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December 2016

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Castro Worship’s Last Hurrah : Daniel Mandel

By on December 20th, 2016

What does it say about Messrs. Obama, Trudeau & Co. that their farewells to Fidel could have been voiced by communist toadies?

The retrospectives on Fidel Castro continue, even as the entombment of the Cuban dictator has passed. New photographic essays, retrospectives and interviews appear on our computer screens. So symbolic has this figure proved that I expect to see apologias and indictments into the New Year, if only because the former necessitate the latter.

Ponder the inability in some quarters to name unpleasant facts. President Obama never quite could bring himself to say “radical Islam” or to tell us what the “extremists” of which he spoke instead were extreme about. Here, he went a step further, silent on the ideology that animated Castro as well as the crimes to which they gave rise.

Indeed, the language deployed by some world leaders has been no more honest or creditable than that heaped upon Castro by veteran KGB stooges and communist fellow-travelers. Note the common resort to the purposely evasive, syrupy valedictory language normally reserved for the passing of a pioneering CEO or a charismatic motivational speaker — “powerful emotions” for someone who “altered the course of individual lives” (President Obama), “deep sorrow” for “a larger than life figure” (Canada’s Justin Trudeau), a “beacon of light,” an “absolute giant of the 20th century” (Marxist former London mayor Ken Livingstone), “a really great man” who “controlled things very firmly” (KGB agent of influence historian Richard Gott).

Note, too, the substitution of real or imagined successes to the exclusion of the dread, deadly deeds dispositive of the lives hundreds of thousands, if not millions. Nothing here of the show trials, the mass executions, the forced labor camps or the decades-long confinement of dissidents to windowless cells. Nothing of the 5,300 people killed resisting Castro’s forces; the one-fifth of Cubans who voted with their feet to escape totalitarian oppression; the lives of the still less fortunate 78,000 Cubans, lost in shark-infested waters fleeing in horror the only home they had known; the 14,000 Cubans killed in Castro’s wars abroad; the 6,800 politically motivated assassinations; the gulag of labor camps, known by their Spanish acronym UMAPs, holding tens of thousands for infractions as arbitrary as being gay, a Jehovah’s Witness or a Seven Day Adventist.

Indeed, the destruction of the lives of opponents was raised to a new virtue and the very concept of law explicitly subordinated to the enforcement of control through brute force. As Castro’s executioner, Che Guevara, put it, “To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary. These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution. And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate.” These were not the aberrant words of a maverick henchman. Castro himself put it no less forcefully: “revolutionary justice is not based on legal precepts, but on moral conviction.”

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THE BOUNTIES OF OBAMA’S WEAKNESS-JED BABBIN

By on December 20th, 2016

If you’ve already told Putin you won’t retaliate, why should he believe you now?
I hate the word “hacking.” It’s too vague, too innocent and wholly inadequate to describe how nations, terrorist networks, and others conduct espionage and sabotage by intercepting and manipulating supposedly secure communications transmitted on the internet.

The more accurate term is cyberwar. Russian cyberwar may have been the cause of the cyber intrusions that leaked Democratic National Committee and John Podesta emails that WikiLeaks published during the campaign, to the Democrats’ embarrassment. WikiLeaks denies these reports, contending that the disclosed documents came from either disgruntled Democratic campaign staffers or WikiLeaks’ own cyber intrusions.

President Obama, Podesta, and their media gang are consumed by their desire to delegitimize Trump’s election and have seized on the Russian cyberattacks to skew the November election results. Their point — which is entirely unproven — is that Putin aimed to elect Trump instead of Clinton.

But both the president and Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson have admitted that there is no evidence whatever that anything the Russians did affected the counting of votes.

There’s a lot more to this. Whatever the Russians did or didn’t do, they apparently did try to affect or discredit the election. At least that’s what Obama claimed three months ago.

On September 5, President Obama had a ninety-minute meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in China. One of the items discussed was the reported Russian cyberattacks on the U.S. election system. Obama acknowledged the attacks after the meeting, saying that although America had problems with “cyberintrusions from Russia in the past… [o]ur goal is not to suddenly in the cyber arena duplicate a cycle of escalation that we saw when it comes to other arms races in the past.… What we cannot do is have the situation in which suddenly this becomes the wild, wild West…”

Last week Obama said something entirely inconsistent: “So in early September when I saw president Putin in China, I felt that the most effective way to ensure that that didn’t happen was to talk to him directly and tell him to cut it out and there were going to be serious consequences if he didn’t. And in fact, we did not see further tampering of the election process — but the leaks… had already occurred.” He said he’d handled the Russian cyberattacks just as he should have.

If you believe what Obama said in September, he decided not to escalate the ongoing cyberwar with Russia to avoid an internet arms race. If you believe what he said last week, he got tough with Putin and told him to knock it off or face terrible consequences after which — he claimed — Putin backed down.

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MEDIA Comments turned off

“Fake News” Sydney M. Williams

By on December 20th, 2016

“Ninety-nine percent of failures come from people who have the habit of making excuses.”

George Washington Carver (c. 1864-1943)

Fake news! “Holy red herring,” as Robin might have said to Batman! The next thing they will be telling us that Santa Claus is fake! Come on! There has been fake news since time immemorial. Think of agencies like the CIA., M15 and the KGB that have always used fake news for purposes of deception. Consider the Apocryphal Press (www.apocryphalpress.com) run by my good friend and former classmate Tom Korson, who uses fake news for the purpose of humor. Think of The New York Times and the Financial Times, both of whom regularly confuse fact with fiction. Much of “real” news is fake.

Hypocrisy is embedded in the sanctimonious Left. Less than two months before the 2004 Presidential elections, Dan Rather went on Sixty Minutes and falsely targeted George W. Bush’s service in the Air National Guard. Later, Brian Williams lied about his helicopter being shot down in Iraq. In 2008, while running for President, Hillary Clinton lied about coming under fire when landing in Kosovo in 1996. She blamed the attack in Benghazi, which killed four Americans including the Ambassador in 2012, on a “hateful” video. In 2009, President Obama told us that under the Affordable Care Act “…we could keep our health-care plan, if we chose.” Or Al Gore’s talking of Polar Bears stranded on melting ice sheets. Or the drumbeat among mainstream media, in the weeks leading to the 2016 election, which assured voters that Donald Trump was too flawed to be elected President. And what about the “recall?” It was born amid great fanfare, but slunk off into the forest to die alone. We were told all of these stories were “real,” but none were. So, what about Santa Claus? With ten grandchildren, I’ll let someone less encumbered respond.

Most media today twist news to accord with a predetermined narrative. News sources on both the Left and the Right succumb to pressure from readers and viewers. But the left’s version is more heinous, as it makes a pretense of having no biases. They cloak their stories in a mantle of sanctimonious rhetoric. The New York Times, a week ago last Sunday, had the chutzpah to editorialize about guiding Americans back to a path of commonly accepted facts: “A President and other politicians who care about the truth could certainly help them along. In the absence of leaders like that, media organizations that report fact without regard for partisanship, and citizens who think for themselves, will need to light the way.” Mr. Sulzberger, it has been you and your staff that have persistently sculpted the news to fit your story lines. It is you and the liberal mainstream media that are so badly in need of a lantern.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The Stockyards of Diversity : Edward Cline

By on December 20th, 2016

Daphne Patal, in her September Gatestone article, “How Diversity Came to Mean ‘Downgrade the West’,” which discusses the degrading of college education to conform to politically correct subject matters to be studied, opens with

There was a time, within living memory, when the term multiculturalism was hardly known. More than twenty years ago, Peter Thiel, cofounder of PayPal and in late July speaker at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, wrote a book with fellow Stanford alum David Sacks called The Diversity Myth: ‘Multiculturalism’ and the Politics of Intolerance at Stanford (1995).

The book’s title refers to the pretense that embracing “diversity” actually promotes diversity of all types, a claim commonly heard to this day. Thiel had been a student at Stanford when, in January 1987, demonstrators defending “the Rainbow Agenda” chanted “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Culture’s got to go!” This protest led to the infamous “revision” (i.e., suppression) of the Western Culture requirement at Stanford, replaced with a freshman sequence called Cultures, Ideas, and Values, mandating an emphasis on race, gender, and class.

Later in her article, Patal notes that

Furthermore, “multiculturalism” did not involve greater emphasis on mastering foreign languages or carefully studying cultures other than those of the English-speaking world. Instead, work in literature and culture programs was (and still is) done increasingly in English and focused on contemporary writers. Nor did multiculturalism, any more than the word diversity, mean familiarizing students with a diversity of views. Rather, as [Elizabeth] Fox-Genovese summarized it, it meant requiring students “to agree with or even applaud views and values that mock the values with which they have been reared.” And all this, she observed, was being accompanied by rampant grade inflation.

So, if anyone thought that “diversity” simply meant several individuals of various ethnic or cultural backgrounds being by happenstance squinched together into a group, or that “diversity” was similar to a bird aviary in which dozens of different species flitted around in an enclosed space, he would not be far off the mark. There have been dozens of TV and movie series and films that flaunt not only their racial diversity, but their cultural and sexual diversity, as well (i.e., the early and later manifestations of Star Trek).

A diversity-rich cast, albeit no Muslims

For example, The Walking Dead, at several points in its seven-Season-old broadcast, has featured blacks as well as whites, Koreans, Hispanics in leading and central roles, as well as Indians (or perhaps Pakastanis, it was never explained), “gender-breakers,” “mixed” couples, the disabled (in wheelchairs), and the “under-aged” (e.g., pre-teen children shooting guns at zombies and the living). The most recent Seasons of the series have introduced lesbian and gay couples, as well as overweight characters.

The most conspicuously absent group are Muslims; they appear neither as living survivors of the apocalypse nor as zombies, neither as bearded imams nor as women in burqas or hijabs. I do not think their absence is an oversight. I do not think it is a stretch of the imagination to assume that the producers were warned off casting characters as living or dead Muslims. Or perhaps, being so diversity-conscious, and sensitive to the sensitivities of Muslims, the producers decided not to “defame” Muslims or Islam with such risky casting, and warned themselves off the idea. I contacted Scott Gimple, The Walking Dead’s “show runner,” on his Facebook page, with the question, but have received no response.

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