RUTHFULLY YOURS

Denounced by useful idiots, Australian novelist Peter Carey loudly in their vanguard, the author and Muslim apostate was accused of ‘Islamophobia”. This was ridiculous, as phobias are irrational fears and there is nothing unhinged in opposing the world’s most troublesome, aggressive and intolerant creed
Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now

by Ayaan Hirsi Ali HarperCollins, 2015, 320 pages, $29.99

Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s new book makes the case that the world is caught up in a conflagration comparable to the Cold War. As was the case during the Soviet-US showdown, this global confrontation will not be won my military means alone, since America “cannot afford to continue a war of ideals solely by military means”. Moreover, by averting our eyes to “the ideas that give rise to Islamist violence”, all we do is “ignore the root of the problem”. Heretic, then, constitutes Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s latest shot at addressing the ultimate hitch to world peace—Islamic jihadism.

In April last year, Brandeis University, Massachusetts, rescinded an offer to the Somali-born feminist to address a commencement ceremony and receive an honorary degree. Brandeis’s Muslim Students Association had ignited a social media firestorm, accusing Hirsi Ali of “Islamophobia” and the powers-that-be at Brandeis crumpled.

That wind farms are ugly is the least of the problems their heavily subsidised, rent-seeking promoters are inflicting on the rest of us. Quite apart from their damage to avian populations, the very process of manufacturing them generates a vast tonnage of toxic waste
Recently, Tony Abbott caused a stir with his entirely rational and reasonable observation that wind turbines are ugly — an opinion that further disturbed Fairfax opinion-page fixture Elizabeth Farelly, who countered that she likes ‘their whiteness and grandeur, and how they catch the morning light like so many celestial beings beamed across the landscape’. The obvious response, once one has recovered from exposure to such fly-blown prose, is that, while beauty will always be in the eye of the beholder, the bottom-line cost of extracting volts from zephyrs presents an irredeemably ugly mess of red ink.

Anthony Dillon identifies as a part-Aboriginal Australian who is proud of both his Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal ancestries. Originally from Queensland, he now lives in Sydney and is a researcher at the University of Western Sydney

The first and saddest reaction of far too many Indigenous activists and spokesmen is to see the past as a crushing burden, one that can only be lifted by profuse apologies and, the most recent demand, a re-written Constitution. It is an attitude no less destructive than delusional.

Many people have asserted that the problems Aborigines experience today are largely due to the influence of the past. Specifically, colonisation is assumed to be the cause of much of the suffering as James Cook University Associate Professor Gracelyn Smallwood has stated . Aboriginal people, she says, remain buirdened by “the trans-generational scourge of violent colonisation”. The Creative Spirits website takes up the same theme, blaming colonisation for causing “all the known social disadvantages and trauma.” Interestingly, despite a past said to be causing such havoc today, there are many Aboriginal people — many thousands in fact — who not only survive but thrive.

It was Palestinian who hurt themselves: When Israelis were not able to hire Palestinian workers, they simply turned to foreign workers, prefabricated construction and other industrial innovations.

If the boycott of goods made in the settlements is successful, thousands, if not tens of thousands of Palestinians will find themselves unemployed, hungry, and ripe for radicalization.

The world will never give up its computing, medical, agricultural and start-up products for us. The Israelis will continue to prosper. They have already found other markets.

Mahmoud Abbas is afraid of Hamas and afraid to enter the Gaza Strip. As a result of rumors that Hamas was working privately to reach a cease-fire agreement with Israel, Abbas is threatening to dissolve the national unity government.

We Palestinians continue to miss one opportunity after the other. Now, we are about to miss yet another opportunity for peace.

The guy who spent twenty years listening to Reverend Jeremiah Wright preach the gospel of racial hostility has decided it is just too much trouble to keep his black-on-white resentment all bottled up.

So the president put it on full display last week at the eulogy for the pastor who was a victim in the Charleston mass murder.

And what we saw was quite a bit different than the fresh-faced, new-vision, ‘put race behind us’ guy who electrified the country with his speech to the Democrat National Convention in 2004.

Remember that guy? “This is why you go into this business, to watch a speech like that.” said David Brooks on PBS immediately following the speech. “It’s a shame the networks aren’t covering this tonight because they just missed a bit of history.”

The left-wing media establishment is turning against Hillary Clinton.

It’s happening long after the rest of us understood that Mrs. Clinton bore a unique responsibility for the tragic and avoidable disaster in Benghazi that cost the lives of four brave Americans, so please: there is no need for applause. After all, the New York Times, the Washington Post, CBS Sixty Minutes, and NBC News are just doing their jobs. Finally.

Well, almost doing their jobs. For most of these, the Clinton “story” is all about process. As more emails turn up that Hillary “overlooked” when she scoured her personal server, the New York Times wonders if any serious discrepancy will emerge, and gives Hillary’s spokesperson’s effort to bury the story far more credit than he deserves.

The stereotyping of “Latino voters” and what it distracts us from.

Whenever the discussion on news programs turns to immigration and politics, invariably the issue of the “Latino Vote” will be raised within the first two sentences of the conversation. It is truly remarkable that the same participants in the discussions on programs who are quick to invoke the concept of block votes — such as the “Latino voters,” “black voters” or “Jewish Voters” — are just as quick to condemn any sort of profiling done by law enforcement.

A few other things to ban besides the Confederate flag .

The return of the Confederacy was averted in the summer of 2015 when major retailers frantically scoured through their vast offerings to purge any images of a car from the Dukes of Hazzard. If not for their quick thinking, armies of men in gray might have come marching down the streets of New York and San Francisco to stop off for an Iced Mocha Frappucino ™ at a local Starbucks before restoring slavery.

Yassin Salhi, who beheaded his boss and tried to blow up the chemical plant where he worked, is likely to face terrorism charges – yet despite a considerable amount of evidence to the contrary, he denies that he was motivated by jihad terror at all.

Reuters reported Monday that Salhi “told investigators he was not a jihadist and repeated earlier statements that he committed the act outside the southeast city of Lyon on Friday after a row with his wife the day before and his boss a few days earlier.” In response to these “personal difficulties,” he sawed off the head of Herve Cornara, his boss at the American company Air Products in Grenoble, and then hung it on a fence outside the plant, with black flags inscribed with the Islamic profession of faith on either side.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) upstaged ‘em all at a rally in Madison, Wis., on Wednesday night.

In fact, he put the number of people who showed up for Hillary Clinton’s official campaign announcement to shame.

Sanders nearly filled the Veterans Memorial Coliseum at the Alliant Energy Center, which seats 10,231 people; the Associated Press put a 10,000 estimate on the crowd. About 5,500 people were on New York’s Roosevelt Island for Clinton’s carefully orchestrated launch.