In what has nearly become a perverse, recurring rite of spring, and yet more evidence that universities have become, as Abigail Thernstrom has described them, “islands of repression in a sea of freedom,” the Teachers’ Union of Ireland (TUI), which represents some 14,500 members, voted in early April “to cease all cultural and academic collaboration […]
In late 1970s Vienna, a father bought his little girl a baby crocodile for her birthday. The child had become enchanted with the reptile after seeing a picture of it in a storybook and when all the other presents were opened, her new pet was presented to her. The little girl was delighted with the […]
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/saudi-shenanigans-in-boston-and-d-c/print/ Abdulrahman Ali Alharbi, a Saudi student who was behaving suspiciously near the bombing site, was briefly treated as a suspect and then as a person of interest. His apartment was searched and law enforcement officers carried out large bags from it. Now there are reports that he is being deported on national security grounds. […]
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-first-union-to-officially-call-for-the-repeal-of-obamacare?f=puball WASHINGTON, April 16, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — United Union of Roofers, Waterproofers and Allied Workers International President Kinsey M. Robinson issued the following statement today calling for a repeal or complete reform of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act (ACA): “Our Union and its members have supported President Obama and his Administration for both of his terms […]
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/obamacare-is-imploding Obamacare-the Affordable Care Act-is both imploding from its own dead weight and conversely exploding in the face of the Democratic Party as we head toward the 2014 midterm elections. You remember the Democrats? They were the ones who, on Christmas Eve 2009 passed Obamacare in the late hours. It’s the bill Nancy Pelosi told […]
http://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/2013/04/18/calling-a-spade-a-spade-in-boston/
One of the curious, but also most predictable, responses to the Boston Marathon bombings from the Left has been the fervent expression — amounting nearly to a prayer — that the perpetrator or perpetrators of this act of mass murder be “homegrown,” preferably white, male, Christian, and conservative.
Why? Why does the Left prefer to have its terrorism served up by Timothy McVeigh rather than Durka Durka Mohammed Jihad [1]? It’s an interesting question. That the Left exhibits this prejudice is, like Falstaff’s dishonesty, “gross as a mountain, open, palpable.”
David Sirota, writing at Salon, gives almost comic expression to the genre in an essay with the really special title “Let’s hope the Boston Marathon bomber is a white American.” [2] Why does Mr. Sirota wish that the Boston murderer of 8-year-old boys be a white American? Because a spectral quality called “white male privilege” operates insidiously behind the scenes. If Timmy McVeigh blows up a government building, says Mr. Sirota, only he is blamed. If Mohammed does it, Muslims are likely to be “collectively slandered and/or targeted with surveillance or profiling (or worse).”
What do you think of that argument? I think it’s hooey. For one thing, categories like “white male privilege” are a sort of Leftist version of phlogiston: hypothetical explanatory devices that have the unfortunate attribute of not actually existing. For another, there’s plenty of “collective slander” of Christian fundamentalists (you know, those “bitter” small-towners who “cling to guns or religion [3]”) going around.
A full anatomy of David Sirota’s hope for a great white villain would fill many pages. What I want to note at the moment, however, is how consonant it is with President Obama’s often noted reluctance to employ what Andrew McCarthy calls the “T-word [4]” when commenting on episodes of mayhem and murder.
http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2013/04/19/one-boston-bombing-suspect-dead-another-at-large-after-chase-shootout/?print=1 In the early hours of Friday morning, the fatal shooting of a police officer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology culminated in a shootout with police in Watertown, Mass., that brought law enforcement face-to-face with the pair of bombing suspects sought by the FBI in the Boston Marathon attack. According to a press conference […]
http://www.thecommentator.com/article/3269/bbc_says_it_won_t_use_anti_semitism_because_the_word_is_too_long
ISLAMOPHOBIA 12 LETTERS….ANTI-SEMITISM…12 LETTERS……RSK
Apparently the word “anti-Semitism” is too complicated or too long for the BBC to use, says an e-mail from the News Online complaints team…
The BBC recently reported the story of the Labour Lord who was suspended for claiming that Jews were responsible for his imprisonment after driving offences.
The Labour peer was jailed for sending a text message shortly before his car was involved in a fatal crash. He later said that Jewish owners of “newspapers and TV channels” had put pressure on the court.
Many queried the BBC’s reporting of the incident at the time. In fact, the odd headline, “Labour peer Lord Ahmed suspended after ‘Jewish claims'” is still currently live. Instead of using “anti-Semitism”, the Beeb opted for “Jewish claims”, making the story seem like there were claims by Jewish people leading to Lord Ahmed’s suspension.
Call it clumsy journalism, intentional stupidity, whatever you want – it doesn’t explain the following e-mail exchange that one reader of The Commentator had with the BBC complaints team. Check it out:
READER: Labour peer Lord Ahmed suspended after ‘Jewish claims’ – What jewish claims? there were no ‘jewish claims’ – it was antisemitism. The EUMC Working Definition of antisemitism clearly states that one of its manifestations is: “Making mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Jews as such or the power of Jews as collective — such as, especially but not exclusively, the myth about a world Jewish conspiracy or of Jews controlling the media, economy, government or other societal institutions.” Racism isnt ‘anti-black’ – call it what it is: ANTISEMITISM.
BBC: Thanks for your email and please accept our apologies for the delay in replying. We try and stick as closely as possible to the words used, so, in this case we used ‘Jewish claims’ in the short space available for headlines to summarise his comments.
READER: Thanks for your reply, but with all due respect that is utter nonsense. ‘Jewish claims’ 13 characters. ‘Antisemitism’ 12 characters. Plus one look at the space available in the headline within the URL will tell you that there is/was PLENTY of space to report factually. To say that the misleading and inaccurate headline was due to space available is provably wrong This is not an acceptable response . Please explain as I am considerably unhappy at the dishonest response you have provided.
http://www.thecommentator.com/article/3287/extreme_right_wing_groups_to_converge_on_munich_on_hitler_s_birthday_tomorrow
This Saturday will mark the gathering of a coalition of German right-wing groups which will hold what they are calling a “regional conference” in Munich. The extreme right-wing Danubia fraternity has also been invited to attend the event that is set to take place on Adolf Hitler’s birthday. The Nazi leader was born on April 20th, 1889.
The meeting, scheduled to be held in Munich’s Old Town, is apparently just one in a series planned by the Dachverband Deutsche Burschenschaft, the umbrella organisation of German student fraternities. The organisation has already been a source of protests in German cities of Kassel and Heidelberg, and one conference in Freiburg was cancelled.
According to a spokesman, the organiser of the series is Bruno Burchart, a member of a Viennese fraternity called Olympia that has close ties with Danubia. In 2005, Olympia invited British Holocaust denier David Irving to be a guest speaker.
The conference have been billed as “continuing education seminars to teach young people about issues such as democracy.” Suddeutsche Zeitung says that no information was available about the exact program of Saturday’s event or those expected to attend. The group maintains that it is only by coincidence that the meeting is taking place on the day of Hitler’s birthday, and in the German city most closely associated with the Nazi leader.
A year ago, a Danubia member is said to have stated in a student newspaper that on of their conference speakers had complained that “Nazi history, women, foreigners and the Vaterland” had become taboo subjects in Germany and stated that resisting this “dictatorship of speech” was a “duty.”
German intelligence services have recently said that among Danubia’s active members were “individuals with current or former links to right-wing extremists“ and that activists from the Munich Neo-Nazi scene had been known to participate in Danubia events.
Obama’s Game of Immigration Poker
Does the president want to change the system, or just blame Republicans for failure in next year’s midterm elections?
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324493704578430843929482444.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_BelowLEFTSecond
The Senate’s Gang of Eight this week unveiled its hard-negotiated immigration bill. A bipartisan group in the House praised the product and declared its own bill not far behind. And the White House? Let the guessing continue.
The overriding question throughout this year’s push to reform immigration has been what game the White House is playing. The media keep writing that President Obama sees immigration as his second-term legacy. That’s what the White House keeps telling them, anyway, and who are they to doubt it?
But congressional negotiators remain highly suspicious that the White House is more interested in using a failed immigration bill as a weapon against the GOP in 2014. They look past the administration’s occasional tepid statements of support to its actions. So far what they’ve seen is a string of events that have been decidedly unhelpful in the cause of reform.thema to the GOP.
There was a lot of blowback against the speech, and two weeks later in his State of the Union address Mr. Obama restrained himself to broad talking points. Yet within a week, the White House leaked a draft of its own immigration bill, a partisan document that seemed designed to force Senate negotiations to the left or derail the talks altogether.
There’s also been the White House’s rear-guard action against a “trigger”—which makes a path to citizenship contingent on progress in border enforcement. There is wide bipartisan understanding that an evaluation of current border security is central to any bill, and this requires the Department of Homeland Security to produce data. Yet in March, a senior DHS official told a House committee that it had not created a broad measure of security (despite promising to do so in 2010), and wasn’t likely to anytime soon.
Obama officials told the New York Times last month that they had “resisted” a measurement “because the president did not want any hurdles placed on the pathway to eventual citizenship for immigrants in the country illegally.” Yet even congressional Democrats understand that the DHS’s failure could be a deal-killer—Texas Rep. (and Obama fan) Sheila Jackson Lee warned the agency it had better “get in the game.” The administration’s response was to roll out Homeland Secretary Janet Napolitano, who on March 26 insisted there is “no one number” that can capture border security, and that in any event a trigger “is not the way to go.”
Meanwhile, the White House has refused to say if it will accept policies that are central for Republican support. Senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer recently dodged a question about whether his boss would sign a bill with a trigger. White House officials have been equally evasive on whether the president supports a guest-worker program.
