NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Sports in a Woke ‘Utopia’ Disagreeing with the “progressive” narrative mandates Maoist-style humiliation. Joseph Hippolito

Posted By on June 12th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/06/sports-woke-utopia-joseph-hippolito/

As riots roiled the nation following George Floyd’s death, the “progressive” quest for totalitarian dominance inflicted two casualties on the NFL.

Denver Broncos’ head coach Vic Fangio and New Orleans Saints’ quarterback Drew Brees had to apologize one day after stating opinions that contradicted the Leftist narrative of the United States as systemically racist.

“I think our problems in the NFL along those lines are minimal,” Fangio said June 2. “We’re a league of meritocracy. You earn what you get, you get what you earn. I don’t see racism at all in the NFL, I don’t see discrimination in the NFL. We live in a great atmosphere, like I alluded to earlier. We’re lucky. We all live together, joined as one, for one common goal, and we all intermingle and mix tremendously. If society reflected an NFL team, we’d all be great.”

Beforehand, Fangio said Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis policeman who killed Floyd, “should be punished to the full extent of the law of the crimes he was charged with” and failed “to uphold the badge and uniform he was entrusted with.”

ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Quiet Struggle Over Jerusalem’s Temple Mount Jordan vs. Turkey. Joseph Puder

Posted By on June 12th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/06/quiet-struggle-over-jerusalems-temple-mount-joseph-puder/

There is a quiet struggle going on over control of East Jerusalem’s Noble Sanctuary (Haram al-Sharif) or Temple Mount.  It is not as you might guess between Israel and the Palestinians.  It is actually between two Sunni-Muslim nations, the Hashemites Kingdom of Jordan and Erdogan’s Turkey.  To the extent that Israel is involved in this quiet struggle, it is to strengthen Jordan’s position against the encroaching Turks, by adding Saudi representatives to the Islamic Waqf Council.  The Islamic Waqf Council controls the activities surrounding the Noble Sanctuary or Temple Mount.  Israel has engaged the U.S. administration to mediate the issue with the Saudis.

The Hashemites, who once controlled Mecca and Medina, Islam’s holiest sites, lost out to the Saudis in the 1920’s.  The Hashemites are related by a bloodline to the Prophet Mohammad through his daughter Fatimah and her husband Ali, the Fourth Caliph.  Hasan, the son of Fatimah and Ali, is the progenitor of the Hashemite line, which is a subdivision of the Quraysh tribe.  The consolation prize was control over Islam’s third holiest site -The Noble Sanctuary or Temple Mount where the Al-Aqsa and Omar mosques are located. The Prophet Mohammad is said to have flown from the al-Aqsa mosque to heaven on his horse named Buraq.

Given the historical rivalry between the House of Saud and the Hashemites, Jordanians in the past would not contemplate allowing their Saudi rivals a foothold in Jerusalem’s holy places.  But now, after 100 years, Erdogan’s Turkey is challenging Jordan’s control over the Temple Mount. Jordan, under the Hashemite King Abdullah II, is finally relenting to the Saudis out of financial necessity and a looming threat from Erdogan’s Turkey.  

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Free Citizens Do Not Kneel White progressive racial masochism is nothing new. Bruce Thornton

Posted By on June 12th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/06/free-citizens-do-not-kneel-bruce-thornton/

In the last couple of weeks we have witnessed people, most of them white, kneeling before black protestors and activists as a supposed gesture of repentance for their crimes of “white privilege” and tolerating “systemic racism.” The kneeling penitents include not just ordinary people, but police officers, National Guardsmen, and, in a shocking self-debasement of the world’s greatest democratic republic, a gaggle of House Representatives adorned with “culturally appropriated” African kente cloth scarves.

White progressive racial masochism is nothing new; Tom Wolfe skewered it brilliantly nearly a half century ago in essays like “Mau-Mauing the Flak-Catchers.” But the current manifestation is more significant and dangerous. It has taken place amidst violent widespread rioting and looting and assaults, and so these acts of kneeling are a form of tribute exacted by the sheer power of destruction wrought by the rioters and their “peaceful” abettors. As such, they undermine the very foundation of citizen self-rule and political freedom: Government by laws, offices, and free deliberation rather than by the whims and failings of one man; and by accountability to the sovereign people and their laws, instead of submission to violent coercion.

Kneeling specifically appears in Greek literature as an emblem of political slavery that follows an absence of rule by law and accountability. In the Histories, Herodotus’s narrative of the Persian wars continually contrasts the free, self-ruling Greek with the slavish, unfree Persians. One cultural practice in particular epitomized for the Greeks the political enslavement of the Persians who were ruled by the quasi-divine Great King Xerxes bestowed with absolute power over the lives and property of his subjects. Hence the law that anytime someone came into the presence of the King, he had to kneel before him, then bend over and kiss the ground as an act of submission. The Greek word for this was proskunesis, an act of “obeisance” suitable only for acknowledging the gods.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

TEXAS DISTRICT 24-Beth Van Duyne for Congress

Posted By on June 12th, 2020

Whichever standard issue leftist wins in the primary in Texas District 24, she will face Republican Beth Van Duyne, former mayor of Irving, Texas in November.

In 2017 Irving Mayor Beth Van Duyne publicly pushed the state legislature to ensure Texas would be next to adopt an anti-sharia law.

https://www.bethfortexas.com/

My name is Beth Van Duyne and I’m running for Congress because I know the people of the 24th District deserve to have a strong, principled voice in Congress.

I’ve been asked what prompted me to run for public office; the answer is simple – my children. We live in a very fragile time for our nation, our families, and the future of the American Dream. Socialism is on the rise, our border crisis has never been worse, and we face constant threats from hostile nations willing to use cyber-attacks, nuclear weapons, and terrorist jihad. When I think about my two children, I want them to have the same opportunities in life that I did; I want them to be able to grow up safe and proud of our country.

ELECTIONS, POLITICS Comments turned off

This Democrat (Kim Olson- TX -District 24)Is So Outraged She Doesn’t Mind if Rioters ‘Burn It to the Ground’ By Tyler O’Neil

Posted By on June 12th, 2020

https://pjmedia.com/election/tyler-o-neil/2020/06/11/texas-dem-even-if-people-loot-so-what-burn-it-to-the-ground-n518917

When protests over the police killing of George Floyd devolved into looting, vandalism, and arson across America, destroying black lives, black livelihoods, and black monuments, Democrats and liberals shamefully downplayed or even excused the violence because the perpetrators agreed with their political agenda. Yet it seems none have proven quite as vocal as a Democrat running for U.S. House in Texas’s 24th congressional district.

In a live digital event on Tuesday, Kim Olson complained about police snipers stationed on a roof at a protest she attended in Dallas, Texas.

“They had snipers on the roof, what the hell you got snipers on the roof for in a peaceful march? Even if people loot, so what? Burn it to the ground, if that’s what it’s gonna take to fix our nation,” Olson said in video obtained by The Washington Examiner. “I don’t think — but I’m just saying, what are you going to do? Shoot us as we protest?”

“I mean, we really have fundamentally pivoted the militarization of our police force. … It used to be ‘protect and serve,’” she complained.

Olson made the comment during a long answer to a question about her position on far-left calls to disband or defund police departments. The candidate began by admitting that while “defunding” is a “tough word,” she supports shifting funding toward rehab centers and social workers.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Iran: The supreme leader’s regional girdle is tearing apart By Hassan Mahmoudi

Posted By on June 12th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/06/iran_the_supreme_leaders_regional_girdle_is_tearing_apart.html

Internal, regional, and international developments reinforced by the coronavirus crisis, have submerged the Iranian regime’s policy of war-mongering and export of fundamentalism and terrorism into a whirlpool of crises.

Iran counts on Syria as its strategic ally. In the last 40 years, and especially the last nine since 2011, it has supported Bashar Assad’s regime with a vengeance, spending enormous amounts of money.

In its turn, Tehran uses Syria as a link through to Lebanon’s Hezbollah, to supply it with weapons and logistics.

On Feb. 25, 2019, on the invitation of Iran’s chief terror master, Qasem Soleimani, Assad, for the first time since the 2011 start of Syria’s civil war, visited Tehran unexpectedly where he met and talked with Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei.

In this meeting, Khamenei said that the Islamic Republic of Iran’s help for the government and nation of Syria is equal to giving help to the ‘resistance’ against the U.S. and its allies pressures and he honors it dearly.

Hossein Taeb, the head of the Ammar Base Council affiliated with the IRGC, explained the strategic importance of Syria when he said: “Syria is Iran’s 35th province.  Defending it is a greater priority than defending Khuzestan (Iran’s southern province).”

After the onset of the uprising in Syria, when the Iranian regime vastly escalated its cooperation with Assad’s regime to suppress it, Hossein Taeb declared: “If the enemy attacks us to invade Syria or Khuzestan, our priority is to preserve Syria. If we hold Syria, we can regain Khuzestan, but if we lose Syria, we will not even be able to hold Tehran.”

P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

J.K. Rowling has been mugged by gender reality By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on June 12th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/06/jk_rowling_has_been_mugged_by_gender_reality.html

In December, J.K. Rowling, the billionaire author of the Harry Potter books, dared to support a woman who argues that men cannot magically become women. For this crime, Rowling, who has been a lockstep leftist, became the subject of a sustained hate campaign. On Thursday, she published an essay justifying her belief in biological womanhood and expressing concern that the transgender movement is part of a sustained attack on women.

Transgender madness has progressed further in Britain than in America. The woman Rowling was defending, Maya Forstater, lost her job for challenging proposed amendments to the Gender Recognition Act of 2004. Under the GRA, people who want legal “gender” recognition have to jump through a few hoops showing their commitment to their non-biological gender. The proposed revisions would end any requirements other than a person’s say-so.

P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

On Name Changing and Statue Toppling By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on June 12th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/on-name-changing-and-statue-toppling/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=corner&utm_term=first

General David Petraeus wrote an impassioned article in the Atlantic this week about the need to change the names of military bases that for over a century have been named after Confederate generals and to recalibrate iconic remembrances such as statues commemorating Robert E. Lee at West Point — points of reference he reminds us that have been central in his own experience and career.

His relevant points were twofold and ostensibly rational: Commanders such as Bragg and Benning (Petraeus proposes the renaming of other eponymous bases as well) were not especially effective commanders worthy of such majestic base commemoration. In some cases, as Petraeus notes, they were not even highly regarded by their peers. No one, certainly, would wish to defend the worldview of a Braxton Bragg. And, as Petraeus put it, as “traitors” they fought for an ignoble cause that perpetuated slavery. (Of course, the logic of renaming should then apply to the northern California community of Fort Bragg, also named after the unattractive Braxton Bragg — an idea to which some in the Democratic California legislature failed to win over the town’s mayor in 2015).

I think Petraeus is in many ways correct about his anguish. Yet, the bases were named not so much to glorify overt racists as for a variety of more mundane, insidious reasons in the late 19th and early 20th centuries — from concessions to local southerners where many of these bases were to be located, to obtain bipartisan congressional support for their funding, and to address the need in the decades-long and bitter aftermath of the Civil War to promote “healing” between the still hostile former opponents.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Krugman-Led Mob Comes for Academic Freedom By David Harsanyi

Posted By on June 12th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/the-krugman-led-mob-comes-for-academic-freedom/

The Left seems increasingly incapable of living by neutral principles.

The long march through the institutions ends in the university economics department. The digital mob, led by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman and Michigan professor Justin Wolfers, has arrived at the University of Chicago, where it is pressuring the school to remove Professor Harald Uhlig from his position as editor of Journal of Political Economy, after he criticized Black Lives Matter.

The left-wing economists were triggered (or, more likely, are pretending to be triggered) by an Uhlig tweet contending that BLM “just torpedoed itself” by supporting “defund the police.” Uhlig went on to argue that it was time “for sensible adults to enter back into the room and have serious, earnest, respectful conversations about it all.”

The horror!

It is almost surely the case that Krugman and his followers see an opportunity to appropriate and weaponize a cause to undermine those in the University of Chicago economics department who still cling to heterodox positions.

Wolfers, who demands academics talk about racial inequality in the manner he prescribes, says, “I don’t think it’s just or fair that Uhlig, as an editor at the @JPolEcon is an important gatekeeper for economists trying to make their mark. I don’t think the profession’s resolve to look more deeply into racial justice will get a fair hearing under his editorship.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Police and Race: Hard Problems and Hard Truths By Charles Lipson

Posted By on June 11th, 2020

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/06/11/police_and_race_hard_problems_and_hard_truths_143422.html

In the midst of head-spinning talk about defunding police or abolishing them entirely, it’s important to step back and take a sober look at the debate. The racial dimension of policing is vexing because the racial dimension of American life is vexing. It is the deepest scar in our history. We treated it indecisively in forming our new nation and finally confronted it, at gruesome cost, in a great Civil War. We confronted it again a century later, after the failure of Reconstruction and decades of Jim Crow laws, during the Civil Rights Movement.

Despite those efforts and significant progress over the past half century, we never eliminated racism completely. We are facing it again today. The laws of the mid-1960s ensured de jure equality. Since then, the struggle has been to create a more equal society in practice. It’s difficult to even agree on the meaning of that term, much less achieve it. For some, equality refers to outcomes; for others, opportunities. Whatever the meaning, it must mean equal treatment by police. There’s no disagreement about that fundamental point.

For those who experienced the racial upheavals of the 1960s, it should be obvious that racism is far less prevalent in all aspects of American life today. That includes policing. It may not seem that way, though, because our time horizons are too short. Most Americans alive today didn’t live through that era, so they haven’t witnessed the gradual but unmistakable improvement.