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A Hatred Of Israel Is The One Thing All Anti-Semites Have In Common The only Jew-hatred still acceptable in public discourse is the kind masquerading as “anti-Zionism.” By David Harsanyi

Posted By on April 29th, 2019

https://thefederalist.com/2019/04/29/its-a-hatred-of-israel-that-unites-all-anti-semites/

“The past few days provide a useful case study,” the New York Times’ Bari Weiss wrote this weekend. “Thursday: an anti-Zionist cartoon is published in the Times. Saturday: a white nationalist guns down Jews in synagogue. Sunday: Javad Zarif appears on Fox. The three strands of modern anti-Semitism: far-left, far-right and Islamist.”

Though Weiss correctly identifies the three strands of contemporary Jew-hatred, none of them are truly modern. To various degrees, Islamic anti-Semitism has been prevalent for a long time. Left-wing anti-Semitism is old as Marx (and, really, even older.) And right-wing nationalist anti-Semitism has been with us since the concept was birthed in Europe.

The only truly modern component found in all three strands is Israel. Anti-Israel sentiment is already the predominant justification for violence, murder, and hatred against Jews in the Middle East and Europe. Now it’s coming here. Sometimes it’s merely a transparent excuse for animosity, other times it’s the spark for that hatred.

The Passover shooting at the Poway Chabad synagogue in suburban San Diego was perpetrated by a 19-year-old gunman who seems to have acted alone. The man hadn’t cooked up his ugly ideas reading “Mein Kampf” in a cabin in the deep wilderness of Red America, but rather in a comfortable home in Southern California using the internet. The shooter wasn’t raised under the shadow of a Robert E. Lee statue or a Confederate flag, but rather in a substantially diverse area in a deeply liberal state.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Smearing of Roger Scruton: Analysis of the Interview By Douglas Murray

Posted By on April 29th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/smearing-of-roger-scruton-analysis-of-the-interview-recording/

Regular readers may know that I have spent a certain amount of time in recent weeks exercised by a British hack called George Eaton and the left-wing magazine that he is deputy editor at (the New Statesman). I have no personal animus against Mr. Eaton, who I believe I only met briefly once, some years ago, in a radio studio. His editor at the New Statesman, Jason Cowley, has always seemed to me a good person and a good editor in charge of a magazine with some fine writing in it.

But three weeks ago Eaton flagged up an interview he had conducted with Sir Roger Scruton with claims which seemed suspect from the start. Eaton claimed that Scruton had made a succession of “outrageous” remarks during their interview. In addition to anti-Chinese racism, he claimed, Scruton had said awful things about Muslims, Jews, and various other groups of people. All of this had an effect. Believing that what the New Statesman’s deputy editor said was true, Scruton was widely defamed across the British media. He was then swiftly and ignominiously fired (without even being personally informed) from his position heading a government quango. This latter decision was taken by the relevant minister, James Brokenshire MP, within five hours of Eaton’s original tweets.

The malicious intent which Eaton brought to the interview was evidenced not just by the manner in which he announced its alleged contents, but in his posting on Instagram of a photo of himself swigging champagne from a bottle and saying that this was how he was celebrating the sacking of “homophobe and racist” Roger Scruton.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Turkish ‘Justice’: Life in Prison for Journalists; Leniency for ISIS Terrorist by Uzay Bulut

Posted By on April 29th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14137/turkish-prison-for-journalists

“The magnitude of these punishments, and the fact that the court failed to implement a related, binding ruling of the Constitutional Court, also raise fundamental questions about the ability of the [Turkish] judiciary to uphold the constitutionally protected right to freedom of expression.” — Harlem Désir, Representative on Freedom of the Media for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE).

“The court decision condemning journalists to aggravated life in prison for their work, without presenting substantial proof of their involvement in the coup attempt or ensuring a fair trial, critically threatens journalism and with it the remnants of freedom of expression and media freedom in Turkey.” — David Kaye, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of the Right to Freedom of Opinion and Expression.

Sadly, such public denunciations have not worked. At least 144 intellectuals are languishing in Turkish jails for their work or political views.

Two recent criminal cases in Turkey underscore Ankara’s disturbing double standard when it comes to the concept of justice.

In February, three dissident Turkish journalists accused of “attempting to overthrow the constitutional order” — for their alleged “involvement in the 2016 coup attempt” against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan — were sentenced to life in prison.

In March, Neil Christopher Prakash, an Australian ISIS terrorist caught in 2016 crossing the border into Turkey from Syria, was given a light sentence by the Kilis High Criminal Court.

Prakash, considered Australia’s “most wanted ISIS member,” was linked by the FBI to a failed plot to attack the Statue of Liberty in New York. In one of his many propaganda videos for ISIS, Prakash describes his conversion from Buddhism to Islam after a trip to Cambodia. He recounts attending meetings at a mosque and Islamic center in Melbourne. After reading the Koran and becoming a Muslim, he says, he traveled to Syria to join the jihad and the caliphate in 2013.

In 2015, the Australian government issued an arrest warrant for Prakash for membership in a terrorist organization and for his suspected involvement in a failed plot to behead a police officer on Anzac Day.

During his hearing on November 1, 2017 at the Kilis High Criminal Court — via video call from the Gaziantep prison, where he has been detained since 2016 — Prakash told the judges:

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Palestinians’ Own Goals by Khaled Abu Toameh

Posted By on April 29th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14141/palestinians-own-goal

“We reject normalization and adopt the approach of resistance until the liberation of the entire Palestinian territory.” — Statement rejecting job offers, issued by Progressive Democratic Student Pole, affiliated with the radical PLO group Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).

“Resistance” is a term used by Palestinians to describe the “armed struggle” against Israel, which includes carrying out various forms of armed attacks against Israelis. When the students talk about the “liberation of the entire Palestinian territory,” they are actually saying that they want to destroy Israel because they do not believe in its right to exist.

A video of the protest at Bir Zeit University posted on social media shows dozens of angry students surrounding the companies’ representatives, and chanting: “Normalization [with Israel] is Treason.”

This is just another example of how the movement for boycotting Israel is causing damage to Palestinians. Perhaps the real motive of the people promoting these boycotts of Israel is not to help the Palestinians at all, but, like terrorist groups, such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad, to destroy Israel.

On April 24, two Palestinian software development companies came to Bir Zeit University, north of the West Bank city of Ramallah, to offer jobs to Palestinian students. The companies were invited to campus as part of the university’s Annual Hiring Day — an event aimed at helping students find jobs with major Palestinian firms.

The event, however, turned ugly when students protested against the presence of the representatives of the two companies on campus. The protesters expelled the company representatives from the university premises after accusing them of engaging in “normalization” with Israel. In other words, the students attacked, humiliated and expelled Palestinian companies that came to offer them jobs at a time when the Palestinian economy is facing a crisis and thousands of young Palestinians remain unemployed.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

ObamaGate: No Misdemeanors, Only High Crimes By Sebastian Gorka

Posted By on April 29th, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/04/28/obamagate-no-misdemeanors-only-high-crimes/

Do you sometimes feel like you are living in a Tim Burton movie? Or an episode of “Monty Python’s Flying Circus”?
It’s hard not to.

When an evening TV show host starts to tear up live on camera after she is forced admit that the Mueller report confirms that the president is not an agent of a foreign adversary, you have to ask: what is going on in America?

All the more so after a private Twitter user, who posted a video of the teary-eyed Rachel Maddow, was suspended by the social media platform. Why? Because she posted the close-up that clearly demonstrated that Maddow was overwrought. Suspended for posting the truth.

Or look instead at Anderson Cooper, CNN’s putative doyen, who can’t even garner 0.3 percent of the population as viewers for his “flagship” program, and who recently accused Jared Kushner of “gaslighting” the nation over Russia; in other words of making statements aimed at convincing the listeners that they are insane.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The Adolescent Progressive Mind By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on April 29th, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/04/28/the-adolescent-progressive-mind/

One of the strangest things about the series of psychodramas that surround the ongoing effort to remove President Trump before the 2020 election is progressive schizophrenia. In teenage fashion, one moment a player in the Trump removal intrigue is deemed by the media-progressive nexus a demigod. The next moment, he’s a devil. It depends solely on his perceived sense of utility.

Robert Mueller, Saint to Sinner
When Robert Mueller was appointed in May 2017 as special counsel to investigate alleged Trump campaign “collusion” with Russia following the firing of FBI Director James Comey, he was practically canonized as a secular saint. The media was giddy over his “all stars” and “dream team” of almost all liberal lawyers who shortly would prove the supposedly obvious: sure winner Hillary Clinton lost only because the vile Trump conspired with Vladimir Putin to sabotage her campaign by leaking John Podesta’s emails.

As the Mueller investigation lumbered along over the last 22 months, the media periodically announced that their newfound hero had inside information, privileged but unnamed sources, and high-ranking anonymous officials who confirmed “the noose was tightening,” the “walls were closing in,” and “a bombshell” was about to go off. It was as if pre-teenagers had group-talked themselves into seeing witches and goblins.

Mueller was just about to ensure Trump’s impeachment, indictment, or voluntary exile. More direct leaks apprised us that Mueller supposedly was sealing Trump’s fate by flipping the alleged sell-out Michael Flynn. Or was it the dastardly Carter Page? Or perhaps the supposed wannabe George Papadopoulos was Trump’s true nemesis. Or again, maybe the deified Mueller had so leveraged Stormy Daniels, or Michael Cohen, or Roger Stone, or Jerome Corsi that Trump would all but confess and slink off into infamous oblivion.

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

“Jihad Johnny” Soon Flies Free “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh started as a hip-hop critic and wannabe Malcom X. Lloyd Billingsley

Posted By on April 29th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273592/jihad-johnny-soon-flies-free-lloyd-billingsley

Next month John Walker Lindh will gain release from federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, after a 20 year sentence for fighting with the Taliban in Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks. Americans may know little about Jihad Johnny’s service for the Taliban, and less about his career as a fake hip-hop critic.

“Lindh, now 25, has largely disappeared from public attention since his imprisonment in October 2002,” wrote Philip Sherwell in a 2006 Telegraph piece headlined “The New Malcolm X?” In prison Lindh was known as “Hamza” and commanded such stature that “religious advisor” Shakeel Syed told him that he could become “the new Malcolm X.”

In upscale Marin County, California, Lindh attended the elite “alternative” Tamiscal High school. After seeing the 1992 Spike Lee movie Malcolm X, Lindh converted to Islam and began using the name “Suleyman.” That was hardly the student’s only affectation, as James Best confirmed in “Black Like Me,” a 2003 article in Oakland’s East Bay Express, subtitled “John Walker Lindh’s hip-hop daze.”

Under the name Mustafa Naim Mujahid, Lindh wrote online that he was “born in Chocolate City,” Washington DC, and “raised in its vanilla suburbs.” Under the pseudonym “John Doe” he wrote “an excoriating lyrical tirade against rappers of every variety, from Too $hort to Sista Souljah to Marley Marl.” As Best notes, the Lindh was especially cruel to rappers he believed to have gone pop and thereby compromised their blackness.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Passover Massacre and Anti-Semitism in America Courage and bravery in the face of murderous hate in a small city in California. Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on April 29th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273613/passover-massacre-and-anti-semitism-america-daniel-greenfield

John T. Earnest came to a small synagogue in a small California city of 50,000 with a rifle and big dreams of killing Jews. In a manifesto posted on 8chan, he boasted, “I would die a thousand times over”.

The Neo-Nazi wannabe killer listed Adolf Hitler as his inspiration. “My act will inspire others to take a stand as well,” he wrote in his manifesto. “And when this revolution starts gaining traction (if I am not killed) I expect to be freed from prison and continue the fight.”

Inside, an elderly Rabbi, a 60-year old woman, an 9-year-old girl, and other Jewish worshipers celebrating the final day of Passover showed him the true meaning of courage.

The older congregants in the sanctuary of Chabad of Poway, the city’s sole Orthodox Jewish synagogue, were reciting Yizkor, the prayer for deceased loved ones, an occasion that can summon even the most secular Jew to the synagogue, while the younger children were playing in the synagogue’s hall.

Had Earnest opened fire in the sanctuary, many of the congregants asking the Lord to embrace their parents and grandparents, and unite their souls with those of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and all of their forefathers, would have joined them in death. But instead, the Neo-Nazi was drawn after the Rabbi and the congregation’s children who embodied the innocence and goodness he was driven to destroy.

The Neo-Nazi stopped in the lobby and opened fire on Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein and the children.

MEDIA Comments turned off

A fake apology from fake news New York TimesBy Ethel C. Fenig

Posted By on April 29th, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/04/a_fake_apology_from_fake_news_new_york_emtimesem.html

After being severely criticized for running an unsigned anti-Semitic cartoon about their most hated subjects — Jews, Israel, Trump, US of A — in their international print edition and then mocked for its pathetic excuse on numerous media sites (including American Thinker), the New York Times belatedly attempted an apology on Sunday. And once again failed. Because the Times is not sorry about printing an “offensive” cartoon; as the latest apology attempt demonstrates, it was just sorry it was caught and couldn’t get away with it this time.

Printing the unsigned cartoon with its euphemistically labelled “anti-Semitic tropes,” as the nameless Times opinion writer originally stated, was the not the NYT’s fault — oh my goodness, no! — but rather the result of a “faulty process a single editor working without adequate oversight” according to the latest bleat. In other words, not my fault because of a “faulty process!

BOOKS Comments turned off

Master of the Craft In his new book, Robert Caro teaches the art of nonfiction writing. Lance Morrow

Posted By on April 28th, 2019

https://www.city-journal.org/robert-caro

Working, by Robert Caro (Knopf, 207 pp., $25)

In Working, Robert Caro tells us how, exactly, it is done. “Truth takes time,” Caro writes. He began his epic study of Lyndon Johnson in 1976, and now, 43 years later, having published four volumes, he is at work on the fifth, which tells of LBJ’s presidency and the disaster of Vietnam. He has interrupted that labor to offer Working.

If I were teaching journalism or nonfiction writing, especially the writing of history and biography, I would build a course around Caro, with Working as my primary text and scenes from his Johnson books as case studies. I would tell my students: “In a given situation, ask yourself, ‘How would Caro handle this?’” The course would teach Caro’s instincts and methods. It’s possible that he is all the education that a writer in this line of work requires.

First, choose the right subject, he advises. Read all available books on the subject. Then read all magazine and journal articles. After that, all national newspaper coverage of the subject—then local coverage. Plunge now into the documents: “turn every page,” as a newspaper editor advised the young Caro long ago. You never know what you might stumble upon. Luck emerges from diligence. In the LBJ Library in Austin, pages from 32 million documents awaited turning. Caro and his wife Ina, his research partner, spent years there, turning pages—panning for gold.