When Gawker Started, I Got A Front Page Link

Posted on August 23, 2016 by Luke Ford

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Never Mind Peter Thiel. Gawker Killed Itself
Think of It as an Autoerotic Asphyxiation

How are you supposed to feel about the fact that Gawker.com is shutting down this week? Very sad, apparently, if the recent wave of Gawker praise in the media is any guidance.
Univision’s announced acquisition of Gawker Media blogs Deadspin, Lifehacker, Gizmodo, Jalopnik, Jezebel and Kotaku last week — a sale forced by Gawker Media’s bankruptcy following a $140 million ruling against it in Hulk Hogan’s invasion-of-privacy lawsuit — is making plenty of media observers suddenly nostalgic about the Gawker Media flagship that nobody wanted. (“Desirable though the other properties are,” Gawker Media founder Nick Denton wrote in a note to his staff, “we have not been able to find a single media company or investor willing also to take on Gawker.com.”)
The New York Post’s Lia Eustachewich, for instance, referred to Gawker on Friday as “Nick Denton’s beloved gossip site” — which is just surreal, because while it was still alive, Gawker made a UFC-worthy spectacle of bashing the Post.
In a piece titled “Gawker is dead: An appreciation,” The Washington Post’s Philip Bump wrote, “There are so many good writers out there who are better, directly or indirectly, thanks to the site’s fearlessness, aggressiveness and attitude. Gawker made its opponents better. Gawker and its writers, despite some steps backward, made the web better. It made the web what it is.”
And Slate’s editors pulled together a list of more than a dozen of their favorite Gawker stories over the years in a post titled “Gawker Is Dead. These Posts Are Why We’ll Miss It.”
By the way, in a sign of just how deeply embedded Gawker is in the media-industrial complex, the Slate post included this disclaimer: “When it comes to Gawker we are conflicted out the wazoo. One Slate editor is married to a Gawker editor. One is married to a lawyer who represented Gawker in the Hulk Hogan trial. One is a former Gawker Media executive editor. None of these Slate staffers worked on this roundup.”
Like the Slate staff, I’ve got my own convoluted relationship with Gawker, which formally launched in January 2003, just a few months after Nick Denton registered the Gawker.com URL. This is a story I’ve told before, but I’ll tell it again here: In the summer of that year, when I was an editor-at-large at New York Magazine, I took Elizabeth Spiers, Gawker’s first writer, out for coffee with the intention of poaching her. (Elizabeth’s title at Gawker was “editor,” but she was its only writer, and the only writer she was editing was herself.) By the fall, she decided to jump ship to NYMag — announcing her surprise departure in a wry statement on her personal blog titled “I sell out.”
I was an early fan of Gawker — in New York magazine I called it “erratic, funny, bitchy, passionate and obsessive to the point of being a little demented” — and I was friendly with not only Elizabeth, but Gawker owner Nick. To his credit, Nick was a good sport about Elizabeth’s departure and we remained friendly; my theory was that, as much as Nick loved Elizabeth, he was also eager to find out if the Gawker brand was bigger than his star blogger.

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Should We Be Concerned About Hillary’s Health?

Posted on August 23, 2016 by Luke Ford

Chaim Amalek writes: One reason Americans are so skeptical of the press when it comes to covering the medical histories of the press-favored (and invariably Democrat) candidates is that in the past, the press has routinely covered up for the Democrat. FDR was crippled by polio. OK, so he managed that. But he also had a heart condition that led to his death early on in his 4th term. All of which the press did not cover. But you may say, “It was war-time.” OK, but not for his first two terms. John Kennedy had Addison’s Disease and was mortally dependent upon powerful, somewhat psychoactive drugs to stay alive, again not reported by the press. So it’s not surprising that people here are skeptical. Personally, I’ve yet to hear a good explanation for those prismatic glasses she was wearing, or for her needing assistance in climbing stairs that does not entail her being infirm. And she, like Trump, is getting up there in years. At 70, folks should be enjoying retirement and not campaigning for what, if handled right, is one of the world’s toughest jobs. So if notwithstanding being around 70 one decides to run then yes, very very close attention must be paid to every aspect of their health. True for Trump, true for Clinton.

Posted in Hillary Clinton | Comments Off on Should We Be Concerned About Hillary’s Health?

GOOGLE HIDES “CLINTON BODY COUNT” SEARCH SUGGESTIONS

Posted on August 22, 2016 by Luke Ford

NEWS: Google has altered its search algorithm to prevent searches for “Clinton body count” from auto-completing, despite the term auto-completing when typed in on virtually any other search engine.
The ‘Clinton body count’ is an infamous list of alleged murders connected to the Clintons.
When a web user searches for “clinton body” on Bing or Yahoo Search, the suggested results all relate to the Clinton body count controversy.
However, search for the same term on Google and “clinton body” only returns suggestions related to auto-repair shops, and nothing to do with the Clinton body count.
Go ahead, try it for yourself.
While Google may not be outright censoring the information (people can still search for “clinton body count”), the fact that the term does not auto-complete clearly suggests that the company has altered its algorithm to clean up “conspiracy theories” about Hillary.
That’s interesting given New York Times columnist Farhad Manjoo’s demand that Google “fix” its search results by censoring information about Hillary’s ill health so as not to “give quarter to conspiracy theorists”.
Back in June it was revealed by SourceFed that Google was indeed manipulating its search results to bury unflattering stories about Hillary.
“For example, when typing “Hillary Clinton cri,” Google’s auto-complete function brings up as its top choice “Hillary Clinton crime reform,” even though competing search engines Bing and Yahoo show the most popular search topics are “Hillary Clinton criminal charges” and “Hillary Clinton crime,” reported the Washington Times.

In August last year, Politico reported on how “Google could rig the 2016 election” by altering its search algorithms.
“Google’s search algorithm can easily shift the voting preferences of undecided voters by 20 percent or more—up to 80 percent in some demographic groups—with virtually no one knowing they are being manipulated,” wrote Robert Epstein, who conducted experiments to prove it.

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WP: The ‘race realist’ theory of how Trump can win, explained

Posted on August 22, 2016 by Luke Ford

David Weigel writes for the Washington Post:

At VDare, a clearinghouse for immigration restrictionists, the news is not what happened in a meeting, but that the media keeps missing Trump’s passionate attacks on crime caused by undocumented immigrants.

The alt-right, in other words, is constantly focusing on the trees and not the forest. And their theory of how 2016 can be won, or how the Republican Party could save itself, is that a supermajority of white voters can be moved by the Democrats’ support of mass legalization of immigrants and greater Syrian refugee acceptance.

“The single biggest issue of the 21st century is whether the First World has the will to resist being inundated by the Third World,” said Steve Sailer, an influential writer for VDare and Taki’s Magazine. “If we do preserve our borders, the Third World will figure out how to control its own fertility like everybody else has. If we don’t, though, we’ll become Rio with worse weather and scenery. But [German Chancellor Angela] Merkel’s [mistake] last year of letting in a million Muslim mob shows how badly the ideology of borderlessness has warped the judgment of the ruling class.”

Last week, Trump began comparing Hillary Clinton to Merkel. The reference was lost in some coverage, Merkel being generally seen as a pathbreaking female leader. On the alt-right, Merkel is identified with one thing: the Syrian refugee surge. As the Center for American Progress’s Alice Ollstein reported, Trump highlighted the most shocking incidents of migrant crime in Europe, and said that in Germany “crime has risen to levels that no one thought they would ever see” — a loose phrase that ignores a recent drop in migrant crime…

The right’s success in Europe underscores what the alt-right believes to be true here: There is a clear path to success if Republicans are willing to become a party of national interests, against multiculturalism. By contrast, if the party thinks it can win on the margins, it will lose white voters as they stay home or fail to see a distinction with Democrats. In “How Trump Could Pull it Off,” American Renaissance’s Jared Taylor laid it out with charts from a new study of white Americans.

“Whites still cast more than two-thirds of the votes in national elections,” Taylor wrote. “They could theoretically choose the president even if every non-white voted against them. Donald Trump will win if he turns out whites in unprecedented numbers and persuades them to vote for him. His best chance is to keep hammering at his signature issues: build a wall, throw out illegals, get rid of birthright citizenship, keep out Muslims. All this strongly appeals to white ‘racial resentment’ and gives a sense of ‘political efficacy,’ thus solving the two problems that almost certainly account for part of the drop in white voter turnout. Mr. Trump could set new turnout records in the general election, just as he did in the primaries.”

Alt-right thinkers have been arguing this for longer than the “alt-right” moniker has existed. In 2004, Sailer purchased raw exit-poll data to prove that network estimates of George W. Bush’s share of Hispanic votes — still cited by Republicans who say the party can win with a nonwhite coalition — had been overstated.

“The Republican Brain Trust is notoriously innumerate,” Sailer wrote. “Look at the 2013 GOP Establishment ‘autopsy’ that claimed that Mitt Romney lost because Republicans hadn’t amnestied Mexican illegal aliens. There aren’t many Mexican voters in swing states. In truth, Romney let the election slip away by not doing very well among Rust Belt whites. According to the large sample size Reuters-Ipsos online panel, Romney won only 52 percent of the white vote across Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, all of which he lost in the Electoral College. Romney apparently did especially badly among white working class men in those six states.”

COMMENTS AT STEVE SAILER:

* “A year and a half ago, Trump stumbled upon the Politics of the Future.”

Now this is one of Steve’s best quotes of the decade. It aptly sums up what is coming as well as the fact that it occurred in the past (relatively speaking, in 2015) and that it was grasped by the most unlikeliest of people.

The question becomes, was the stumble by Trump a conscious one or was it in fact unconscious? In other words could he have instinctively grasped what’s coming and actually as time wore on (in 2015) consciously became aware of the ramifications of what he stumbled upon? As in, ‘Omg, immigration, borders, America First, etc. this is very very important to America. Good thing I figured it out before everyone else, ’cause this isn’t going away and this issue’s only going to get bigger and bigger as time goes on’. I mean, Trump had to have a reason or two for latching onto immigration in particular. And, since that day, June 16, 2015, Trump has completely driven the news cycle. That’s incredible that any one person could entirely dominate every single political, national, even cultural news cycle for over 14 consecutive months. For better or worse, the issues that Trump stumbled upon has completely driven the election since last June.

And that is a possibility, namely, that Trump became fully conscious of what he had stumbled upon as well as the long term ramifications of the nation (e.g. bringing the immigration question into the foreground). Especially if we are to believe that he did in fact read, skim through, etc. Ann Coulter’s 2015 book a mere two weeks before his official announcement for the GOP nomination.

Hi, Ann!

* Well done. Weigel has always seemed quite willing to go beyond pointing and sputtering. I think he is more intelligent than the typical member of the clickbait lumpenintelligentsia at Slate or the Atlantic.

I give Weigel credit for the following (in addition to interviewing Steve).

1. Identifying VDare (accurately) as “a clearinghouse for immigration restrictionists” rather than (as is more typical) “a vile nest of Hitlerian, racist, unforgivably white racists”

2. Identifying Steve (accurately) as “an influential writer for VDare and Taki’s Magazine” (rather than, say, “controversial,” “extreme,” etc.)

3. Not citing the $outhern Poverty Law Center or any of its “hate group” designations anywhere in the article

and most importantly

4. Taking the time and space to actually present (at least the rudiments of) the “alt-right’s” argument, rather than isolating the most inflammatory quotations out of context and pinning them up for point and sputter.

Posted in Alt Right | Comments Off on WP: The ‘race realist’ theory of how Trump can win, explained

TheJewishRight.com by Joshua Seidel

Posted on August 22, 2016 by Luke Ford

From his “About Me” entry:

My name is Joshua Seidel, and I’m a bit of an anomaly in the Jewish community. A true wanderer, I wasn’t born and didn’t grow up in typical “Jewish” circumstances. The small town and rural settings of my childhood informed an outsiders perspective that has stayed with me my entire life. I’ve wandered into Christian Churches, and I’ve examined countless political philosophies. My conclusions are the result of a diverse and examined life.

Right wing philosophy is the key to restoring greatness to the West. This site will serve as an anchor for a growing movement of Jewish people who are willing to look beyond the conclusions of the past and stand forth against the new threats to our community.

From his latest blog post:

On the Inside Looking out- A Jew in the Alt-Right

On social media, I am often asked: “As a Jewish person, why would you identify with the Alt-right, aren’t they anti-Semitic?” I understand why people would ask, and why they see the alt-right as they do. To answer, I need to ask a question of my own:

What is antisemitism?

I favor Rothbard’s definition, slightly modified: an anti-Semite is someone who wants Jews subjected to legal sanction of some kind, as well as those who call for violence against us, qua Jews. This definition won’t help the mental tranquility of liberal Jews and Trump critics, seeing a deluge of frog-memes coming their way, but it helps me stay focused. I ask myself: Why do some Jews put so much effort into combating the Alt-Right for cartoonish memes, while ignoring systematic, institutional threats? Why are we, as a community, afraid of any reasonable engagement with people like this:

Is “Ricky” wrong? Does this dynamic indeed exist in our community? Are Jewish people not overrepresented in this great western push for “diversity”?

 

 

Again, is Ricky wrong? Mention the Holocaust this way and most Jews slam their minds shut. I can’t speak for Lena Dunham (thank G-D), but Ricky has his finger on a point here. I sometimes wonder what Jews who enthusiastically go on about “white privilege” think the endgame is. They seem to think this concept will serve to shut the mouths of middle and working class whites in flyover country, while liberal Jews hold the clipboards and direct victorious POC in a dismantling of “whiteness”. Privileges will be checked, and all will be well in the world. I don’t see it.

 

Consider the case of Eliav Terk, Jewish High School student in Texas. Complaining about fellow students posting anti-Semitic imagery on Facebook:

“School administrators informed him that no action would be taken. Terk was told by the administrators that the anti-Israel students must be excused for their behavior because they are part of an ‘oppressed and victimized’ people.”

 

This is High School! In the same national environment where saying “All Lives Matter” can lead to sanction, posting “anti-Semitic” caricatures are part of being “an oppressed and victimized people”?

 

Does this look like the language and behavior of the Alt-Right? Where is the ADL to investigate? American Jewish organizations have made us look foolish, kvetching about Pepe the Frog and nasty tweets, yet when a Jewish High School student faces institutional discrimination, only the Israeli Press notices. The situation is much worse when we take a larger look at things. Jews are fleeing Europe, under constant attack by members of the Muslim community. Jews in higher education face threats, ostracism, and discrimination. Identity groups like Black Lives Matter have made Israel the ONLY overseas focus point, and this is replicated in Hispanic, Asian, and Muslim student groups. Considering the institutional fawning over identity groups representing “people of color”, this will not end well for Jews. Jewish groups remain largely ineffective in dealing with left wing intuitional and demographic threats. The Alt-Right is more observant:

 

 

If you’re still with me, the dopey ADL is clueless, the Alt-Right is nasty but redeemable, and left wing institutional power is the real threat. But how does any of this explain ME? Why can I swim in a sea of (sometimes genuine) antisemitism and laugh at it, while other Jews can’t stand to be called “Jew”? Why am I easily able to ignore the nasty language, stereotyping, and general hostility Jews experience from the Alt-Right?

Posted in Alt Right, Jews | Comments Off on TheJewishRight.com by Joshua Seidel

How much shiksa love can a Jew receive and still maintain that he is Orthodox? Asking for a friend.

Posted on August 22, 2016 by Luke Ford

Darren: 24%. I thought Shiksas were legit practice fodder for the Orthodox?

Susan Williams I take exception to this….like the word fodder gives one the impression that non Jewish women are expendable like canon fodder to be used

Darren: Don’t worry Susan, I wasn’t referring to you, just all of the rest of the Shiksas.

Susan Williams How dare you infer that non Jewish women are less than Jewish and their honour is not to be preserved but they can be used for …..practise!!

Darren: Susan, as you know, Jews are superior. It’s simply an honour to be in their presence. If a Jew spends time with a Shiksa, she should view it as a gift.

If you don’t believe me, ask one of your dear friends.

Genc Newman Jews are superior in what? Why do then, all the tough guidos bang Jewish chicks on the side ? A lot of blacks too. This is a fact.

Susan Williams Genc Newman Jews are victims of propaganda…from the cradle they are told they really special….. the thing is they are not…..we are all the same…..I try not to tell them…..they generally throw their toys out of the cot.

Darren: If once you go black, you never go back. What happens when you go Shiksa?

S: A disciple once came to the Rebbe Reshab, asking for penance for a certain sin, on behalf of his friend.
The Rebbe Reshab asked him: “Why didn’t your friend just come here and ask ‘on behalf’ of his friend?”

Posted in Jews | Comments Off on How much shiksa love can a Jew receive and still maintain that he is Orthodox? Asking for a friend.

Justice For Palestinians

Posted on August 22, 2016 by Luke Ford

I don’t place much faith in worldly justice for any group. Instead, you get what you can. All groups are competing for scarce resources. Those who are the most fit perpetuate themselves and those who don’t adapt die.

From a Jewish perspective, the Palestinians (with their average IQ of 85) resemble a violent and retarded relative who won’t go away. From a Palestinian perspective, Jews are like a rich PR-savvy businessman who worked the system to dispossess you from your home and then employed armed thugs to keep you at bay.

I was given a link to this blog: “I preached for forty three years in the Presbyterian Church before retiring. If anyone would ever refer to me as a Liberation Theologian, I would be pleased. I started blogging several years ago to express my political and religious concern for justice, especially justice for the Palestinians.”

Here is an excerpt of his latest post:

Back in 1956, David Ben-Gurion, possibly struggling with his conscience, confessed:

“If I were an Arab leader, I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural, we have taken their country. Sure God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We came from Israel, it’s true, but that was two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?” [2]

“God promised it to us”?

Not so fast. More and more scholars, Jewish and humanist, are questioning the exodus story and that “promise”. Rabbi David Wolpe raised just that provocative question before his congregation of 2,200 at Sinai Temple in Westwood, California back in 2001, saying:

“After a century of excavations trying to prove the ancient accounts true, archeologists say there is no conclusive evidence that the Israelites were ever in Egypt, were ever enslaved, ever wandered in the Sinai wilderness for 40 years or ever conquered the land of Canaan under Joshua’s leadership.[3]”

Teresa Watanabe continues:

“The modern archeological consensus over the Exodus is just beginning to reach the public. In 1999, an Israeli archeologist, Ze’ev Herzog of Tel Aviv University set off a furor in Israel by writing in a popular magazine that stories of the patriarchs were myths and that neither the Exodus nor Joshua’s conquest ever occurred.[4]”

Think about that. Outside of the Jewish Bible, there is not one shred of evidence that Israel was ever in Egypt to be rescued by God in the first place. Even in the Bible, the Pharaoh is not named, nor is the context identified. There is no record in Egyptian history of two million people suddenly making an exodus nor of a labor shortage when a third of its workforce disappeared almost overnight. Disregarding the sociopathic image it makes of God sending plague after plague upon innocent Egyptian families who had no power to do what Moses demanded and discounting the fact that rivers just don’t suddenly part to allow people to walk across, there has never been one piece of pottery, (the archeologist best friend) found in the Sinai to indicate that a couple of million Jews roamed around there for forty years. Nor is there any record in Canaan that suddenly an invading army came and conquered them with or without God’s blessings. In other words, it was made up hundreds of years after it was supposed to have happened to justify Israel’s presence and occupation of Canaanite land.

To be fair, I am not just doubting Jewish traditions.

I don’t believe stars ever roamed across the sky no matter how many times we sing Star of Wonder, Star of Night in our Christmas carols. Nor do I believe that virgins have babies or that dead people suddenly rise up out of their graves in mass as described in Matthew 27:52-53. In more than forty years of preaching, I have never preached on that text, nor have I been asked to.

And not to leave the Muslims out, I don’t believe that a huge rock called out to a Muslim warrior saying “There is a Jew hiding behind me, kill him,” as is recorded in the Hadith. Or that Mohammed heard about Jinns (angels) from a tree, that Adam was ninety feet tall or that roosters crow and donkeys bray because they see Satan.

What I DO believe is that there is a call for peace and justice in all three Abrahamic religions. If we took seriously the compassion mandate that we all share, if we accepted the responsibility to feed the hungry, bring water to the thirsty and justice for the oppressed, there would be little energy left to fight over our imagined traditions.

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How a Seattle Synagogue Made News by Hiring a New Custodian

Posted on August 22, 2016 by Luke Ford

When Christianity ruled Europe, it made sense for European Jews to side with anti-clerical factions.

You don’t find many Jews in any diaspora movement to increase the rights of the majority as against minorities. You do find many Jews in movements that seek to increase minority rights as against the majority.

In a dominantly white Christian America, it makes sense for Jews to side with other members of the Coalition of the Fringe.

I don’t know why white Protestants would want many outsiders in their country just as the Japanese don’t want many non-Japanese in their country.

Allegiance to shared values is nice, but in the end, ethnic groups only assimilate in the most superficial senses (such as language). They tend to act out their genetic imperatives and to be most loyal to those who most share their genes.

As internet commentator Maj. Kong put it: “Anti-Semitism is as natural to Western civilization as anti-Christianity is to Jewish civilization, Islamic civilization and Japanese civilization.”

Tabletmag:

Seventy years ago this past spring, in March 1946—several months after Japan surrendered to the Allies on August 15, 1945—the U.S. government closed the Tule Lake Segregation Center. It was the last of the 10 internment camps where people of Japanese ancestry, including American citizens, living on the West Coast were forcibly relocated during WWII.

Some of the internees had been released and allowed to return to the West Coast before Tule Lake was finally closed for good, and before Japan had even surrendered. When one former Tule Lake internee returned to his hometown of Seattle to take a custodial job, it made the Seattle Times—on May 3, 1945—complete with a photograph.

Why would such an everyday event make the newspaper? Even today, when editors constantly scramble for content to fill a 24-hour news cycle, this little vignette about a custodian seems like a nonstory. The answer to this puzzle lies in the largely forgotten context of the anti-Japanese hostility along the West Coast at war’s end, and in the personal stories of the returning internee and the man who hired him.

In the newspaper photo, the former internee, Eddie Otsuka, clad in rumpled work clothes, shares a smile with Rabbi Franklin Cohn in the lobby of Seattle’s Herzl Congregation. It was Cohn who hired Otsuka to care for the synagogue’s building and grounds. Cohn had been the congregation’s spiritual leader for three years: He had arrived in Seattle to take the pulpit in 1942, around the time when the federal government was driving Otsuka, along with the rest of the West Coast’s Nikkei (ethnically Japanese) population, behind barbed wire fences.

Many Washingtonians, Oregonians, and Californians were nothing short of delighted when the federal government exiled Otsuka and the rest of the Nikkei on spurious claims of military necessity and locked them up in internment camps. Racial suspicions and economic envies had made the immigrant Japanese and their U.S. citizen children unwelcome along the coast for decades. War with Japan provided a rationale for forcing them from their farms and businesses and relieving them of much of their wealth and property.

Just as many whites celebrated when the Nikkei left in 1942, many were incensed at the thought of their return in 1945. In January of that year, a Japanese family returning to Placer County, California, was greeted with gunshots at their house from passing cars and an attempt to blow up and burn down one of their farm buildings. (The perpetrators were arrested and then acquitted.) February and March saw shotgun blasts at or into the homes of returning Japanese families in Fowler, Fresno, Vasalia, and Madera, California. Vandals set fire to houses in Selma and San Jose and a Buddhist temple and a Japanese school in Delano. In various communities, Japanese graves were defaced. In Hood River, Oregon, returning Nikkei were denied service in most local stores, and the American Legion chapter stripped from its war memorial the names of the community’s 16 native-son soldiers who were Japanese-American. The threats and violence sometimes extended not just to the Nikkei but also to white people who dared to help them: In one notorious incident, graffiti was scrawled on the Los Angeles home of the celebrated scientist Linus Pauling’s home when he and his wife hired a returning Japanese-American veteran to do some gardening…

It is tempting to imagine that what Cohn did was part of a broader American Jewish commitment to easing the plight of the Nikkei. But it was not. While a number of individual Jews, especially a handful of lawyers, advocated for the rights of Japanese Americans as the war went on, American Jews as a group were notably silent about the removal and imprisonment of the Nikkei of the West Coast in 1942. As Ellen Eisenberg documents in her book The First to Cry Down Injustice?, Jewish groups along the West Coast chose to keep their heads down rather than speak out against a program of exile and imprisonment that in some ways resembled the treatment of their fellow Jews in Europe. They were more concerned with firming up their own somewhat tenuous position as American insiders than with reaching out to a group that had long been a prototype of the outsider.

Just as European gentiles rarely risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust, Jews have rarely risked their social position, let alone lives, to save gentiles. Aggressive social activism by Jews only started en masse in the 1960s when Jews felt secure in their position in America.

There’s not much in Judaism that mandates that Jews stick their necks out to save non-Jews.

Posted in America, Anti-Semitism, Japan, Jews | Comments Off on How a Seattle Synagogue Made News by Hiring a New Custodian

Tabletmag: Does Nobel Prize Winner Aung San Suu Kyi Want To Push Her Country’s Muslims Into the Sea?

Posted on August 22, 2016 by Luke Ford

If you love your people, you are going to want to push out your enemies. This rule is not complicated. It applies equally to Jews, whites, Christians, Muslims, Germans, Australians…

Why would a non-Muslim country want Muslims (or any foreign group) in their midst? To the extent it is in their best interest, they should, and if not, they should not.

Jon Emont writes for Tabletmag:

There are about 1.1 million Rohingya living in Myanmar, which makes them roughly 2 percent of the country’s population. Myanmar is ethnically heterogeneous but overwhelmingly Buddhist, and the Muslim Rohingya, descendants of traders who have lived in Rakhine state, on the border with Bangladesh, for centuries, are labeled as Bengalis by the state, regardless of how many generations their families have resided in Myanmar. State discrimination against the Rohingya was enshrined in the Burmese citizenship law of 1982, which did not recognize Rohingya as an indigenous race to Myanmar, rendering the majority of Rohingya stateless…

It was once accepted that Suu Kyi, Nobel Laureate and darling of the human rights community, was simply unwilling to speak out on behalf of the Rohingya because doing so would make it easier for her political opponents to attack her. But given the scale of her party’s victory, and her continued unwillingness to defend Rohingya, observers and critics are looking at previous statements she has made on violence in Rakhine state, and wondering whether she herself shares in conventional Buddhist-Bamar prejudices against Rohingya Muslims.

In a 2013 interview with the BBC, Suu Kyi categorically denied that ethnic cleansing was taking place in Rohingya and attempted to explain the fear that many Burmese Buddhists brought against Muslims. “There is a perception that Muslim power, that global Muslim power, is very great. And certainly that is the perception in many parts of the world and in our country too.”

…ANP politicians and voters I spoke with viewed the Rohingya as collaborators in the centuries-long attempt to erase their people’s proud history…

Activists believe that Suu Kyi’s best opportunity for improving the status of Rohingya will come in the next few months, when her party’s mandate is strongest and NLD lawmakers are still years away from having to worry about re-election. Yet as Phil Robertson of Human Rights Watch observes, “every indication has been that she is not that interested in this stuff and she has other fish to fry and she is going to fry those other fish first.” Andrea Gittleman, of the Simon-Skojt Center for the Prevention of Genocide at the National Holocaust Museum, was also not optimistic that Suu Kyi’s NLD was going to restore Rohingya civil and political rights. Indeed, in May Suu Kyi formally requested the U.S. government cease referring to Rohingya as Rohingya, but refer to them as Bengali—foreigners—instead. Whether the Rohingya begin fleeing and dying at sea again will be an early sign of what kind of democracy Myanman’s Nobel Laureate has in mind for her country.

Posted in Islam | Comments Off on Tabletmag: Does Nobel Prize Winner Aung San Suu Kyi Want To Push Her Country’s Muslims Into the Sea?

Is Israel Trying To Turn American Jews Into Orthodox Right-Wingers?

Posted on August 22, 2016 by Luke Ford

J.J. Goldberg writes: As part of its promotion of Orthodox observance, Chabad Hasidism touts a traditional version of Jewish family values, including rules on modest dress for women, “impurity” during menstruation and opposition to homosexuality.

Less well known is Chabad’s political role in Israel, where many of its rabbis and leaders are prominent in far-right, pro-settlement and anti-compromise activism. Several top Israeli Chabad leaders have become leading right-wing activists. Rabbi Yitzhak Ginzburgh, a senior Chabad educator and philosopher, has written in praise of the late Baruch Goldstein, who committed the 1994 Hebron massacre. Ginzburgh also mentored Yitzhak Shapira, co-author of the 2009 book “The King’s Torah,” which justified killing Palestinian babies because they might grow up to be terrorists. Another Chabad leader, Rabbi Shalom Dov Wolpo, raised money for the families of Jewish terrorists and has urged the death penalty — by a court, not vigilantes — for dovish Israeli leaders Ehud Olmert, Ehud Barak and Tzipi Livni.

Posted in Chabad | Comments Off on Is Israel Trying To Turn American Jews Into Orthodox Right-Wingers?