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A Book for Our Times: Peter Wood’s 1620 Skewers 1619 Project By Stanley Kurtz

By on November 16th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/a-book-for-our-times-peter-woods-1620-skewers-1619-project/

I can think of no book more deserving of a review in The New York Times—or less likely to receive one—than Peter Wood’s just-published 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project. More than a powerful refutation, Wood’s 1620 is a withering appraisal and deadpan skewering of the 1619 Project as a cultural phenomenon. That ill-starred journalistic project is the purest and most perfect example of woke. The cultural revolution of 2020 will always rightly be associated with the 1619 Project of The New York Times. Not for nothing did project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones cheerfully embrace the term “1619 riots.”

Many young Americans believe that slavery was a novelty in world history—an exclusively American innovation. That misapprehension is abetted by the 1619 Project. Wood thus begins with a quick tour of New World slavery prior to 1619. Among the indigenous peoples of the Americas, captive enemies were kept for their labor, for the sport of torture, and in a few cases for what Wood calls “almost industrial level” human sacrifice, not to mention cannibalism.

Long before 1619, the Spanish and Portuguese used slavery to extract forced labor from native peoples. Eventually, they abolished the enslavement of native Americans in favor of something closer to serf-like dependence. Certainly, the Spanish and Portuguese imported slaves from Africa (where slavery was also common), sometimes putting them in charge of indigenous slaves. Those African overseers often discharged their task with brutality. When a party of Spanish conquistadors out to subdue what is now Florida were shipwrecked, they themselves were enslaved by the indigenes. Most died in short order. Slavery was a world-wide human norm.

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In New Memoir, Obama Accuses Netanyahu of Engaging in ‘Orchestrated’ Push Against His Administration

By on November 14th, 2020

https://www.algemeiner.com/2020/11/13/in-new-memoir-obama-accuses-netanyahu

In his own words, former US President Barack Obama regarded Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a “smart, canny, tough…gifted communicator” who engaged in an “orchestrated” push against his administration.

The disclosure is contained in Obama’s presidential memoir, “A Promised Land,” which will be published on Tuesday.

In excerpts of the book released in advance, Obama wrote that Netanyahu’s “vision of himself as the chief defender of the Jewish people against calamity allowed him to justify almost anything that would keep him in power.”

On the subject of AIPAC, the US pro-Israel lobbying group, Obama claimed that its positions moved rightward in accordance with a political shift in Israel, “even when Israel took actions that were contrary to US policy.”

He lamented that politicians who “criticized Israel policy too loudly risked being tagged as ‘anti-Israel’ (and possibly antisemitic) and [were] confronted with a well-funded opponent in the next election.”

Obama said that he was the subject of a “whisper campaign” that sought to portray him as “insufficiently supportive — or even hostile toward — Israel” during the 2008 presidential race.

“On Election Day, I’d end up getting more than 70 percent of the Jewish vote, but as far as many AIPAC board members were concerned, I remained suspect, a man of divided loyalties; someone whose support for Israel, as one of [campaign manager David Axelrod’s] friends colorfully put it, wasn’t ‘felt in his kishkes’ — ‘guts,’ in Yiddish,” Obama wrote.

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Obama Defames ‘Millions of Americans’ as Racists in New Memoir By Jack Cashill

By on November 14th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/11/obama_defames_millions_of_americans_as_racists_in_new_memoir.html

Barack Obama owes the people of America an apology.

“For millions of Americans spooked by a Black man in the White House,” writes Barack Obama in his new memoir, A Promised Land, “Donald Trump promised an elixir for their racial anxiety.”

Rather than speak for the millions of Americans whom Barack Obama casually defamed, I am going to speak for the 130,000 or so residents of Chautauqua County, New York, a semi-rural “rust belt” county tucked away in the far southwest corner of western New York.

I know the county well.  I spend a good chunk of each year there and set my first published novel, 2006: A Chautauqua Rising, therein.  (Word to would-be writers: do not use names in book titles that no one can pronounce: sha-TAWK-wa).

In 2008, Mr. Obama, you won Chautauqua County.  In that the county is only 2 percent black, it was the white people of Chautauqua who elected you.  In that many residents have not seen a black American since the Buffalo Bills moved their training camp, “racial anxiety” is preposterously low on the list of local motivators.  You appeared just as black in 2008 as you did in 2012, and you scared no one.

High on the list of real anxieties was the economy.  The once prosperous county had been hemorrhaging jobs and people since 1970.  In 2008, with the economy collapsing, you promised “hope and change.”  People ignored the details and put their trust in you.

In October 2012, after four years of left-leaning economic amateurism, the national unemployment rate stood at 7.9 percent, the worst “recovery” in our history.  It was higher still in Chautauqua County.

Months before the election, with Congress unable to pass a law giving relief to the so-called “DREAMers” — young people brought to this country illegally by their parents — you unilaterally decided to give as many as a million people relief from deportation proceedings, as well as the right to apply for work authorization.

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Israelis’ Worries Center on Biden’s Plans to Negotiate with Iran By P. David Hornik

By on November 13th, 2020

https://pjmedia.com/columns/p-david-hornik/2020/11/13/israelis-worries-center-on-bidens-plans-to-negotiate-with-iran-n1141462

There’s no question about who Israel’s majority Jewish population was rooting for on November 3. A poll by the Israel Democracy Institute found 70 percent of Jewish Israelis supporting Trump, 13 percent preferring Biden, and 17 percent who didn’t know. Strikingly, with respondents defining themselves as right-wing, centrist, or left-wing, half of the left-wingers came out in favor of Trump.

Israelis, in other words, are well aware of the remarkable record Trump racked up in four years as history’s most pro-Israel president, which included: moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem; recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights; defunding the Palestinian Authority until it behaves decently and constructively; coming up with a realistic peace plan in which Israel retains indispensable parts of the West Bank; brokering peace deals with three Arab states; and — not least — treating Israel as the U.S. treats its other allies instead of constantly berating it publicly.

Most probably, though, those days are gone, and speculations now center on what to expect from a Biden presidency — particularly regarding the Palestinians and Iran. On the Palestinian track, Biden is likely, unfortunately, to throw out Trump’s peace plan and return to the “Clinton parameters” or worse, in which Israel gives up virtually all of the West Bank and turns Jerusalem into a divided, warring city. Even so, with domestic issues on his plate like COVID-19 and an economy striving to recover from the pandemic, many believe Biden won’t replicate Barack Obama’s obsession with the stubborn, self-pitying Palestinians — who have proved unamenable to peacemakers since the late 1930s.

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The Deep State From Inside Out Rich Higgins’ new memoir reveals just how murky is the swamp. Jack Cashill

By on October 30th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/deep-state-inside-out-jack-cashill/

“The Trump administration is suffering under withering information campaigns designed to first undermine, then delegitimize and ultimately remove the President,” so wrote National Security Council staffer Rich Higgins in a May 2017 memo that ultimately landed on President Trump’s desk. Although the NeverTrumpers in the NSC did not succeed in removing Trump, they did remove Higgins.

The Higgins memo reportedly distressed National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, who had replaced Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn in the position. McMaster ordered a probe that some described as “McCarthy-type” to identify the author. That search led to Higgins, a Flynn loyalist who had worked on the Trump campaign.

After his authorship was established, Higgins had to choose between resignation and termination, the latter coming with the potential loss of his security clearance. Higgins resigned and was promptly escorted out of the building.

An everyday guy from Boston, Higgins had started his career as an army bomb technician with a hands-on specialty in IEDs, worked his way up to become an anti-terrorism expert, and ended his stint in the Deep State as a national security expert in the Trump administration.

Here is one unnerving fact: Trump received only 4 percent of the vote in the District of Columbia. As Higgins tells the tale in his new eye-opening memoir, The Memo: 20 Years Inside the Deep State Fighting for America First, the staffers at the National Security Council were no more disposed to support the president’s agenda than were the District voters writ large.

Higgins tells his tale well. I downed the book in two quick gulps. It was that good, that readable, that prescient, and that essential. As closely as I follow events, before reading this book I had no real sense of just how deep and murky the swamp is.

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“Great Society,” by Amity Schlaes Reviewed by Sydney Williams

By on October 21st, 2020

https://swtotd.blogspot.com/

The book reviewed, Great Society by Amity Schlaes, is a timely history of what happens when hopes and expectations exceed capabilities. It is especially timely now when Socialism and the “Green New Deal” are being pushed on the American people by a progressive left that has become distanced from the average American.

By the time John Kennedy became President, The Depression was a distant memory and World War II had been over for over fifteen years. Americans were prospering. Theys felt good about themselves. They were admired by friends and feared by enemies. But, as happens once prosperity becomes common, people don’t seem to care or understand the role capitalism plays in eliminating poverty and making lives comfortable and happy. They don’t understand that nothing moves in straight lines – GDP growth, stock market performance, human emotions, or views of liberty. In the 1960s, the compounded rate for the Dow Jones Industrial Averages (DJIA) was 4.9% – all in the first half of the decade – and in the ensuing decade, the DJIA lost eight percent. What happened in the ‘60s, and its effect on subsequent decades, is the subject of this well-researched history of the period from the summer of 1960 to the summer of 1972. 

On January 20, 1961, a 43-year-old John F. Kennedy became the youngest U.S. President since Theodore Roosevelt. In his inaugural he focused on the Country’s strength and the meaning of freedom: “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty.” Americans were confident. In May of that same year, Kennedy announced a goal of putting a man on the moon by the end of the decade. Yet the Cold War persisted, poverty had not been vanquished and civil rights were not equally shared. Convinced of a need to stop the spread of Communism got us entangled in Vietnam. Concern for those living in penury led to the War on Poverty. Disquiet about equality and fairness were behind the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. A decade that began on a high note, exemplified in Kennedy’s inaugural, ended with Nixon taking the nation off the gold standard on August 15, 1971. The years between witnessed a growth in national debt, a declining Dollar, student riots, and the assassination of a President, a civil rights leader and a U.S. Senator and Presidential candidate.

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‘Crosswinds’ Review: Middle East Balancing Act An exploration of the Saudi temper that has both the interpretative heft of scholarship and the anecdotal brilliance of literary travelogue. By Martin Peretz

By on October 20th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/crosswinds-review-middle-east-balancing-act-11603149873?mod=opinion_reviews_pos1

Search for recent news articles about Saudi Arabia and the first name certain to appear is that of Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi journalist and inside player of Saudi power politics who was exiled from the kingdom, became an outspoken critic of the House of Saud, and in October 2018 met his gruesome end in an ambush inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul—an attack about which Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman denies any foreknowledge. The Khashoggi incident was met by world-wide revulsion; it’s been a blow to Saudi Arabia’s reputation that, in comparison to those of the kingdom’s neighbors, is warranted but not deserved. Every day, for example, more evidence surfaces of the top-down human-rights abuses in Iran and the unending human wreckage caused by the Syrian genocide. Still, Khashoggi’s fate has become a more potent symbol than either of these, emblematic of an increasingly hardline, conservative regime that the American foreign-policy establishment, and much of the American public, dislikes and distrusts.

Actions don’t exist outside of contexts. Insisting on a less myopic look at Saudi Arabia doesn’t mean excusing Khashoggi’s murder, but it does mean contextualizing it, bringing to it an analytical commitment to complexity too often attenuated in our times. This is the indirect achievement of “Crosswinds,” a posthumous book by Fouad Ajami that makes sense of the Saudi kingdom on its own terms—terms dense and tense with possibilities.

The Lebanon-born Ajami, who died in 2014 at age 68, was director of Middle East Studies at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and America’s most prominent pragmatic idealist about the possibilities of liberalization in the Middle East. “Crosswinds,” completed in 2010 and drawing on 30 years of anecdote and analysis, attempts to gauge those possibilities in Saudi Arabia, not as an apologia for the kingdom but as a corrective to facile critiques.

In this work, more penetrating than argumentative and more deepening than sweeping, Ajami shows that behind its deliberately opaque exterior, modern Saudi Arabia has been defined by the calibration of tensions between competing forces: deep conservatism and yearnings for modernity; the ferocity of radicalism and the dependability of oil revenues; pressures from America to move left and from Iran to move right. The role of the monarchy in negotiating these crosswinds implicitly repudiates the brutal despotic repressions of regional neighbors like Iran and Syria: the Saudis may be authoritarians but they are also pragmatists.

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The Despair of Feminism By David Solway

By on October 19th, 2020

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2020/10/17/the-despair-of-feminism-n1066231

“The relationship between men and women,” writes Megan Fox in her recent book Believe Evidence: The Death of Due Process from Salome to #MeToo, “is a mysterious and beautiful thing. When each is acting within their boundaries, there is no end to the joy that comes from male and female love, familial or romantic.” The weakening of men and the empowerment of women, as “women claw their way to ever increasing power and fix men (especially young, white men), in their crosshairs,” destroy the sexual, romantic and institutional bond between the sexes. Similarly, the common preachment that men should jettison their manhood and become more like women is to distort the gender relationship and introduce a schism into the culture that can lead only to turmoil and unhappiness for both men and women. Male feminist Michael Kimmel ludicrously claims in Angry White Men that “abandoning that sense of masculine entitlement actually enables us to live happier lives.” On the contrary, the upshot is social misery.

“Radical androgyny,” writes Stephen Baskerville in The New Politics of Sex, is the consequence of the effort to control and punish men for their natural sexuality and to deny that “relationships between men and women should be regulated by social conventions that recognize the differences between men and women.” When nature is violated, domestic anarchy becomes the rule, not the exception, the feature, not the bug. This may partly explain why marriage is in decline and the MGTOW movement (Men Going Their Own Way) is gathering momentum.

Feminists have sold their birthright for a messy cottage, and will come increasingly to suffer for it in the coin of regret, loneliness and despair. In The Sickness unto Death, Danish philosopher and master ironist Soren Kierkegaard discussed the source of feminine despair, which he sensed gradually taking hold of the feminine psyche. Women, he felt, were being encouraged to file, so to speak, for self-divorce, to violate their own essential nature, which he understood as the capacity for devotion. “In devotion she loses herself, and only then is happy, only then is she herself…Take this devotion away, then her self is also gone.” “Devotedness” is her essential nature. Kierkegaard, a devout Christian, clearly had Matthew 16:26 in mind: For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul? The word “man,” of course, is intended generically. 

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DAVID GOLDMAN REVIEWS ANN APPLEBAUM’S “TWILIGHT OF DEMOCRACY”

By on October 16th, 2020

https://lawliberty.org/book-review/applebaum-pride-prejudice/

Anne Applebaum’s Pride and Prejudice

This is not a book, but rather an Atlantic essay puffed into a $25 sale item with grotesquely large type and comically wide margins. The typography offends the eye almost as much as the content offends the mind. It is a barely coherent rant against ex-friends and political opponents. It is a tantrum from a liberal who expected a univeralist millennium after the fall of Communism and discovered to her horror that national identity still matters.

Half a century of Nazi and Communist occupation nearly crushed the spirit of the nations of Eastern Europe; a decade ago they approached the point of no return for demographic extinction. The new nationalists who now govern Hungary and Poland, the objects of Applebaum’s direst imprecations, have rebuilt vibrant economies, raised birth rates, and established viable democracies out of nearly-ruined Soviet colonies. Despite their missteps—which are frequent and sometimes grave—they have restored hope for the future to lands which not long ago seemed like a cemetary of the human spirit.

Anne Applebaum’s list of little Hitlers includes some ex-friends who came to her 1999 New Year’s Eve party in Poland, when her husband Radek Sikorski was a foreign ministry official, as well as former acquaintances like British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. The renegade party guests somehow morphed from democracy activists into Nazis, because they suffer from “authoritarian personalities,” Applebaum avers. Also on her list are “the old Hungarian right, the Spanish right, the French right, the Italian right, and, with differences, the British right and the American right, too.” It is hard to separate Applebaum’s ideological rancor at friends who moved away from the liberal dogmas of 1989 and her personal disappointment over her husband’s career.

Boris Johnson a crypto-fascist? Who but the overwrought Ms. Applebaum noticed! She would have a pint at the pub with Johnson when she was Deputy Editor of the Spectator and he was Mayor of London, but since then she has discovered that the Prime Minister is a liar, a home-wrecking philanderer, and a budding authoritarian due to his opposition to Brexit. She claims that the rising fascists of the British Isles duped their compatriots into voting Leave by lying about money that might be saved for the National Health Service.

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A Radical Shift The nightmare Obama brought to U.S. foreign policy. Thu Oct 15, 2020 Walid Phares

By on October 15th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/radical-shift-frontpagemagcom/

Editors’ note: Walid Phares has a new book out on the difference in foreign policy between Obama and Trump titled: The Choice: Trump vs. Obama-Biden in US Foreign Policy. Below is an exclusive excerpt – Chapter 3 – which illustrates the nightmare that Obama brought to U.S. foreign policy.

Soon after landing in the White House, President Obama initiated two major moves, which by the end of May or early June 2009 indicated where his administration was going in terms of national security and foreign policy. It was obvious to me at the time that the country was veering away from the post-9/11 posture and the so-called War on Terror and heading in the opposite direction of demobilization of America on the one hand and the activation of an apologist policy on the other in order to engage with future partners who were actually at the core of terrorism and extremism.

Most Americans in the early years of the Obama administration focused on the domestic agenda and therefore did not see or understand the much wider change of direction that the new team at the White House was implementing: the eventual dismantling of the War on Terror and with it the war of ideas. In other words, the Obama doctrine was telling Americans that our conflict with the radicals overseas was in error because the conflict was caused by us—and therefore we need not only to cease our efforts of resistance against the jihadists, Iran, and the other radicals but jump on a train going in the other direction, one that would lead us to engaging the foes and finding agreement with each of them in order to transform American policy overseas.

The first major benchmark that indicated a massive Obama-Biden change in foreign policy with implications on national security was Obama’s trip to Egypt in spring 2009 and his address at Cairo University. The main idea of President Obama on the political philosophy level was to inform the American public that the United States has been seen as an aggressor against Arabs and Muslims since 9/11—maybe even decades before that. This perception prevailed on U.S. campuses for decades among leftist academics and intellectuals. It was explained as the American branch of Western colonialism. But the urgency behind this U-turn made by the administration in foreign policy perception was in fact linked to how the United States reacted to the 9/11 attacks.

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