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Falling Out of Love with Obama: What changed? The public’s disenchantment with Barack Obama stems from Donald Trump’s success and growing rejection of woke policies, unchecked immigration, and systemic repression. By Roger Kimball

Posted By on December 8th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/12/08/312542/

I always found the literary critic Harold Bloom (1930-2019) distinctly curate’s-eggish. You ask, “How is your egg this morning, curate?” “Good in parts,” comes the reply. But Bloom made one observation that stuck with me. Lots of literature, Bloom wrote somewhere, deals with the phenomenon of falling in love. But equally poignant is the story of falling out of love.

Bloom was thinking primarily of personal romance. However, the emotional dialectic he limned works itself out on the larger stage of political life as well. There is a certain mystery about both sides of the process. The public’s enthusiasms are as fickle as they are extravagant. What explains the infatuation with figures like Barack Obama? In retrospect, it is possible to offer more or less plausible explanations. Obama’s race, his smooth, non-confrontational manner, and his ability to dress up radical policy proposals in an emollient jelly of seeming common sense all help explain his political success.

Obama has occupied an enviable place in the magic circle of celebrity since his first election in 2008. It persisted through Donald Trump’s first term and for most of Joe Biden’s. There were signs that Obama’s star was fading during the later stages of Kamala Harris’s disastrous campaign. Trump’s resounding victory on November 5 crystallized the eclipse. Speaking at a “Democracy Forum” last week, Obama attempted to wheel out his old standby: that Republicans were in the habit of “weaponizing” the DOJ and other institutions in order to steal elections and cement their hold on political power. “One side tries to stack the deck and lock in a permanent grip on power,” he said, “ either by actively suppressing votes or politicizing the armed forces or using the judiciary criminal justice system to go after opponents.”

There was a time when Obama might have gotten away with such antics. Not anymore. His blatant act of projection was instantly called out and ridiculed. Quoting the remark, Miranda Divine spoke for the Zeitgeist when she observed that “It’s over for Obama. The spell is broken. Donald Trump vanquished him, Biden, Harris, the Bushes, and the Cheneys. All of them, with a spring in his step.” The commentator John Gibson offered a pithier précis of Obama’s comment: “Shorter: I accuse them of doing what we did, and they must be stopped.”

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Syria: Enemies Masquerading as Friends by Amir Taheri

Posted By on December 8th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21184/syria-enemies

[T]he use of the label “Levant” (Sham) puts a question mark in front of the “liberating force.” Using that medieval term instead of the word Syria, which jihadists have always regarded as alien because it was put in use under the French mandate, the group and its backers implicitly deny the existence of a Syrian nation-state.

Some in Turkish political circles regard the creation of “artificial states” after the fall of the Ottoman Empire as an act of revenge by Western powers against the Turkish caliphate, which for centuries had represented the Islamic challenge to Christendom’s goal of ruling the world.

In Erdogan’s view, that could reopen the Turkish claims, if not of sovereignty at least as having “special rights,” to parts of Iraq and Syria.

Denying the existence of a Syrian nation with full rights to statehood and territorial integrity poses a risk to the security and stability of the whole region.

Almost dormant for four years, last week the volcano of the Syrian uprising erupted with a vengeance. In four days, its lava covered the country’s second largest city Aleppo before moving towards central cities of Hama and Homs on its way to the capital Damascus.

The force that carried out the operation came under the label “Mission to Liberate the Levant” (Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham) but was quickly identified as a reincarnation of the Victory Front (Jabhat al-Nusra), which was the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda.

Whoever redesigned that force as a “new and improved product” wanted to achieve three goals.

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2 Pearl Harbor survivors, ages 104 and 102, return to Hawaii to honor those killed in 1941 attack

Posted By on December 8th, 2024

https://www.startribune.com/100-year-old-pearl-harbor-survivor-recalls-confusion-and-chaos-during-japanese-bombing-83-years-ago/601192005

PEARL HARBOR, Hawaii (AP) — Ira “Ike” Schab, a 104-year-old Pearl Harbor attack survivor, was so determined to stand and salute during a remembrance ceremony honoring those killed in the Japanese bombing that thrust the U.S. into World War II some 83 years ago that he spent six weeks in physical therapy to build the strength to do so.

On Saturday, Schab gingerly rose from his wheelchair and raised his right hand, returning a salute delivered by sailors on a destroyer and a submarine passing by in the harbor. His son and a daughter supported him from either side.

“I was honored to do it. I’m glad I was capable of standing up,” he said afterward. “I’m getting old, you know.”

Schab is one of only two servicemen who lived through the attack who made it to an annual observance hosted by the U.S. Navy and National Park Service on a grass field overlooking the harbor. A third survivor had been planning to join them but had to cancel because of health issues.

The Dec. 7, 1941, bombing killed more than 2,300 U.S. servicemen. Nearly half, or 1,177, were sailors and Marines on board the USS Arizona, which sank during the battle. The remains of more than 900 Arizona crew members are still entombed on the submerged vessel.

Dozens of survivors once joined the event but their attendance has declined as survivors have aged. Today there are only 16 still living, according to a list maintained by Kathleen Farley, the California state chair of the Sons and Daughters of Pearl Harbor Survivors. Military historian J. Michael Wenger has estimated there were some 87,000 military personnel on Oahu on the day of the attack.

Schab agreed when ceremony organizers asked him earlier this year to salute on behalf of all survivors and World War II veterans.

“He’s been working hard, because this is his goal,” said his daughter Kimberlee Heinrichs, who traveled to Hawaii with Schab from their Beaverton, Oregon, home. “He wanted to be able to stand for that.”

Schab was a sailor on the USS Dobbin at the time of the attack, serving as the tuba player in the ship’s band. He had showered and put on a clean uniform when he heard the call for a fire rescue party.

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Jew-Hunting: Open Season in the West by Guy Millière

Posted By on December 8th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21185/jew-hunting-open-season

“We have become the Gaza of Europe. I will NOT accept that. NEVER. The authorities will be held accountable for their failure to protect the Israeli citizens. Never again”. — Dutch MP Geert Wilders, X, November 8, 2024.

In Europe, saying that one is for the Palestinians has become the politically correct way of saying one loathes Israel and Jews.

So long as courageous politicians like Geert Wilders are pushed to the margins, the situation in Europe can only get worse. European political leaders are afraid of Muslim unrest and of losing potential votes. They have commensurately become increasingly anti-Israel. French President Emmanuel Macron urged completely stopping arms deliveries to Israel.

“Offering to negotiate with Islamic terrorists is a statement of weakness. Jihadists only offer to negotiate out of fear, weakness or to entrap us, and they assume we do the same thing. Nothing would ever convince them that we genuinely want to live in peace with them, or that we prefer alternatives to violence. So any time we offer to negotiate, they see it as weakness or a trick. If our diplomats ever understood this cultural reality, they would stop being baffled when the negotiations fall apart.” — Daniel Greenfield, Gatestone Institute, December 2, 2024.

On November 7 in Amsterdam, visiting Israeli soccer fans were chased through the streets, beaten, thrown to the ground, punched, kicked, stabbed, and thrown into the icy water of the city’s canals. While the attackers shout anti-Semitic slurs, the victims, in an attempt to escape, shout back that they are not Jewish. No one was arrested during or after the pogrom. The attackers were only put on buses and dropped off on the outskirts of the city. Pictured: Police officers chase rioters who attacked Jews and Israelis in Amsterdam on November 7, 2024. (Photo by Wahaj Bani Moufleh/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images)

November 7. Amsterdam. As soon as a soccer match between the Netherlands’ AFC Ajax, a Dutch soccer club, and Israel’s Maccabi Tel Aviv ends, Maccabi supporters who came from Israel and several European countries to attend the match, are attacked. Many are chased through the streets, beaten, thrown to the ground, punched, kicked, stabbed, and thrown into the icy water of the city’s canals. While the attackers shout anti-Semitic slurs, the victims, in an attempt to escape, shout back that they are not Jewish.

The attackers film what they do, then post the videos on social networks. Five Israelis are hospitalized; dozens of others, some wounded, lock themselves for hours in their hotel rooms. The Israeli government sends planes to rescue the Jews. A jihadi pogrom has just taken place in the city where Anne Frank and her family hid until they were turned over to the German occupiers and sent to death camps.

“This is a very dark moment for the city, for which I am deeply ashamed,” said Femke Halsema, Amsterdam’s “left wing” mayor.

BOOKS, P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

Cancel Cowards “Officially in New Zealand it was ‘Girls can do anything year’. I was instructed to make the boys in my story into girls”Amy Brooke

Posted By on December 7th, 2024

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/society/cancel-cowards/

Although the move throughout the West to impose a cancel culture as a form of control seems to be nearing its apex, the fight against the truth has been decades in the making. For example, when moving some decades ago to Nelson, I tried to get from the local library some of the Enid Blyton books I and so many others had loved as children.

Blyton eventually wrote so many books that some of her themes became repetitive. But she was imaginatively outstanding, and her wonderful stories about the Faraway Tree, the Enchanted Wood, the Magic Wishing Chair, and Galliano’s Circus, followed by the Famous Five and Secret Seven adventure stories, spanned a career of nearly fifty years. Sales of her books were estimated at over 2 billion copies. As a young Froebel-trained teacher, with her father one of Britain’s top naturalists, her weekly courses of seasonal nature study evoked enthusiastic tributes from schools throughout Britain. She had an extraordinary knowledge of the natural world, coupled with a great flair for detail, and brought to thousands of children an increased awareness of the world around them.

Blyton was well aware that many children living in industrial towns in the 1930s with fathers on the dole couldn’t visit the country, but through her pages she tried to give them vicarious pleasure in the joys of rural life, and described how they might make tiny gardens of their own. One suggestion which met with a huge response was that country readers might like to send such things as budding twigs or wildflowers to their counterparts in town.

She became one of the first victims of the cancelling culture, which apparently sprang from the envy of a rival children’s writer in Britain, and by the end of the 1950s librarians were banning her books in Britain, Australia and New Zealand. The librarian I spoke with some decades later dismissed Enid Blyton with apparent contempt, her reasons hard to find. One was the silly suggestion that Noddy and Big Ears, in the stories younger children loved, had “an unnatural relationship”. Doubtless this would be a reason to have these stories highly regarded these days. Then there was the claim that she wrote for middle-class children only, that she had no social concern—utterly untrue. She and the many thousands of children who belonged to the clubs she formed raised astonishingly large quantities of money for the many charitable organisations they took under their wing. She personally answered a staggering number of letters each week for the children who wrote to her and whose views she always asked for. This didn’t stop the accusations piling up, including from New Zealand librarians and writers such as children’s books specialist Dorothy Butler, who claimed that, “regrettably”, Blyton was a snob.

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Corbin K. Barthold “The Civilized World Seems Tired of Its Civilization” Almost half a century on, Saul Bellow’s To Jerusalem and Back still reads as an uncannily accurate take on Israel, the United States, and the enemies of the West.

Posted By on December 7th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-civilized-world-seems-tired-of-its-civilization

“Israel is pressed, it is a suffering country,” a sympathetic visitor says with a sigh. International organizations, the intellectual Left, and much of Europe are arrayed against it. American support is shaky. The Israelis are fighting for their existence, perhaps for liberal democracy itself, but “at this uneasy hour,” our pilgrim laments, “the civilized world seems tired of its civilization, and tired also of the Jews. It wants to hear no more about survival.”

The traveler was Saul Bellow, the year 1975. A few months later, Bellow published a diary of his visit, To Jerusalem and Back (1976), his only full-dress performance of nonfiction. He took a stand for civilization in that book and elsewhere, and his claim to lasting literary fame has suffered for it. But the link between Israel and civilization is real, and Bellow’s account of his journey to the Holy Land resonates today.

In this book, as in Bellow’s novels, what strikes you first are the character sketches. On the flight east, Bellow sits next to “a young Hasid” (“his neck is thin, his blue eyes goggle, his underlip extrudes”) who offers to pay him $15 a week, for life, to eat kosher. Bellow befriends a masseur, “both priestlike and boyish,” whose hands “have the strength that purity of purpose can give.” He marvels at how a scholar whom he knows, “a vegetarian, a pacifist, a Quaker—most odd, most unhappy, a quirky charmer,” could “fall in love with militant Islam.” Though Bellow’s run-ins with the likes of Yitzhak Rabin and Henry Kissinger may be of some historical interest, his portraits of humbler men are where his talent shines.

To Jerusalem and Back is structured—if that’s the word—around walks and conversations, drop-ins and dinners, stray thoughts and sense impressions. The book is unruly and disjointed. A review in the New York Times called it “spotty” as a travelogue: “a sharp if patched-together picture of contemporary Israel.” Sometimes, Bellow the tourist is a sedate creature: “The Valley of Jehoshaphat, with its tombs. A narrow road, and on the slopes acres and acres of stone.” Sometimes he almost seems to suffer from the syndrome for which his destination is famous: “The light of Jerusalem has purifying powers . . . I don’t forbid myself the reflection that light may be the outer garment of God.” In all events, the sights and sounds are just a backdrop. Bellow’s attention returns to politics—to the existential dread of an Israel unsettled by the Yom Kippur War.

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A CEO Was Shot Dead. These People Cheered. This is real life. Not ‘John Wick.’ By Kat Rosenfield

Posted By on December 7th, 2024

https://www.thefp.com/p/the-extremely-gleeful-extremely-dark?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Brian Thompson, the fifty-year-old CEO of UnitedHealthcare, was gunned down on the street in New York Wednesday, in what appears to be a carefully planned and utterly cold-blooded assassination. I say appears because the shooting was captured on video: The killer, masked and dressed in black, steps out from behind a parked car as Thompson passes. A moment later, Thompson stumbles, falls, and doesn’t get up.

It is terrible to watch—and yet, even this literal snuff film is less disturbing than the various critics and commentators, many of them self-described progressive empaths who preach compassion for the marginalized and hashtag their posts with “#BeKind,” who are treating this real murder of a real person as though it were the emotionally cathartic climax of a John Wick movie—the part where the archetypal villain gets his just deserts. The police later revealed that the bullets fired at Thompson had the industry terms deny, defend, and depose written on them—a cinematic detail that only further encouraged the notion that he was killed as vengeance for UnitedHealthcare’s misdeeds.

The online reaction has been extremely gleeful and extremely dark: “My thoughts and prayers are on hold pending prior authorization,” reads one representative (and massively upvoted) comment on a New York Times Facebook story about the murder. Taylor Lorenz, recently of The Washington Post, wrote, “and they wonder why we want these executives dead” on Bluesky before cross-posting the name and photo of Blue Cross Blue Shield CEO Kim Keck to her accounts on multiple platforms (along with a cheeky suggestion that her followers engage in “very peaceful letter writing campaigns” against murderous insurance execs).

In a viral X post, Columbia University professor Anthony Zenkus—whose profile describes him as an “anti-violence” “trauma expert”—quipped, “Today, we mourn the death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, gunned down. . . wait, I’m sorry—today we mourn the deaths of the 68,000 Americans who needlessly die each year so that insurance company execs like Brian Thompson can become multimillionaires.”

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Scoop: Biden Regime Quietly Revokes Veterans Hiring Preference For Civil Service Jobs By Debra Heine

Posted By on December 7th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/12/05/scoop-biden-regime-quietly-revokes-veterans-hiring-preference-for-civil-service-jobs/

“A source from the U.S. Air Force told American Greatness: “This is government-wide hiring ramped up like never before seen. They are literally packing the federal workforce with as many loyalists and subversives as they can. Worst of all, they think it is their duty to do so.”He added: “Since DEI is getting pettifogged rather harshly (and rightly so) this is yet another way they can worm into the bureaucracy—at the expense of veterans.”The source told American Greatness that “veterans are being cast aside for this new workforce (wokeforce).”

The Biden regime has quietly revoked the veterans hiring preference for civil service jobs and promotions, which since the 1944 Veterans Act gave eligible veterans preference over others for appointments in federal civil service selection, a memorandum obtained by American Greatness shows.

The goal of the veterans’ preference law was to “provide a uniform method by which qualified veterans [could] receive special consideration for federal employment,” according to Military.com.

By law, veterans who are disabled or who served on active duty during certain specified time periods or in military campaigns are entitled to preference over non-veterans both in hiring from competitive lists and in retention during reductions in force.

New guidelines from the Defense Civilian Personnel Advisory Service (DCPAS) now stipulate that “veterans’ preference should be considered on an equal basis as other qualified candidates.”

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That was my Melbourne synagogue set aflame.“Just one arson attack,” some might say. “Not indicative of a broader trend.” But this would be a lie, a self-soothing fiction. Joshua Hoffman

Posted By on December 7th, 2024

Ihttps://www.futureofjewish.com/p/that-was-my-melbourne-synagogue-set?utm_campaign=email-half-post&r=126wpb&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

I saw the footage, and my stomach churned.

Mask-wearing arsonists set a synagogue ablaze in a predawn attack Friday in the Australian city of Melbourne, police said, sparking widespread condemnation.

The fire broke out at 4:10 a.m. local time in the Adass Israel Synagogue when some congregants were already present, police said, gutting much of the inside of the building in the southeast Melbourne suburb of Ripponlea.

The flames that consumed that synagogue were not just destroying bricks and mortar; they were attacking something far more sacred. That building was a beacon, a house of prayer, a place where my people have gathered to celebrate, to mourn, to stand before God in all our flawed humanity.

And now, it is charred rubble.

But the pain extends far beyond the local Jewish community in Melbourne. The attack feels personal — because it is personal. To strike at one synagogue is to strike at us all.

For Jews, community and continuity are lifeblood. The synagogue is not merely a physical structure; it is the embodiment of our collective spirit. It is where generations have come to hear the same ancient words read from the Torah, where the melodies of our ancestors find new life in each recitation of the Shema¹. When a synagogue is set aflame, it is not just a local tragedy. It is a desecration of the sacred, a violation that rips through time and across oceans.

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Ben-Gvir’s call to curtail volume of Muslim call to prayer mimics Saudi Arabia’s by David Isaac

Posted By on December 7th, 2024

https://www.jns.org/ben-gvirs-call-to-curtail-volume-of-muslim-call-to-prayer-mimics-saudi-arabias/

While Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has been accused of attempting to ignite a “religious war,” his push to limit the volume of Muslim calls to prayer follows similar efforts in several European countries and even in the cradle of Islam itself.

Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s announcement on Nov. 30 that he had instructed Israeli police to enforce noise ordinances on mosques by issuing fines and confiscating loudspeakers was met with outrage from Arab Knesset members, the Palestinian Authority and even Hamas.

The terrorist group urged Palestinians to “reject this criminal decision and take action to prevent the occupation authorities from tampering with our sacred sites and religious practices.

Arab-Israeli MKs Ahmed Tibi of the Hadash-Ta’al list and Mansour Abbas, leader of the Ra’am Party, accused Ben-Gvir of attempting to ignite a “religious war.” 

Early-morning Muslim calls to prayer are a simmering problem in Israel. Ma’ariv reported in February that since the outbreak of the Swords of Iron War, Israeli police have noted that most mosques’ calls to prayer have increased in volume “in a significant manner, which caused serious harm to residents.”

Two imams from the Great Omari Mosque of Lod were arrested on suspicion of increasing the decibel level of its public address system, the report said. They were released with a warning.