P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

When Will Transgender Clinical Activists Acknowledge Detransitioners? By Madeleine Kearns

Posted By on December 3rd, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/12/when-will-transgender-clinical-activists-acknowledge-detransitioners/

British media coverage has increased the visibility of people who change their mind about sex change. But they exist in America, too.

In the United Kingdom, there has been increased media attention on “detransitioners” — people who identify with their natal sex after a period of being “transgender” through social, medical, or surgical “transition.”

A recent BBC documentary opens with the story of Debbie, who was “born a girl, assigned female at birth, and lived most of her life this way.” (Of course, she wasn’t “assigned” female, she was observed female, but never mind.)

At age 44, Debbie transitioned medically, taking testosterone, which gave her a beard and made her go bald. She then transitioned surgically, having flesh from her arm grafted to construct a pseudo-penis. Debbie told the BBC that she got the idea about being transgender after watching TV coverage of trans people: “It was like a Eureka. I thought, This is me. This is what I’ve got to do.” Debbie had struggled with many issues and had been sexually abused as a child.

She hoped that changing gender would help her “become a different person” as well as “accepted in the world.” However, after 17 years on testosterone and changing her name to Lee, and after having had “multiple procedures,” she realized she had made a mistake:

I remember breaking down. It was like this was a mistake. It should never have happened. But what the hell do you do about it? How do you go through yet another harrowing transition? What do you do? I’ve got no hair. I’ve got a beard. I’ve had all my body mutilated. How the hell do I go back to being the Debbie that I was?

Another British woman, Charlie Evans, who formerly identified as a man, has set up a charity to help people who are detranistioning. Evans told the BBC she has been overwhelmed by the number of people coming forward. “There are thousands of us,” Evans says. “A lot of these women feel that they were not in a position to give informed consent because they were so unwell.”

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Brown University committee on corporate responsibility votes in favor of BDS

Posted By on December 3rd, 2019

https://www.jns.org/brown-university-committee-on-corporate-responsibility-votes-in-favor-of-bds/
 
The vote occurred months after students voted overwhelmingly in favor of a referendum, calling on the school to separate itself from companies that conduct business with Israel.

The Advisory Committee on Corporate Responsibility in Investment Policies (ACCRIP) at Brown University in Providence, R.I., voted on Monday in favor of the BDS movement that aims to boycott Israel.

The final tally of the committee was six in favor, two against and one abstention.

The ACCRIP, which consists of university students, faculty, staff and alumni, vote on resolutions surrounding “ethical and moral issues or issues of alleged social harm with respect to the activities of corporations in which the University is an investor,” according to its website.

The resolution consisted of the following language:

“We recommend that the Brown Corporation exclude from Brown’s direct investments, and require Brown’s separate account investment managers to exclude from their direct investments, companies identified as facilitating human rights violations in Palestine. In addition, the Investment Office will share with all investment managers the University’s desire to adhere to this investment philosophy. We recommend that the Corporation and Brown’s separate account investment managers maintain the withdrawal of investments from said companies until they cease to engage in social harm … ”

POLITICS Comments turned off

Democratic Presidential Hopefuls Meet With Terrorist-Run Pay-To-Slay Group By Benjamin Baird

Posted By on December 3rd, 2019

https://thefederalist.com/2019/12/02/democratic-presidential-hopefuls-meet-with-terrorist-run-pay-to-slay-group/

Why did Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders meet with a legal advocacy group founded by a convicted terrorist and that functions as a de facto ‘martyrs fund’ for American jihadists?

“There’s no other conference like this,” the Coalition for Civil Freedoms (CCF) claimed ahead of its ninth annual Family Conference and Lobby Day in Washington D.C. last month. You can say that again.

CCF is a legal advocacy and support group founded by a convicted terrorist that functions as a de facto “martyrs fund” for American jihadists and their families. Would-be suicide bombers, terrorism financiers, and jihadist recruiters can rest easy knowing that CCF will pay their prison commissary and provide for their families should they end up on the wrong side of the law.

However, this “pay-to-slay” program doesn’t seem to alarm a handful of U.S. lawmakers and their staff — including the office of Democratic presidential frontrunner Sen. Elizabeth Warren — who welcomed CCF to Capitol Hill on October 28 and lent a sympathetic ear to this terrorist fan club and lobby group.

CCF spent three days grooming terrorist next-of-kin on how to effectively lobby Congress, before parading this delegation through the Capitol Building to meet with U.S. lawmakers and propose legislation. The Entrapment and Government Overreach (EGO) Rel͏i͏ef Act would deprive law enforcement of some of the most effective prosecutorial tools at their disposal, effectively prohibiting the use of undercover informants and decriminalizing material support for terrorism.

But that’s not the worst of it. “If the EGO bill passes, it may be possible to bring many, if not most, preemptive cases back into court to be reevaluated under the new standards imposed by EGO,” said Leena Al-Arian, CCF associate director and the daughter of CCF founder and President Sami Al-Arian.

Al-Arian has a personal stake in reversing terrorism convictions. He pleaded guilty in 2006 to conspiring “to make or receive contributions of funds, goods or services to or for the benefit of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), a Specially Designated Terrorist.” The former University of South Florida professor was later deported to Turkey, where he gave a speech in a 2018 calling the United States “our enemy.” Qatar, which consistently offers a haven to terrorist leaders from Hamas and the Taliban, continues to provide the elder Al-Arian a platform to demonize Israel and the West.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

VIDEO: THE BARBARIANS ARE AMONG US: PROFESSOR JASON HILL

Posted By on December 3rd, 2019

This new edition of The Glazov Gang features Dr. Jason D. Hill, a professor of philosophy at DePaul University in Chicago, and a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is the author of several books, including We Have Overcome: An Immigrant’s Letter to the American People. Follow him on Twitter: @JasonDhill6.

Jason Hill Video: The Barbarians Are Among Us.
And bleeding us to death – with thousands of tiny scratches.

https://jamieglazov.com/2019/12/02/jason-hill-video-the-barbarians-are-among-us/

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Transgender Palestinian living in Tel Aviv attacked in Ramallah

Posted By on December 3rd, 2019

https://www.jpost.com/Breaking-News/Transgender-Palestinian-living-in-Tel-Aviv-attacked-in-Ramallah-609670

Sami, a transgender Palestinian originally from Hebron, who now lives in Tel Aviv, was severely beaten on Monday afternoon in Kfar Aqab, a village close to Ramallah.

Sami and his friend were able to escape after reaching the Kalandia checkpoint, not before the youth damaged his car and destroyed much of its exterior body.Because of his transgender identity, Sami was kicked out his home by his family, later gaining refuge in Tel Aviv. The circumstances surrounding the incident are still unclear.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The shame of Labour’s liberal supporters Stephen Daisley

Posted By on December 3rd, 2019

https://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/politics-current-affairs/2019/12/the-moderates-who-turn-a-blind-eye-to-jeremy-corbyns-anti-semitism/

Last week, Richard Evans, the eminent historian of Nazi Germany whose testimony was a deciding factor in the trial of the Holocaust denier David Irving, announced on Twitter that he would be voting for Labor in the UK’s upcoming election. Evans offered the caveat that “the failure to deal with anti-Semitism in the party makes me very angry”—but wasn’t enough to change his vote. Since then, spurred in part by an open letter from the historian Anthony Julius, Evans has evidently changed his mind. But, writes Stephen Daisley, his original position is all too typical of many of Labor’s moderate supporters:

[T]he Corbyn moment, counterintuitively, is not the story of far-left anti-Semitism but of liberal collaboration, of those who know in their gut this is wrong but deploy a series of strategies to avoid, minimize, invert, excuse, and deny what is happening. Extremists have always believed these things, but liberals have made it acceptable to air them within the mainstream.

There is a nexus of complicity among anti-Semites, their defenders and amplifiers, and those who fail to resist [what Ruth Wisse has termed] “the organization of politics against the Jews.” It includes those who, though awake to the evils of anti-Semitism, will still vote, campaign, and stand for an institutionally anti-Semitic party. Some rationalize this as acting for the greater good—securing more money for the vulnerable or an end to cruel cuts in benefits. In doing so, they define the good as something greater than mere comfort and security for Jews and juxtapose, in telling ways, Jews’ welfare and that of the poor.

This nexus rests on two instincts: one fundamental to Labor politics and the other an import from progressive identity theory. The Labor impulse is home to a burning certainty that politics is a struggle between good and evil in which one side is the Elect and the other demonic. This is why Labor supporters have vilified Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis’s [wholly unprecedented decision to write an article condemning Labor]. Can’t he see Labor is on the side of the angels and the Tories are foot soldiers of wickedness? If not, it must be because he, too, is from the ranks of the reprobates.

The other conviction, born of the Jew-exclusionary theories of racism that took hold in the universities in the 1980s and on the broader left more recently, is that anti-Semitism is a lesser form of racism because Jews are beneficiaries of “white privilege.” . . . [I]ntersectionality only intersects with Jews on its own terms.

ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Impasse Obstructing U.S.-Israel Relations, and How to Remedy It In some ways, the two countries have never been closer, but in others, and notably with regard to China, they’ve never seemed farther apart.Arthur Herman

Posted By on December 3rd, 2019

https://mosaicmagazine.com/essay/israel-zionism/2019/12/the-impasse-obstructing-u-

The strategic relationship between the U.S. and Israel has reached a strange impasse. In important ways, thanks in particular to initiatives by the Trump administration, the two countries have never been closer. In other ways, however, they have never seemed farther apart. This is notably the case with regard to relations with China, America’s most important geopolitical competitor.

A year ago in Mosaic, I detailed Israel’s increasing ties to China and the chill those ties might bring to the longstanding U.S.-Israel strategic partnership. That essay, entitled “Israel and China Take a Leap Forward—but to Where?” spelled out the dramatic expansion in Israel-China trade, with Israeli companies investing heavily in the Chinese market and China buying up large sections of Israel’s technology sector, especially in areas critical to future advanced-weapons systems. It also noted how U.S. officials, and even some Israeli security experts, were disturbed by the extent and potential direction of this relationship and its possibly deleterious effect on Israel’s security cooperation with the United States. In the words of one American observer whom I quoted:

The Pentagon is increasingly worried that artificial-intelligence capabilities acquired by Chinese firms through civilian investments or licensing deals could find their way into a new generation of Chinese weapons that would threaten American troops and American allies.

FOREIGN POLICY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Hong Kong: A different kind of Cold War Former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger believes the US-China rivalry has entered dangerous waters David Goldman

Posted By on December 3rd, 2019

America and China are in “the foothills of a Cold War,” Henry Kissinger told a Bloomberg News conference in Beijing in November. “So a discussion of our mutual purposes and an attempt to limit the impact of conflict seems to me essential. If conflict is permitted to run unconstrained the outcome could be even worse than it was in Europe. World War 1 broke out because a relatively minor crisis could not be mastered,” the former secretary of state added.

Kissinger’s analogy seems overwrought. For several reasons a Sarajevo-style trigger for conflict between the US and China is improbable. The European powers in 1914 had large standing armies ready to invade each other; if one power mobilized, its adversaries had no choice but to do so. As the Australian historian Christopher Clark demonstrated in his 2014 book The Sleepwalkers, Russia’s decision to mobilize irrevocably set the Great War in motion. The United States has a strong naval presence and military bases in East Asia, but nothing resembles the tenuous balance of power in Central Europe. China now has enough missiles to neutralize virtually all American assets in East Asia within hours of the outbreak of war, according to a recent evaluation by the University of Sydney. It also has the means to blind American military satellites, as Bill Gertz reports in his 2019 book Deceiving the Sky. 

If the analogy to August 1914 in Europe seems strained, the popular “Thucydides Trap” argument comparing America and China to Sparta and Athens on the eve of the Peloponnesian War is even less appropriate. Athens and Sparta were unstable societies dependent on slaves and tribute, and had the capacity to destroy each other’s economic foundation in short order. Each side therefore had an incentive to initiate war. Game theory dictated a high probabilitly of war. No such vulnerability exists in Sino-American relations.

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, EDUCATION Comments turned off

Muslim nations are donating huge amounts to American universities. Here’s why by William Kilpatrick

Posted By on December 2nd, 2019

https://www.lifesitenews.com/opinion/muslim-nations-are-donating-huge-amounts-to-american-universities-heres-why

In a recent, insightful First Things piece, Peter Hitchens reiterates the not so well known fact that Hitler was, in many respects, a progressive. And like progressives everywhere, Hitler saw young people as the vanguard of his movement. Thus:

When an opponent declares ‘I will not come over to your side’ I say calmly ‘Your child belongs to us already… What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing but this new community.’

I thought of this as I was reading a recently released Clarion Project report on “Foreign Influence Ops on U.S. Universities.” Now, college students are not children, but neither were many of the Hitler Youth. Moreover, most college students today seem to enjoy a prolonged adolescence that was not available to young people living in the Germany of the 1930s. Like adolescents everywhere, university students today are still at an impressionable stage. And “impressionable” would also describe a lot of graduate students as well.

Why would foreign donors give large sums of money to already wealthy American colleges? What do they get out of it? Are they doing it simply out of the goodness of their hearts, or are they, as the Clarion report title suggests, carrying out influence operations?

What would we think if historians discovered that Hitler’s government had given huge sums of money to select British and American universities in the years leading up to World War II?

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

The Climate Cult’s ‘Grave New World’ Thaddeus McCotter

Posted By on December 2nd, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/12/01/the-climate-cults-grave-new-world/

A new and dire manifesto demands population control that would dictate who gets to eat, have heat, and procreate to save the world with “social integrity”—whatever that means, other than nothing good.

As a proud debunker of the apocalyptic climate scam, it’s only natural that the climate cult has a plethora of biodegradable slings and arrows to hurl at my person. Among their most common claims is that I use “straw man” arguments to describe the climate cult’s destructive agenda. Yet, no sooner is this straw man accusation leveled that some new fanaticism unwittingly provides me vindication.

For example: “Earth Needs Fewer People to Beat the Climate Crisis, Scientists Say” by Eric Roston in the “Climate Changed” (get it?) section of Bloomberg News (which I believe was founded by a billionaire former Republican mayor who oddly expects Democratic presidential primary voters to embrace his candidacy rather than confiscate his property).

In an “emergency declaration,” more than 11,000 of the climate cult’s high priests of politicized science pledged your lives, your fortunes, your sacred honor, and your genitalia to impose immediate, radical changes in how human beings acquire energy and food, and reproduce.

After noting that 40 years ago “scientists from 50 nations converged on Geneva to discuss what was then called the ‘CO2-climate problem’” and “predicted global warming would eventually become a major environmental challenge,” (but failing to note the earlier false alarms that the planet was heading into a “another ice age”) apparently “the scientists got to work, building a strategy on how to attack the problem and laying the groundwork for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s preeminent body of climate scientists. Their goal was to get ahead of the problem before it was too late.”