Yossi Klein Halevi: Why the anti-Israel boycott movement is an immoral threat to peace

This is a clueless op-ed. The point of BDS, just like the point of the pro-Israel advocacy that Yossi Klein Halevi practices, is to promote the interests of one group over other groups.

A Jewish state of Israel is great for Jews and it sucks for Arabs and Muslims. The destruction of the Jewish state of Israel would feel great for Arabs and Muslims. The success of the Jewish state of Israel results in shame and mortification for Arabs and Muslims, who can’t keep up due to their low average IQs.

What is good for one group, such as Jews, is often horrible for other groups.

Judaism and Torah do not accord democracy much respect, but democracy is useful when you are arguing the case for Israel to people who believe in democracy.

What would the pro-Israel crowd prefer? That those opposed to them use violence or use the non-violence of BDS? Or dream that people opposed to Israel do not assert their own interests?

Jews would support a Jewish state even if it was not a democracy, even if it had no Muslims and no freedom to practice any religion but Judaism, and no free press and no universal healthcare. Why? Because a Jewish state is good for Jews.

As far as what is moral here, as far as who God has given the land to, that’s a matter of faith and it is silly to argue about faith.

Yossi Klein Halevi writes:

As the Middle East devours itself, leaving behind the worst human devastation since World War II, an international movement seeks to delegitimize Israel, the region’s only intact society. Israel alone in the Mideast has an independent judiciary, a free press, universal healthcare and religious freedom. Yet the anti-Israel boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, or BDS, has singled out the Jewish state as the world’s most pressing problem in the early 21st century.

BDS is at once immoral and a threat to peace. Immoral, because it perpetuates the lie that Israel is solely or even primarily to blame for the absence of a Palestinian state — rather than the repeated rejection by Palestinian leaders of peace plans presented over the decades. Immoral, too, because it ignores the anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hate education on which generations of Palestinians have been raised, an education that denies any place for a Jewish state in any borders.

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Game of States

From Steve Sailer’s new column in Taki’s Magazine:

The near universal response of the punditry to a majority of Brits voting to leave the E.U. has been so enraged that the average voter must have begun by now to notice that their furious elites just plain don’t like them. As a Bizarro World Sally Field might have exclaimed in wonder, “You hate us, you really hate us!”

The past week has been the mirror image of the Stale Pale Male taunting and touchdown dances that followed Obama’s reelection. Then, it was Democracy Rules (because we’ve imported millions of ringers). Now, it’s Democracy Sucks (because voters are stupid).

I’ve long been suggesting that it would be prudent for elites to moderate the policies under which they’ve flourished, such as by scaling back mass immigration. … What has ruined the E.U. is the ideological momentum of elites. Now that the public has twigged to the fact that globalism is basically a scam to allow those who would do pretty well in life anyway to do even better, the globalists have doubled down on their claims to be justified by their more advanced morality of universalism.

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Australia’s Election July 2

Comments at Steve Sailer:

Amidst the admittedly very important events of the Orlando shooting and the Brexit, the Australian election is set to take place in 4 days and has gone overlooked on iSteve. This election is of both the House and Senate, so this is as big as it gets. I spent 2-3 hours writing a post to explain everything, but unfortunately the browser died. (!!!)

In a nutshell, my idea is that Australia lacks a “Numbers USA” style website or ratings of individual Australian politicians on the basis of legal immigration, and needs that and a similar election guide by electorate. There is a “Sustainable Population Party” (formerly Stable Population Party) but they only have 4 candidates. There are about 76 seats in the Senate and 150 seats in the House, so something more extensive is really warranted. The beauty of this approach is that politicians are not monolithic on immigration, and similar approaches have been used to considerable success by Numbers USA, the NRA, AIPAC, etc. Apply the filter and let the politicians get the message. This is the best and quickest approach in a country where both major parties want (on average) high levels of immigration, for who knows what reason.

I am not sure whether something of value might be crowdsourced in 2-3 days, but who knows what is possible. If we could get someone on Breitbart onside it would help a lot, if not in the actual help with the guide, at least with the publicity. The largest countries of origin for immigrants to Australia are China, India and then it trails off after that. These are not majority Muslim countries, so whoever helps would need to understand that it is the overall immigration level that is the problem, not just the Muslim issue.

Australia ties Canada in net migration rate, equal first in the Anglosphere in immigration rate. Amongst white countries, only Spain has a higher level of immigration and population. Australia is a valuable ally of the USA and it would be a shame to let it slip out of the Anglosphere through rapid demographic change.

Unlike the USA, Australia’s primary source of immigration has been legal immigration, not illegal immigration. While Australia has been offered a real choice on illegal immigration which to their credit the Liberals were effective in halting, there has been no choice offered on legal immigration by either of the major parties or for that matter, the Greens.

The government media outlet, the ABC, does not even list immigration as a major policy.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-05-13/election-2016-policy-big-issues/7387588

The Australian Labor Party (ALP) in particular does not want to debate immigration.

http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/federal-election-2016/federal-election-2016-coalition-labor-back-away-from-health-immigration-debates-20160623-gpqil1.html

In terms of the world, there are few white countries taking in more migrants per capita than Australia. Of white countries above Australia’s population, there is only Spain ahead of Australia (would make a good story as to who they are taking in and why). Australia is next and practically tied with Canada. Australia is first in the Anglosphere of its size or greater.

Country | Net migration per thousand p.a. | population

Luxembourg 17.16 0.5M

Spain 8.31 47M

Norway 7.25 5M

Belgium 5.87 11M

Canada 5.66 35M

Australia 5.65 23M



United States 3.86 319M

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_net_migration_rate

As I said before, most of the immigration is non-white. Most is from India, China and the Phillipines, with some white refugees from the UK and South Africa.

http://blog.id.com.au/2011/population/australian-demographic-trends/australia-newest-migrants/

https://www.border.gov.au/about/corporate/information/fact-sheets/02key

Really, we should be aiming for an immigration moratorium to at least halt the demographic change. There is no white country producing much in the way of surplus, so there is no real point to keeping the borders open in the hope we get some compatible immigration. Taking in more Euro migrants only robs Peter to pay Paul. The only white countries breeding at above replacement levels are Israel at about TFR of 3 depending on source, and Argentina at 2.3. It’s very sad.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependent_territories_by_fertility_rate

Unfortunately, history shows there is no real difference between the major parties on immigration. Liberal Howard’s tenure oversaw a doubling of the immigration rate. Liberals have been in power from 9/2013, previously ALP from 12/2007, previously Liberals from 3/1996, previously ALP from 3/1983, previously Liberals from 11/1975.

https://www.border.gov.au/Factsheets/PublishingImages/02key-graph-2008-12.gif.jpg

Even Liberal Cory Bernardi, who has good views on Muslim immigration, is either not particularly strong on the legal immigration question, or it is not overly evident where he stands.

http://www.corybernardi.com/learning_from_british_mistakes_on_islamic_migration

http://www.afr.com/news/politics/cory-bernardi-branded-an-embarrassment-for-refugee-comments-20150907-gjhb4h

So, while I am not overly hopeful of finding that much difference between candidates, perhaps there will be some and where there is some, that is a start. I am not sure whether it has merit but since Numbers USA has merit, it seems relatively likely that an Australian equivalent may also have merit. Whether this can be done in time… not sure. Perhaps difficult at this late stage. I welcome comment.

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Can Trump Keep Winging It?

Mark Steyn writes: I did check out the action backstage, and I’ll say this: It was unlike any other candidate event I’ve been to. By comparison with, say, presidential campaigns such as Lamar Alexander’s or Orrin Hatch’s, Trump is very lightly staffed, and entirely unmanaged. Twenty minutes before the event, backstage is usually a whirl of activity with minions pretending to look busy and frantically tippy-tapping away on their phones over some vital matter or other. Deputy speechwriters and assistant campaign managers bustle about saying things like, “Mike’s seen the Egyptian Prime Minister’s response to the Secretary of State, so we’re working on a sentence to add to the nuclear-proliferation section.” There’s none of that around Trump. He’s meandering around back there shooting the breeze, posing for pics, totally relaxed – and so are his press secretary and campaign manager, too. If you’ve seen any of those inside-the-campaign movies, from Robert Redford in The Candidate to George Clooney in Ides of March, it looks all wrong: There’s far too few people, and there’s none of the fake busyness.

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Santa Monica’s Dumpy Housing

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* Santa Monica’s housing stock was pretty unimpressive when I lived there in 1981-82. No airconditioning in my dumpy apartment, but I only needed it about 10 days per year, and barely needed any heat.

Before antibiotics, rich people didn’t like to live near the ocean because they thought they’d get TB. So they lived inland in places like Pasadena. My grandfather, for example, moved from Oak Park, IL to Altadena above Pasadena in 1929.

But then smog and antibiotics came along, so people with money started to moving to Santa Monica, which had surprisingly crummy houses.

Now the smog is gone, so Pasadena is nice again.

* My brother-in-law and family lived in a rental in Santa Monica in the mid to late 1980s as they began their university careers. I recall their saying that several of their older neighbors bought homes there in the late 1940s and early 1950s for about $10-15,000 or so. Not very fancy homes going by external appearances—definitely lower middle to middle income homes.

But even by then, the market value had gone up by 20 or 30 times in nominal dollars and these had become upper-middle class properties for those who sought to buy.

* A friend of mine bought a 900 square foot house in Santa Monica around 1986. That was pretty typical of the housing stock except in the extreme north where there were big houses. Santa Monica shows up a lot in Raymond Chandler detective novels from around 1940 as “Bay City” — a kind of sleazy, low rent place. Philip Marlowe’s best girl lives in a tiny house on…

The new construction in 1981, however, was extravagant. I recall touring a new house made out of white pipes by some avant garde architect that looked, as Tom Wolfe would say, like an insecticide refinery.

It took me a long time to figure out that my parents’ worries about me catching some terrible disease from the fog in Santa Monica were actually reasonable from a pre-1945 point of view in which penicillin didn’t really exist and inland hot / dry weather was healthier than Santa Monica’s cool / moist weather.

And that’s why Santa Monica in 1981 was a fairly expensive dump. Now, it’s much more expensive but it’s less of a dump.

* the documentary dogtown and z-boys gets it title from Santa Monica and Venice being called, well, Dogtown in the 70s.

Venice was still pretty sketchy to me in the early 2000s. Now that was the place to buy for recent property increases.

it was an interesting documentary, btw. you get to see the white punk skate subculture being born because a guy was filming it at the time. White Dogtown surf punks showed up white straitlaced suburban Californians at skate competitions with their 70s stoner surfer style.

* Dogtown was specifically the Pacific Ocean Park area, where the pilings left over from the old amusement park made for some interesting surfing. The poseurs of Venice and Santa Monica appropriated the Dogtown cache after the documentary became a cult classic.

* Aside from worries about tuberculosis, it was not unusual before 1970 for parents of children with chronic asthma to be told by their doctors to move to drier climes for the benefit of their children, if they could do so. Humidity, fog and sea air significantly worsen symptoms of asthma in many patients.

* The assumption was that dampness (e.g., fog) was dangerous. Santa Monica is mostly sunny, but it does get foggy at nights. Fog used to shut down LAX frequently, but now they have extremely powerful runway lights that keep the otherwise dilapidated airport busy until the wee hours every night.

Southern California was settled after 1887 first in the inland San Gabriel Valley (e.g., Pasadena,about 30 miles inland) first. A large fraction of early residents of SoCal were Midwesterners with respiratory problems (some actually had TB, some had other problems, some had no problems — as in Mann’s “Magic Mountain,” tuberculosis was hard to prove). Pasadena’s warm dry climate was considered healthier than Santa Monica’s mild moist climate.

There’s no natural harbor to draw people to the coast. And downtown Los Angeles, about 20 miles inland, was a rare place where the Los Angeles river always flowed above ground due to a geological quirk forcing the aquifer under the river to the surface.

* Fog did not discourage the settlement of San Francisco, but if there’s gold in them thar hills, you’ll put up with a little fog.

* LA had a train that ran down to the Beach Cities to service the beachgoers and the people who lived in those little cottages. In the South Bay the tracks ran along what is essentially now the bike path. Photos from the early 20th century show beach homes scattered among rolling sand dunes.
A colleague of mine’s 100 year old Mom was still living in one of those beach cottages on a 1700 square foot lot on a walk street several blocks from the beach. When she passed away he listed it for $2.2 million and took the first offer above asking, which came in 2 hours after the property was listed. Kicked himself afterward when he had the thought, too late, that he could have ridden a bidding war. There is probably a 2500+ square foot house on the property now.

* I recall reading that the original Spanish settlement of Los Angeles was built inland due to some Spanish regulation about avoiding maritime attacks

* SM didn’t strike me as sunny. And definitely the fog was still there in the mornings at Samohi (close enough to the ocean to just barely have a view–standing at the right place in no fog).

I still don’t see how you think the Bay area has better weather. The Pacific ocean is cold. So the coast from San Diego to SB has the best weather in the world. SF is too far north.

Your take only makes sense if you’re comparing the valley to going to Berkeley/SF/Palo alto. but why skip Malibu? It’s just better.

* But only 12,500 people are allowed to live along the 26 miles of ocean in Malibu. And Rob Reiner and Barbra Streisand are going to keep it that way. You might say that Malibuites are privileged xenophobes who hate and fear the huddled masses of the San Fernando Valley yearning to breathe free in non-existent high rises overlooking their beachfront homes in Malibu, but then you aren’t holding the Microphone are you?

* I took a vacation to Santa Monica last year, and while it’s overall architecture is prosperous/pedestrian, I thought it the most enticing place to live that I have ever been to. The mellow vibe, close to the cool parts of LA, an hour’s drive from the beautiful coastal interior of So. Cal, the warmth, with the cool natural airconditioning from the sea. Who wouldn’t want to live there? I’ll never have the money, though, so it’s just a dream.

* Palisades High School, aka Pali Hi, has been around for decades. I lived a few blocks from there after college and knew many who went to school there. The local community thrived based on the semi-remote location, accessible mainly via Sunset Boulevard and Pacific Coast Highway (PCH). That kept it somewhat removed from the homeless scene in Santa Monica and kept the crime rate down.

Pali remains a wonderful close-in very expensive suburb, fairly accessible to Century City meaning not a really horrible commute like having to drive to downtown LA or the Valley. Modest bungalows cost millions and those on larger lots get torn down to construct bigger homes. The old housing stock was not very well built, as Steve noted as well about Santa Monica. When the wind blew, you could see the curtains move, and there was no insulation as none was really needed.

If you are feeling patriotic, and are in the LA area on July 4th, watch the Palisades Parade. They usually have some celebrities along with bands and such. One of my memories from past parades was seeing dozens of people flipping off then-politician Tom Hayden.

* I had never heard that one before, the rationale I did hear was that the LA river in what is now the downtown area is the only place in Southern California where you had a reliable year round supply of potable water in the open. This allowed enough farming and livestock to support a community of about 10000 people. The only other significant open water at that time was the marshlands at what is now Marina Del Rey where the LA River flowed to the Pacific prior to the early 1800′s. That would not have been a healthy area to live and because there was no natural port there, there was no other incentive to settle in the area. The only other water was the seasonal winter floods, and Lake Elsinore on the other side of the Santa Ana Mountains which is the only natural lake in SoCal, but even Lake Elsinore disappeared during droughts.

* My wife and I took our very young children to Santa Monica about four times. The last time, in Fall 2014, we were harassed, intimidated, and followed for a prolonged period by an aggressive, large, young black man. Nobody did anything, even merely calling the police, and we had to leave lest I get into it with him and get arrested.

Santa Monica people are hateful leftist bullies when it comes to people like us, and self-hating cowardly pussies when it comes to guys like the “African-American gentleman” (as they would say) who menaced us.

* One element of “the Plan” may be municipal minimum wages that are elevated above the national minimum. Washington, D.C.’s minimum hourly wage rises to $11.50 this week and goes up annually until it reaches $15 in 2020, and will be adjusted for inflation each year after that.

Is this a canny strategy to make such cities out of reach for people whose labor isn’t worth $15 an hour? (My 17-, 19-, and 20-year-old sons are working this summer for $12, $11, and $15/hour.) And not only will there be no low-paying work available, but there won’t be any cheap, low-margin businesses around; there will only be pricey places, and poorer people, even the ones without jobs, will have to move somewhere else if they want to shop in a Dollar General or eat a Big Mac. As with the housing, immigrant businesses will play into this somehow, the places that don’t really pay official wages to their self-employed owners and relatives. Also, immigrant laborers will be as exempt from a $15 an hour wage floor as they are from any other legal restriction on their ability to work.

* They did this [high minimum wage] in Santa Monica a number of years ago. It’s probably pretty effective at clearing out lower working class people. It has no effect on the nonworking homeless, so they become more noticeable amidst all the pretty people.

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