Displaying posts categorized under

BOOKS

New book Palestinian Delusion makes the conflict easy to understand By Amil Imani

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/11/new_book_empalestinian_delusionem_makes_the_conflict_easy_to_understand.html

Robert Spencer’s new book, The Palestinian Delusion, under the “light of reason,” is an invaluable, accurate account that ranks as a most worthy scholarly work on the subject by a man of outstanding credentials, impeccable integrity, and unsurpassed qualifications.  This meticulously documented and comprehensive book is a treasure for anyone wishing to learn the truth of the Palestinian and Israeli conflict. 

Spencer methodically demonstrates not only that the Jews have the right to live in their ancestral homeland, but that the term “Palestinian” was invented.  “Invented people” may sound disturbing to some who have not taken the time to study historical facts.  However, truth is the best weapon against falsehood.  Spencer has carefully tied various historical origins with current events that provide facts and understanding about what is happening in our present time. 

Spencer states:

Another familiar theme of pro-Palestinian literature today is that the State of Israel exists on “stolen land”— stolen, of course, from the indigenous people of Palestine. In reality, the land is no more stolen than the Palestinian Arabs are its indigenous inhabitants. … Nonetheless, the myth has taken hold, and it is now widely taken for granted, in our age that has little historical memory and scant interest in gaining more, that the Palestinians are a genuine nationality and are the indigenous people of the land that Israel illegally occupies.

Hitler’s Pawn: The Boy Assassin and the Holocaust by Stephen Koch

On November 7, 1938, a 17-year-old Jewish boy named Herschel Grynszpan, distraught over the Nazi persecution of his family and thousands of other Polish German Jews, slipped into the German Embassy in Paris and used a gun he’d never fired before to shoot the first diplomat he saw. When the diplomat died two days later from the wounds, Adolf Hitler and his sinister propaganda henchman, Joseph Goebbels, changed the course of history by turning this one rash act of one Jewish teenager into a pretext for the Kristallnacht, the nationwide orgy of mass state-sponsored anti-Semitic criminality, violence, and murder that initiated the Holocaust. Scholarly accounts of the Kristallnacht, the Holocaust, and the Second World War ordinarily devote a few lines—sometimes even a couple of paragraphs—to Herschel’s story, noting how the Nazis exploited his brave but foolish “protest” to ignite the great pogrom.

In 1938, Europe was on the cusp of a political transformation. Western Europe’s worst fear—and it was a truly terrible fear—was the threat of another world war. After the murderous horrors of the first one, a second, even worse one loomed as madness that could kill millions, bringing the end of civilization. Europeans high and low went into deep denial, desperately convincing themselves that Hitler was somehow a normal, if distasteful, politician who could be handled and appeased. The Munich pact, long since a byword for diplomatic cowardice and disgrace, had been signed a mere month before the Kristallnacht, and for one fleeting month, the pact had been celebrated with delirious mass relief. Apart from Jews and others who had taken Hitler’s measure, the Munich Agreement was greeted by euphoric waves of joyful people—people by the hundreds of thousands literally dancing in the streets.

With the Kristallnacht, that dancing stopped. On November 9–10, when Hitler ripped off his mask of legitimacy and normality to reveal the true face of his fundamentally criminal regime, the pipe dream of a rational, appeasable Hitler died a swift, sickening death. Plenty of appeasers kept busy, but for most, the truth was clear: Hitler would stop at nothing. The fearsome return of war was probable, unavoidable, even inevitable.

The Tyranny of Virtue Salvatore Babones

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2019/11/the-tyranny-of-virtue/

Whether it’s Bernie Sanders lauding the Swedish welfare state or Donald Trump demanding the release of an American rapper from a Swedish jail, Americans are fascinated by the Scandinavian home of dancing queens and flat-pack furniture, where sexual liberation seems to have been sublimated into a Freudian fixation on political correctness.

In PC Worlds the American anthropologist Jonathan Friedman, who is married to a Swede and formerly taught in Sweden, offers a rare tour of the “opinion corridors” of the Swedish intellectual elite in this morally compelling but unevenly written indictment of political correctness. Sweden, it turns out, is obsessed with proving its politically correct anti-racism, even to the point of unravelling its once close-knit cities in the cause of multicultural accommodation and closing its eyes to serious crimes ranging from car burning to gang rape, as long as they happen to have been committed by recent immigrants. In Friedman’s telling, Swedish intellectuals are so fixated on demonstrating their anti-racist credentials that perhaps the only plausible explanation is that they are trying to make up for their own deeply held, but publicly inadmissible, racist leanings. In short, he thinks they doth protest too much.

Some of what Friedman criticises as political correctness might pass these days for simple good manners: whatever your politics, blasphemy cartoons and ethnic put-downs are not very nice, even if liberals rightly abhor their prohibition. But today’s Sweden shows how much can go wrong when political correctness is taken too seriously by those who charge themselves with enforcing it. Friedman reports incidents in which self-appointed anti-racist vigilantes make “house calls” on those who have the temerity to contradict the PC party line, vandalising their homes and terrorising their families. Less frightening but potentially more damaging, universities and newspapers have been pressured—sometimes successfully—to dismiss students and fire employees who make factually correct statements about ethnicity, immigration and crime that contradict officially-ordained PC myths.

The Rosenhan Study Was Bunk By John Hirschauer ******

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-rosenhan-study-was-bunk/

As Hilaire Belloc stated in an essay buried deep in 1941’s The Silence of the Sea, “Statistics are the triumph of the quantitative method, and the quantitative method is the victory of sterility and death.” One wonders just how many “deaths” have been caused by junk social science and bungled statistics. Consider:

David Rosenhan — Stanford professor of psychology, influential scholar, the rest — published his famous study “On Being Sane in Insane Places” in 1973. It came at the apex of the “first wave” of deinstitutionalization in the United States — John Kennedy’s last act as president was the Community Mental Health Act of 1963, a federal boondoggle which usurped state power and tried to deinstitutionalize the mentally ill via national mandate. He created a network of “community mental health centers” with federal funds, centers that he hoped would replace the state hospital as the locus of psychiatric care. The results were mixed; on one hand, plenty of individuals were mistreated in state hospitals, and still others never belonged there in the first place. Yet for the most seriously ill, the results were disastrous — the new “community mental health centers” Kennedy initiated had becomes hotbeds of political activism and had little time or interest for the violently disturbed. By 1973, many of those who were unnecessarily hospitalized in the past had already been discharged. But anti-institutional sentiment had reached a fever pitch among progressive academics; Mike Gorman, one of the architects of deinstitutionalization, admitted later in life that his “hidden agenda was to break the back of the state mental hospital.”

Rosenhan, caught in the spirit of revolution, instructed eight so-called “pseudo-patients” to play-act as schizophrenics and seek admission to mental hospitals. The subjects allegedly returned with a litany of horror stories — neglect, overmedication, squalor, uncaring staff — and Rosenhan further asserted that, if psychiatric professionals considered these fake patients insane when they were perfectly lucid, then the institutional psychiatry must itself be a sham. The study was cited time and again by activists eager to close “the asylums.” Today, with scores of drug-addled, mentally ill persons toiling on our streets, the fruits of this effort couldn’t be clearer.

Susannah Cahalan, author of the new book The Great Pretender, raises significant questions about Rosenhan’s study. She discovered, for instance, that one of the subjects contradicted the study’s findings outright — he told Cahalan that his experience at the institution was much different than Rosenhan let on. From her account in the New York Post:

Lee Smith’s Book Will Make Patriots’ Blood Boil By Eric Georgatos

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/11/lee_smiths_book_will_make_patriots_blood_boil.html

Lee Smith: The Plot against the President.  Center Street: New York, 2019.  368 pp., $17.34 hardcover, $14.99 Kindle.

Lee Smith’s The Plot against the President is an invaluable contribution to the history of America in the Trump era.  Built upon the role and perspective of California congressman Devin Nunes as the tip of the spear that would unravel and expose the coup plot and its co-conspirators, it’s a thorough chronicling of how the traditional American-bred gut instinct of a San Joaquin Valley, California farmer provided the spark of discernment that ultimately uncovered the lies and liars who perpetrated (and are still perpetrating) the worst scandal in American history.

Every congressman and senator, and every American voter, ought to read Smith’s book.  Americans who detest President Trump’s personality and decorum will remain free to continue, but if they are honest, they will be absolutely repelled by the behavior of the higher-ups in just about every so-called American “institution” — the CIA, FBI, DOJ, State Department, and mainstream media, and yes, the Obama White House.  Concocting lies and leaks to the media, fabricating evidence, running “humint” scams to develop further lies and leaks, manipulating courts by withholding evidence and declaring half-truths, carrying out orchestrated personal threats against Nunes and anyone else who dared to expose the truth — these are nothing short of organized crime activities, with each and every one of these institutions directly and knowingly involved.

How The Obama Administration Set In Motion Democrats’ Coup Against Trump by Lee Smith

https://thefederalist.com/2019/10/28/how-the-obama-administration-set-in-motion-democrats-coup-against-trump/

Rep. Devin Nunes realized the purpose of Obama’s dossier. ‘Devin figured out in December what was going on,’ says Langer. ‘It was an operation to bring down Trump.’

The following is an excerpt from Lee Smith’s book out October 29, “The Plot Against the President: The True Story of How Congressman Devin Nunes Uncovered the Biggest Political Scandal in U.S. History.”

AFTER DONALD TRUMP was elected forty-fifth president of the United States, the operation designed to undermine his campaign transformed. It became an instrument to bring down the commander in chief. The coup started almost immediately after the polls closed.

Hillary Clinton’s communications team decided within twenty-four hours of her concession speech to message that the election was illegitimate, that Russia had interfered to help Trump.

Obama was working against Trump until the hour he left office. His national security advisor, Susan Rice, commemorated it with an email to herself on January 20, moments before Trump’s inauguration. She wrote to memorialize a meeting in the White House two weeks before.

Is there no field in which the Jewish mindset doesn’t excel? Norman Lebrecht celebrates the explosion of Jewish talent between 1847 and 1947 in music, literature, painting, film, politics, philosophy, science and invention David Crane

https://www.spectator.co.uk/2019/10/is-there-no-field-in-which-the-jewish-mindset-doesnt-excel/

Genius & Anxiety: How Jews Changed the World, 1847–1947Norman Lebrecht

More than 20 years ago, George Steiner, meditating on 2,000 years of persecution and suffering, posed the ‘taboo’ question that no one dared ask: ‘Has the survival of the Jew been worth the appalling cost?’  It was not just the horrors of the pogroms or of Auschwitz that ‘enforced’ the question for Steiner, nor the centuries of exclusion and violence but — equally destructive — ‘the fear, the degradation, the miasma of contempt, latent or explicit,’ which has been the hereditary birthright of every Jewish child ‘across the millennia’. ‘Would it not be preferable, on the balance sheet of human mercies,’ Steiner asked, ‘if he was to ebb into assimilation and the common seas?’

For the Orthodox believer, armed with the certainties of God’s covenant with His people, the question might not exist, but for those who cannot go down that road Norman Lebrecht’s urgent and moving history provides a different and stirring answer.  ‘Between the middle of the 19th and 20th centuries,’ Genius & Anxiety opens,

a few dozen men and women changed the way we see the world. Some of their names are on our lips for all time. Marx, Freud, Proust, Einstein, Kafka. Others have vanished from our collective memory, but their importance endures in our daily lives. Without Karl Landsteiner, for instance, there would be no blood transfusion or major surgery; without Paul Ehrlich no chemotherapy; without Siegfried Marcus no motor car; without Rosalind Franklin no model of DNA; without Fritz Haber there would not be enough food to sustain life on earth.

I don’t know if Lebrecht actually buys into so simple a description of scientific progress, or whether it is just a good, combative kick-off to a book, but either way the main thrust of the argument is inescapable. For the best part of the past 200 years a small and threatened minority has exerted a creative influence out of all proportion to their numbers, and whether they flaunt it like a Disraeli or a Bernstein, or a convert like Mendelssohn, whether they hate it like Marx, are religious or atheist, Orthodox or Reform, assimilist or Zionist, the one thing they share is their ‘Jewishness’. While it seems a difficult thing to define without slipping into tautology — a ‘Jewish aphorism’ or a ‘Jewish joke’ takes one as close as one is probably going to get — the one quality, for Lebrecht, that distinguishes the ‘Jewish mindset’ is the rabbinical, counter-intuitive ability to think ‘outside the box’. He is quick to refute any suggestion of Jewish ‘exceptionalism’, but whether in the end it is a matter of culture, hereditary experience or the eternal, driven angst of a people who could only fear the worst, the western world has every reason to be grateful to this astonishing explosion of talent.

The polar bear catastrophe that wasn’t

Polar bears are the poster critters of the global warming movement. 

Their striking white coats are absolutely adorable — when they’re not trying to eat you alive.

School kids are taught every day to agonize over the fate of cute white bears starving, drowning and dying out. 

None of it is true.

Canadian Zoologist Susan Crockford has written an important new book.   explains why the catastrophic decline in polar bear numbers we were promised in 2007 failed to materialize.  Dr. Crockford sent us a limited supply of her fascinating book. 

Susan Crockford is the zoologist we wrote to you about last week who was purged from the University of Victoria for having the temerity to tell people the true facts about polar bears.

The warming-left considers their suffering cute polar bear narrative to be too valuable to allow hard data to interfere.  They are prepared to destroy the reputation of anyone who dares speak the truth.

The fact is that polar bears are a conservation success story.  Their numbers exploded from around 5,000 in the sixties to as many as 30,000 plus today thanks to a hunting ban.

Polar bears are thriving. 

The polar bear as global warming icon is anthropomorphism fused with alarmism run amok. 

‘Anonymous’ and the Whistleblower: DC’s Epidemic of Cowardice By Roger L. Simon

https://pjmedia.com/rogerlsimon/anonymous-and-the-whistleblowerdcs-epidemic-of-cowardice/

Our hearts are supposed to be pounding because “Anonymous,” the character who wrote a New York Times op-ed back in 2018, supposedly from inside the Trump administration, has secretly been working on a book that is about to be published.

The book, titled “A Warning,” is being promoted as “an unprecedented behind-the-scenes portrait of the Trump presidency” that expands upon the Times column, which ricocheted around the world and stoked the president’s rage because of its devastating portrayal of Trump in office.

The column described Trump’s leadership style as “impetuous, adversarial, petty and ineffective,” and noted that “his impulsiveness results in half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions that have to be walked back.”

The author of the column, which was titled “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration” and published Sept. 5, 2018, was known to the Times but identified only as a senior official in the Trump administration. The person has still not been publicly identified.

Oh, really? Excuse me, but why is this person being anonymous if what he or she has to say is true? To keep a job? If Trump is so bad, why would he or she want to work for him in the first place? To support the “resistance” inside the White House and effectuate change? He or she hasn’t been very successful at that so far, to say the least. Wouldn’t the honorable thing be to resign and speak your piece publicly? Making it easier, given the riven state of our politics, finding other employment would be relatively simple and likely considerably more remunerative.

No, “Anonymous” is something of a careerist looking to sell a book via some cheesy hocus-pocus.

Women Under the Spell Augusto Zimmermann

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2019/10/women-under-the-spell/

The connections of early feminism with secular ideologies such as liberalism and socialism are well known. I have myself written about these in several of my articles, including a chapter in my book on Western legal theory. However, the spiritual dimensions that underpinned the early feminist movement in the nineteenth century were entirely unknown to me until I discovered this important book on the subject.

Dr Per Faxneld obtained a PhD in History of Religions at Stockholm University in 2014. He is a professor at Stockholm University, was a visiting professor at Cambridge University in 2014, and is currently a post-doctoral fellow at Mid-Sweden University. He has published numerous peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on the history of Satanism and Western esotericism.

Satanic Feminism is based on Faxneld’s doctoral dissertation, which was awarded the Donner Institute Prize for Eminent Research on Religion. It discusses how prominent feminists—primarily between 1880 and 1930—used Satan as a symbol of their rejection of the so-called “patriarchal traits of Christianity”. It shows that these women were inspired by the period’s most influential new religion, Theosophy, and how the anti-Christian discourses of radical secularism affected feminism.

Satanic Feminism sheds a new light on the early feminist movement. It discusses neglected or unknown aspects of the intellectual connections of early feminism with Satanism in a way that nobody before Faxneld has dared to do. In doing so, he richly illustrates how leading figures of the early feminist movement, such as the suffragette Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the actress Sarah Bernhardt and the poet Renée Vivien, viewed God as the precursor of patriarchy and Satan as an ally in the fight against it.