RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/11/islamophobia-industry-mark-tapson/

“There is an industry at work today, taking advantage of our liberty, infiltrating and influencing Western values and democracy,” writes Canadian author and blogger Diane Bederman in her brand new book The Islamophobia Industry: The Insidious Infiltration of Islam into the West. As the memory of the 9/11 attacks on American soil a generation ago recedes for many, this courageous short new work serves as an essential wakeup call to a Western world that, in the name of tolerance and inclusion, is allowing our rights and freedoms to be eroded as the value system of Islam grows in influence and power.

FrontPage Mag readers may recall that I interviewed Ms. Bederman here about her previous book The Serpent and the Red Thread, a unique history of antisemitism blending fiction, history and myth. She is also the author of Back to the Ethic: Reclaiming Western Values, which I reviewed for FrontPage Mag here.

I posed some questions to Ms. Bederman about The Islamophobia Industry.

Mark Tapson: To paraphrase a question you pose in the preface to your new book, why did you decide to write a book about Islam at a time when saying anything critical of it is immediately denounced as bigotry?

Diane Bederman: It says 365 times in the Bible: Do Not Fear.

Fear is debilitating. We often run away rather than confront.

I am of an age and in a place where being called an Islamophobe does not worry me. I cannot be canceled! I worry more about my children and grandchildren. We have to teach our children the importance of protecting democracy and freedom. Ducking and hiding will only lead to a loss of that freedom. The ethic that underpins our freedom, the Judeo/Christian ethic, is 3500 years old. We cannot let it perish out of fear of being called a name or even under threat of death. Without freedom, there is no life.

https://www.amazon.com/Getting-Risk-Right-Understanding-Science-ebook/dp/B01MAXIL21/ref=sr_1_3?crid=

Do cell phones cause brain cancer? Does BPA threaten our health? How safe are certain dietary supplements, especially those containing exotic herbs or small amounts of toxic substances? Is the HPV vaccine safe? We depend on science and medicine as never before, yet there is widespread misinformation and confusion, amplified by the media, regarding what influences our health. In Getting Risk Right, Geoffrey C. Kabat shows how science works—and sometimes doesn’t—and what separates these two very different outcomes.

Kabat seeks to help us distinguish between claims that are supported by solid science and those that are the result of poorly designed or misinterpreted studies. By exploring different examples, he explains why certain risks are worth worrying about, while others are not. He emphasizes the variable quality of research in contested areas of health risks, as well as the professional, political, and methodological factors that can distort the research process. Drawing on recent systematic critiques of biomedical research and on insights from behavioral psychology, Getting Risk Right examines factors both internal and external to the science that can influence what results get attention and how questionable results can be used to support a particular narrative concerning an alleged public health threat. In this book, Kabat provides a much-needed antidote to what has been called “an epidemic of false claims.”

https://quillette.com/2021/10/29/it-works-it-works-it-works-jonas-salk-and-the-vaccine-that-conquered-polio/

Excerpted, with permission, from You Bet Your Life: From Blood Transfusions to Mass Vaccination, The Long and Risky History of Medical Innovation, by Paul A. Offit.

Jonas Salk was born on October 28th, 1914, in a tenement in East Harlem, New York—the first son of Russian immigrants and the eldest of three brothers. After finishing four years of high school in three, Salk entered the City College of New York and later won a scholarship to the medical school at New York University. In December 1941, after the United States entered World War II, Salk was given a choice. He could either be commissioned as a doctor in the armed forces or remain in the United States to pursue a scientific career. He chose science, working on an influenza vaccine in the laboratory of Dr. Thomas Francis at the University of Michigan. Fifteen years later, Francis would supervise the critical test of Salk’s vaccine.

In 1943, while Salk was working on the influenza vaccine, 10,000 people, mostly children, contracted polio in the United States; in 1948, when Salk was first studying polioviruses at the University of Pittsburgh, 27,000 more people were affected; and in 1952, when Salk was first testing his polio vaccine in and around Pittsburgh, 59,000 more cases occurred. A national poll found that polio was second only to the atomic bomb as the thing Americans feared most. There was a desperate, growing desire to prevent polio.

Viruses, unlike bacteria, grow inside cells. To grow polioviruses in the 1930s, scientists John Kolmer and Maurice Brodie had used cells from monkey brains and monkey spinal cords. Salk, on the other hand, used cells from monkey testicles. Later, concerned that people would never accept a vaccine grown in monkey testicles, Salk switched to monkey kidney cells, which are still used to make polio vaccines today.

Because three different types of poliovirus cause disease, Salk knew that he would need to include representatives of all three types in his vaccine. For type 1, Salk chose the Mahoney strain—a decision that would haunt him for the rest of his life. The Mahoney strain was first recovered from a child in Akron, Ohio, whose last name was Mahoney. But the Mahoney strain wasn’t limited to the Mahoneys. The Klines, living next door, were also infected. Three of five Kline children were paralyzed and later died from the disease—an early clue to the unique horror of this particular strain. The other two strains of virus contained in Salk’s vaccine, representing types 2 and 3, weren’t controversial.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/29/very-fine-people/

An excerpt from Wrath: America Enraged (Encounter, 256 pages, $28.99)

Jacob Anthony Chansley, who also goes by the name Jake Angeli, was one of the people who made their way into the chamber of the U.S. Senate in the Capitol on January 6, 2021, to protest the Senate’s impending certification of state electors who would install Joe Biden as the 46th president of the United States. His name may not register, but his image will: he was the fellow bizarrely attired in a coyote-fur hat sprouting black buffalo horns; shirtless, showing his muscular but heavily tattooed torso; sporting black gloves and a red knapsack; face painted in vertical red, white, and blue stripes; and carrying an American flag on a spear.

The disorderly intrusion of several hundred protesters into the Capitol was quickly characterized by the media, and by many politicians, as an “insurrection.” Moreover, the accusation of insurrection was applied to the many thousands of Trump supporters in Washington that day who had nothing to do with the intrusion into the Capitol. And that characterization became the basis for the House of Representatives to impeach President Trump for supposedly inciting the “insurrection” and the impetus for Joe Biden to order 26,000 National Guard troops to defend Washington during his inauguration on January 20.

As it happened, there was no insurrection.

Images of Chansley in his costume—arguing with a police officer; posing with other protesters in a foyer; standing behind the Senate dais with his fist raised in triumph; outside holding a sign that declared “Q Sent Me!” and speaking into a microphone while clutching the obverse of the sign, “Hold the Line Patriots God Wins”; and, in several shots, chin raised as he apparently sings—stand out among the handful of photos of the Capitol protest that have become iconic. They helped cement the reputation of the protesters as crazy extremists.

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/when-your-body-is-someone-elses-haunted

Tomorrow marks three years since the massacre at Tree of Life, the most lethal attack on Jews in American history and a watershed event in the lives of so many I love.

I find myself pulled back to that time. To the shock I felt. To the sense I had immediately that the country I thought I lived in was changing in radical ways, even if I didn’t yet fully understand them.

One of the people who helped me make sense of it all — who helped me see that the fate of Jews and the fate of liberty are intertwined; who helped me grasp that an assault on Jews was an assault on the very notion of difference — was Dara Horn.

Dara is a novelist and an essayist whose writings on Jewish history, culture politics has shaped my own thinking. Her new book is called “People Love Dead Jews.”

This is a book deeply relevant to everyone who cares about the future of America, not just the future of American Jews.

………Sometimes your body is someone else’s haunted house. Other people look at you and can only see the dead.

I first discovered this at the age of seventeen in the most trivial of moments, at an academic quiz bowl tournament in Nashville, Tennessee—where, as the only girl from my New Jersey high school, I shared a hotel room with two girls from Mississippi. We were strangers and competitors pretending to be friends. One night we stayed up late chatting about our favorite childhood TV shows, about how we had each believed that Mr. Rogers was personally addressing us through the screen. We laughed together until one girl said, “It’s like Jesus. Even if he didn’t know my name when he was dying on the cross, I still know he loved me, and if he knew my name, he would have loved me too.” The other girl squealed, “I know, right? It’s just like Jesus!” Then the two of them, full of messianic joy, looked at me.

I said nothing—a very loud nothing. The girls waited, uncomfortable, until one braved the silence. “It seems like people up north are much less religious,” she tried. “How often do you go to church?”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/book-review-woke-racism-by-john-mcwhorter-11634596283

‘This book frankly leapt out of me,” writes John McWhorter, “during the summer of 2020.” The country was convulsed not just with Covid-19, but with protests in response to the killing of an unarmed black man by a white policeman whose actions were caught on camera. Mr. McWhorter began to write in the first week of August. Eight weeks later, he’d finished “Woke Racism,” a book that hits back at the “antiracists” who prowl public life in search of transgression, and whose mission to rid America of “racist” thought he likens to that of a religious cult. His book is a cry from the heart, and readers should gauge the depth of his indignation from the fact that its working title was “F*** ’Em.”

This eloquent manifesto is Mr. McWhorter’s 22nd book, a majority of those on the subject of linguistics. His is a split personality: A linguist in his day job as a professor at Columbia University (specializing in creoles, particularly the Saramaccan language in Suriname), he’s also an outspoken commentator on race whenever the national mood requires it. As Mr. McWhorter’s thinking on race is in conflict with that of the black American political mainstream, he’s often miscast as a black conservative by glib taxonomists. But he’s careful to point out that he wasn’t “thinking of right-wing America as my audience,” even as he acknowledges that many liberal readers will think him “traitorous” for writing this book.

Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America

By John McWhorter

Mr. McWhorter’s target audience is, precisely, the one that would regard him as racially incendiary. It includes white progressives who have “fallen under the impression that pious, unempirical virtue signaling about race is a form of moral enlightenment and political activism.” Equally, it comprises black people who have succumbed to the “misimpression” that the way to their own salvation lies in “a curated persona as eternally victimized souls.”

Mr. McWhorter’s targets in “Woke Racism” are antiracist crusaders whom he calls the Elect—borrowing a term used by the essayist Joseph Bottum in his book “An Anxious Age” (2014). Mr. McWhorter chooses not to call these people Social Justice Warriors or Inquisitors, deeming those labels “unsuitably dismissive” and “mean,” respectively. He’s not the first to trace the “rootstock” of their ideology to critical race theory. This is a once-fringe belief, now muscling its way into mainstream thought, that every individual’s fate is determined by racial “hierarchy” and power. The theory contends, writes Mr. McWhorter, that a nonwhite in America is “akin to the captive oarsman slave straining belowdecks in chains.”