Steve Sailer: The Growing Menace Posed by Lawless, Anti-democratic Autocracy in Central Europe

Posted on May 30, 2016 by Luke Ford

Steve Sailer writes: A couple of weeks ago in Taki’s Magazine, I recounted commenter Sean’s theory that the German Chancellor’s 2015 whim to open the gates of Europe was part of a coherent plan to weaken European opposition to united Germany’s New Order in Europe by positioning Germany not as the scary hegemon it objectively is, but as a moral superpower, Sweden writ large.

In the London Review of Books back in March, a top German academic offered a similar analysis:

Scenario for a Wonderful Tomorrow
Wolfgang Streeck

Wolfgang Streeck is director emeritus at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne. His next book, How Will Capitalism End?, is due to be published by Verso in September.

Europe’s Orphan: The Future of the Euro and the Politics of Debt by Martin Sandbu
Princeton, 336 pp, £19.95, September 2015, ISBN 978 0 691 16830 2

Europe is falling apart, destroyed by its most devoted fans, the Germans. In the summer of 2015, having humiliated the Greeks by forcing another reform diktat down their throats, Angela Merkel started a new game, aimed at diverting attention from the economic and political disaster monetary union had become. …

Last year, the refugee crisis offered Merkel another opportunity to demonstrate just how fast she can change tack. Once again, media coverage influenced her decision-making, just as it would a few months later when smartphone videos of the New Year’s Eve riot at Cologne Central Station triggered another 180 degree turn in her policies. In July a PR event, part of a government campaign to encourage cabinet members to meet ordinary citizens and listen to their ideas, went wrong. One of the young people invited to take part in a ‘dialogue’ with Merkel on the environment, the 14-year-old daughter of Palestinian asylum seekers, unexpectedly complained in front of the TV cameras that her family, who had been living in Germany for four years, might be sent back to the Lebanon at any moment. She asked, in flawless German, why she wasn’t allowed to stay in Germany ‘to enjoy life like everybody else’. Merkel said something like, ‘we cannot take in everyone, much as we might want to.’ The girl began to cry. Not knowing what to do, Merkel started patting the child’s head with a helpless expression on her face. The result was widespread outrage on social media. A few months later, the authorities told the girl’s family that they could stay in Germany for at least another year.

The elite was persuaded that the German public would never put up with images like those of the Jungle in Calais. Day after day the media, whipped into a frenzy by Facebook and Twitter, accused France and Britain of callously denying migrants’ human rights. Then, in September, the publication of the photograph of the dead Syrian child, Alan Kurdi, forced political leaders worldwide into hectic if symbolic activity. Among Germans it was widely believed that the boy’s death was the fault of ‘Europe’ as a whole, including Germany. Meanwhile, refugees had been gathering in increasing numbers at Budapest’s central station, which produced another set of powerful images; most of those refugees seemed to be heading for Germany.

A master politician like Merkel will never let a good crisis go to waste. It wasn’t just media stories about suffering migrants that led her to invite the refugees in Budapest to come to Germany, no papers required and no questions asked. What Merkel called ‘showing a friendly face in an emergency’ was meant to shame those who, during the euro crisis, had enjoyed the cartoons of Merkel and her finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, in Nazi uniform. By opening the German border while the French and British borders remained closed, Merkel could hope to recapture the moral high ground occupied for so long by those accusing the German government of sado-monetarism, or worse.

Another factor was the tight labour market that German employers, still Merkel’s main constituency, were facing, especially after the introduction of a statutory minimum wage was forced on Merkel by her coalition partner, the SPD. Rumours spread in the German press that Syrian refugees in particular, many of them allegedly with degrees in engineering and medicine, had all manner of skills. German economic research institutes predicted a new Wirtschaftswunder, while employers promised to invest heavily in training the presumably tiny number of less skilled immigrants. Everybody assumed that most if not all the refugees and asylum seekers – a distinction soon lost in the general excitement – would stay in Germany for a long time if not for good. For Merkel, who in October 2010 claimed that ‘the multikulti approach [had] failed, absolutely failed,’ this was no longer a problem. In fact, it had become a solution: in the first half of 2015, several studies indicated that the expensive measures taken over a decade of Merkel rule to induce German families to have more children had had next to no effect. Early that summer, to avert what was perceived as a looming demographic crisis, Merkel got her closest aides to test the mood in the party and among the general public on immigration legislation, but was met with firm resistance.

Budapest was what the ancient Greeks called a kairos – a lucky moment when a number of birds were positioned in such a way that they could be killed with one stone. Politics, as always with Merkel, trumped policies. ‘Showing a friendly face’ would make it possible for the Greens at the next election in 2017 to do what their leadership has long wanted to do but never dared: enter into a coalition government with the Christian Democrats. Merkel acted exactly as she did on neoliberal reform in 2005 and nuclear energy in 2011: quickly, on her own, and without wasting time explaining herself. … she counted on the opposition parties in the Bundestag – Linkspartei and the Greens – not to ask awkward questions, and they obliged. The members of her party couldn’t complain: they had been backed into a corner by the SPD’s approval of Merkel’s stance, and by their desire not to damage their leader. Once again, a decision ‘that will change our country’, as Merkel herself put it, was made without regard for democratic process or, for that matter, constitutional formalities. When Merkel declared the German borders open, there had been no cabinet decision to this effect and no official statement in the Bundestag. Since the opposition didn’t ask, as Merkel knew they wouldn’t, nobody knows to this day what sort of order, legal or not, by whom and when, was given to the police. The Interior Ministry is still refusing requests from leading figures (including the former president of the constitutional court, who was preparing a legal opinion on the matter for the Bavarian government) for access to the ministerial decree that should have been issued to the border authorities.

There were good reasons for asking questions. The refugees, more than a million of them, who arrived in Germany in 2015, all arrived from safe third countries. Under German and European law, they had to register in the country where they entered the European Union, and then wait to be assigned a legal residence in a member state. Merkel seems to have decided that she could safely ignore all this. When anyone complained that this was both a huge stress test on German society and a giant social engineering project, Merkel regally announced that if she had to apologise for ‘showing a friendly face’, ‘then this is not my country’ – an extraordinary statement for a democratically elected leader to make. In fact, as the Energiewende demonstrated, she has for some time been governing not like a parliamentary leader but like a president with emergency powers. For some time, inquiries into the wisdom of her immigration policy were answered by her entourage – which in this case included all the Bundestag parties – by claiming that the mere expression of dissent ‘played into the hands of the right’, a potent rhetorical device in Germany. Until Cologne, concern over the government’s handling of the refugee crisis was effectively suppressed.

Between September and January, Merkel’s minister of the interior was left out of the loop as Merkel governed directly, using staged public appearances – press conferences, talk shows and party conventions – to cultivate the support of those in German society who saw the influx of refugees as an opportunity to demonstrate to the world their country’s new friendliness. Merkel did not shy away from Obama-style nationalist pathos, employing it in her annual summer press conference on 31 August, when she told her compatriots: ‘Germany is a strong country … We did so many things, we can do that. We can do it, and where something gets in our way, it has to be overcome.’ For six months she evaded all constitutional checks and balances, enjoying the praise showered on her by, among others, Time magazine, which made her Person of the Year 2015. She was talked about as a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize, and even Holocaust Remembrance Day on 27 January turned into a Merkelfest when the guest speaker in the Bundestag, an Austrian writer who survived the Holocaust, told her audience that ‘this country, which eighty years ago was responsible for the worst crimes of the century, has today won the applause of the world, thanks to its open borders.’

What about Europe? And why dwell so long on the refugee crisis when I’m supposed to be discussing a book on the euro crisis? The answer is that Merkel’s immigration policy offers an object lesson in what other countries can expect from Germany acting European. Just as the United States sees the world as an extended playing field for its domestic political economy, Germany has come to consider the European Union as an extension of itself, where what is right for Germany is by definition right for all others. There is nothing particularly immoral about this; indeed Germans think it is supremely moral, as they identify their control of Europe with a post-nationalism understood as anti-nationalism, which in turn is understood as the quintessential lesson of German history. Very much like the US, German elites project what they collectively regard as self-evident, natural and reasonable onto their outside world, and are puzzled that anyone could possibly fail to see things the way they do. Perhaps the dissenters suffer from cognitive deficits and require education by Schäuble in the Eurogroup classroom?

One problem with hegemonic self-righteousness is that it prevents the self-righteous from seeing that what they consider morally self-evident is informed by self-interest. The self-interest of German export industries, for example, underlies Germany’s identification of the ‘European idea’ with the single European currency. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that the national interest that is mistakenly seen as identical to the interest of all reasonable human beings, in Europe and beyond, is necessarily shaped by the political interest of the government and its dominant social bloc in preserving their power. This puts peripheral countries at the mercy of the national power games and the moral and semantic ethnocentrisms of countries at the centre, which are hard to decipher for outsiders – especially with a postmodern leader like Merkel who, free from substantive commitments and constitutional constraints, has perfected the art of staying in power by means of unpredictable changes of course.

As the refugee crisis unfolded, Europe was dragged into the complicated twists and turns of German domestic politics. Merkel early on informed an astonished German public that controlling national borders had become ‘impossible in the 21st century’, and backed this up by aggressively criticising the Hungarian government for preparing to close its borders. After Cologne, of course, the closing of borders suddenly became possible again, and Hungary re-emerged as a model for the rest of Europe, in particular for Greece, which was threatened by Germany with exclusion from the Schengen area if it didn’t seal its borders. German law forbids, or is said by the German government to forbid, sending would-be immigrants away once they have expressed a desire to apply for asylum. So Merkel had to get the Greeks, and Europe as a whole, to observe this principle, lest her German pro-immigration constituency smelled the rat that was heading in its direction. The burden of keeping the migrants out of Europe fell on Turkey, which was supposed to put an end to the illegal trafficking of migrants to Greece – on a country, that is, whose human rights record suggests it may not be particularly careful when dealing with Syrian or any other refugees. Of course, Turkish co-operation had a price, and though Merkel had in the past steadfastly opposed the country’s bid for EU membership, now, having changed tack again and speaking on behalf of Europe as a whole, she promised Erdoğan expedited negotiations on accession as a reward for preventing the Syrian refugees she had invited to enter Germany from entering Greece. …

So immigration once again became ‘Europeanised’ while Europe became more ‘Germanised’ than ever. Merkel’s highest priority is to avoid having to close the German border, as Denmark and Sweden have closed theirs: closed borders make for ugly pictures, and they also make German voters wonder whether it’s worth paying for Europe if they have to stop at the border when they go on holiday. Moreover, German businesses have begun claiming that the end of Schengen would cost billions of euros because of time lost at Europe’s internal borders, as well as tens of thousands of jobs. Even so, the German public had to be given a reason to believe that the number of immigrants coming to Germany is going to drop. EU member states must therefore agree to take a share of the immigrants invited by Germany, even though they weren’t consulted before Merkel made her offer. The number of migrants can have no upper limit, or Obergrenze, a term that Merkel’s PR machine has declared anathema, and that has consequently become a signifier in German public discourse of Fremdenfeindlichkeit (xenophobia, if not racism). It’s difficult, however, for member countries to commit to letting in a defined proportion of an undefined total number of migrants. So Visegrád-bashing – Visegrád representing the alliance of four Central European countries, the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia and Hungary – followed Hungary-bashing, and German politicians started threatening Poland, of all countries, with financial punishment unless it fell in line with German-style ‘European solidarity’. …

The result of all the equivocation, double-talk and Merkelspeak, this difficult-to-disentangle mix of self-interest and sentimentality, is an immense political and institutional mess caused by the imposition on Europe of German policies disguised as European policies to which, supposedly, there is no alternative. This includes a restructuring of the citizenry through immigration, not just in Germany where it might seem economically or demographically expedient, but also in other European countries where it definitely isn’t. The result is rapidly rising anti-German sentiment in the form of anti-European sentiment, not only among political elites but also, most powerfully, among the electorate.

… The new ‘European question’ is whether the only way to protect Europe from the antics of a German chancellor and her increasingly personal rule is to dismantle centralised European regulations like Dublin and Schengen, along with the euro.

COMMENTS:

* Hitler wasn’t stupid. He was a brilliant orator and political player who seized control of one of the biggest economies in the world and gambled big on making Germany a first-rank power like America or Russia.

His end result was the division of his country in two, and the creation of a state for his enemies for the first time in 2000 years. Sometimes, when you gamble big, you lose big.

Merkel wants cheap labor for German firms (the wages are too damn high!) and thinks she can import people to satisfy this, and that she can turn them into Germans. I think most of us would disagree with her only on the last point.

The belief in the fungibility of peoples is, well, the current fashionable belief. Particularly in Germany where blood and soil are very dirty words.

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The Right: Home of the Domesticated Intellectual

Posted on May 30, 2016 by Luke Ford

Robert Weissberg writes: These are unusual political times but especially bizarre is the treatment of Donald Trump in many of today’s “conservative” magazines. I have not read them all, but of the three I do follow—The National Review, The Weekly Standard and Commentary, the treatment of The Donald can only be described as totally one-sided, sky-is-falling hysterical. Not the slightest semblance of balance, not even a tiny “horrible but the best we can do.” Everything is just pure, unadulterated vitriol.

Hating Trump per se is not the issue here (disclosure: I support Trump); the point is the ubiquity of the two-minute hate, and if each of these countless rants were an autonomous event, the odds of this uniformity occurring naturally must exceed a billion to one. Clearly, more is involved than just unmitigated aversion.

My understanding of this remarkable consistency is that the majority of today’s conservative pundits, whether pontificating for magazines, syndicated columns or conducting think tank research, are the modern equivalents of 18th century intellectuals whose livelihood depended on aristocratic patronage. These were the folk invited for after-dinner coffee to spice up conversations or whose witty gossipy chit-chat amused rich ladies at elegant salons. And, of the utmost importance, like their earlier clever and erudite predecessors, today’s intellectual entertainers know their place. To be a little cruel, they are “the help.”

What drives this arrangement is the power of a relatively handful of generous donors whose kindness permits Conservative Inc. to survive. Yes, Conservative Inc. does charge subscription fees, garners tax-deductable contributions from black tie dinners and even over-charges for meals-with-the-pundits Alaskan cruises but those informed of such matters tell me that behind every Right Wing enterprise stand a tiny handful of wealthy patrons (just observe the skimpy advertising in all conservative magazines to see the role of subsidies). And given that such donors are intensely courted elsewhere, keeping them happy is always the first order of business. This means never, never doing anything that would make them ashamed of their generosity. Imagine the reaction of a wealthy benefactor who encountered the Reverend Al Sharpton and a dozen raucous foul-mouthed middle-school students shouting “No Justice, No Peace” outside the Harvard Club to protest a conference he had sponsored? A few more of such discomforting incidents might mean taking his largess elsewhere.

The enforcement of ideological “no-go” zones in Conservative Inc. is generally well-hidden. The parallel are the “invisible fences” that keep Fido from running off—the cable is buried but the tip-off is a tiny devise attached to his collar and seeing Fido occasionally screech to a halt for no apparent reason. A man associated with a prominent conservative think tank once told me that a certain staff member in his shop was known as “the enforcer” for keeping fellow writers on the straight and narrow.

A particularly devious strategy to escape taboos is energetic dullness. Here discussions and publications are free of anything that might be “controversial” and thus serve as a guaranteed cure for insomnia. The Darwinian parallel is a fish that tastes so disgusting that all potential predators avoid it. So, rather than a conservative organization considering, say, the link between unchecked immigration and the growing US underclass, the topic will instead be the riveting, “Thomas Aquinas and the Medieval Concept of Moral Authority.” Hard to imagine the Southern Anti-Poverty Law Center getting upset let alone inserting a spy to “out” conference attendees. (One tip-off to the dullness strategy is the ratio of the half comatose state of those at conference panels versus noisy conference attendees at the hotel bar.)

More common, however, is sanitizing everything so as not to receive unwanted attention or, horror of horrors, cause a public embarrassment for major donors. Recall the old joke about how nudists dance—very carefully. I recall one event that focused on the travails of contemporary Detroit and how to fix the mess. Everybody in the room—maybe 200 or so—surely knew that Detroit was largely populated with lower class blacks prone to crime, violence, a reluctance to pay taxes and otherwise not behave in ways permitting Detroit to return to its pre-1960s glory days when the city was 90% white. Nevertheless, every attendee also sensed the invisible fence and thus politely ignored the source of Detroit’s problem—its residents. This delicate charade concluded when the speakers announced that Detroit could be resurrected by investing in infrastructure and importing foreign-born entrepreneurs. Tellingly, even in the Q and A, the race issue escaped notice.

I follow education policy and in the dozens of conservative conferences on this subject I have attended it is obvious that participants know the invisible fence boundaries. Want to help struggling kids in ghetto schools? I guarantee that the proffered suggestions will include vouchers and charter schools, de-certifying unions, holding school administrators accountable, cash bonuses for high-performing teachers, eliminating progressive pedagogy, restoring local control and for those inclined toward social engineering, “fixing” the supposedly dysfunctional black family. That none of these alluring interventions work as advertised is irrelevant—it’s totally cost-free to ignoring decades of contradictory research provided the “solution” is inoffensive. Absolutely unspeakable is the pointlessness of it all: that these kids and their parents don’t want a decent education, lack the necessary personal self-control and are incapable of learning much beyond the basics due to their low IQ’s.

In effect, much of the Right offers in the war of ideas is threadbare stuff. If I had a nickel for every time I heard lunchtime speaker at some fancy venue insist that the solution to African poverty was vigorous free-market competition, I would have at least $5.00.

I first became aware of this please-the-donor enterprise when I noticed the paucity of academics like myself at conservative sponsored events. I finally figured it out—professors are not big donors (most probably give nothing) and thus “have nothing to say.” Worse, we are inclined to pick apart high-sounding but weak arguments, not exactly a welcome activity when somebody is paying thousands for a fine chicken lunch at the elegant University Club. This is a literal marketplace of idea—those who can pay get to choose the ideas and better not annoy those who pick up the tab.

This is not to condemn as wrong what is produced by those dependent on donor generosity (disclaimer: I eat the chicken but don’t drink the Kool Aid). Rather, the rules of engagement make it difficult to defeat the Left. The parallel might be Galileo trying to satisfy Pope Paul V. What, for example, is a “domesticated” conservative to say when his university-based enemy insists that welcoming millions of Middle East Arabs and refugees from sub-Sahara Africa poses no problem since all can be integrated into a modern economy thanks to free community colleges? How does one respond to the oft-make claim that affirmative action has intellectually strengthened American higher education? It’s no wonder that the Left goes from victory to victory while the Right seems paralyzed.

Sadly, those conservatives who speak honestly about contemporary issues are few in numbers and spread thin. Despite flourishing on the Internet they are marginal to the public debate. Maybe we should return to the earlier era when the public debate included wealthy folk, “a gentleman from the country” as they were often called, who didn’t have to sing for their supper. It is no accident that Donald Trump buys his own Big Mac’s and fries.

COMMENTS:

* Conservatives who speak honestly will be purged from any job in the academy or journalism with a ruthlessness almost equal to that under Mao’s Cultural Revolution, and if they are lucky, they will thereafter get jobs as truck drivers.

True story: several years ago, Ph.D. in hand, I managed to get a job teaching at a community college. (I was overqualified; as it turned out, the female Vice-President for Academic Affairs who hired me — and later fired me — had no Ph.D. But she was the “first woman” to hold her position…!)

I worked there as an adjunct, making a 120-mile round trip commute, before I got the full-time position. A semester after I was hired, I was put on a committee to hire a full-time professor of African-American History, to replace the lone black in the department. (All the committee members were white).

The Dean was pushing for us to hire a black kid who had not yet completed his Master’s. As we looked at his undergraduate transcript, we saw that he had failed out of, or withdrawn from, eleven undergraduate courses and had transferred from a highly selective institution to an “open admissions” institution before entering a Master’s program. There was a highly qualified, liberal white woman with a Ph.D. who wanted the job, but they refused to interview her.

I objected to the Dean’s preferred candidate, pointing out the obvious flaws in his academic history, and insisted that we get someone with a Ph.D. The senior members of the department agreed — but they were tenured, and I was not. Big mistake.

I got canned within six months on flimsy, contrived charges, after they found out they had mistakenly hired a conservative who wasn’t going to go along with “the program.”

As for the black hire, they couldn’t find an American black qualified to do the job, so they hired a Nigerian who could barely speak English, missed classes, couldn’t lecture coherently, didn’t grade exams or show up for office hours, etc. His performance reviews were so bad that they wanted to fire him, but they couldn’t bring themselves to do it, so they issued a recommendation of “no recommendation” on this retention report and kicked it upstairs — where the academic Veep rehired him anyway just to keep the “diversity” quota up.

He got tenure; I’ve never made more than minimum wage since.

* RW: Your tale is a bit extreme but it rings absolutely true. I served on various recruitment committees and these were exercises in self-humiliation. We had to recommend job candidates at a major research university that would not qualify for grade school classroom assistants. Down deep, nobody cared and most remarkably, the job candidate most likely believed that he or she was really qualified. Everything was surrealistic.

I doubt whether today’s academy will ever recover from the push for diversity. We are destroying the social sciences and humanities to keep the racial peace. I suspect that in the long run we would be better off to bite the bullet and have riots.

I began my career in political science in the mid-1960s, long before affirmative action hit full force, and the rot was already creeping in. I recall one distinguished political scientist, Ken Prewitt at the U of Chicago, arguing that since 85% of black mothers wanted their child to attend college, racial differences in education attainment were not due to culture. And so on.

As for economics, the problems are more serious than garden variety pandering. They are clueless about how to add culture to their equations and from what I can tell, nobody is interesting in solving the problem. For economists, regardless of ideology, all people are inter-changeable. Sure.

I’m a bit more optimistic regarding the academy. Places like Cal Tech and MIT seem almost entirely safe. Today’s scholars doing “controversial” research are learning to obscure their findings to outsiders but not to each other. But there is a problem and it may grow worse.

My overview view is that society, including universities, is self-segregating and as long as blacks can get decent jobs to fuel their consumer spending, we can live with things. At least they don’t run around randomly stabbing people. I view America’s race problem as yet one more necessary pay-off. Just add black to the list–the Mafia, corrupt police, dishonest building inspectors etc.

* I’ve always thought that the term “pseudo-intellectual” was tailor-made to describe George Will. His needling little columns have been irritating me ever since I was teenager, full as they are of recherche factoids aping the mien of deep knowledge and goal-seeked conclusions substituting for brilliant leaps of insight. Although he has revealed himself to be predominantly a scribbling whore of the donor class, I do believe that there is actually some narrow region of the ideological phase-space legitimately occupied by Will, Kristol, and their ilk—I just can’t figure out what would drive anybody to live there. Their whole concept of conservatism is so ironical, so self-negating, so Hegelian, so Straussian, so rarefied, so pointless, so beyond the ken of ordinary people, that it belongs in an anthology of intellectual oddities. They preach to a bizarre choir of six dozen highly warped individuals and then wonder why the masses aren’t clamoring to die on their barricades.

The problem is, they were always that way; yet they enjoyed decades of intellectual respectability before that fact became generally apparent. This means that the ideological slogans, motivating tropes, and rallying marching songs of Movement Conservatism have always been infected with a deep madness, the insalubrious consequences of which are now fully evident and frequently lamented. It is hard to say what exactly could be more useless than this so-called conservatism, which has not only capitulated entirely to the Leftist barbarians but also endowed them with a greater panoply of arguments, excuses, and rationalizations than any they could have manufactured on their own. The actual effect of this “Right” has been to function as the Left’s apostles to Middle America—to make Leftist ideas palatable to normal people who otherwise would have shunned or ignored them. It is a legacy of abuse, deception, and hypocritical nonsense culminating in treason and murder. They should all be shot, but silencing them is an acceptable expedient.

* The outsize role of a small coterie of very wealthy donors in determining how conventional conservatism (and liberalism) manifests itself in terms of the think tanks and idea formation, which is directly upstream from conventional politics, is a very underappreciated choke point.

* The problem, Bob, is that we’re not getting “racial peace.” To the contrary, race relations are getting worse. They have certainly gotten worse under the “first black president” — an affirmative action guy his entire life.

And it’s not just social sciences and humanities that are getting destroyed. It’s the “hard” sciences, too. Econometrics is the least normative and most objective methodology for providing quantitative data in the social sciences. But God forbid if anyone should ever run a regression inferring that race is the dominant variable predicting crime, poverty, low SAT scores, etc. Beyond that, natural scientists are afraid to formulate hypotheses contrary to the politically-driven global warming theory. And how, exactly, does homosexuality fit into Darwin’s discussion of evolution and sex selection? It doesn’t. I’d say the academy at large has been corrupted, not just the social sciences.

I grew up during the Cold War; I still can’t get over how Sovietized this country, and the academy in particular, has become in my lifetime.

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LAT: Bernie Sanders moves toward a fight over Israel, forcing Hillary Clinton to navigate a splintered party

Posted on May 29, 2016 by Luke Ford

Los Angeles Times: “A large majority of Americans strongly support Israel, according to polls, but the Democratic Party is increasingly torn over some of the actions of the Israeli government and how much sympathy to accord the plight of Palestinians.”

That’s nonsense that “a large majority of Americans strongly support Israel, according to polls.” Americans largely support America.

As John J. Mearsheimer wrote: “A May 2003 poll reported that over 60 percent of Americans were willing to withhold aid to Israel if it resisted U.S. pressure to settle the conflict; that number
rose to 70 percent among “politically active” Americans. Indeed, 73 percent said that United States should not favor either side.”

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Transgender Israeli Arab Wins Historic Tel Aviv Pageant

Posted on May 29, 2016 by Luke Ford

Another reason to support Israel! Or not.

I mean, would it bother you if your son or daughter married a transgendered person? And if so, why would it bother you?

A friend says: “I actually think that is the question that should be put to Clinton, Obama and everyone else who supports transgendered rights. Of course they would say something to the extent that if their son or daughter were truly in love with a transgendered person they would support them, but I think even posing the question might wake some people up to how bizarre the whole thing is.”

Forward: A Christian Arab-Israeli ballet dancer won Israel’s first-ever transgender beauty pageant.
Ta’alin Abu Hanna, 21, was named “Miss Trans Israel” in Tel Aviv Friday, the Jerusalem Post reported .
Abu Hanna told reporters she is “proud to be an Israeli Arab,” noting, “If I had not been in Israel and had been elsewhere — in Palestine or in any other Arab country — I might have been oppressed or I might have been in prison or murdered.”
The Nazareth resident will represent Israel at the Miss TransStar International pageant in Barcelona in September — the first time an Israeli will participate.
She also will receive $15,000 worth of plastic surgery treatments from a hospital in Thailand, plus airfare and a hotel stay during the treatments and recovery.
Abu Hanna beat out 11 other finalists, a diverse group spanning Israel’s geographic, ethnic and religious diversity, including a Russian, Muslims and residents of Beersheba, Haifa, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. At least one finalist grew up in the haredi Orthodox community.

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How an Orthodox High School Takes Spammers to Court — and Reaps Rewards

Posted on May 29, 2016 by Luke Ford

This is a wonderful way for Jews to be a light unto the nations — by fighting back against spammers.

Forward: Sometime in the late morning of November 27, 2012, a fax machine rang at a high school for Orthodox girls in Rockland County, New York.
The message that spooled out of the machine’s printer was an invitation to an information session about a London-based university.
The Orthodox school’s response to the fax? A lawsuit, filed in federal court against the London-based university.
It wasn’t the school’s first time suing over a fax. Bais Yaakov of Spring Valley, located on a quiet suburban street near the town of Monsey, New York, has initiated at least seven class action lawsuits since 2011 under a federal law that restricts faxed advertisements.
That federal law dates from the 1990s, when spam faxes tied up phone lines and used up printer paper. Now, with many businesses using virtual fax machines that deliver incoming messages as digital files, the cost of spam faxes is often negligible.
Yet spam fax lawsuits are a growth industry among enterprising tort lawyers, with the number of new cases skyrocketing since 2012. But Bais Yaakov is a highly unusual spam fax suit plaintiff, experts told the Forward. Not-for-profits rarely act as lead plaintiffs in these cases, and experts said they had never heard of a school bringing a spam fax suit.
Bais Yaakov has sued companies in Massachusetts, New York and Minnesota. In three separate lawsuits, the school has sued ACT, Inc. — the company behind the ACT college readiness test, Alloy, Inc. — the firm that created the Gossip Girl teen romance series and the publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
“People bring these cases to me because they’re sick and tired of being bombarded with robocalls [and] faxes that tie up their telephone lines and interfere with their businesses,” said Bais Yaakov’s attorney in all of its spam fax cases, Aytan Bellin. “This is something that the American people are furious about.”
Bellin’s firm received $900,000 of a $6 million settlement reached this past March with the London-based university over the 2012 faxes. A $2.6 million settlement in a Bais Yaakov class action case against the college guide publisher Peterson’s earned Bellin’s firm over $800,000 in fees.
Bais Yaakov itself has not earned much money from the suits. Between the two settlements reached so far in Bais Yaakov’s cases, the school appears to have received only $15,500.
Bellin is the husband of a prominent rabbi who leads the Conservative movement’s rabbinical arm.

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