The New York Times has a new op-ed contributor named Marwan Barghouti. His op-ed “Why We Are on Hunger Strike in Israel’s Prisons”– is a screed to make Thomas Friedman proud.
The Times described Barghouti as a “Palestinian leader and parliamentarian.”
Oops! The Times somehow forgot to mention that Marwan Barghouti is a terrorist serial killer whose savagery earned him five life sentences. It’s like describing Jeffrey Dahmer, the cannibal serial killer, as a “culinary innovator.”
The New York Times must like the name Barghouti. Omar Barghouti, one of the founders of the BDS movement and author of Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights is also a favored contributor. In a January 2014 op-ed he explained “Why Israel Fears the Boycott” listing the usual litany of lies and accusations. In May 2015 he wrote an op-ed “Israeli Extremism Will Encourage Global Boycott” quoting a poll by J Street to bolster his bias. On March 16th, 2017 in a letter to the editor, he compares BDS to the civil rights movement, quotes a questionable Brookings Institute poll on American support for sanctions against Israel, and spells out the agenda of BDS:
“Since its inception in 2005 by the Palestinian grass-roots civil society coalition, B.D.S. has consistently called for ending Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem; granting full equality for Palestinian citizens of Israel, who are discriminated against by dozens of laws; and recognizing the United Nations-stipulated right of Palestinian refugees to return to lands from which they were forcibly displaced during Israel’s establishment in 1948.” He could have said it in one sentence: BDS calls for the end of Israel….period! And has anyone told him that Gaza is not “occupied” since 2005?
Other mainstream papers contribute to anti-Israel bias by ignoring relevant stories.
To paraphrase George Berkeley about a tree falling in the woods, if the media doesn’t report it, did it happen?
In France, on April 3, an Orthodox Jewish woman, Sarah Halimi, a doctor aged 66, was thrown out of a window to her death by an African neighbor who shouted “Allahu akbar!” The mainstream media ignored it.
On April 21 a speeding car driven by an Arab rammed into a bus stop at the Gush Etzion bus stop injuring an elderly man. The Gush Etzion spokesperson said the incident marks the second such attack in the last month. Earlier this month, Sgt. Elchai Teharlev was killed in a car ramming attack while guarding a bus stop just outside the West Bank settlement of Ofra.
The mainstream media ignored these events. Maybe they did not happen? CONTINUE AT SITE
Europe owes everything to the beneficence of America, which was even prepared to sign up for mutually-assured destruction in its protection. When Trump accuses such generosity’s recipients of ingratitude the only surprise is that the complaint was so long in coming.
Out of despair, insight. A comment from a despairing American friend of mine suddenly helped me to understand Donald Trump and his context. “If Thomas Jefferson had foreseen Donald Trump,” he said, “he would have told his fellow revolutionaries that they must stop fighting immediately and make peace terms with George III.” There was further gloom. “Trouble is, and despite Jefferson, the Enlightenment only had shallow roots in the United States.” Thus an intellectual blue-stater, more influenced by Hollywood than he would ever acknowledge, looks down on the plain people of middle America: the Donald Trump electorate.
Forgetting Donald Trump for a moment, my friend was right, more so than he realises, about the long-term failure of the Enlightenment. Which, in turn, was partly responsible for the thirty-year failure of Western policy which threatens us with decline. If the West’s will to power and ability to exercise power are gone beyond recall, then anarchy and destruction loom over the entire planet.
In recent years, the world has been turned upside down. Old assumptions and old certainties no longer work. This means that there are no grounds for Western geopolitical self-confidence. At the beginning of the 1990s, we were invited to hail the new world order and the end of history. How hollow those phrases sound now. If they are ever recalled to mind, it is with bitter irony. Forget optimistic slogans: we are now in the era of the unknown unknowns.
Yet none of this is Donald Trump’s fault. The President is dramatising the problems, not creating them. He had no hand in the West’s failures in the Middle East. He did not create the threats to American jobs and living standards from automation, robotisation and globalisation. He is not responsible for the immigration pressures from the huddled masses in poor countries. He cannot be blamed for the failure of the European single currency, or for the West’s inability to reach a post-Cold War modus vivendi with Russia. Men who regard themselves as much wiser than Mr Trump and who have the academic credentials to prove it, if not necessarily the record of practical successes, ought to scrutinise their own motives. They clearly have an aesthetic objection to a Trump presidency: that is understandable. “What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Washington to be born.” Yet it may also be that they are angry with him because he is forcing them to confront their own failure.
This failure is not always blameworthy. Some of the challenges which face the West may be beyond the capacity of anyone to surmount, even Donald Trump. In the meantime, Mr Trump is at least forcing them onto the agenda. The wiser men usually prefer not to think about the insolubles, rather as the Eloi tried to ignore the Morlocks. But even if he might seem to resemble a Morlock, Mr Trump is a great stimulator of thought. Not just thought; action too. On at least three problems, he might even be able to rescue the West from some of the Enlightenment’s minor failures.
My gloomy friend seemed to take it for granted that even if his fellow Americans had not been worthy to receive the message, the Enlightenment had been successful in Europe. That, alas, is untrue. If one considers its high expectations, it has failed. This failure has been associated with the most tragic period in human history and may well lead to the destruction of the human race. But it should all have been so different. For countless millennia, and despite great cultural achievements, much of human life was a wretched business: nothing but the animal struggle for food, warmth and sex at a slightly higher technological level. Countless numbers of individual lives were a cry of pain.
Patriotism in the White House, in any other era, would not have been anything out of the ordinary. In the America of managerialism and ‘global governance’, not to mention identity politics, Trump’s patriotism plunges the chattering classes into fits of frothing indignation.
The rise and rise of Donald J. Trump is a revolution. While today’s leftists would call it a counter-revolution, we might all agree that the 2015-16 populist-nationalist insurrection, which swept President Trump to power, falls outside the category of business as usual. For the anti-Trump camp, from Hollywood celebrities to Obama holdouts in the Deep State, Trump’s inauguration represents the moral equivalent of January 30, 1933.
The short-lived Journal of American Greatness and now the quarterly journal American Affairs provide a counterpoint to this Antifa (anti-fascist) narrative. An integral aspect of this nascent Trumpist intelligentsia is a high regard for James Burnham (above), a founding editor of the National Review and the author of such formative works as The Managerial Revolution (1941), The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom (1943), The Struggle for the World (1947) and Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism (1964).
When Burnham died in 1987, President Reagan described him as “one of those principally responsible for the great intellectual odyssey of our century—the journey away from totalitarian statism and towards the uplifting doctrines of freedom”. Not everyone shared Ronald Reagan’s admiration. Old-style Leftists reviled Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution and The Machiavellians because these books repudiated their fantasy that socialism—that is to say, a classless people’s community—would emerge out of the ruins of capitalism. Trotskyists broke with Burnham (and vice versa) for his refusal to accept that Stalin’s Russia somehow remained a workers’ state, albeit a deformed or degenerated one. Communist apologists, in turn, were aghast at Burnham’s mid-war denunciation of the Soviet Union as “the most extreme totalitarian dictatorship in history”. Coming in the midst of the Swinging Sixties, the central thesis of Suicide of the West—that the real role of American-style liberalism is “to permit Western civilisation to be reconciled to its dissolution”—garnered few friends on the progressive side of politics.
It is a different story with conservatives, of course, but still complicated. During James Burnham’s lifetime his work was widely read and, in the case of the Cold War, highly consequential. Many of the ideas he articulated in The Struggle for the World were already in circulation as early as 1944. He had identified guerrilla skirmishes in Greece, a power vacuum opening up in Eastern Europe, and the Chiang Kai-Shek-Mao Zedong standoff as the early stages of a global conflagration entirely distinct from the Second World War. Winston Churchill would have been aware of Burnham’s thinking before he delivered his “Iron Curtain” speech on March 5, 1946.
Despite this, and his key role in the National Review for a lengthy period, Burnham was rarely a source of political debate in the decades after his death. In 2002, for instance, Roger Kimball wrote an appreciative essay but feared that not even a new biography by Daniel Kelly would rescue James Burnham from relative obscurity:
But in this world, the combination of Burnham’s ferocious intellectual independence and unclubbable heterodoxy long ago consigned him to the unglamorous limbo that established opinion reserves for those who challenge its pieties too forcefully.
A “general renaissance” did not appear to be on the cards—until the momentous events of 2016, that is. In October last year, the anti-Trump conservative Matthew Continetti, editor of the Washington Free Beacon, spoke of the need:
“to rehabilitate Burnham’s vision of a conservative-tinged Establishment capable of permeating the managerial society and gradually directing it in a prudential, reflective, virtuous manner respectful of both freedom and tradition.”
Jeet Heer, a senior editor for the New Republic, lambasted Continetti for “holding up Burnham as an alternative to Trumpism, portraying him as an advocate of a measured, brainy, and pragmatic right-wing politics that seeks to shape elite institutions rather than to take populist delight in burning it all down”. Heer, who writes a bi-weekly column with headings such as “Steve Bannon is Turning Trump into an Ethno-Nationalist Ideologue” and “Donald Trump is the Bizarro Noam Chomsky”, appears to have contracted a particularly virulent strain of Trumpophobia. That said, Heer might be right to argue that Burnham is not “an alternative to Trumpism” and, if anything, “a precursor to Trump”.
Red/blue, conservative/liberal, and Republican/Democrat mark traditional American divides. But one fault line is not so 50/50 — that of the contemporary hard progressive movement versus traditional politics, values, and customs.
The entire menu of race, class, and gender identity politics, lead-from-behind foreign policy, political correctness, and radical environmentalism so far have not won over most Americans.
Proof of that fact are the serial reliance of their supporters on deception, and the erosion of language on campus and in politics and the media. The progressive movement requires both deceit and euphemism to mask its apparently unpopular agenda.
What the Benghazi scandal, the Bowe Bergdahl swap, and the Iran Deal all had in common was their reliance on ruse. If the White House and its allies had told the whole truth about all these incidents, Americans probably would have widely rejected the ideological premises that framed them.
In the case of Benghazi, most Americans would not fault an obscure video for causing scripted rioting and death at an American consulate and CIA annex. They would hardly believe that a policy of maintaining deliberately thin security at U.S. facilities would encourage reciprocal local good will in the Middle East. They would not agree that holding back American rescue forces was a wise move likely to forestall an international confrontation or escalation.
In other words, Americans wanted their consulate in Benghazi well fortified and protected from seasoned terrorists, and they favored rapid deployment of maximum relief forces in times of crises — but, unfortunately, these were not the agendas of the Obama administration. So, to disguise that unpleasant reality, Americans were treated to Susan Rice’s yarns about a spontaneous, unexpected riot that was prompted by a right-wing video, and endangered Americans far beyond the reach of U.S. military help.
Ditto the Bowe Bergdahl caper, the American deserter on the Afghan front. Aside from the useful publicity of “bringing home” an American hostage, there was an implicit progressive subtext to both his earlier flight and eventual return: Young introspective soldiers are often troubled about their nation’s ambiguous role in the Middle East and so, understandably, sometimes err in their search for meaning. When they do, and when they perhaps “wander off,” the government has win-win resources to address their temporary lapse — in this case, killing two birds with one stone by downsizing the apparently repulsive Guantanamo Bay detention facility and returning punished-enough Taliban combatants to their families.
What Susan Rice (ostensibly the go-to consigliere in such deals) could not say is that the Obama administration released five dangerous terrorists in order to bring home one likely deserter, whose selfish AWOL behavior may have contributed over the years to the injury or even deaths of several American soldiers tasked with finding him. Instead, we got the lie that Bergdahl was a brave solider who served with honor and distinction and was captured in mediis rebus on the battlefield, with the implication that his personal odyssey inadvertently led to the bonus of returning in-limbo foreign detainees and reducing the population of an embarrassing gulag.
A few days ago, in a reply that showed a rare understanding of political realities, my 12-year-old grandson responded to a question from his 16-year-old brother: “Do you even know what Communism IS, George?” “Sure, I do. It’s when one man works two hours and another guy works fourteen hours and they both get paid the same!” George gets it! I wish more adults did as well.
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Global news dominated: Kim Jong-un continued to play chicken with the civilized world; Russian bombers, off Alaska, came within 30 miles of U.S. airspace; the U.S. dropped the “mother of all bombs” on ISIS holdouts in Nangarhar province in Afghanistan; in retaliation for a chemical attack by Assad forces, the U.S. fired cruise missiles onto a Syrian airbase; food riots broke out in Venezuela, as Socialism broke down. These events demonstrate how delicate is civilization’s balance. Keeping Humpty-Dumpty on the wall is the most important job of world leaders, especially the American President.
The most significant events during the month were rising tensions between North Korea and the civilized world. Kim Jong-un has nuclear weapons. He is developing missile programs, which threaten South Korea, Japan, the United States and dozens of other nations. President Trump spent time during the month with Kim’s sole patron, China’s President Xi Jinping. He may have had some effect. By month’s end, it was indicated that China had reduced coal purchases from North Korea. Two failed launches may be ascribed to North Korea’s ineptness, or to cyber interference on the part of the U.S. We don’t know. American Naval ships have been repositioned to the East China Sea and the Sea of Japan. Mr. Trump, in a rare move, summoned all 100 Senators to the White House to discuss the situation. Missile defense should be front and center. A few South Koreans were reported to be upset with Mr. Trump’s declaration that it would be “appropriate” for them to pay for the missile defense system. But, after all, it is their hide that is in most immediate danger. (Last Saturday, Defense Secretary James Mattis said the U.S. would pay for the system.) Reality, as most South Koreans know, is that the U.S. is the only counter-balance to China.
BACK ON MONDAY MAY 1
I lost an entire family in the Holocaust- grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins all perished among the one in every three Jews in the world that were exterminated. My brother and I were born in Bolivia where my parents presciently went before the war. I read the speeches and sermons and editorials this event evokes, but for me there is only one answer. and that is unstinting support for the security and future of Israel.
Only three years after the end of the Holocaust Israel was reborn in the ancient homeland where the unbroken chain of Jewish survival in spite of oppression, dislocation, murder and genocide, was started in Hebron. In Europe the words “Shma Israel”…Hear oh Israel were the last words uttered by the martyred.
Israel heard and offered succor and rescue.
Today, I cringe when supporters of BDS or J Street or other serial bashers of Israel grow solemn at the mention of the Holocaust but are complicit in criticism and libels of Israel which weaken the Jewish State and by extension encourage violent anti-Semitism throughout the world…even in this wonderful corner of the Diaspora.
Damn their caterwauling tears and hypocrisy. The only memorial and answer to the extermination of 6,000,000 Jews is a safe Israel within the boundaries of the ancient homeland where there has been a Jewish presence from time immemorial. The rest is just commentary. rsk
US President Donald Trump paid tribute to the victims of the Holocaust on Sunday and lauded Jewish courage in the face of genocide, in Holocaust Remembrance Day remarks to a leading international Jewish group.
“On this Holocaust Remembrance Day, we tell the stories of the fathers, mothers and children, whose lives were extinguished and whose love was torn from this earth,” Trump said, in a pre-recorded video address to the World Jewish Congress Plenary Assembly in New York. “We also tell the stories of courage in the face of death, humanity in the face of barbarity, and the unbreakable spirit of the Jewish people.”
He added, “On Yom HaShoah, we look back at the darkest chapter of human history. We mourn, we remember, we pray, and we pledge: Never again. I say it, never again.”
Trump also spoke about the achievements of the state of Israel and about the importance of combating antisemitism, including from the Iranian regime.
“Today, only decades removed from the Holocaust, we see a great nation risen from the desert and we see a proud Star of David waving above the State of Israel.” he said. “That star is a symbol of Jewish perseverance. It’s a monument to unyielding strength. We recall the famous words attributed to Theodor Herzl: If you will, it is no dream. If you will it, it is no dream.”
He continued, “Jews across the world have proved the truth of these words day after day. In the memory of those who were lost, we renew our commitment and our determination not to disregard the warnings of our own times. We must stamp out prejudice and antisemitism everywhere it is found. We must defeat terrorism, and we must not ignore the threats of a regime that talks openly of Israel’s destruction. We cannot let that ever even be thought of.”
Trump’s remarks stood in contrast to the White House’s International Holocaust Remembrance Day statement in January which was roundly criticized for neglecting to specifically mention Jews.
The president also had words of praise for WJC president Ronald Lauder, with whom he reportedly attended the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1960s.
WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump, adding to strong criticism of the Iran nuclear deal voiced by his administration, said on Thursday that Tehran is “not living up to the spirit of the agreement.”
His comments, in a joint press conference with Italy’s Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni, added to signals from Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and others that the Trump administration could back away from the landmark deal reached in 2015 between six world powers and Iran.
“We’re analyzing it very, very carefully and we’ll have something to say about it in the not-too-distant future,” Mr. Trump said. “Iran has not lived up to the spirit of the agreement and they have to do that.”
The Trump administration certified to Congress earlier this week that Iran is abiding by the accord, but senior officials have said they are reviewing whether to stick with the deal.
Mr. Trump’s comments come a day after Mr. Tillerson made a rare public appearance to list U.S. complaints against Iran, complaining about its destabilizing activities in the Middle East, and Next week, Tom Shannon, the undersecretary of state for political affairs, will attend a meeting in Vienna with Iran and the other world powers who were party to the accord in what will be the first session with Trump administration representation.
Mr. Trump on Thursday also questioned another key U.S. policy position in the Middle East—its role in Libya. The Obama administration had carried out strikes against Islamic State and backed the Government of National Accord, which stemmed from a 2015 U.N.-brokered deal. The internationally recognized Government of National Accord has struggled to assert itself since then.
“I do not see a role in Libya,” Mr. Trump said Thursday. “I do see a role in getting rid of ISIS.” CONTINUE AT SITE
Yesterday, like all Americans, I ruefully sent my tax returns and payments to New York State and the IRS. Do you ever wonder, as I do, where that money goes? Would you be shocked to learn that those funds feed corruption and rampant wast at the state and federal levels?
Some examples are mind boggling….Veterans who languish in a hospital for the blind don’t get to see doctors, nor do they get to see the costly statues that are placed on their lawn at taxpayers’ expense. At the EPA the coercive regulatory agency they use funds from American taxpayers like us to buy $800.00 inkwells and high end furniture….desks and chairs which they occupy to make regulations that kill infrastructure repairs and construction work and jobs. At the Ivy League Colleges government grants fund ridiculous programs that implement bias and ignorance to the tune of $41.59 billion dollars.
How do I know this? Because of the meanest and leanest and most informative organization in America which exposes rampant waste and corruption. Home Page | Open the Books http://www.openthebooks.com/
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Go to their website and please support them. rsk
