WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Two-State Solution: A Greater Threat to Palestinians than to Israel By Prof. Hillel Frisch

Posted By on January 22nd, 2017

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Most observers, when debating the pros and cons of a two-state solution, focus exclusively on its potential impact on Israel and its Jewish citizens. Much less attention is paid to the solution’s potential impact on the Palestinians. Leftists, right-wingers, conservatives and liberals all tend to assume that two states would naturally be in the Palestinians’ interest. Think again.https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/396-frisch-two-state-solution/

As was apparent at the recent Paris conference, the world refuses to acknowledge that the two-state solution has already failed the Palestinians. The Palestinian Authority (PA), established in 1994, came to rule over all of Gaza in the summer of 2005 after the complete Israeli withdrawal and destruction of Israeli settlements. The PA also had exclusive control over the major cities in Judea and Samaria/the West Bank and their environs, comprising some 95 percent of these territories’ population.

However, that unified Palestinian entity, which was supposed to be the Palestinian side of the two-state equation, proved extremely short-lived. Within two years of Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza, Hamas took over Gaza completely. In the summer of 2007, after several rounds of fighting that began soon after Hamas’s electoral victory in 2006, the Islamist group established its own exclusive government in Gaza.

Thus, the Palestinians partitioned themselves into two bodies: an autocratic entity headed by Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank, and a Hamas theocracy in Gaza. Almost unnoticed, the two-state solution had given way to a three-state solution.

European states – like France, for example, which convened the Paris conference – will no doubt clam that that was all in the past, and the past can always be corrected.

It is certainly true that the Palestinians are always allowed by the international community to have yet another chance. But a two-state solution is simply no longer feasible.

A relatively bloodless civil war has been raging between the two entities day in and day out since their bloody 2007 confrontation, offering a constant illustration of why there cannot be a single Palestinian state. If the two sides were to attempt to reunite, that war would become very bloody indeed. The Palestinians themselves realize this, which explains the succession of failed attempts to bring the sides together.

As separate entities, the two sides make do by utterly subduing the opposing group. The cost of this suppression has been relatively low so far: several deaths of tortured political prisoners in Hamas and PA prisons, a few extrajudicial killings, and the occasional closing down of professional or charitable organizations linked to the opponent. The PA, the economic clout of which is financed by the international community, has blocked projects like the creation of a new Israeli electric grid line into Gaza and the creation of a modern port that would considerably improve Gazans’ standard of living.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Pope warns against populism and ‘saviours’ like Hitler see note

Posted By on January 22nd, 2017

There are 1.2 billion Catholics across the globe or almost 20% of the earth’s population, more than 1 out of 5 Americans and 40% of Latin America. This is a disgraceful abuse of power by the leader of the largest Christian denomination in the world. Janet Levy
Madrid (AFP) – Pope Francis warned against populism, saying it could lead to the election of “saviours” like Hitler.

In an hour-long interview with Spanish newspaper El Pais conducted as Donald Trump was being sworn in as US president, the pontiff also condemned the idea of using walls and barbed wire to keep out foreigners.

“Of course crises provoke fears and worries,” he said but added that for him “the example of populism in the European sense of the word is Germany in 1933.

“Germany… was looking for a leader, someone who would give her back her identity and there was a little man named Adolf Hitler who said ‘I can do it’.”

“Hitler did not steal power,” the pope said. “He was elected by his people and then he destroyed his people.”

The Germans at that time also wanted to protect themselves with “walls and barbed wire so that others cannot take away their identity,” he said.

“The case of Germany is classic,” he said, adding that Hitler gave them a “deformed identity and we know what it produced.”

Pope Francis however underscored that it was too early to pass judgement on Trump.

“Let’s see. Let’s see what he does and then we will evaluate,” he said.

FOREIGN POLICY, HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Security Is Job No. 1 President Trump, when it comes to radical Islam, don’t ‘build that wall!’ By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on January 21st, 2017

Say this much for Washington: The Swamp knows how to do pageantry. Beginning on Thursday afternoon at Arlington National Cemetery, the solemn and joyful rituals of a presidential inauguration overwhelmed the clown show — on Capitol Hill, where brickbats aimed at Trump’s cabinet nominees left marks mainly on the Democrats who hurled them, and on the streets, where the radical Left’s tantrums couldn’t even sour the mood, much less spark the revolution.

As Donald J. Trump became the 45th president of the United States, American pride in peaceful transfers of power, so historically remarkable, seemed to melt away the rancor. Self-absorbed House Democrats who skipped the proceedings — confounding a celebration of America with an endorsement of a president they reject ex ante — rendered themselves invisible beyond their intentions.

None of us should be naïve. For Americans, the inauguration of a new president is a “we hit life’s lottery” moment. We could, after all, have been born in Bentiu or Helmand or Aleppo. But it is just a moment. We can hope we draw strength from it, and patriotic resolve to remember what unites us. Then we go back to the bitter divisions of our day-to-day.

In the two and a half months since President Trump’s stunning victory on November 8, speculation over how he would manage those divisions — or pour more gasoline on them — has dominated the public debate. That is to be expected. It has been an anxious interregnum: one presidency winding down, unconstrained by political concerns and unabashed about its inner radicalism; a new presidency in waiting, making a splash here and there but powerless to direct policy.

Much of the speculation is idle. Yes, there are matters of enormous consequence before us, the collapse of Obamacare perhaps the most immediate. But presidencies are never judged by what is on the president’s desk when he first enters the Oval Office. Donald Trump’s presidency will be judged by things that haven’t happened yet, by how he reacts to events, especially the unexpected — the Pearl Harbor, the Cuban missile crisis, the 9/11.

Neither success nor failure is guaranteed. In the here and now, what matters is whether the new president is setting himself up for success — and, more important, setting the country on a path to security whatever may come.

So, let’s talk security.

In his ambitious inaugural address, President Trump vowed that the United States would “eradicate radical Islamic terrorism from the face of the earth.” That is ambitious, to say the least. What we call “radical Islam” is not so radical on much of the earth. What makes it “radical” here in the West is the subject of dispute. According to Washington, it is the practice of violent jihadism. For those with eyes willing to see, though, it is the ideology that animates the jihad: the belief in a divine mission to implement sharia — Allah’s law and blueprint for how life is to be lived, as classically understood for more than a millennium.

EDUCATION, ISRAEL Comments turned off

‘Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain’ Leftist activists try to deflect blame for fheir own campus Jew-hate. Richard L. Cravatts

Posted By on January 21st, 2017

In early December, a bipartisan Congressional bill, H.R. 6421/S. 10, the “Antisemitism Awareness Act,” took on a long-overdue task, namely, increasing “understanding of the parameters of contemporary anti-Jewish conduct and will assist the Department of Education in determining whether an investigation of anti-Semitism under title VI is warranted.”

“Jewish students,” the bill accurately noted, “are being threatened, harassed, or intimidated in their schools . . . including through harassing conduct that creates a hostile environment so severe, pervasive, or persistent so as to interfere with or limit some students’ ability to participate in or benefit from the services, activities, or opportunities offered by schools.”

The Department of Education had been alerted before to the distressing situation of resurgent anti-Semitism on university campuses, but previous evaluations of Title VI violations were imprecise and “did not provide guidance on current manifestation of anti-Semitism, including discriminatory anti-Semitic conduct that is couched as anti-Israel or anti-Zionist.”

This was all too much for critics, including the morally tendentious, malignant group Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), who immediately condemned the intent of the bill, attaching to a December 8th press release two letters with signatures from 60 Jewish Studies “scholars” and some 300 “concerned” Jewish student activists, respectively.

Clearly oblivious to the current scourge of anti-Israel, anti-Semitic campus activism (in which they have, not coincidentally, been active and complicit), JVP and these faculty and students derided the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act as misguided and dangerous, not because it provides a tool for finally being able to identify instances where anti-Semitic speech and behavior has infected campus communities, but because they believe, seemingly irrationally, that Jewish students are actual and potential victims, not of Leftist and Muslim student groups (as they clearly and demonstrably are), but of Right-wing extremist groups, emboldened, they contend, by the election of Donald Trump in November.

The campus war against Israel, promoted relentlessly and virulently for some 15 years now, has been fueled and given life, not by the occasional Nazi-loving skinhead living in his mother’s basement and living on the fringes of society without a substantial base of like-minded fellow travelers, but by student-funded, highly visible, and vocal on-campus groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine (with 220 chapters nationwide) and the Muslim Student Association (with over 600 chapters). Jewish Voice for Peace, along with Open Hillel, J Street U, and other pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel groups, frequently join forces with these virulent groups on campuses to stage Israel Apartheid Weeks, construct mock apartheid walls, and sponsor hate-Israel events, seminars, courses, speeches, and boycott and divestment resolutions—all of which appear promiscuously on campuses around the country, and which are, significant to the Antisemitism Awareness Act, the primary source of the hostile environment Jewish students experience, especially, as often happens, when anti-Israel, anti-Zionist radicalism morphs into anti-Semitism.

These perpetrators of anti-Israel agitation have been leading a virulent campaign to demonize and delegitimize Israel for years now, and it is astonishing that JVP and these meretricious scholars and students ignore all the factual and shameful chronology (of which they have been central fomenters and cheerleaders in the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign), and instead are trying to perpetuate the fantasy that the true threat to Jewish students and other Israel supporters is from the Left’s perennial boogeymen, the lunatic fringe of white power extremists who these willfully-blind activists believe, and want others to believe, are the chief perpetrators of anti-Jewish bigotry.

MEDIA Comments turned off

Dangerous Games The MSM’s endless, wily contortions on Islam. Bruce Bawer

Posted By on January 21st, 2017

“Why are Jews, gays, and other minorities in Europe increasingly voting far-right?” So read the headline of a recent article in the Christian Science Monitor by Sara Miller Llana and Tamara Micner. I’m going to take a quick stroll through their article – not because there was anything special about it, but precisely because it provided a near-perfect example of the way in which the mainstream media handle anything related to Islam. The headline alone contained two familiar elements: (1) the reflexive grouping of all European counter-jihadist parties under the thoroughly mendacious rubric “far-right” and (2) the feigned puzzlement over declining gay and Jewish support for the European political establishment.

What’s worth noting about Llana and Micner’s article is that it made the answer to the question in their headline crystal clear: quite simply, European Jews and gays are voting for counter-jihadist parties because they know that Islam represents an existential threat to their own lives, and that the political establishment has increasingly aligned itself with their would-be executioners. Llana and Micner admitted, for example, that Jewish schools and synagogues in the Netherlands are now under police guard owing to “anti-Semitism…in pockets of Muslim communities.” (There’s no need, of course, for those words “pockets of.”) They cited a Dutch Jewish leader’s charge that the “openness, tolerance, and diversity” preached by “liberal elites” are “hard to defend” when “radical Muslim[s]” are “so highly intolerant.” (Again, “radical” isn’t really required there.) And without criticism or snark, they quoted a Dutch Jewish novelist’s statement that Geert Wilders’s strong anti-Islam posture makes him “a necessity in today’s political landscape” and a gay Frenchman’s explanation that he supports the National Front because it calls for “reducing immigration, taking back control from the European Union, and promoting a tough stance against Islamic fundamentalism.”

Now, any honest reporter faced with all of the above data would be obliged to acknowledge that, yes, Islam preaches the murder of gays and Jews and that members of those groups in Europe are aware of this fact and are acting out of sheer self-preservation. Period.

But the mainstream media can’t allow itself to admit these facts and leave it at that. So it muddies the waters. Llana and Micner did so in a familiar way. The “far-right” parties, they charged, don’t really believe in freedom and human rights, and don’t really care about gays’ or Jews’ well-being, but are, on the contrary, nests of bigotry – including homophobia and anti-Semitism. Why, then, are these parties welcoming Jews and gays into their ranks? According to Llana and Micner, it all came down to two words: window dressing. They’re taking in Jewish and gay members, you see, only because those groups’ support for them allows the parties to pose as non-bigoted “[e]ven as they feed on” – wait for it – “the fear of the ‘other.’”

Ah yes, that useful concept: “fear of the ‘other.’” Llana and Micner, as we’ve seen, had already made it perfectly clear that Jews and gays have a very good reason for fearing Islam. But by bringing in the postmodern concept of “fear of the ‘other,’” they deftly swept all sense away and turned the whole thing around. For the entire concept of “the other” is tied up, in contemporary academic discourse, with what is meant to be regarded by all and sundry as the thoroughly ugly history of Western imperialism – the colonization of various non-Western corners of the earth, and the cruel subordination of the almost invariably dark-skinned natives of those places to their white European conquerors. Let it be understood, moreover, that for one of today’s academics to reduce a social or political situation to a distrustful encounter between “self” and “other” is to suggest that the former view themselves as civilized and view the “other” as a bunch of savages.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

CNN’s Hit Job on Monica Crowley An expert weighs in on the “plagiarism” allegations. Matthew Vadum

Posted By on January 21st, 2017

The plagiarism allegations CNN leveled against conservative commentator Monica Crowley were part of a “political hit job,” according to a publishing law attorney with expertise in plagiarism cases.

Crowley, a popular TV pundit and Washington Times editor who holds a Ph.D. in international relations, previously worked for former President Richard Nixon years after he resigned his office.

Trump’s transition team stood by Crowley when the controversy erupted, stating, “Any attempt to discredit Monica is nothing more than a politically motivated attack that seeks to distract from the real issues facing this country.”

Crowley has suffered mightily because of the allegations. President-elect Donald Trump had asked her to become a national security spokeswoman but she backed out of the job offer. Her publisher has withdrawn one of her books, and critics of Crowley have raised the possibility that Columbia University could revoke her doctoral degree. The university hasn’t weighed in on the matter publicly.

It is significant that CNN’s smear vehicle is written by Andrew Kaczynski, formerly of BuzzFeed, the cat video-loving so-called media outlet run by Ben Smith, a gossip-loving left-wing former Politico reporter. Kaczynski quit BuzzFeed to join CNN in October.

The attorney who has weighed in on this case is Lynn Chu, a member of the New York State Bar who earned her juris doctor degree from the University of Chicago in 1982.

In a report this week about Crowley’s alleged plagiarism, Chu establishes her expertise by explaining that she has “over 30 years of experience in the field of publishing and publishing law.” She notes that she has “often reviewed literary materials with an eye to issues of quality and … [is] well familiar with sourcing and attribution standards in both university press and commercial publishing.”

Chu said she looked at Crowley’s work and “found CNN’s splashy ‘plagiarism’ accusation to be ill-supported—a heavily exaggerated, political hit job.”

The “CNN list [or plagiarized passages] was misleadingly long, possibly a calculated attempt to condemn her with manufactured, but false, bulk.”

Chu also revealed that CNN had deliberately misrepresented evidence. In two dozen of the supposed examples of plagiarism cited by the cable TV network, “CNN hid from readers that her footnotes gave proper credit to the source,” she said.

“I came away impressed by the very high quality and care taken by Ms. Crowley in her writing, scholarship and research overall,” Chu said. There were “relatively few examples of unsourced copying” that should simply “be corrected, and not allowed to besmirch Ms. Crowley’s reputation.”

At first glance, the case CNN’s Kaczynski makes against Crowley in his Jan. 7 article seems damning.

Kaczynski writes:

The review of Crowley’s June 2012 book, “What The (Bleep) Just Happened,” found upwards of 50 examples of plagiarism from numerous sources, including the copying with minor changes of news articles, other columnists, think tanks, and Wikipedia. The New York Times bestseller, published by the HarperCollins imprint Broadside Books, contains no notes or bibliography.

He continues:

Sections of her book are repeatedly lifted from articles by National Review author Andrew C. McCarthy, who is a friend of Crowley’s. Lines in her book also match word-for-word the work of other columnists, including National Review’s Rich Lowry, Michelle Malkin, conservative economist Stephen Moore, Karl Rove, and Ramesh Ponnuru of Bloomberg View.

Crowley also lifted word-for-word phrases from the Associated Press, the New York Times, Politico, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, the BBC, and Yahoo News.

But closer examination reveals Kaczynski to be at best a hairsplitter, and at worst, a liar.

MEDIA, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The “Fake News” Censorship Industry by Robbie Travers

Posted By on January 21st, 2017

Name a single person or organisation you trust to control your speech. Whom would you trust to control what you can read, or make decisions on what is true and what is false for you? Whom do you trust to police what you think?

The German government thinks it knows exactly who should be the arbiter of truth and what articles you should be allowed to post. Itself!

This would lead to a monopolisation of the media industry. One or two large platforms would dominate the public debate; fringe voices would be ignored or cast aside.

Who is to police the police? Facebook, caught out, already had to dismiss those compiling their trending stories, when it was revealed that they had a runaway political bias and were routinely suppressing (conservative) material with which they did not agree.

The whole censorship industry is open to abuse; presumably, that is what censorship is for in the first place.

Name a single person or organisation you trust to control your speech. Whom would you trust to control what you can read, or make decisions on what is true and what is false for you? Whom do you trust to police what you think?

The German government thinks it knows exactly who should be the arbiter of truth and what articles you should be allowed to post. Itself!

After a bill was proposed by German lawmakers, which threatened fines of up to 500,000 euros ($522,000) for publishing “fake news,” Facebook decided to use an organisation called Correctiv, described as a German fact-checking non-profit organisation, to decide whether reported stories are “real” or “fake.”

This system would then encourage individual Facebook users to report other users’ posts to Correctiv. Facebook would then have Correctiv label any of the articles “fake news,” as they see fit.

Even then, this proposed response by Facebook was not harsh enough for some German lawmakers, who want articles deemed to be fake by the government to be removed within 24 hours, or else fine Facebook 500,000 euros. That move would undoubtedly lead to individuals abandoning Facebook for other social networks, or more probably, Facebook abandoning them. German attempts to police the Facebook could end up useless; to many, the plan looks suspiciously like a money-making stratagem.

ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Europe’s Jihad against Israel by Salim Mansur

Posted By on January 21st, 2017

Resolution 2334 was as sickening a surrender to the Arab-Muslim jihad in the name of “peace,” as was the surrender of UK Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain to Adolf Hitler at Munich in September 1938.

The UN before 1967 did not refer to the West Bank and Gaza as “occupied” territories when they were “occupied” by Egypt and Jordan after the 1948-49 war, which the Arab states launched against Israel. The Arab states then were the “occupiers” of parts of Palestine west of Jordan until 1967, and rejected any notion of Jews having a historic connection with Palestine, which they claimed was an integral part of Arab lands.

From the time of the Balfour Declaration and the League’s Mandate for Palestine until the UN Resolution 181 (1947), reference to Palestine meant land with historic connection to the Jewish people. It was on this basis that the Jews’ (Zionist) claim to reconstitute their national home was given legal recognition by the League, which the UN, as its successor, was legally bound to protect.

From the Arab perspective of religion and politics there never was a “Palestinian” people, or nation, distinct and separate from Arabs as a people or nation. The jihad called by the Mufti Haj Amin el-Husseini against Jews in Palestine after 1921 was in the name of “Arabs” and Islam, and it has so remained since. According to the Hamas charter, “the land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf [Trust] upon all Muslim generations till the day of Resurrection.”

Jerusalem, its principal city, was built by King David, a Jew, some ten centuries earlier.

For the past nine decades and more, however, Arabs and Muslims, with 56 Muslim states in the OIC, have been waging jihad to destroy the one and only state of the Jews. And Christendom, as if oblivious of its own shameful past history of anti-Semitism, has even more shamefully supported the falsification of history. Now, with Security Council Resolution 2334, the UN, with the enthusiastic the backing of Europeans and the prodding of U.S. President Barack Obama, is complicit in this jihad against Israel.

UN Security Council Resolution 2334, adopted as a result of the United States abstention, on the instructions of outgoing President Barack Obama, confirmed the historic bigotry against Jews and Israel entrenched within the United Nations, just as it was within its predecessor, the League of Nations. As previously indicated, Arab and Muslim states could not move a single anti-Israel resolution in the Security Council without the complicity of the Western powers, representing the historically Christian nations.

The collusion of the Western powers and the Islamic countries against Jews and Israel is now ostentatious, without any subterfuge. Resolution 2334 was as sickening a surrender to the Arab-Muslim jihad in the name of “peace,” as was the surrender of UK Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain to the Adolf Hitler at Munich in September 1938.

The gathering in Paris on January 15, at the invitation of French President François Hollande, was further evidence of appeasing the Arab-Muslim world’s jihad against Israel.

The timing of the Paris gathering – five days short of the 75th anniversary of the notorious Wannsee Conference of 20 January 1942, held in the suburbs of Berlin, in which top-ranking Nazi officials finalized the preparation for the “Final solution to the Jewish problem” in Europe – could not have been more overtly insulting to Israel. Members of the European Union plotted shafting the Jewish state in accordance with the wishes of their Arab and Muslim friends of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) – 56 Muslim states, plus “Palestine,” and the biggest bloc at the UN.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Who really won the Cold War? Today’s politics create doubt. Herbert London

Posted By on January 21st, 2017

In 1989 the Berlin wall tumbled like Humpty Dumpty amid a joyous celebration in Germany and across the West. The symbol of the Russian Communist dictatorship was blasted into bits of concrete. In the subsequent couple of years those states caught in the grip of the Soviet orbit seceded reducing the Russian population by about 150 million people.

NATO expanded to embrace many of these former states including the Baltic nations contiguous to Mother Russia. While the West viewed this new reality with promise liberal democracy would spread, former KGB officials regarded this defeat as humiliation, a humiliation that had to be redressed.
The accession of Vladimir Putin into a leadership position was a clear signal KGB operatives were intent on reclaiming the so-called “Near-Abroad” and extending Russian influence into areas from which it was formerly ousted.

This plan, transparent from the outset was assisted inadvertently or perhaps directly by the Obama administration that “reset” policy towards Russia by remaining “flexible,” another word for accepting Russian goals.

In fact, when President Obama refused to act on his own “red line” over Bashar al Assad’s use of poison gas, he invited the Russians to adjudicate the matter handing Putin a diplomatic victory and a legitimate pathway into Middle East politics.

Putin seized every opportunity. Signs of U.S. withdrawal from the region, offered Russia the chance to align itself with Iran and Hezbollah and fill the U.S. created vacuum, including naval dominance in the Eastern Mediterranean.

In the ensuing months, Russian air superiority over Syria gained one victory after another for pro-Assad forces until the final blow – the bombing of Aleppo, a massacre as noteworthy as the killing fields in Cambodia.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

EDWARD CLINE: DO BLACK LIVES MATTER?

Posted By on January 21st, 2017

Do black lives matter?

Hispanic lives? Muslim lives? Gay lives? Women’s lives?

Black lives matter – to me, at least – if blacks adhere to reason, lead productive, non-parasitical lives, do not demand the unearned, and, to paraphrase Martin Luther King, Jr., if blacks judge others, blacks, whites, Asians, Arabs, Hispanics, Muslims (not actually a “race,” just as Islam is not a “race,” either), Mexicans, Cubans, and so on, that is, judge an individual by the content of his character. This is how I expect to be judged, and how I judge others. I otherwise place no importance on a person’s color.

But this is not what Black Lives Matter (BLM) means. BLM is grounded on race and a hatred for whites and the police. The hatred is so severe that BLM has declared war on the police. It is a terrorist organization, whether or not the government recognizes it as one. It has declared war on the police to effect “change” in how the police handle blacks in their encounters. Often it is black policemen who shoot or “mistreat” violent blacks in the course of self-defense, and these policemen have also been deemed “fair targets” by BLM for murder and harassment. Their “blackness” does not exempt them from murder.

It is a black subculture, perpetuated by the government and the welfare state, which rejects civilization, which BLM perceives as an oppressor. Although what blacks as a “collective” would replace it with has never been answered except for a “racial supremacy of blacks.” In that respect it is similar to Islam’s goal of dominating every country in the world.

Readers should be reminded that nothing like Locke’s Two Treatises of Government ever came out of the Congo or Egypt or the Sub-Sahara. Whatever there is to value in the West that serves as a benchmark of life-affirming progress was produced in the “lily-white” north – across the Mediterranean.

Some historians and cultural writers contend that climate played a big role in the development or Western civilization, so that blacks living in deserts or in fetid, smothering jungles were at a disadvantage to improve agriculture or invent steam engines and even to study the skies.

This is not an endorsement of the racist notion (advanced by creatures like the Aryan Nation and others) that whites are genetically superior to blacks or any other race.

Left out of the narrative is the role of reason.

This will not be the central subject of this column, but I am repelled by today’s black subculture. It is anti-reason, anti-esthetics, anti-everything that comports with a civilized society, and is a belligerent expression of self-hatred projected onto the “white race.” Today’s black “entertainers” are not of the caliber of past black singers and musicians as Cab Calloway and Louis
Armstrong and Billy Holiday.