the campaign to build support for impeachment, said establishment leaders who are trying to postpone talk of impeachment are “the outliers”: “80% of registered Democrats think … we’re right.”

Two of the most powerful incoming chairs tell “Axios on HBO” that they are plotting action far beyond Russian interference in the 2016 elections.

1) Schiff, the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, told us he wants to help special counsel Robert Mueller and plans to release — with some redactions of classified material — transcripts of dozens of interviews the committee conducted during its own Russia probe.

POLITICS Comments turned off

More Women in Congress, But Was It a Pink Wave? . By Adele Malpass

Posted By on November 12th, 2018

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2018/11/12/more_women_in_congress_but_was_it_a_pink_wave_138629.html

The 2018 election season was billed as the Year of the Woman, but was there a “pink wave” to match the hype? With results from the midterms (mostly) tabulated, the election indeed resulted in a new high-water mark for women in the House — an increase of 15 seats from 85 in 2016 to at least 100 in 2018 — though some observers are hesitant to use the term “wave.”

“All along, we’ve been pushing back on the expectation that any single election would be a ‘wave’ or a ‘tsunami’ for women,” said Kelly Dittmar, a scholar at the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. She added, “It’s taken us a long time to get even here.”

In the Senate, the change will be more modest (or possibly remain flat). Claire McCaskill and Heidi Heitkamp lost; Jacky Rosen and Marsha Blackburn won, and either Martha McSally or Kyrsten Sinema will represent Arizona. If Cindy Hyde-Smith — who was appointed to the seat of Thad Cochran this spring — wins her Mississippi run-off election on Nov. 27, the number in the chamber will rise by one to 24.

Overall, of the women elected to both houses, 34 were new faces, which tops the record set in 1992, when 28 non-incumbent women were victorious. In the end, the Year of the Woman will result in a female representation on Capitol Hill of 23 percent, up from 20 percent.

As the midterms approached, the message from women’s advocates morphed “The Year of the Woman” to “The Year of Firsts.” For the first time, Native American and Muslim women were elected. Also for the first time, Alaska, Mississippi, North Dakota, Iowa and Vermont will be sending women to the House.

By other measures, it also was a milestone election season. A record number of women filed to run for office, and the amount of money raised by women for women was also an all-time high. From a political standpoint, these numbers were lopsided, since most of “the firsts” were achieved by Democrats. “Democrats have a more robust recruitment process and a network of organization to support their candidates,” said Dittmar.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The Virtues of Nationalism Can civic equality and national unity prove mutually reinforcing?Reihan Salam

Posted By on November 12th, 2018

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/11/why-nationalism-better-cultural-pluralism/575458/

We all have books that have influenced how we make sense of the world. One of my favorites is Polyethnicity and National Unity in World History, a short book by the Canadian American historian William McNeill that was first published in 1985. I recently learned that McNeill died in the summer of 2016, not long after Britain voted to leave the European Union and shortly before Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. It occurs to me that McNeill would have had a great deal to say about the reassertion of nationalism around the world, and I regret that he is not here to share his thoughts with us. This is not because I expect that McNeill would echo my own beliefs—indeed, I am confident he would not—but rather because his work might help reorient our perspective.

Though McNeill was very much a skeptic of nationalism, he taught me, in a roundabout way, to appreciate its virtues. Critics of nationalism often point to the fact that it is a relatively novel doctrine, and they’re not wrong to do so. What they tend to neglect, however, is that the same can be said of nationalism’s chief rival: the ideal of a cultural pluralism that is bereft of hierarchy. In liberal circles, “nationalism” is typically understood as a divisive, exclusionary force, usually in implicit contrast with some form of cultural pluralism, and so to identify as a nationalist is to declare oneself a chauvinist.

But as McNeill suggests, nationalism can be understood as a unifying alternative to a society built on polyethnic hierarchy, in which a series of hereditary ethnic castes live together in uneasy peace, usually with some dominating the others. It is polyethnic hierarchy that has been the norm throughout modern history, not national unity or egalitarian pluralism. One could argue that the dream of pluralism without hierarchy is at least as chimerical as that of an egalitarian nationalism built on the melting and fusing together of once-distinct groups, if not far more so. McNeill’s stylized history gives us a sense of what we’re up against as we try to build decent and humane societies amidst entrenched ethnic divisions, and why so many modern thinkers have embraced the politics of national unity.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

HERBERT LONDON, INTELLECTUAL, CONSERVATIVE LUMINARY AND FRIEND

Posted By on November 12th, 2018

Conservative luminary Herb London passes away at age 79

NEW YORK – November 11, 2018 – Dr. Herbert I. London, Ph.D., founder of the London Center for Policy Research, former dean of New York University’s Gallatin Division, and leading American conservative intellectual passed away last night after a coronary ailment. He was 79.

Dr. London was born in Brooklyn in 1939. Reaching 6’5″, he led Jamaica High School to a citywide basketball championship. He played hoops at Columbia University and was drafted by the NBA’s Syracuse Nationals, although an injury kept him from playing professionally. He enjoyed a hit rock & roll record in 1959, and went on to a highly distinguished career as an academic and conservative activist. The author of 30 books on public affairs was a widely beloved fixture on the local, state, national, and global stages.

Dr. London ran for mayor of New York City in 1989. He was the Conservative Party nominee for governor of New York in 1990 and finished just 1 percent behind GOP standard bearer Pierre Rinfret. Dr. London was the Republican Party’s nominee for state comptroller in 1994.

After founding NYU’s Great Books-oriented Gallatin Division in 1972 and leading it until 1992, he ran several think tanks. He was president of the Hudson Institute from 1997 to 2011 and was also chairman of the National Association of Scholars.

In 2013, Dr. London founded the London Center for Policy Research, which he guided until his death. This organization is the vessel through which he advanced U.S. national interests and enlightened our Republic’s leaders on the vital need to ensure that America remains the greatest nation on Earth. His deep understanding of our national fabric and his wish to support the aspirations of the American people have inspired the London Center to become this country’s premier “think and do” tank. Likewise, the London Center and its scholars provide thoughtful solutions to a variety of domestic and foreign-policy challenges.

“Herb’s dedication and commitment to America and furthering its place in the world stemmed from his deep-seated love for this country,” said Eli M. Gold, senior vice president of the London Center. “His patriotism was unsurpassed.”

“Herb was a Renaissance man’s Renaissance man,” said Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, the London Center’s vice president for strategic initiatives and operations. “In all aspects, he was a peerless scholar and visionary leader who knowledgeably and comfortably could discuss history, philosophy, art, science, and the latest baseball scores.”

“Herb was not only a spectacular leader, he was a good man,” said Laddyma Thompson, the London Center’s secretary and treasurer. “An amazing father to his three daughters, Stacy, Nancy and Jaclyn; an effective instructor to young people; a brilliant mentor to professionals, both fledgling and venerated; and a devoted husband to his wife, Vicki.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The War That Made the World We Live In by Mark Steyn

Posted By on November 12th, 2018

https://www.steynonline.com/8981/the-war-that-made-the-world-we-live-in

This is no ordinary Remembrance Day in the Commonwealth and much of Europe, and Veterans Day in the United States. Today we mark the one hundredth anniversary of the Armistice that brought to an end the most terrible war in history. Exactly a century ago – on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month – the guns fell silent on Europe’s battlefields. The belligerents had agreed the terms of the peace at 5am that November morning, and the news was relayed to the commanders in the field shortly thereafter that hostilities would cease at eleven o’clock. And then they all went back to firing at each other for a final six hours. On that last day, British imperial forces lost some 2,400 men, the French 1,170, the Germans 4,120, the Americans about 3,000. The dead in those last hours of the Great War outnumbered the toll of D Day twenty-six years later, the difference being that those who died in 1944 were fighting to win a war whose outcome they did not know. On November 11th 1918 over eleven thousand men fell in a conflict whose victors and vanquished had already been settled and agreed.

It was that kind of war. Four years earlier – at dusk on August 3rd 1914 – Sir Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary, stood at the window of his office in the summer dusk watching the lamplighters go about their daily business in the Whitehall gloaming. And then he made a remark that endured across the decades:

The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.

Grey died in 1933, a couple of months after Hitler outlawed all German political parties other than his own. But you could have lived a lot longer than Sir Edward, and still recognized the truth of his words – in France until 1945, in Hungary until 1989, and in the Middle East today, where we’re still dealing with the unfinished business of the Great War.

Edward Grey was Britain’s longest-serving Foreign Secretary, although, in contrast to contemporary foreign ministers, he had a modest appetite for foreigners: For his first eight years in the job, he never set foot abroad, and then only did so because he was obliged to accompany King George V on a State Visit to Paris in 1914. He served a prime minister, Asquith, who had little interest in foreign affairs and was unengaged by distant events in faraway places until late July of 1914 – by which time it was too late, and the great unraveling of world order had begun. Five years later, the German, Russian, Austrian and Turkish empires lay shattered, and in their ruins incubated Communism, Fascism and a hardcore post-Ottoman Islam. And in a more oblique sense the horrors of the trenches caused the ruling classes of the Great Powers to lose their civilizational confidence – and across a century they have never recovered it.