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June 2017

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Is Netanyahu building bridges with left-wing Israeli leadership? Caroline Glick

By on June 20th, 2017

Assuming that Livni is telling the truth and Likud’s denial is false, we need to ask why Netanyahu courted the former foreign minister.

The homes of the terrorists who murdered Border Police officer Hadas Malka on Friday evening are now bedecked with Fatah flags and banners reading, “Our heroes.”

Far from condemning the terrorist attack, Palestinian Authority chairman and Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas and his comrades are condemning Israel. Its security forces, they allege obscenely, committed a “war crime” when they killed the three terrorists to stop their rampage.

The only reason that these actions are not enough to warrant the US and the rest of the West – not to mention the Israeli Left – treating Fatah/PLO as the terrorist group they are and have always been, is because doing so would require them to stop playacting at peace making.

And they couldn’t have that.

Instead, they mimic or recycle “peace process” lingo about “windows of opportunity,” and reincarnate failed peace processors.

In apparent bid to do the latter, last Friday Channel 10 first reported that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asked MK Tzipi Livni to join his government with her Knesset faction and serve as his foreign minister.

While Likud denied the report, Livni claims Netanyahu made the offer through mediators that have been carrying out indirect negotiations between the two politicians.

Livni also has said that she rejected Netanyahu’s offer because she doesn’t believe he is willing to adopt her expansively pro-PLO positions.

Assuming that Livni is telling the truth and Likud’s denial is false, we need to ask why Netanyahu made the attempt.

There’s certainly no love lost between the two. Netanyahu’s last campaign centered on Livni’s radicalism.

The fact that the Labor Party formed a joint candidates list with Livni radicalized the party, he argued. Livni, for her part, was the main reason Netanyahu’s last government fell apart. She was disloyal and subversive throughout her brief tenure as justice minister.

Politically Livni has nothing to offer Netanyahu. As things stand today, Livni has no future in politics. She is unpopular in the Labor Party. And if she as an independent list, she is unlikely to even pass the four-seat threshold to be reelected to Knesset.

Yair Lapid, whose Yesh Atid Party has been leading Labor as the most popular Center-Left political party, has evinced no interest in joining forces with Livni.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Prestige As A Tool Of Foreign Policy Thanks to Trump, the days of America “leading from behind” are over. Bruce Thornton

By on June 20th, 2017

Reprinted from Hoover.org.

In April, President Trump took three actions to radically reset the course of American foreign policy. In response to Syrian president Bashar al Assad’s use of sarin gas, Trump had the air-field from which the attack originated bombed. To counter North Korea’s threats and continuing testing of intercontinental missiles, he ordered the aircraft carrier Carl Vinson and its accompanying strike group to deploy closer to the Korean peninsula. And he gave military commanders leeway to drop the largest non-nuclear bomb in our arsenal, the Massive Ordnance Air Burst, colloquially known as the “Mother of All Bombs,” on an ISIS tunnel-and-caves complex on the Afghan border, killing about 100 jihadists.

These bold moves alerted the world that the days of America “leading from behind” are at an end. And they have achieved something important for every foreign policy no matter its ideological compass: restoring our country’s damaged prestige.

Whether we call it “credibility” or “deterrence,” prestige involves the old concept of “honor” that Thucydides recognized as one of three major causes of conflict, the other two being “fear” and “interest.” The subsequent 2,400 years of military philosophy have not improved on the Athenian historian’s catalogue. “Fear” and “interest” are more familiar to us, for we too make national security and interests our foreign policy goals. But “honor” often strikes us a concept from a bygone age, one we rational moderns have progressed beyond. But as the classical military historian Donald Kagan has written, “Arguments about morality and ideology involve what Thucydides called honor, and nations from antiquity to our own world cannot ignore it.”

Prestige is like honor in that it refers to the perception other countries have of a nation’s worth or value, and the respect it is due. This estimation of worthiness determines other states’ behavior. If a nation consistently rewards friends, punishes enemies, and matches its words to its deeds, enemies and rivals will honor it as a faithful ally and a fearsome foe. This perception of resolve and loyalty in turn acts a force multiplier, inasmuch as when enemies believe that a country will use its military power, often it won’t have to; the fear of a country’s willingness to act decisively can deter aggression. As Virgil writes in the Aeneid, “They have power because they seem to have power.” Likewise, if a rival or an enemy perceives that a country is unwilling to use its power to defend its interests and security, it will seek opportunities to achieve its aims at a country’s expense, inciting others to do the same.

A people’s morale, their confidence and zeal in countering threats and attacks, is part of prestige. When a nation believes in its way of life, honors in action its principles and values, and is proud of its achievements, its citizens are more apt to defend their prestige against those who would challenge or attempt to destroy them. As Napoleon said, morale is three times more important than physical factors in winning a battle. The willingness to fight, the confidence in victory, and the assurance that your side morally deserves to win are more crucial than superiority in material resources. Countering aggression by defending prestige requires morale to overcome the fear of unforeseen consequences, the cost in lives and resources, or the risk of an escalation into full-blown war.

History provides a large catalogue of conflicts precipitated by an aggressor who disdained a rival’s prestige and judged that its people had lost their morale. The two decades between the world wars is a record of incremental aggression by the Axis powers that was left unpunished by the more powerful Allies. The infamous Munich Conference of 1938, of course, remains the supreme example of appeasement that damaged the already weakened prestige of England and France and led to the catastrophe of World War II.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Giving Terrorists a Heads-Up A proposed law would force the NYPD to publicize the details of its surveillance technology. Heather Mac Donald

By on June 20th, 2017

A bill in New York’s city council would require the New York Police Department to reveal crucial details about every surveillance technology that the department uses to detect terrorism and crime. Ninety days before the NYPD intends to implement a new surveillance technology, it would have to post on the Internet a technical description of how the new tool works, and how the department plans to use it. The public would have 45 days to comment on the proposed technology; the police commissioner would then have 45 days to respond to the public comments before he could actually start using the new capacity. Existing technologies would also have to be retroactively submitted to public review.

Perhaps aware that this moment may not be ideal for promoting what would be, in effect, a terrorists’ manual on how to evade discovery in New York City, the bill’s supporters have hilariously taken to casting it as a pro-illegal alien, anti-Trump gesture. New York is a “sanctuary city, now in open resistance to the Trump administration,” two members of the Brennan Center for Justice wrote in an op-ed advocating for the so-called Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology (POST) Act. (The Brennan Center wrote the POST Act for council members; the center has pushed similar bills across the country, including in Seattle and Oakland, two cities that have been particularly vulnerable to “anti-fascist” violence.) The city council press release claims that the bill “strengthens New York City’s commitment as a sanctuary city . . . as the Trump administration seeks to increase surveillance across America.”

In fact, the proposed law has nothing to do with New York’s deplorable status as a sanctuary city. Criminal illegal aliens avoid lawful deportation in New York because city and police officials release them back to the streets in defiance of Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainer requests, not because of sophisticated surveillance technologies. But though the bill would have no effect on the city’s campaign to thwart immigration enforcement, it would impede the city’s ability to stay one step ahead of terrorist planning. Memo to the council: counterterrorism is not a leisurely activity compatible with lengthy public review and administrative red tape. It requires nimbleness and speed in the face of a rapidly evolving threat. And disclosing to the enemy the extent of, and details about, your surveillance capacities provides an invaluable blueprint for foiling those capacities.

Supporters of the bill are playing the race card as well, claiming that the bill is necessary to counter the NYPD’s historic tendency to oppress minorities. The managing director of the Bronx Defenders claims, without evidence, that the NYPD has illegally surveilled Black Lives Matter activists. Council members Dan Garodnick and Vanessa Gibson argue that “Surveillance technology often has a disproportionate, harmful impact on communities of color.” This claim is ludicrous. The radiation detectors that ring the city looking for nuclear threats, say, or the network of public cameras that protect critical infrastructure and sensitive buildings, have no disproportionate impact on minorities or any other group, other than on someone looking to do the city harm.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Anger Privilege Only leftists are allowed to be angry. Daniel Greenfield

By on June 20th, 2017

If you want to know who has privilege in a society and who doesn’t, follow the anger.

There are people in this country who can safely express their anger. And those who can’t. If you’re angry that Trump won, your anger is socially acceptable. If you were angry that Obama won, it wasn’t.

James Hodgkinson’s rage was socially acceptable. It continued to be socially acceptable until he crossed the line into murder. And he’s not alone. There’s Micah Xavier Johnson, the Black Lives Matter cop-killer in Dallas, and Gavin Long, the Black Lives Matter cop-killer in Baton Rouge. If you’re black and angry about the police, your anger is celebrated. If you’re white and angry about the Terror travel ban, the Paris Climate treaty, ObamaCare repeal or any leftist cause, you’re on the side of the angry angels.

But if you’re white and angry that your job is going to China or that you just missed being killed in a Muslim suicide bombing, your anger is unacceptable.

If you’re an angry leftist, your party leader, Tom Perez will scream and curse into a microphone, and your aspiring presidential candidate, Kirsten Gillibrand, will curse along, to channel the anger of the base. But if you’re an angry conservative, then Trump channeling your anger is “dangerous” because you aren’t allowed to be angry.

Not all anger is created equal. Some anger is privileged rage.

Good anger gets you a gig as a CNN commentator. Bad anger gets you hounded out of your job. Good anger isn’t described as anger at all. Instead it’s linguistically whitewashed as “passionate” or “courageous”. Bad anger however is “worrying” or “dangerous”. Angry left-wing protesters “call out”, angry right-wing protesters “threaten”. Good anger is left-wing. Bad anger is right-wing.

Socially acceptable displays of anger, from Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter riots to the anti-Trump marches to the furious campus protests, are invariably left-wing.

Left-wing anger over the elections of Bush and Trump was sanctified. Right-wing outrage over Obama’s victory was demonized. Now that left-wing anger led a Bernie Sanders volunteer to open fire at a Republican charity baseball practice outing. And the media reluctantly concedes that maybe both sides should moderate their rhetoric. Before listing examples that lean to the right like “Lock her up”.

Why were chants of “Lock her up” immoderate, but not Bush era cries of “Jail to the chief”? Why were Tea Party rallies “ominous” but the latest We Hate Trump march is “courageous”? Why is killing Trump on stage the hottest thing to hit Shakespeare while a rodeo clown who wore an Obama mask was hounded by everyone from the Lieutenant Governor of Missouri to the NAACP?

Not all anger is created equal. Anger, like everything else, is ideologically coded. Left-wing anger is good because its ideological foundations are good. Right-wing anger is bad because its ideology is bad.

It’s not the level of anger, its intensity or its threatening nature that makes it good or bad.

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MEDIA Comments turned off

Bret Stephens’s Exclusionary Politics His Swiftian satire is a misguided approach to citizenship. By Fred Bauer

By on June 20th, 2017

One of the more interesting trends of recent years has been the effort to view citizenship through a kind of debauched meritocratic lens. This approach is favored particularly by those who oppose enforcing immigration laws, who argue that somehow immigrants (including illegal immigrants) are more “American” than poor Americans. Like some earlier iterations of Social Darwinism, this worldview combines moral self-righteousness with a crass materialism.

In a recent column for the New York Times, Bret Stephens offers a “Modest Proposal”–style recommendation to deport poor Americans: “Complacent, entitled and often shockingly ignorant on basic points of American law and history, they are the stagnant pool in which our national prospects risk drowning.” Stephens says he doesn’t really want to deport struggling Americans; his tongue is firmly in his cheek. His main purpose is to criticize the deportation of illegal immigrants by pointing to the supposed shortcomings of many native-born Americans. However, rather than destroying the case for enforcing immigration laws, this satirical proposal far more effectively skewers efforts to dissolve national fellowship in the name of the pseudo-meritocracy.

Stephens’s proposal cherry-picks evidence to show the supposed degeneracy of native-born Americans. But it does not account for the fact that immigrant households rely on government assistance at a much higher rate than native-born households do. Nor does it account for research finding that the children of many immigrant families sometimes face more challenges than their immigrant parents did. For instance, sociologists Edward E. Telles and Vilma Ortiz found that the economic prospects of those descended from Mexican immigrants often stall or even decline after the second generation. To note the struggles of immigrants and their families is not to pile moral blame on them. These difficulties do, though, indicate that immigrants face many obstacles, some of which are greater than those faced by the native-born. In many areas, illegal immigrants are prime competitors to legal immigrants, so widespread illegal immigration almost certainly makes it harder for legal immigrants to climb the ladder of success.

Intellectual shortcomings radically compound the economic deficiencies of the meritocratic denigration of the native-born. The worldview that poor Americans can’t cut it and should therefore be replaced by more “competitive” immigrants might fit comfortably in a corporate boardroom, but it profoundly misunderstands the purpose of citizenship and the enterprise of inclusive politics. Whether or not a poor American “deserves” to be an American is beside the point — what matters is that he is American and that, by virtue of his citizenship, he has an inherent claim to the public square and public concern. While pseudo-meritocratic initiatives to cull the weak are chic on Wall Street, they inject poison when applied to politics. Arguing that the poor and disadvantaged are somehow less worthy citizens exacerbates civic alienation; it cuts the materially unsuccessful out of the body politic and flatters the indifference of the successful, whispering to them that they are justified in sneering at the struggles of the weak. In its high-handed dismissal of the struggles of the poor, the argument that the native-born are degenerate trash-people is almost a recipe for even more populism, a force that has caused Stephens himself no small angst in recent years.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

No, Hillary, Voter-ID Laws Don’t ‘Suppress’ Turnout Mrs. Clinton maligns Wisconsin’s effort to protect the integrity of its elections in an attempt to excuse her own fatally flawed campaign. By Hans A. von Spakovsky & Benjamin Janacek

By on June 20th, 2017

Hillary Clinton just doesn’t know how to lose gracefully. She does, however, have a knack for coming up with ever more inventive excuses for her loss to Donald Trump.

Just last month, she chalked it up to “voter suppression” in Wisconsin. This spurious claim was a reference to the Badger State’s common-sense voter-ID law, which has been upheld by the courts. It followed on the heels of a tweet from Wisconsin’s Democratic senator, Tammy Baldwin, claiming the law had reduced voter turnout by 200,000 statewide.

Both claims relied on a study commissioned by Priorities USA Action and conducted by CIVIS USA, two liberal groups that actively supported Clinton’s presidential bid. Unfortunately for Clinton and Baldwin, though, the study has been roundly debunked.

Politifact rated Baldwin’s claim as “Mostly False,” asserting that “experts . . . question the methodology of the report and say there is no way to put a number on how many people in Wisconsin didn’t vote because of the ID requirement.”

While it is true that 2016 saw Wisconsin’s turnout drop from 2012, it is also true that the state still experienced higher turnout than in 2008, before the voter-ID law was passed. Moreover, according to the U.S. Elections Project, Wisconsin had the fifth-highest turnout rate in the country, far higher than that of many states with no ID requirement. 69.4 percent of the state’s eligible voters showed up to the polls, far surpassing the national average of 59.3 percent and the 56.8 percent rate in Clinton’s home state of New York, where there is no voter-ID law.

Wisconsin’s turnout decrease from 2012 is just as likely, or more likely, attributable to a natural regression from its unusually high 2012 turnout rate. President Obama’s high-powered turnout operation, coupled with Wisconsin’s own Paul Ryan being on the GOP ticket, would easily explain the 2012 surge in statewide voter turnout. Hillary Clinton’s ineffective campaign, her decision not to visit the state, and the general leftward shift of the Democratic party may also have dampened enthusiasm for her candidacy.

Democrats have generally admitted that they failed to connect with blue-collar workers in 2016. In fact, their party chairman, Tom Perez, has organized a year-long outreach program to try to rectify the problem. Unfortunately for Democrats, these voters are highly concentrated in Rust Belt states, such as Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa, Minnesota, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, that proved especially susceptible to Trump’s economic message. None of those states saw any increase in voter turnout, but it wasn’t because of voter-ID laws, which vary widely among them; it was because Clinton failed to rally their working-class voters to her side, convinced that she could rely on Obama’s winning coalition from 2008 and 2012 to put her over the top.

The problem with that strategy was two-fold: (1) The voters of the Obama coalition make up disproportionately high percentages of state populations in already deep-blue states such as New York and California; and (2) they were not nearly as enthusiastic about Clinton as they had been about Obama. FiveThirtyEight’s David Wasserman warned last September that the demographic groups the Clinton campaign was targeting were concentrated in non-swing states. The Clinton campaign failed to heed that warning.

In fact, turnout data from 2012 and 2016 do not show any “voter suppression” because of ID requirements. Nine of the eleven states that have implemented so-called strict ID Laws either saw an increase in turnout or exceeded the national average in turnout in 2016. Two of them, Wisconsin and New Hampshire, finished in the top five nationally. Meanwhile only two of the 17 states plus Washington, D.C., that have no ID requirement finished among the top five.

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The Architecture of Regime Change The ‘Resistance’ is using any and all means — lies, leaks, lawbreaking, and violence — to overturn the results of the 2016 election. By Victor Davis Hanson

By on June 20th, 2017

The problem with the election of President Donald J. Trump was not just that he presented a roadblock to an ongoing progressive revolution. Instead, unlike recent Republican presidential nominees, he was indifferent to the cultural and political restraints on conservative pushback — ironic given how checkered Trump’s own prior conservative credentials are. Trump brawled in a way McCain or Romney did not. He certainly did not prefer losing nobly to winning ugly.

Even more ominously, Trump found a seam in the supposedly invincible new progressive electoral paradigm of Barack Obama. He then blew it apart — by showing the nation that Obama’s identity-politics voting bloc was not transferrable to most other Democratic candidates, while the downside of his polarization of the now proverbial clingers most assuredly was. To her regret, Hillary Clinton learned that paradox when the deplorables and irredeemables of the formerly blue-wall states rose up to cost her the presidency.

And now?

We are witnessing a desperate putsch to remove Trump before he can do any more damage to the Obama project. Political, journalistic, and cultural elites of a progressive coastal culture aim at destroying the Trump presidency before it can finish its full four-year term.

The branches of this insidious coup d’état are quite unlikely anything our generation has ever witnessed.

I. Political and Judicial

a. Warping the Electoral College. As soon as Trump was elected, progressives mobilized to overturn the very architecture of the Electoral College. They organized efforts to persuade delegated electors not to vote according to their own state results — as they were legally or informally pledged to do so. Had the effort succeeded, it would have destroyed the entire constitutional notion of an Electoral College.

b. Challenging the 2016 Vote. Simultaneously, we saw another failed insurrectionary effort, through the stalking horse of failed leftist candidate Jill Stein, to sue on false grounds of voting-machine fraud that would have required recounts in three swing states that Trump won.

c. Delaying, Stalling, and Accusing. Then Democrats in the Senate systematically delayed customary approval of dozens of key appointments of the newly inaugurated president. Obama holdovers such as Acting Attorney General Sally Yates sought to oppose Trump initiatives while political appointees such as Obama federal attorney Preet Bharara complained of inordinate pressures to step down. The normal assumption is that a new president appoints key federal officials of his own party; liberals abandoned this custom and depicted Trump’s staffing efforts as some sort of insurrectionary subversion of the federal government.

d. Recusal. Meanwhile, Democrats in Congress orchestrated false charges of “Russian collusion” against Trump himself, based on leaks of false information and fake-news stories, some of them originally orchestrated by Never Trump primary opponents and the Clinton campaign.

No evidence emerged of Trump’s culpability. But investigations were aimed at diverting attention from, and thereby stalling, the Trump legislative agenda. Again, the goal was driving his popularity ratings down to levels that would advance the cause of future impeachment should the Democrats ride the anti-Trump collusion hoaxes to midterm victory in the House.

An effective way to emasculate Trump was to demand recusals, supposedly due to some sort of hyper-partisanship on the part of Attorney General Jeff Sessions and House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes. No sooner had each agreed to step aside from some limited aspects of their investigations than Democrats insisted that their magnanimous recusals were both proof of guilt and yet too narrow — as they pressed on to seek recusals from ever more Trump White house officials.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Bangladesh Turning More Radical by Mohshin Habib

By on June 20th, 2017

“Bangladesh is a Muslim country, no culture of statue establishment would be allowed by the people here… all of them must be removed.” — Nur Hossain Quashemi, president, Dhaka branch of Hefazat-e-Islam.

“The Quran says: You [women] should stay at your home… Your duty is to stay at the husband’s house and safeguard property. Your primary duty is to stay home and look after your family and children only. Do not go out even for shopping.” — Shah Ahmed Shafi, chief of Hefazat-e-Islam.

Millions of Bangladeshi youths are increasingly wearing Islamic attire; and freedom of speech and freedom of movement are fast becoming a luxury — if not a threat to the safety — of Bangladesh’s more secular-minded people, already feeling themselves a minority of sorts.

The government of Bangladesh, led by historically known secular political party Awami League, has completely surrendered to the country’s radical forces regarding the demands, made by Hefazat-e-Islam and some other Islamic political and religious organizations, including the removal of the sculpture that was designed with the theme of the Greek goddess of justice. The statue was installed in last December following a decision taken by the Chief Justice. On May 26, at night, Bangladeshi authorities, in the name of the “consent of the chief justice”, removed the sculpture from the front side of the Supreme Court. The current chief justice, incidentally, is the ever first non-Muslim to hold the constitutional post.

In reaction, the next day, after Friday prayers, Islamists, led by Hefazat-e-Islam, arranged a rally and expressed joy and satisfaction over removal of the sculpture and demanded further removal of all existing idols/statues/sculptures — whatever one might call them — across the country. “Bangladesh is a Muslim country, no culture of statue establishment would be allowed by the people here… all of them must be removed,” said Nur Hossain Quashemi, the president of Dhaka branch of Hefazat-e-Islam, to the media.

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They Want Us Dead: Gavin McGinnis

By on June 20th, 2017

A Marxist professor at Syracuse University just called on lunatics to come and kill us. “We almost have the fascists on the run,” she said from her Twitter account, @danaleecloud, “come down to the federal building to finish them off.” By “fascists” she means people like you and me who oppose Sharia law, and by “finish them off” she likely means death. This is what Robert Spencer has been saying since he was poisoned. The left dehumanizes us with violent rhetoric so it will be easier to kill us. They don’t want to challenge our ideas. They want to end our lives, and they are willing to do it by any means necessary. I don’t think they care if it’s a mentally ill person or a jihadi who does the killing, as long as we’re taken out. They themselves say, “The only good fascist is a dead one,” and it’s going mainstream. Plays in the park depict long, drawn-out scenes of Trump being stabbed to death. Kathy Griffin holds the president’s severed head. Rap videos play out the assassination of Trump. In fact, the whole concept of assassination has been normalized by the mainstream media.
“These people don’t think they’re killing someone they disagree with. They think they’re killing Hitler.”

The professor was talking about the March Against Sharia events last Saturday. Syracuse was one of dozens of cities that held a rally to oppose the worst Islam can get. I hosted the New York City one, which was organized by gay conservative Paxton Hart. The reason Sharia was chosen was to erase any ambiguity about what we’re here to protest. Whether there should be a moratorium on Muslim immigration is debatable. The assimilability of Islam is also a controversial subject. By going way out to the edge of religious extremism, we thought we found something everyone can agree on. We were wrong. Hundreds of protesters showed up in New York to “Drown us out,” as they put it. They said our event had nothing to do with Sharia and was all about hatred of Muslims. I honestly think they would have said the same thing if we had done a rally against child rape gangs. They held up huge pictures of the stabbing victims in Oregon as if Jeremy Christian was one of our guys (sorry, but he was a Bernie Bro just like the man who shot Steve Scalise). Islam apologist Dean Obeidallah made the same mistake and tweeted to me, “Saw ur last anti-Sharia rally on the train in Portland last week where 2 were killed-will ur people be killing more soon?” Some of us went over to speak to the protesters and explain that Jeremy was a deranged man who stabbed people because they were demanding he not offend Muslims. In other words, they died of political correctness. They threw piss at us (again) and we beat them up.

When I got to the stage, I did the first half of my talk as a sexist pig who loved Sharia law. I said women are terrible drivers and with Sharia, you don’t have to worry about broads driving ever again. I said it’s awesome because you get to punish your wife if she doesn’t want to blow you. You make her sleep on the couch and if she still refuses, you get to beat the shit out of her. I also said Sharia is cool because you don’t have to hear women bitching about rape all the time. She has to get tons of witnesses and even then her testimony is worth only half what a man’s is. Finally, I said I get too horny walking down the street and can’t concentrate, but if we could cover up these chicks we could focus on just hanging out with the guys. I bombed, obviously, but that was the point. Like a true martyr, I used one big bomb to prevent future bombs.

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A MONUMENTAL DISGRACE: BY “TAKI”

By on June 20th, 2017

They’re falling like dominoes, starting with the great Robert E. Lee, whose statue went down with a yank of a crane in a jiffy, after standing tall on his New Orleans perch for 133 years. Jefferson Davis is also down, and the great Confederate general P.G.T. Beauregard, who partnered the heroic General Johnston on his left flank in the battle of Shiloh, has also bitten the dust.

Removing statues of great American generals who fought for, er…the wrong cause is the latest trendy thing to do. In fact, the virus has spread as far away as Australia, where the politically correct in cahoots with the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender brigades are demanding that a tennis legend’s name be removed from a stadium named after her. Margaret Court won 24 Grand Slam titles in her time during the ’60s and early ’70s, one more than Serena Williams, but a couple of years ago committed the greatest crime ever: She criticized same-sex marriage from the pulpit of her church in Perth, where she is a pastor. Her name has been mud ever since, at least among those who think it’s normal for people of the same sex to marry.

So far so bad, and I will get back to Margaret Court in a minute, but here are a few predictions of my own concerning these latest outrages by the PC crowd: Old Hickory is history, as far as the $20 bill is concerned, Malcolm X or Muhammad Ali will take his place. Andrew Jackson killed too many Indians and never apologized for it, so there. Poor old Alexander Hamilton had a close call, but the Broadway play depicting him as black and speaking rap has saved him on the tenner, at least for now. The next big bad guy is going to be Thomas Jefferson, who not only owned slaves but also slept with them. I expect my old alma mater the University of Virginia, whose founder he was, will deal with him rather sternly. The big one, of course, will be when the PC Nazis demand old George be struck off the dollar bill for owning and freeing his slaves only after he met his maker.
“America has started the trend by taking down the greatest general ever, Robert E. Lee.”

Back in the old country, Greece, people are in a tizzy over the removal of past heroes in order to satisfy present trends. “The Parthenon was not exactly built by rich Athenians, only financed by them,” was the way a nephew of mine put it. “It was the slaves, under a merciless whip, who put it up. Should we dynamite it?” The Parthenon is known as the most perfectly symmetrical and beautiful edifice ever built by man, but it was slave labor that put the marble pieces together. And what about the pyramids down south? Did free rich Egyptians carry those stones all the way up to the top during the permanent heat wave that is Egypt? We’ll need a lot of TNT to blast those monuments to smithereens, but what the hell, as long as the PC bunch is satisfied, who are we old-timers to object?

When I was young and on the tennis circuit I met Margaret Court, Smith as she then was, and she could not have been nicer. We were not close by any means, but I remember her standing out because of her winning ways and—let’s face it—her refusal to join the crowd of female competitors who were mostly lesbian, although extremely discreet. Fifty years later she has become a hated figure despite the fact that there are members of the LGBT community in her church who admit that she is not homophobic. In one of her sermons, Margaret included that “a lust for the flesh leads people to destroy their lives.” Which rang a bell. I remembered during a tournament in Rome when I was in hot pursuit of an American female tennis player, Margaret told me words to that effect. “I hope I’m destroyed sooner rather than later,” I answered her, and she gave me a rueful smile and dropped it.

So here we are, with Martina Navratilova, as great a champion as she was a predator, pressing for the name of Margaret Court Arena to be changed, describing Margaret as racist and homophobic. The latter is neither, but you know how it is—if you believe in God too much, you must also be someone who wants to boil all gay people and all black people, and all brown people, and all those with slitty eyes. The fact that in her church Margaret Court has people from ten different African countries is neither here nor there. Navratilova knows better. Heaven help us.

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