NYT: Israelis’ Favorite Thing About Donald Trump? His Style (to Put It Bluntly)

New York Times: JERUSALEM — Donald J. Trump has been called a lot of things by a lot of people around the world. In Israel, where his comments about remaining “neutral” in peace negotiations raised hackles but his condemnation of “radical Islam” wins plaudits, the word that keeps coming up is “dugri.”

A slang Hebrew term derived from the Arabic for “straight ahead,” dugri describes someone who is frank and blunt no matter the consequences. This is how many outsiders view Israelis, often with considerable discomfort. But here in Israel, a society that views pretension with suspicion and disdain, it is almost universally a compliment.

“Israelis tend to talk more frankly and openly about subjects that, in America, could be somewhat taboo,” said Zev Chafets, a co-host of a weekly radio program in Tel Aviv that focuses on the United States’ election. “Trump does that. People find that refreshing.”

…More recently, Mr. Trump has generated headlines in Israel by declaring that the United States should emulate some of Israel’s security practices. He has said a version of the security barrier Israel built along and through the occupied West Bank should be erected along the border with Mexico, and he asserted that the United States should follow what he called Israel’s “profiling” of Muslims at security checkpoints.

His compliments were not universally welcomed. A columnist for the left-leaning newspaper Haaretz, Chemi Shalev, worried that Mr. Trump’s admiration of Israel could weaken Democratic support in the United States for Israel’s security policies. “His compliments damn Israel with loud praise,” Mr. Shalev wrote.

Pressed by reporters after Mr. Trump’s “profiling” comment, a senior Israeli minister refused to discuss American politics but defended profiling as effective in limited circumstances, according to Reuters. “Sometimes, when there is a specific form of terrorism, you can seek out Islamic terrorism only among Muslims,” said the minister, Yisrael Katz.

Mr. Trump’s praise of Israeli policies alone is not likely to lift his appeal to Israelis, said Shmuel Sandler of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University. “We always enjoy the fact that the West is coming to learn from us,” Mr. Sandler said. “More than this, I don’t think it will make a difference.”

COMMENTS AT STEVE SAILER:

* Speaking of Israel, it is a good example of what to expect when your country becomes 20.7% Muslim.

Lots more suicide bombings, random stabbings, seedy neighborhoods and “no-go” areas for law-abiding whites. Public institutions exploited and trashed by people who did not build them and never have and never will pay substantial taxes for their upkeep.

That is Angela Merkel’s Europe and Hillary’s USA!

Now some might say Israel has it worse became they “stole” the land. That’s not true, but that is really the wrong way to look at it. There is always going to be a pretext for Muslims to trash and destroying neighboring peoples.

You’ll notice, also, that land is “stolen” all the time in recent history without the “victims” engaging in endless bloody terrorist campaigns. American Indians? Sudetan and Prussian Germans? North Cypriot Greeks? All accepted honorable military defeat on fair terms and moved on. But Muslims will always have grievances against non-Muslims that they believe justify jihad.

Is it OK for me to envy the anti-establishment right in England over ours? Trump is to be commended, but really, it is a night-and-day difference. Leave ran a modern, extremely well run campaign. Trump … is not.

Leave figured out they needed to make the election about Diversity damaging the old middle class welfare state, and most of all a referendum on Muslim migration. Trump has this part figured out, but the whole “well oiled turnout machine” he is not even trying.

He very quickly needs to make his peace with the GOP establishment so he can raise money, and pivot left on middle-class economic issues, and not look bad doing it.

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Why the Brits do political satire so well — and Americans can barely do it at all

Michael Hiltzik writes: To serve this end, American producers become obsessed with making their characters lovable. The idea is to give the audiences characters they’re comfortable welcoming into their homes week after week, year after year. So the rough edges of even the nastiest roles, not to mention the merely offbeat, get sanded down over time. They lose their distinctiveness and become a collection of tics and catchphrases.

Jonathan Lynn, the co-creator and co-writer of “Yes, Minister” and “Yes, Prime Minister” (and director of “My Cousin Vinny”), understood this very well.

“American TV comedy nowadays tends not to be ironic or satirical,” he related. “There is a wish to make it homey and cozy. When I was talking to a network about turning [“Yes, Minister”] into an American series, I was asked if I could put a kid into it — or failing that, a dog. I decided that life is too short.”…

The finite lifespan of British programming gives producers the luxury of retaining and enriching the qualities that make their characters so distinctive without turning them insipid. John Cleese’s Basil Fawlty may occasionally inspire our sympathy, but never do we lose the feeling that it’s Basil’s actions that make things go from bad to worse. When Viacom tried to turn the show into an American sitcom named “Amanda’s” with Beatrice Arthur in the title role, they allowed her to be acerbic like her Maude, but softened her into a California hotel owner more sinned against than sinning. Cleese was aghast. Viacom told him, “We have changed one thing, we’ve written Basil out,” he recalled years later. The show lasted four months in 1983.

Cleese recalled that an earlier attempt to remake “Fawlty Towers” with Harvey Korman and Betty White misfired because the actors “were embarrassed by the edgy dialogue.” That points to another reason why American political sitcoms are so wan next to their British forebears: cowardice…

The makers of American political satires always claim to have devoted close personal study to the workings of Congress and the White House before they set pen to paper, but it’s the Brits who really base their work on real life. “Yes, Minister” and “Yes, Prime Minister” drew heavily from the diaries of former Cabinet minister Richard Crossman. There he wrote of his battles with his own private secretary, the fearsome Dame Evelyn Sharp, who became the prototype for Sir Humphrey Appleby.

The British “House of Cards” has an even finer pedigree: It’s based on a trilogy of novels by Michael Dobbs, who spent 10 years serving Margaret Thatcher as advisor, speechwriter, and “hit man” and used his fiction in part to settle old scores. “The Thick of It,” again, draws its realism by starting with real-life characters, and augmenting them into dramatic types with the skill of expert caricaturists.

But the defining difference is spine. British TV producers actually have more to fear from their political masters than Americans do — the BBC, which broadcast all three of the series we’ve discussed, is after all a government agency. (Government efforts to manipulate the news, by no means unsuccessfully, are a thread running through all three programs.) But as Lynn perceived, the guiding ethos of American producers of political shows seems to be harmlessness. They don’t want to offend the broadest possible audience or those who might make trouble for them in Washington. It’s always safer to be frankly implausible.

British shows have a simpler goal. They want to be funny, and in the process they end up being real.

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LAT: Why the second movie is the biggest hurdle to becoming a filmmaker — especially for women and minorities

Elsewhere in the Times: “Outfest Los Angeles embraces the LGBT-friendly mainstream with ‘Ghostbusters’ and more

LAT: Politics on parade: How Black Lives Matter halted a gay pride parade in Toronto

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One Solution To The Homeless Problem

Killer Preying on San Diego Homeless Attacks Again: SDPD

I suspect Mafia communities do not have big homeless problems.

LAT: L.A. will need to create a ‘housing machine’ as part of homeless bond measure, official says

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Obama In Muslim Dress

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Source.

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