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Ruth King

POLITICS Comments turned off

A Trumpocalypse? Oh do grow up It is the anti-Trump set that is trading reason for emotionalism. Brendan O’Neill

By on November 13th, 2016

There’s a dark irony to the somewhat swirling media response to Trump’s victory. For months now, observers have been telling us that Trump’s army is motored more by feeling than reason. Trumpism is a movement based on ‘untrammelled emotion’ over ‘reason [and] empiricism’, said Andrew Sullivan. Trump makes ‘sly appeals to… human irrationality’, said Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert cartoon. Like all of history’s demagogues, Trump conjures ‘vivid images and intense emotions’, said a writer for the Conversation. Especially in relation to security: apparently he plays on people’s feelings of ‘uncertainty or instability’.

Yet now, as Trump’s victory shocks the world, or at least that portion of it that lives in its own echo chamber, who is it that’s exhibiting ‘untrammelled emotion’? Who’s conjuring up ‘vivid images’ and ‘intense emotions’, particularly with regard to security? It isn’t Trump’s supporters, most of whom went from the ballot box back to their everyday lives. It’s the anti-Trump set. It’s those who spent months claiming Trump supporters lack the mental and moral equipment necessary for ‘reasoned deliberation’. Many of these rather elitist politicos and observers are behaving in a way that makes even the most hot-headed Trump cheerer look perfectly rational in comparison.

The emotionalism of their response has been intense. ‘“I feel hated”, I tell my husband, sobbing in front of the TV in my yoga pants and Hillary sweatshirt’, said an American columnist in the Guardian. Former UK foreign secretary Margaret Beckett says Trump’s victory feels like ‘the end of the world’ (bit rich coming from a woman who voted for the Iraq War in 2003). Emotion over reason is widespread: the Washington Post reports that ‘mobs of tearful students’ are protesting against Trump’s win; some American universities are providing counselling for those ‘traumatised’ by Trump; celebs including Miley Cyrus and Perez Hilton have issued videos of themselves weeping over Trump’s victory, which have been shared hundreds of thousands of times by similarly frazzled Hillary backers.

Even worse than the emotionalism is the apocalypticism. Trump conjures up ‘vivid images’ to exploit people’s feelings of ‘uncertainty’? Yes, he does, but not as intensively as anti-Trump observers have been doing. British historian Simon Schama said Trump’s victory will ‘hearten fascists all over the world’ and is reminiscent of Hitler’s rise. Trump’s victory is the ‘greatest calamity to befall the West since World War II’, says Guardian columnist Owen Jones, clearly having never experienced the deprivations of 1970s recession or 1980s class conflict. Cheap, history-exploiting Hitler comparisons are rife: protesters hold up pictures of Trump with a Hitler moustache while celebs cry over America becoming like ‘Germany in the 1930s’.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Courageous Iranian professor deliberately avoids stepping on US/Israel flags by Lisa Daftari

By on November 13th, 2016

Courageous Iranian professor deliberately avoids stepping on US/Israel flags Defying Iranian convention, Sadegh Zibakalam, 68, a professor at University of Tehran, enters a university building, painstakingly avoiding stomping on American and Israeli flags. SEE VIDEO

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HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

ISIS suggests targeting Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade by ramming trucks into crowds by Lisa Daftari

By on November 13th, 2016

ISIS has called for jihadis in the U.S. to use trucks to kill as many attendees as possible at this year’s Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City.http://www.foreigndesknews.com/world/middle-east/isis-suggests-targeting-macys-thanksgiving-day-parade-ramming-trucks-crowds/

The terror group posted a new message to potential jihadis in the third issue of its Rumiyah (Rome) Magazine intended for its supporters in the West, suggesting that using cars in high-speed ram attacks are the easiest and most effective way to cause major carnage.

“Very few actually comprehend the deadly and destructive capability of the motor vehicle and its capacity of reaping large numbers of casualties if used in a premeditated manner,” the post states, emphasizing the success of the Bastille Day attack in Nice, France July 14 in which Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel’s killed 85 and injured 434 by intentionally ramming a cargo truck through a crowded promenade.

“The method of such an attack is that a vehicle is plunged at a high speed into a large congregation of kuffar, smashing their bodies…crushing their heads, torsos, and limbs under the vehicle’s wheels and chassis – and leaving behind a trail of carnage,” the post says.

And when a jihadi comes to choose a potential target, they advice, priority should be given to the accessibility of vehicles.

Practical locations to target include large outdoor gatherings, heavily congested streets, festivals, parades and political rallies.

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A photo of Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade appears with the caption beneath: “An excellent target.”

“It has been shown that smaller vehicles are incapable of granting the level of carnage that is sought,” the author argues, citing that one of the central reasons for this is that smaller cars don’t have the weight and wheel span needed to cause a large number of casualties.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Boris Johnson Tells EU Leaders to Stop Whining About Trump Win By Rick Moran

By on November 13th, 2016

The British foreign secretary will not attend an “emergency meeting” of the EU to discuss Trump victory.
I really wish someone in the U.S. would just stand up and tell liberals and all the snowflakes who are weeping over Trump’s victory to get a life and move on.

That’s what British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson told European leaders as the EU prepares for an “emergency meeting” to discuss the Trump win.

CNN:

British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson told European leaders Friday to stop whining about the US election results following a slew of anxious statements in response to Donald Trump’s shocking victory.

“I would respectfully say to my beloved European friends and colleagues that it’s time that we snapped out of the general doom and gloom about the result of this election, and collective ‘whinge-o-rama’ that seems to be going on in some places,” Johnson said at a press conference in Belgrade, Serbia, using British slang for complaining.

The comments from the colorful British politician — who was widely tipped to become prime minister after successfully spearheading the campaign to leave the European Union — may have surprised some since he had earlier been outspoken about his disdain for the President-elect.

Johnson once said he was “genuinely worried that (Trump) could become president.”

And after Trump claimed areas of London were dangerous due to radicalized Muslims, Johnson said: “The only reason I wouldn’t visit some parts of New York is the real risk of meeting Donald Trump.”

But he appears to have found a silver lining in Trump’s win, saying the election was a “great opportunity for the UK” following Britain’s seismic vote in June to leave the EU.

Johnson’s optimism contrasts with the lukewarm response from many EU politicians to Trump — a candidate who lobbed insults at Europe and European leaders during his campaign, and was heavily criticized in turn.

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HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

ISIS Guide: Rent U-Haul as a Weapon, Target Thanksgiving Day Parade or Political Rallies By Bridget Johnson

By on November 13th, 2016

Following up on their October instructions for lone jihadists to conduct knife attacks, the Islamic State’s latest magazine offers tactical instructions on how to use a vehicle as a weapon to inflict the greatest damage.

Their muse, of course, is Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, who plowed a cargo truck through a crowd of Bastille Day revelers in Nice, France, this summer.

“Vehicles are like knives, as they are extremely easy to acquire. But unlike knives, which if found in one’s possession can be a cause for suspicion, vehicles arouse absolutely no doubts due to their widespread use throughout the world,” states the article in the third issue of Rumiyah, ISIS’ recently launched monthly English-language magazine, adding that cars are one of the “safest and easiest” weapons as well as “most successful in harvesting large numbers of the kuffar [disbelievers].”

ISIS encourages shying away from budget sedans and “off-roaders, SUVs, and four-wheel drive vehicles” that “lack the necessary attributes required for causing a blood bath” as “smaller vehicles lack the weight and wheel span required for crushing many victims.” They recommended trucks with double wheels for “giving victims less of a chance to escape being crushed by the vehicle’s tires.” Long semi trucks are discouraged because of the possibility of jack-knifing.

The article encourages jihadists to find a vehicle with a “metal outer frame which are usually found in older cars, as the stronger outer frame allows for more damage to be caused when the vehicle is slammed into crowds, contrary to newer cars that are usually made of plastics and other weaker materials.”

A picture of a U-Haul truck is shown with the caption “an affordable weapon.”

On the next page of the article, a picture of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade is shown with the words “an excellent target.”

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trump and Hillary on climate By Anthony Bright-Paul

By on November 13th, 2016

On the campaign trail, Trump, a Republican, backed more fossil fuel production in the U.S. and vowed to “cancel” the Paris agreement. He has repeatedly suggested that climate change is a hoax. His Democratic challenger Hillary Clinton, in contrast, has called for urgent action on climate change.

There in a nutshell you have the difference between the two challengers for the Presidency of the United States of America.

Some apparently highly intelligent people constantly talk about ‘tackling climate change’. But is this intelligent? This is not a question of science, but a question of definitions and of the correct use of the English language.

Strictly speaking, to talk about tackling climate change is an affront to intelligence and an affront to language. How is climate defined? ‘The weather conditions prevailing in an area in general or over a long period’. So we see at once that climate is intimately connected to the weather.

Change is defined as ‘make something different’. So, what does all that mean? It means in a nutshell that all those who are fighting climate change want to make the weather static.

Can you imagine anything more ridiculous? It is like saying, ‘I am against tomorrow’. Only an imbecile would make such a statement. Yet we have world leaders, Presidents, Popes and Prime Ministers all trying to stop change.

Of course, the unDemocrats are rioting. They are burning effigies of Donald Trump. These unDemocrats are against democracy, even though they call themselves Democrats. We have the same phenomenon in England. A democratic referendum took place, where the majority wanted to leave the EU. So the unDemocrats are peeved. The same thing is happening on a bigger scale in the United States.

The American people should congratulate themselves in having elected indisputably the most intelligent of the contenders.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Post-Trumpmatic Stress Disorder By Doris O’Brien

By on November 13th, 2016

In the machinery of politics, all cycles are spin cycles. And once the centrifugal force takes hold, the whirlwind will not easily come to an abrupt halt. So it is not surprising that after the most contentious presidential election in recent history, a lot of disgruntled Americans can still be seen spinning out of control.

The protests – some of them morphing into riots – were not unexpected. They have become a popular activity enjoined by mostly younger people who some suspect may not even have voted. Yet the irony of this is as lost on them as is their carrying placards saying “Love Trumps Hate” while they shout obscenities and make mischief.

In the past, protests and marches were staged with the expectation of achieving some kind of tangible result. Workers went on strike and picketed for higher wages and better working conditions. The disenfranchised marched for the freedom to vote. Protests and the like took place in order to right unconstitutional wrongs.

But the 2016 post-election protests haven’t a prayer of changing anything. As one wag put it, you cannot question American democracy. Trump won this election fair and square. Nobody in authority contends otherwise. Yet despite the fact that both Obama and Clinton have urged a peaceful transition, the devastated liberal mob heeds only the call of the wild.

These are the whiners who sorely suffer from what I call “Post-Trumpmatic Stress Disorder,” a self-induced disease that is void of physical manifestations other than those that spring like evil dreams from hyperventilating imaginations: coat hangers becoming the only obstetrical tool available in back-alley abortion abattoirs, same-sex unions dissolved; sick Americans, deprived of health insurance, untreated and dying on our streets; polluted air and water killing off the rest of us; hordes of hardworking immigrants hustled across the border, never to return.

Perhaps the protesters are too young and politically naïve to understand that election outcomes in America are the result of our democratic process. Trump is not a banana republic dictator foisted on the people. He cannot be driven into exile by a chorus of shouted insults. Nevertheless, protests, per se, have become courts of first resort for many young people, even if participation in them leads to nothing more than national press attention and a party atmosphere with the like-minded. Their generation, after all, has been encouraged by role models to protest wherever and whenever possible, in the belief that unified venting, in itself, is a noble end.

Early on in their pampered lives, modern protesters learned the nature of parental indulgence. Their temper tantrums were endured, and even rewarded if thrown in public. Their progressive parents, harboring angst of their own, found it convenient to avoid disciplining their offspring lest it breed resentment. So if Junior felt in any way thwarted, he vigorously protested until some placating action or reward shut him up. Distraught parents learned quickly that the humiliation of a child’s meltdown could be eased by a piece of chocolate melting in his mouth. They wanted their way and made trouble if they didn’t get it!

Twenty or whatever years later, these disgruntled whiners are still up to their old tricks, even if there are no treats. As long as they can have their expensive smartphone on hand when they high-mindedly trot off to a protest, they can brave anything. And since they can expect little to change as a result of their action, they find satisfaction in thinking of themselves as a concerned part of history. Besides, isn’t there safety in numbers? Well, at least until the shouting turns to shooting

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FOREIGN POLICY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Trump Must Change US Defense Policy for Taiwan By Stephen Bryen

By on November 13th, 2016

United States defense policy toward Taiwan must change. Now there is a rare opportunity to make that happen with the election of Donald Trump. But everyone knows he lacks experience in foreign affairs, although he is a man with great instincts. If he can prevail over the established litany, there is a chance that Taiwan can stay independent. But if he follows the “party line” from the State Department and their supporting chorus in parts of the Pentagon, Taiwan is a goner. It is only a question of time.

Taiwan is an island that lives next to a behemoth in the form of China. It is a democracy and, with its new government with a very strong domestic mandate, intent on maintaining its independence and democratic system. For China, democracy is the enemy as they have just demonstrated again in Hong Kong where they blocked two elected officials from taking office. Democracy threatens the Communist party dictatorship, and China is yearning for it. That is what happened before at Tiananmen, where democratic dissent was ruthlessly suppressed. And across China that is happening every day, and China’s government knows it. For them, the big thumb in their eye is Taiwan. They would take any opportunity to knock it off, and China has been building up forces to make it hard for the United States to come to Taiwan’s defense. When China’s forces reach a tipping point, and when they think America might back off, they will strike.

The question is not whether but when. America should be following a defense policy that pushes the “when” back to “whether” and puts a price on the “whether” decision that would make it hard for China’s leaders to act, if they were unsure of the outcome.

Unfortunately, America’s support of Taiwan has played directly into China’s hands and put Taiwan at considerable risk.

Consider for example that Taiwan has been allowed to have only half an air force and half a navy.

What is meant by “half”?

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BOOKS Comments turned off

Stealing Judaism Review: Richard H. Schwartz, ‘Who Stole My Religion?: Revitalizing Judaism and Applying Jewish Values to Help Heal Our Imperiled Planet’ Reviewed byDavid Isaac

By on November 13th, 2016

Richard H. Schwartz accuses his fellow Orthodox Jews of stealing Judaism—even as he attempts to hijack it for his own environmentalist creed.

A man who fell in love with progressive politics first and Orthodox Judaism second, Schwartz married the two in his mind and is now frustrated that the shidduch—or love match—won’t take hold in the larger community. The roughly 10 percent of Jews who are Orthodox are stubbornly conservative. Schwartz laments that, while an overwhelming 78 percent of all Jews went for Barack Obama in 2008, an almost identical percentage of Orthodox Jews voted for John McCain. Given that Schwartz praises Judaism for its heritage of non-conformity (starting with Abraham), he might have celebrated the Orthodox for going their own way. But no, Schwartz seeks 100 percent Jewish support for the current pieties of the left wing of the Democratic Party.

Although Schwartz admits that “Judaism does not recommend any one type of economic system,” that doesn’t stop him from essentially arguing that it does—socialism. He quotes the famous passage where the Prophet Samuel warns the Israelites against a king who will “take your daughters as perfumers and bakers; he will seize your choice fields, vineyards, and olive groves and give them to his courtiers.” Schwartz asks the reader to substitute “international corporations” for “kings.” CEOs are the “corporate kings,” he says. But why not substitute “government” for “king”? Surely, that’s nearer to the original meaning of the text. After all, a CEO can’t conscript you, tax you, or claim eminent domain over your property. These are the types of powers to which Samuel refers.

But the issue that transcends all others for Schwartz is climate change. In apocalyptic fervor, he is right up there with Al Gore and Bill McKibben: Climate change is “the most urgent, immediate problem facing the world today,” with virtually all climate scientists agreeing that “climate change poses an existential threat to life as we know it—and that humans are the cause and the potential solution.” Schwartz invokes Talmudic and Biblical teachings on how mankind should care for the Earth to support his contention that Jews must take a leading role in fighting climate change.

While his citations may cast Judaism in an admirable light, they have nothing to do with climate change, an issue that is far from settled. Schwartz states over and over that 97 percent of climate scientists agree that climate change “poses a major threat to humanity.” But that statistic has been thoroughly debunked. Expert opinion about the severity of climate change is far less uniform than it is typically portrayed.

Schwartz does not for a moment entertain the possibility that the global warming apocalypse (like all apocalyptic forecasts before it) may not materialize and, if it doesn’t, that his drastic efforts to fight it by making everyone a vegan and substituting expensive renewable energy for oil and gas would undercut his other political goals—above all, improving the lot of the poor worldwide.

To enlist Jews in the global warming crusade and other progressive causes, Schwartz enlists the concept of tikkun olam (literally “world repair”). Since the 1950s, this Hebrew phrase has been seized on by Jews who want to make radical ideas more palatable to other Jews.

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BOOKS, ISRAEL Comments turned off

A REVIEW OF “JUDAS” BY AMOS OZ BY SAM SACKS

By on November 13th, 2016

“Judas” ( Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 305 pages, $25), the quietly provocative novel by Israeli writer Amos Oz, concerns a wayward university dropout named Shmuel Ash, who, in Jerusalem in 1959, takes a position as a companion to an elderly invalid. His job is to engage the old man in a few hours of lively debate each evening; in return he receives a monthly stipend and room and board in the house shared by the man and his widowed daughter-in-law, Atalia.

Two strains of history run together in the course of this arrangement. Shmuel is writing a book about “Jewish Views of Jesus.” His argument is that Judas Iscariot, “the hated archetype of all Jews,” was actually the first fervent Christian believer, and far from being a betrayal, his role in bringing about the crucifixion was an attempt to prove Jesus’s divinity.

Mr. Oz layers this interpretation upon the bloody birth of the Jewish state. Atalia’s husband—the old man’s son—was killed during the 1948 war of independence; her late father, furthermore, was a prominent Jewish voice opposed to the creation of Israel, arguing that it was better to try to share the territory with the Arabs than to drive them out. For this quixotic belief, he was deemed a traitor.

Young Shmuel, idealistic and vulnerable—built “like a walking question mark”—discusses these figures at engrossing length with the old man and Atalia, with whom he falls hopelessly in love. Inevitably, their talk about the past reflects upon the future of Zionism. Who should lead the movement, the book asks: realists like David Ben-Gurion (“a clearheaded, sharp-sighted man who understood a long time ago that the Arabs will never accept our presence here of their own free will”) or pacifist dreamers like Atalia’s father? Who are the true believers and who are the traitors?

Mr. Oz has generous sympathy for the overmatched dreamers, yet “Judas” sets down no fixed answers. Aided by Nicholas de Lange’s lucid translation from the Hebrew, it challenges you to think afresh about stories and histories whose interpretations can seem chiseled in stone. It is a novel that prompts questions and self-questioning. What else can one ask from a book?

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