ISRAEL, MEDIA Comments turned off

Cracks in the bulwarks of decency Why are The Critic and the Spectator rehashing inane anti-Israel malice? Melanie Phillips

Posted By on November 15th, 2021

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/the-bulwarks-of-decency-are-cracking?token=

In the past few weeks, two especially egregious examples of Israel demonisation and delegitimisation have surfaced in mainstream media magazines. 

The first, in The Critic, was by Janine di Giovanni which you can read here. The second, by Rian Malan in 2010, was republished in the Spectator and you can read that one here.

Both have been eviscerated by Adam Levick of Camera UK here and here. 

Di Giovanni’s article consisted of boiler-plate Israel-bashing, rehashing knee-jerk falsehoods about the “occupation,” air-brushing out of the picture Palestinian war-crimes against Israel and malevolently depicting Israel instead as the aggressor — the kind of lazy malice that you can read year in, year out in the Guardian, New York Times, Socialist Worker or other  Palestinian-narrative propaganda sheets.

Levick writes: 

Then, after she uncritically cites recent reports by the NGOs B’tselem and Human Rights Watch characterising Israel as an “apartheid” state, without mentioning detailed criticism of both reports, Giovanni turns up the demonising rhetoric by (in her own voice) criticising a two-state solution as something that would uphold the “status quo of a state that imposes Jewish ethno-national supremacy“.

“Jewish supremacy” is an antisemitic term historically used by Nazi Germany, and neo-Nazis.  The fact that it’s recently been resurrected by the anti-Zionist left, after being used one of the NGOs she cited, says more about the precipitous moral decline of the progressive movement than it does about Jewish nationalism.Giovanni then imagines a post-Zionist future:

But how would this kind of peace [sic] look, realistically? What if Gazans were allowed to fully develop their tremendous potential? Gaza has a 98 per cent literacy rate, a population of energetic and highly motivated young people who could become successful entrepreneurs if only Israel’s crippling embargo was lifted.

The idea that what’s really standing in the way of Gaza reaching its potential isn’t the authoritarian, antisemitic extremist movement controlling the territory, but, rather, Israeli measures preventing Hamas’s import of deadly weapons, evokes the Orwell quote that “some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals can believe them”.

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Joe Hoft: Dr. Atlas Blasts Fauci and Birx Who Did All They Could to Use COVID to Destroy President Trump, Luckily VP Pence Was There to Provide Them Cover

Posted By on November 15th, 2021

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/11/serial-liar-adam-schiff-says-doesnt-regret-pushing-fake-hillary-funded-steele-dossier-video/

The Daily Mail reports that Dr. Atlas is coming out with a new book in a couple of days discussing his time at the White House working with crazy and corrupt doctors Fauci and Birx.

Strict lockdowns pushed by White House advisers Drs. Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx failed to stop the vulnerable dying from COVID-19, while families suffered and children lost out on their education, according to a forthcoming book by Trump adviser Dr. Scott Atlas…

…A Plague Upon Our House: My Fight at the Trump White House to Stop COVID from Destroying America,’ is published on November 23 by Bombardier.

‘People were dying from the virus, and the lockdown policies were not preventing the deaths,’ he writes in a copy obtained by DailyMail.com

‘The simple logic of assuming you could stop the spread of, and some said eliminate, a highly contagious virus by shutting down society after millions had been infected was worse than nonsensical.

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Biden Torpedoes US Labor Production to Its Lowest in 40 Years

Posted By on November 15th, 2021

https://thepatrioticvoice.com/biden-torpedoes-us-labor-production-to-its-lowest-in-40-years/

We all know President Biden is as useless as tits on a bull. Now he can’t even get people to work thanks to his lovely plans for free money to keep people out of work, and his inability to get large-scale employers to pay real wages for their employee’s hard work.

Additionally, the smaller mom-and-pop businesses have found themselves being pushed out of the economy through mandates and forced closings. Their leases and taxes didn’t stop when the pandemic forced them to close, and now many are out of business. As all this occurs, inflation is skyrocketing, and people everywhere are finding themselves consistently doing more with less.

Given how quickly inflation can rise and how slowly it lowers, we are finding ourselves in very perilous territory, and Biden is the cornerstone for all these problems.

As the U.S. Labor Department outlined on Thursday “Nonfarm business sector labor productivity decreased 5.0 percent in the third quarter of 2021, as output increased 1.7 percent and hours worked increased 7.0 percent. This is the lowest rate of quarterly productivity growth since the second quarter of 1981, when the measure decreased 5.1 percent.”

Let’s break this down a bit.

As defined by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics “Labor productivity is defined as real output per labor hour, and growth in labor productivity is measured as the change in this ratio over time. Labor productivity growth is what enables workers to produce more goods and services than they otherwise could for a given number of work hours.” In other words, people are doing less with the time they are working.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Higher education is broken. Can a new anti-woke start-up make a difference?Jonathan S. Tobin

Posted By on November 15th, 2021

Bari Weiss and other independent thinkers are right in thinking that it’s time for a new approach to college. But the war on wokeism will require more than just advocacy for open discourse.

As toxic as Twitter can be, sometimes the orgies of abuse and mockery for which the social media forum is so well-known can tell us something important. When the woke world is competing to see which blue-checked left-wing wiseacre can come up with the most cutting and condescending snark about a subject or person, it’s often a sign that the object of their contempt is on to something important. That’s exactly the case with the reaction to the announcement of the formation of a new institution of higher learning: The University of Austin, whose avowed purpose is to create a haven for open discourse at a time when academia has become best known for the way cancel culture enforces the new left’s aversion to debate about its orthodoxies.

The public announcement of the effort earlier this week by former New York Times editor Bari Weiss, who is a member of the proposed school’s board of advisors, set off a tsunami of derision from many of the usual suspects in journalism and academia who think there’s nothing wrong with shutting down those who raise questions about woke sensibilities.

Their contempt for Weiss, who is best known for leaving the Times last year after claiming that the same forces were making it difficult, if not impossible, to report about anti-Semitism or have an open discussion about issues like the Black Lives Matter movement, is already well-established. But as historian Niall Ferguson, another of those who are involved in this project, wrote in Bloomberg, the plague of illiberalism on college campuses is destroying the modern university:

“Trigger warnings. Safe spaces. Preferred pronouns. Checked privileges. Microaggressions. Antiracism. All these terms are routinely deployed on campuses throughout the English-speaking world as part of a sustained campaign to impose ideological conformity in the name of diversity. As a result, it often feels as if there is less free speech and free thought in the American university today than in almost any other institution in the U.S.”

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

What to Expect from the Biden-Xi Meeting – And It’s Not Good by Pete Hoekstra

Posted By on November 14th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17942/biden-xi-meeting

With the U.S. suffering significant inflation, and with supply chain disruptions identified as one of the causes, expect little pressure on China to address intellectual property theft, currency manipulation, unfair Chinese government support in distorting markets, or disruptive Chinese trade barriers. The bias will be to put a happy face on this relationship.

We certainly can hope for Biden to put up a strong position on the COVID-19 pandemic. More than 750,000 Americans are dead…. America, and the world need answers. China needs to be held accountable.

One can only fear where this goes if the U.S. does not confront China. It is unlikely we will see any leadership from Europe on this issue; European leaders seemed determined to forge closer economic ties with China, which will doubtless use these revenues for bulking up its military to “take over the world.” It is either Biden or nobody, and nobody seems to have the upper hand.

An even worse potential outcome on the COVID-19 pandemic issue may be a gauzy statement along the lines that … the U.S. and China will closely cooperate on addressing the current situation…. Even worse, we will form the core of a new global organization to prepare for, confront, and combat any potential future pandemics.

Heaven help us if this is the outcome.

Here is what we likely can expect from the upcoming meeting between U.S. President Joe Biden and Communist China’s President Xi Jinping. Climate change, yes. Human rights, not so much. Throw in a little trade but take out all references to the Wuhan-origin of the coronavirus pandemic. This will be a summit that majors in minors. It will have significance, but only because of what it fails to do rather than what it does.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

France: Nationalism Makes a Comeback by Amir Taheri

Posted By on November 14th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17941/france-nationalism-zemmour

Like Macron five years ago, Zemmour is seen as the outsider opposed to incompetent and corrupt insiders.

He seems unaware of the difference between American “secularism,” in which the state sees itself as protector of all religions, and the French laïcité in which the state regards all religions as potential or actual threats.

The problem that France faces comes from political groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood, the Salafist groups, Khomeinist circles and home-grown militants radicalized through the Internet.

Although the next French presidential election is months away, the way the media in Paris along with French chattering classes are behaving, one might think that we are on the eve of polling day.

Turn on any TV channel and open any newspaper and you are likely to run into oodles of speculation about the journey to the Élysée Palace.

One reason may be even the main one, for this premature interest is a 63-year old journalist who has cast himself as a modern version of the Prophet Jeremiah to depict gloom and forecasting doom for French democracy.

The man in question is Éric Zemmour, who has been lurking on the margins of French journalism, always in minor roles for almost three decades and, yet, is now entering as the rising star of French politics on the right or, as his enemies claim, the far right.

EDUCATION, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Duke Professor’s Distorted Lens into Israel/Palestinian Conflict By Andrew E. Harrod

Posted By on November 14th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/11/duke_professors_distorted_lens_into_israelpalestinian_conflict.html

Israel exhibits a “colonial systemology about nativeness” in the treatment of online smartphone pictures of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, stated Duke University associate professor of anthropology Rebecca Stein during a Nov. 4 webinar.

This presentation, at George Washington University’s Institute for Middle East Studies (IMES). of her new book, Screen Shots: State Violence on Camera in Israel and Palestine, exposed her incorrigible anti-Israel bias.

That bias is evident in her Duke classroom, where last spring she announced to her class on social media in the Middle East that “she doesn’t care what prior knowledge or experience [class members] have on the topic,” as the only documents to be discussed were those she introduced.

As IMES associate director Shana Marshall moderated, Stein explained how her book examines the effects of widely disseminated smartphone cameras among clashing Israelis and Palestinians. These “proliferating cameras across the political theater of military occupation in the hands of all constituents” are “all aimed at the scene of state violence.” “A lot of this book is spent in the offices of B’Tselem, Israel’s oldest human rights organization” from 2010-2016, she added, a whitewashed description for a militantly anti-Israel organization.

B’Tselem and Stein, both supporters of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) economic warfare campaign against Israel, are ideological allies. She has previously described the 2000-2005 Second Intifada’s bloody terrorism as amounting to “mass demonstrations.” She has also praised the “Israel Studies” program at Birzeit University near Ramallah, a historic breeder of anti-Israel violence dubbed “Terrorist University” by some. In another book presentation, she claimed that Israel’s “occupation has been going on since 1967 and has been expanding and normalizing ever since,” even though Israel has withdrawn from significant Palestinian territories like the Gaza Strip.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Thinking Critically About ‘Critical Thinking’  Reason allows us to distinguish between appearance and reality; but our reality turns out to be rooted firmly in the realm of appearance. By Roger Kimball

Posted By on November 14th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/11/13/thinking-critically-about-critical-thinking/

“We must never,” Bismarck is said to have warned, “look into the origins of laws or sausages.” Sage advice, I’ve always thought (and no pun intended with that “sage”)—but how much at odds it is with the dominant current of modern thought, which is to say Enlightenment thought. 

Immanuel Kant, a great hero of the Enlightenment, summed up the alternative to Bismarck’s counsel when, in an essay called “What is Enlightenment?,” he offered Sapere Aude, Dare to know!, as a motto for the movement. Enlightened man, Kant thought, was the first real adult: the first to realize his potential as an autonomous being—a being, as the etymology of the word implies, who “gives the law to himself.” As Kant stressed, this was a moral as well as an intellectual achievement, since it involved courage as much as insight: courage to put aside convention, tradition, and superstition (how the three tended to coalesce for Enlightened thinkers!) in order to rely for guidance on the dictates of reason alone.

Bismarck’s observation cautions reticence about certain matters; it implies that about some things it is better not to inquire too closely. What Walter Bagehot said about the British monarchy—“We must not let in daylight upon magic”—has, from this point of view, a more general application. The legend “Here be monsters” that one sees on certain antique maps applies also to certain precincts of the map of our moral universe. Enlightened man, by contrast, is above all a creature who looks into things: he wants to “get to the bottom” of controversies, to dispel mysteries, to see what makes things “tick,” to understand the mechanics of everything from law to sausages, from love to society. Who has the better advice, Bismarck or Kant?

Of course, it is not a simple choice. For one thing, it might be argued that Kant’s own attitude toward the imperative “Dare to Know!” was complex. In a famous passage toward the beginning of The Critique of Pure Reason, for example, Kant tells us that he was setting limits to reason in order to make room for faith. Exactly what Kant meant by this . . . what to call it? (This admission? Boast? Concession?) Well, whatever Kant meant by his invocation of faith, it has been an abiding matter of debate. Nevertheless, it is fair to say that Kant’s “critical philosophy” is itself a monument of Enlightenment thought, as much in its implied commendation of the “critical attitude” as in the “Copernican revolution” he sought to bring about in philosophy.

Today, we can hardly go to the toilet without being urged to cultivate “critical thinking.” Which does not mean, I hasten to add, that we are a society of Kantians. Nevertheless, what we are dealing with here is an educational watchword, not to say a cliché, that has roots in some of the Enlightenment values that Kant espoused. It’s a voracious, quick-growing hybrid. A Google search for the phrase “critical thinking” brings up 102 million results in 0.62 seconds. One of the first matches, God help us, is to something called “The Critical Thinking Community,” whose goal is “to promote essential change in education and society through the cultivation of fair-minded critical thinking.” (Why is it, I wonder, that the conjunction of the phrase “critical thinking” with the word “community” is so reliably productive of nausea?)

EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Long History of Parents’ Rights Joseph Griffith

Posted By on November 14th, 2021

EXCERPT

What rights do parents have in directing their children’s education?

Parental Rights at the Supreme Court

The Supreme Court of the United States first upheld this right of parents in a series of landmark cases in the mid-1920s. In Meyer v. Nebraska (1925) the Court struck down a state law prohibiting instruction in German to students before the ninth grade; in the lesser-known decision of Farrington v. Tokushige (1927), the Court overturned a similar law in Hawaii that forbade instruction in Japanese. In Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925), the Court struck down an Oregon law that effectively outlawed private schools.

The primary motivation behind these laws was the nativist impulse to assimilate the children of immigrants, to “standardize” children, into white, Protestant, American culture. In Oregon, for example, the Ku Klux Klan was among the most powerful and vocal supporters of the law forbidding private (read: Catholic) education. In a pamphlet widely distributed in Oregon, the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan wrote of Catholic parents and their school-aged children: “somehow, these mongrel hordes must be Americanized; failing that, deportation is the only remedy.” “Democratic education,” he wrote, is the “one unfailing defense against every kind of alienism in America.”

In overturning these laws, the Supreme Court established what William Galston has described as “a rebuttable presumption” in favor of parental liberty: parents have the right to direct their children’s education for the simple reason that parents typically know the unique needs and capacities of their children and desire what is best for them. As the Court wrote in Pierce, “those who nurture [a child] and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations.” At their best, parents “recognize” what “additional obligations” their children are capable of and called to and then “direct” them to these ends.

In these same decisions, the Supreme Court also upheld the general authority of the state to compel school attendance and require schools to teach, in the language of Pierce, “certain studies plainly essential to good citizenship.”

The Supreme Court was able to balance the specific rights of parents to direct their children’s education and the general authority of the state to form educated citizens by drawing from seven decades of state supreme court decisions on the issue. Indeed, the Meyer Court alludes to this rich history when it identifies the right of parents to direct their children’s education as one of “those privileges long recognized at common law as essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Appeals Court Reaffirms Its Decision to Stay Vaccine Mandate By Rick Moran

Posted By on November 14th, 2021

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2021/11/13/appeals-court-reaffirms-its-decision-to-stay-vaccine-mandate-n1532531

Saying that Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate “grossly exceeds OSHA’s statutory authority,” the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans reaffirmed its original decision made on Nov. 6 to block OSHA from taking any steps to enforce the mandate.

The three-judge panel will probably not have the last word on the mandate. A judicial lottery will be held next week to determine in what circuit the several challenges to the mandate will be heard. The New Orleans-based circuit court that ruled last night is one of the most conservative in the nation.

The judges didn’t mince any words in stating how they felt about the mandate.

Washington Post:

“Rather than a delicately handled scalpel, the Mandate is a one-size fits-all sledgehammer that makes hardly any attempt to account for differences in workplaces (and workers) that have more than a little bearing on workers’ varying degrees of susceptibility to the supposedly ‘grave danger’ the Mandate purports to address,” they wrote.

They said they believed that the ruling imposed a financial burden on businesses and potentially violated the commerce clause of the Constitution.

“The Mandate imposes a financial burden upon them by deputizing their participation in OSHA’s regulatory scheme, exposes them to severe financial risk if they refuse or fail to comply, and threatens to decimate their workforces (and business prospects) by forcing unwilling employees to take their shots, take their tests, or hit the road,” they wrote.

It’s important to note that the legal landscape is now decidedly tilted against the mandate. The administration is now going to have to prove that there is a “grave danger” to workers and that the danger is “immediate.” That’s a difficult standard to meet.