The Meaning Of An Olympic Snub

It’s about the Jews!

I am unable to get exercised about the Egyptian judo athlete who would not shake hands with his Israeli competitor.

Playing sports is goyish. Sports plays no role in Torah. While the New Testament is filled with sports metaphors, they are absent from Tanach and from the Talmud.

From a traditional Jewish perspective, a Jew competing in judo is like a black doing physics.

Good sportsmanship is an Anglo thing. I don’t expect non-Anglos to act like Anglos. I expect Arabs and Muslims to hate Jews and for Jews to hate Arabs and Muslims just like I expect the Koreans and Chinese to hate the Japanese and vice versa.

Good manners are a WASP thing. They are a product of island cultures like England and Japan. There’s no Hebrew word for etiquette.

If Jews and Arabs laid down their arms tomorrow and shook hands, Israel would boom and the Arab world would remain backward. How would Arabs live with the shame of being outshone by the Jewish state? It would kill them and they simply do not have the cognitive power to compete. It would take hundreds of years of eugenics for them to catch up to the Yiddishe kup.

So I don’t expect Arabs to simply shake hands with the Jews and accept third-rate status. A self-respecting Arab is going to have some negative feelings about the Jewish state and about Jews in general. That’s why the presence of two million Arabs in the Jewish state does not make Israel stronger.

Diversity usually weakens a country. The more united a nation, the stronger it is. The more cohesive, the less divided, the more effective it will be.

I was just watching the French documentary “Planet FIFA” about how the soccer federation became corrupt when it stopped being run by an Englishman in 1974 and was instead directed by a Brazilian.

I don’t expect Brazilians to be as free of corruption as Anglos. I don’t expect poodles to act like pit bulls and I don’t expect pit bulls to act like pussy cats.

As Maj. Kong put it in a comment at Steve Sailer’s website: “Anti-Semitism is as natural to Western civilization as anti-Christianity is to Jewish civilization, Islamic civilization and Japanese civilization.”

Jews have plenty of reasons to fear gentiles and gentiles have reasons to fear Jews. Different groups have different interests and different abilities. When you bring people or animals from one habitat into a non-native habitat, severe destruction for the native forms of life often results (see Wikipedia’s entry on “invasive species“). This is as true for rabbis in Australia as blacks in America and Muslims in Europe and for the Native Americans and Native Australians when the Europeans invaded.

One reason that Western Europe has a prosperous middle class and Eastern Europe does not, according to one theory, is that at various times, Western Europe threw out its Jews, allowing the natives to take over the middle-class jobs that Jews were doing. Eastern Europe did not throw out its Jews (until the Holocaust, when it killed most of them), and so superior Jewish intelligence meant that Jews dominated the middle-class jobs such as money-lending, doctoring, and running estates.

No group is universally superior or marked out as chosen unless you subscribe to a faith. Otherwise, the world consists of various forms of life struggling to survive and to perpetuate genes. Life is war.

When a professional athlete gets religion, it’s usually bad for his athletic performance (except for Tim Tebow). If Tony Romo, the quarterback of the Dallas Cowboys, were to become born again and a holy roller this season, it would turn off his team, hurt his performance, the Cowboys would win fewer games, but it would be great news for the opponents of Dallas. If Tony Romo were to break his leg today, it would be great news for the teams that play Dallas. What is bad for one group is often great for other groups.

A Jewish state of Israel is great for the Jews, but not so great, perhaps, for America (9/11 would not have happened if the US was not so entangled with Israel) and for Arabs and for Muslims. Arab unity is great for Arabs but lousy for the Jewish state. Japanese homogeneity makes Japan strong but that is not so great for countries that compete with Japan.

A big increase in Muslims in America is great for Muslims but perhaps lousy for everyone else in America.

Jewish power and influence tends to be great for Jews but it is sometimes bad for some non-Jews (just as Christian power and Muslim power tends to be great for those groups but not so great for outsiders). If America had fewer Jews, it might be more nationalistic, more homogeneous, more Christian, and more unified. On the other hand, it would have fewer of the great things that Jews make such as technological advances.

Arabs and Muslims are not backward because they hate Jews. They are backward because they have low IQs. Islam is a low-IQ religion.

Jews and Arabs have fundamental conflicts of interest (just like all groups tends to have conflicts of interest). Jews want a Jewish state in the middle of the Arab-Islamic world. Arabs and Muslims naturally consider this an affront. These conflicts of interest are why the groups hate each other. Most Arabs and Muslims want the Jewish state to disappear and most Israeli Jews want their enemies to disappear.

Donald Templer writes:

The present research found that the Muslim country mean IQ of 81 is half a standard deviation below the mean IQ of non-Muslim nations and is not related to strength of Muslim culture as defined by the percentage of Muslims in the country. The mean IQ of 84 in Arab countries is not associated with per capita income and is incompatible with the intellectual achievements of the golden age of the Muslim Empire. Possible explanations for this decline include hybridization with sub-Saharan Africans, dysgenic decrease in the more educated Muslims employing birth control as suggested by Meisenberg, the Muslim religion not fostering critical thinking, and the intellectual contributions being both exaggerated and made by non-Muslims.

1. Introduction

The purpose of the present study was to compare the mean IQs of Muslim and non-Muslim countries. The great intellectual achievements of the Muslim Empire from the 7th to the 12th century have been written about by numerous authors (e.g., Bloom & Blair, 2000; Lyons, 2009; Masood, 2009). These achievements have been especially noted in science, mathematics, architecture and medicine. However, the contemporary Muslim world is underrepresentated in highly creative contributions published in prestigious scientific journals. Lynn (1991) presented the total number of Nobel Prizes in science, literature, and economics combined with the Fields award in mathematics as a function of five major categories of ethnic origin. Europeans had a total of 541, North East Asians 23, South Asians and North Africans combined 10, Africans one (in literature), and Southeast Asians none. It is apparent that the predominantly Muslim countries are in the bottom three categories. Such a dearth of superlative scholarly achievement is consistent with the Lynn & Vanhanen (2006) Table 6.5 listing of mean IQs of the world’s countries. Indonesia, the most populous Muslim country, has a mean IQ of 87. If the standard deviation in Indonesia is 15, two standard deviations above the mean is only 117, which probably is not a high enough IQ to obtain a Ph.D. in physics from prestigious universities in high mean IQ countries. Even if mean IQ differences between two countries are modest, the disparity of extremely gifted persons can be huge.

The IQs of the Muslim populations in non-Muslim countries tend to be lower than those of the majority population (Lynn, 2008a). In the Netherlands, the mean IQ of Turks is 83, of Moroccans 81, and Indonesians 94 (Lynn, 2008a). Mackintosh (2007) reported that in the United Kingdom Pakistanis score 4 to 6 IQ points below the Indians. It is unlikely that this can be attributed entirely to minority status. The Chinese are a minority in many countries of the world and yet obtain higher mean IQs than the majority populations. They generate and/or control over half the wealth in Southeast Asian countries. In Indonesia the Chinese constitute 3.8 % of the population and generate/control 73% of the wealth. In Malaysia they constitute 28% of the population and generate/control 69% of the wealth (Lynn, 2008a). Caution should be employed because of the possibility of selective migration.

Special attention is given here to the Arab countries for two reasons. One is to examine the role of the great variation in per capita income. At the high end are Kuwait with $25,314, Qatar with $20,987, and the United Arab Emirates with $20,585. At the low end areYemen with $2,588 and Syria with $2,892. The second reason is to raise for consideration an incongruity between the achievements of the past and the state of the present. The Muslim Empire began in the Arabian Peninsula and the Arabs played a dominant role in its expansion and rise to greatness. Islam did not become established until the 15th century in Indonesia and in what is now Pakistan. The 16 countries regarded as Arab are Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates and Yemen.

Jews, like any group, find it flattering to imagine that they are hated for being so wonderful. The truth is more prosaic. Groups, including Jews, are hated when there are important conflicts of interest.

Bret Stephens writes in the WSJ:

An Israeli heavyweight judoka named Or Sasson defeated an Egyptian opponent named Islam El Shehaby Friday in a first-round match at the Rio Olympics. The Egyptian refused to shake his opponent’s extended hand, earning boos from the crowd. Mr. Sasson went on to win a bronze medal.

If you want the short answer for why the Arab world is sliding into the abyss, look no further than this little incident. It did itself in chiefly through its long-abiding and all-consuming hatred of Israel, and of Jews.

That’s not a point you will find in a long article about the Arab crackup by Scott Anderson in last weekend’s New York Times Magazine, where hatred of Israel is treated like sand in Arabia—a given of the landscape. Nor is it much mentioned in the wide literature about the legacy of colonialism in the Middle East, or the oil curse, governance gap, democracy deficit, youth bulge, sectarian divide, legitimacy crisis and every other explanation for Arab decline.

Yet the fact remains that over the past 70 years the Arab world got rid of its Jews, some 900,000 people, while holding on to its hatred of them. Over time the result proved fatal: a combination of lost human capital, ruinously expensive wars, misdirected ideological obsessions, and an intellectual life perverted by conspiracy theory and the perpetual search for scapegoats. The Arab world’s problems are a problem of the Arab mind, and the name for that problem is anti-Semitism.

As a historical phenomenon, this is not unique. In a 2005 essay in Commentary, historian Paul Johnson noted that wherever anti-Semitism took hold, social and political decline almost inevitably followed.

Spain expelled its Jews with the Alhambra Decree of 1492. The effect, Mr. Johnson noted, “was to deprive Spain (and its colonies) of a class already notable for the astute handling of finance.” In czarist Russia, anti-Semitic laws led to mass Jewish emigration as well as an “immense increase in administrative corruption produced by the system of restrictions.” Germany might well have won the race for an atomic bomb if Hitler hadn’t sent Albert Einstein, Leo Szilard, Enrico Fermi and Edward Teller into exile in the U.S.

These patterns were replicated in the Arab world. Contrary to myth, the cause was not the creation of the state of Israel. There were bloody anti-Jewish pogroms in Palestine in 1929, Iraq in 1941, and Lebanon in 1945. Nor is it accurate to blame Jerusalem for fueling anti-Semitism by refusing to trade land for peace. Among Egyptians, hatred of Israel barely abated after Menachem Begin relinquished the Sinai to Anwar Sadat. Among Palestinians, anti-Semitism became markedly worse during the years of the Oslo peace process.

Posted in Anti-Semitism, Arabs | Comments Off on The Meaning Of An Olympic Snub

Fox News Keeps It In The Tribe

Shouldn’t we be more subtle about these things?

From The Jewish Week April 9, 2014:

Fox News Honcho In Jest At JCRC

Roger Ailes, the eminence of Fox News, has been coming to the annual benefit dinner of the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) ever since he was guest of honor in 2005. Last week he hobbled into the Pierre Hotel with the aid of a cane, which startled Michael Miller, longtime JCRC executive vice president and CEO.

“Oy vay!” Miller gasped. “It’s his last dinner. Not gonna make it.”

“It’s just a sore leg, Michael,” Ailes assured him. “It’s not life-threatening. You probably missed my recent appearance on Dancing with the Stars.”

You can always depend on the Fox News Channel chairman/CEO to cheer up a sober awards program.

Ailes introduced one of the three honorees, Sharri A. Berg, senior vice president of news operations at Fox News Channel and Fox Television Stations.

“But first,” he said, “I want to acknowledge a few friends here — because I only have a few.” By the mirthful feedback from the audience of 700, you could tell he had more than a few fans in the ballroom.

Berg proved to be one of his most ardent friends. In order to receive a JCRC Corporate Leader Award she must have done something right in her career. Eighteen years ago, when Ailes invited her to join his launch team, she was ecstatic. But instead of immediately accepting the offer, she tried to talk him into giving her more responsibility.

“This is what I need you to do, Berg,” he snapped. “You come here, work hard, do a good job and good things will happen. But I’m a little busy. So I suggest you take the job.” Ever since then, Berg listened to the boss, whom she calls a “courageous and inspiring leader.”

One thing that inspires Berg to honor and respect her heritage through JCRC is an experience from her teenage years. She and her mother were cast in the play The Diary of Anne Frank at their local community theater, Antrim Playhouse in Suffern, N.Y. She has never forgotten how, at the end of the play when the stage turned dark, she heard the increasingly urgent footsteps of the Nazis running up the stairs to the attic.

“My mother and I both stared at each other, bonded. We were frozen, tears in our eyes. We were transported to another place in time, a terrible time, one we must never allow to happen again.”

New York Mayor Bill DeBlasio dropped by and described his two trips to Israel. “It was particularly challenging to see the children’s center in Sderot which resembled a war bunker.” He praised Michael Miller as the best guide you can have in Israel.

“We will use every effort to confront any evidence of anti-Semitism,” the mayor pledged. “We will not accept any such incidents.”

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Michael Weiss, the Neocon’s Neocon

Anatoly Karlin writes: In terms of content, the Weisses of this world are a dime a dozen. So why “expose” yet another neocon propagandist?

Because he is also very nasty, and very dangerous – as Richard Silverstein’s comprehensive profile of Michael D. Weiss, just published at The Unz Review, convincingly argues.

So far as (functional) psychopathy goes, he really is one of a kind in the world of journalism.

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Can’t We All Get Along?

Steve Sailer writes: Some of the Soviet Jews eventually bounced from Israel to Los Angeles.

The first Israelis I can recall meeting in Los Angeles were in late 1980. There was an Israeli fighter pilot who competed with Martin Rothblatt for being the most arrogant man in MBA school. And there was an Israeli three man basketball team that started a fight at Valley College over whose turn it was on the court. Their leader tried to headbutt in the face of the Valley Guy who was patiently explaining the local customs to the newcomers.

Comments:

* I first started noticing the arrival of Israelis in the San Fernando Valley when one tried to headbutt a local at a 3-3 basketball game while the local was trying to make the local custom of which team gets to play next.

Comments:

* Once upon a time, ten All-American boys were happily playing basketball at their neighborhood park. One day two newcomers to the neighborhood asked them if they could join them. “Sure” the boys responded and so the game proceeded with the newcomers rotating in.

Then one day the original ten boys showed up to play only to find that the two newcomers were on the court before them. When the ten asked to join in, the two said “Let us finish our game first”. And so they did.

A few days later the same thing occurred but this time, when the two said, “Let us finish our game first”, they added “and we’re playing to a hundred”. By the time the two had played to one hundred, it was dinner time and the original All-American boys had to go home without having gotten to play at all.

This was repeated the next day and the ten boys got very angry and threatened the two with violence. The two boys ran home and the ten got to play their game.

The next day, the two boys showed up with their fathers in tow. Their fathers confronted the ten and told them that if they didn’t share the court equally with their two sons, then they would find themselves in a different kind of court where they would be facing charges of assault and discrimination against a minority. “After all”, they argued, “two is less than ten and twoness must be protected from assimilation by ten lest it become just another member of twelveness and in doing so, lose it’s unique identity as two.”

The boys didn’t understand this argument but did understand the threat of legal action and so they consented to share time on the court equally with the two. And so the two groups alternated days on which they could play.

All was fine until one day the ten showed up to play only to find the two occupying the court with four other complete strangers. “What’s this?” asked the tens, “Today is our day to use the court”.

The twos responded, “Yes, but, now there are others and you must share. The fours deserve their chance to play too. After all, you didn’t build this court. Today is the four’s turn. You come back tomorrow. Even if you don’t like this new arrangement, that’s tough because if you don’t consent we’ll bring our fathers back and they will sue you.”

And so the court was shared between the three groups.

Until one day when the ten were to play and showed up only to find the twos there with a new group of six strangers. The twos presented the same arguments and the four groups were accommodated just as the three had been.

But as time had passed, the ten couldn’t help but notice that the courts had begun to suffer. First, the nets were gone from the goals, leaving just the bare hoops. The area around the court which had at first been green grass, pleasant to sit on between games, became littered with cast off paper and wrappings. This distressed the ten who began leaving signs asking the others not to litter and such. The signs too were defaced.

Eventually the rims themselves were bent down so that they no longer conformed to standard basketball convention. The court was littered not just with paper, but with broken glass from liquor bottles which made it dangerous to play on. One day the ten arrived to find the burned out hulk of a car sitting square in the middle of the court. When they pushed it to one side, they found that the pavement underneath had melted and broken up, making the court in that area undribbleable.

The ten were dismayed to see the destruction of what had been there nice neighborhood play area. They called a meeting with all the other groups but no one else bothered to attend. So, giving up on the others, the ten with their parents spent one of their play days replacing the hoops, nets and picking up the litter. Barrels were provided for trash.

The next week, when the ten arrived to play, they were dismayed to find that the court was a mess again. The barrel, still smoking, had been used as a burn barrel. Broken glass lay on the ground and the nets were hanging in tatters. They left dejected.

When the ten told their parents what had occurred, their parents said, “No problem, we’ll just build a new court elsewhere, where you can play as you did in the old days”. Which they did.

One of the parents had space in the alley behind his garage which would be perfect for a court. A backboard and hoop were erected, debris swept away and the ten boys resumed playing happily.

Then one day, two strange boys approached them and asked if they could join in……

Posted in Basketball, Diversity, Israel | Comments Off on Can’t We All Get Along?

Will Hillary Have A Sister Souljah Moment?

Comments:

* Her commitment to BLM and what it stands for is akin to her commitment to amnesty, unending immigration, acceptance of the “refugees”, and the “Dreamers”: a matter now of established dogma/religion which it is unthinkable to breach.

I don’t see Hillary as being much different from Merkel: as rigid on points of official religion as has been true of the pious across history. I think there a lot more women like this than men, which is why the most devout parishioners, the ones who, say, show up for Mass every day, are far more frequently women than men. Men, on average, give logic and evidence considerably more weight and are less attached to dogma qua dogma. Women tend to feel their way to belief, to be rigid in their commitment, and to punish dissenters more readily and, generally, more severely. (This is the sort of behavior one sees most transparently among feminists–and there is a huge number of feminists. I can’t think of a like movement among men that approaches the same number.)

One will notice that Bill Clinton has been far more prone to going off the reservation on BLM. One might explain that in a variety of ways, but I think an important component is that, as an intelligent man — if generally a cynically calculating one — the pure bullshit of it is sometimes too much to take.

I really doubt that Hillary even perceives the bullshit. She takes the bullshit as coming from somewhere on high, and therefore unquestionable. She was, for example, convinced — probably by that preachy moron Samantha Power — that Arab Spring was coming, that Qaddafi was an Evil Man who had to be killed, that Assad was an Evil Man who had to be deposed. In the grip of this mindset, Hillary stuck to her guns in pursuit of her idea of Righteousness. At least one sign of her fundamental sociopathy in pursuit of Right was that in infamous video in which she joked around about killing Qaddafi. I wonder if to this day she has any real belief that what she did in the ME was a mistake, other than a political one.

More than anything else, what I fear in Hillary is more of the same rigidity and perverse adherence to ideology over any other consideration. Merkel is a good example of how that can turn out, and I see Hillary as coming from the same mold.

As for the question of whether Trump has any chance at this point, I think we need to hang fire and wait it out.

Hillary is obviously winning the fake news, but Trump wins the real news. I doubt we’ve seen the end of Milwaukees, or worse, before the election. And we are certain to see more Orlandos and Nices — the only question is whether they occur before, or after, the election. I suspect the jihadists would just love to get the extra attention that comes with the election season, and would love the possibility of having an impact on that election (even at the expense of getting in someone who would seem powerfully to oppose them).

And there is finally, and with the greatest likelihood, the possibility that WikiLeaks will dump a bunch of documents that will be very destructive to the demonstrably very vulnerable Hillary. The email thing hurt her badly at the time. More of the same and worse of the same will not fail to bring down her numbers.

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Syria’s Civil War and Michael Weiss’ New-Found Calling as Syria Interventionist

Richard Silverstein writes: In 2011, Syrian civil unrest commenced and turned gradually into a regional proxy war. As Syrian rebels began their fight to topple Bashar al-Assad; and Russia and Iran rallied to support the Syrian dictator, Weiss saw a new opportunity to advance his interventionist agenda. He became one of the leading neocon intellectuals advocating muscular U.S. intervention on the side of the Syrian rebels. He advocated those views in publications of the foreign policy elite like Foreign Policy, think tanks like the Carnegie Council for International Affairs, and TV shows too innumerable to mention.

He is a producer’s dream. Like his mentor Hitchens, he is glib and articulate. He explains complicated, confusing issues like ISIS in a media-savvy package. His slashing wit (again, think a dumbed-down version of Hitchens add a note of drama and conspiratorial mystery as well) piques the interest of his audience. Few producers will do enough due diligence to research articles like this one exposing Weiss’ foibles, or damning profiles by James Carden in The Nation or Mark Ames in Pando…

In 2013, Weiss teamed up with Elizabeth O’Bagy to write an article in The Atlantic which advocated regime change in Syria. Separately, she wrote a similar piece for the Wall Street Journal. What the WSJ didn’t reveal was that O’Bagy was a paid consultant for an NGO working to provide military weapons to the Syrian rebels and overthrow Assad, the Syrian Emergency Task Force (SETF). On the strength of her work, she was invited to testify before Congress. But she had a wee-small problem. She’d embellished her academic record, which led to being fired by the NGO and staining all those who’d championed her, including Weiss. WSJ’s failure to note her affiliation with SETF also posed a clear conflict of interest…

His relationship with oligarchs offers mutual benefit to both: Weiss gains financing, media access and social approval; while the billionaires exploit his dashing exploits in combat zones and intellectual panache to advance their own political and financial interests.

In the Middle Ages, European rulers had court Jews who financed their wars and building projects. But these modern oligarchs don’t need money. They need popularizers who can package and transform political jihad into a simple, appealing mantra. Weiss performs this role admirably.

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‘Democracy & Diversity Are Not Friends’

From Slate: Never one to allow harrowing events to upstage him or to let propriety stand in the way of his sales pitch, Donald J. Trump cheered every twist and turn in London, Nice, and Ankara from the sidelines. When Brits voted to Brexit, Trump congratulated them on taking “their country back,” promising “to do the exact same thing on Election Day 2016 here in the United States.” When he heard of the terror attack in Nice, he saw, first and foremost, an opportunity to drive home his opposition to Muslim immigration. “When will we learn?” he tweeted that Thursday night. “It’s only getting worse.” Even the coup in Turkey became “further demonstration of the failures of Obama-Clinton. You just have to look,” he said at a Saturday press conference announcing Mike Pence as his running mate, “every single thing they’ve touched has turned to horrible, horrible death-defying problems.”

Trump’s case is straightforward: The challenges facing America are momentous. But they were brought about by incompetence, corruption, or false loyalties. And so they can easily be solved once a strong, incorruptible, patriotic leader—a leader just like Trump—takes power. He, and only he, is the solution to the “death-defying problems” that shaped this terrible week.

It is this providential fusion of the people and their leader—the belief that collective deliverance from a dark world can only come from a pure, unadulterated conduit for the people’s voice—that defines the core of his appeal. And it is his closely related inability to contemplate that he may at times be mistaken, or that there may be legitimate conflicts of interest in a democracy, or that the power of the presidency needs to be checked by other institutions, that makes him so dangerous…

Across the affluent, established democracies of North America and Western Europe, the last years have witnessed a meteoric rise of figures who may not be quite so brash or garish as Trump and yet bear a striking resemblance to him: Marine Le Pen in France, Frauke Petry in Germany, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, and many of the leading Brexiteers in the United Kingdom. They too harness a new level of anger that is quite unlike anything liberal democracies have witnessed in a half-century. They too promise to stand up for ordinary people, to do away with a corrupt political elite, and to put the ethnic and religious minorities who are now (supposedly) being favored in their rightful (subordinate) place. They, too, are willing to do away with liberal political institutions like an independent judiciary or a free, robust press so long as those stand in the way of the people’s will. Together, they are building a new type of political regime that is slowly coming into its own: illiberal democracy.

Critics often attack Trump, Le Pen, and their cohort for being undemocratic. But that is to misunderstand both their priorities and the reasons for their appeal. For the most part, their belief in the will of the people is real. Their primary objection to the status quo is, quite simply, that institutional roadblocks like independent courts or norms like a “politically correct” concern for the rights of minorities stop the system from channeling the people’s righteous anger into public policy. What they promise, then, is not to move away from popular rule but rather to strip it of its artificial, liberal guise—all the while embodying the only true version of the people’s will.

Places like Hungary and Poland show what this might mean in practice. Once celebrated as examples of successful democratic transition, these countries are now at the forefront of the movement toward illiberal democracy. After Viktor Orbán took power in Budapest six years ago, his Fidesz party undermined the country’s constitutional court, stacked government institutions like the electoral commission with party loyalists, and turned the most important media outlets into uncritical propaganda machines. Over the course of the past year, Poland’s Law and Justice party has accomplished much the same feat in a fraction of the time. In both places, key liberal rights are honored more in the breach than the observance.

Political elites are understandably terrified by the speed with which illiberal democracy is coming into its own. But if the populists are pushing for a political system that does away with one half of liberal democracy, the truth is that a large number of establishment politicians are increasingly tempted to embrace a system that does away with the other half. Where Trump and Le Pen seek to establish an illiberal democracy, a lot of sensible centrists are quietly seeking their salvation in what I call “undemocratic liberalism.” If the people want to violate the rights of unloved minorities, setting up the prospect of democracy without rights, the political establishment is increasingly insulating itself from the people’s demands, opting for a form of rights without democracy.

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Who’s Afraid of Religious Liberty?

Professor Richard Samuelson writes:

Not so long ago, doubts about the ability of Jews to live and practice Judaism freely in the United States would have been dismissed as positively paranoid: relics of a bygone era when American Jews could be turned away from restaurants and country clubs, when restrictive covenants might prevent their purchase of real estate or prejudicial quotas limit their access to universities and corporate offices.

None of that has been the case for a half-century or more. And yet recent developments in American political culture have raised legitimate concerns on a variety of fronts. To put the matter in its starkest form: the return of anti-Semitism, by now a thoroughly documented phenomenon in Europe and elsewhere around the world, is making itself felt, in historically unfamiliar ways, in the land of the free.

Statistics tell part of the tale. In 2014, the latest period for which figures have been released by the FBI, Jews were the objects of fully 57 percent of hate crimes against American religious groups, far outstripping the figure for American Muslims (14 percent) and Catholics (6 percent). True, the total number of such incidents is still blessedly low; but what gives serious pause is the radical disproportion.

The rise and spread of anti-Israel agitation, particularly on the nation’s campuses, is the most common case. Such agitation, expressed in the form of defamatory graffiti, “Israel Apartheid” demonstrations, and the verbal or physical abuse of pro-Israel students, feeds into and is increasingly indistinguishable from outright anti-Semitism. Even the most zealously “progressive” young Jews are targeted as accomplices-by-definition with the alleged crimes of Zionism. As one student who has fallen afoul of his campus’s orthodoxies has lamented, “because I am Jewish, I cannot be an activist who supports Black Lives Matter or the LGBTQ community. . . . [A]mong my peers, Jews are oppressors and murderers.” Such is the progressive doctrine of “intersectionality,” according to which all approved causes are interconnected and must be mutually supported, no exceptions and no tradeoffs allowed.

Lately, this brand of wholesale anti-Semitic vilification under the guise of anti-Zionism has leapt beyond the precincts of the academy to infiltrate American political discourse, becoming vocally evident on both the political left and the political right and insidiously infecting this year’s presidential campaign and party maneuverings. For an analysis of the campus assault’s underlying mechanisms and wider effects, Ruth Wisse’s Mosaic essay, “Anti-Semitism Goes to School,” is unsurpassed. So far, the trend shows no sign of abating.

But there is another danger, equally grave though as yet less open and less remarked upon. It is connected with longer-term shifts in Americans’ fundamental understanding of themselves and of their liberty, and consequently with the laws that embody and reflect that understanding: in particular, the laws enshrining America’s commitment to religious liberty and, relatedly, liberty of association or, as the Constitution has it, assembly. Coming to the fore over issues of personal identity, most saliently in relation to the gay-rights movement, same-sex marriage, and transgender rights, it has resulted in a legal battle in which the radioactive charge of “discrimination,” borrowed from the civil-rights movement of the 1960s, is wielded as a weapon to isolate, impugn, and penalize dissenting views held by Americans of faith and informing the conduct of their religious lives.

Jews are hardly the only group at risk from developments in this area of progressive agitation; up till now, its main targets have been believing Christians. Perhaps for that same reason, Jews have also not been in the front ranks of those raising an alarm. Nevertheless, the threat to them, and to the practice of Judaism, especially by Orthodox Jews, is very real. Unlike in the past, the threat comes not from private initiatives; it comes from government. Read on.

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Key Members Of The Coalition Of The Fringe – Blacks, Jews – Start Firing On Each Other

Jews and blacks are as disparate as two groups can get in America. They have minimal daily interaction. They live in different places and work in different fields. Yet a small number of elites among both groups have occasionally found common cause, but this coalition is weak.

If a Jew is a normal orthodox Jew, he puts Jewish interests first. If a black is a normal black, he puts black interests first. These interests at times coincide but they frequently diverge.

Jews and almost all groups, including Muslims, have common interests at certain times and places, and at other times and places, their interests diverge.

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Ellen Wexler writes: In its new platform, the Movement for Black Lives—a coalition of more than 50 social-justice groups of which the Black Lives Matter Network is a member—called for action on dozens of policy issues, including ending U.S. aid to Israel.

“We want investments in Black communities, determined by Black communities and divestment from exploitative forces,” the platform reads.

Since it went live on Aug. 1, the platform has left some American Jewish groups trying to balance their obligation to the racial justice movement with their dedication to Israel. They wonder: Do the two beliefs oppose each other? What role can left-leaning Jews play in Black Lives Matter?

The platform represents the most comprehensive plan yet to emerge from the Black Lives Matter movement. In its section on investment and divestment, it argues that the United States should redirect aid to Israel to domestic issues such as education, health care and housing. It also calls Israel an “apartheid state” and argues that the U.S. “is complicit in the genocide taking place against the Palestinian people.”

Many American Jewish groups, drawing on a tradition of Jewish involvement in the American civil rights movement, have supported Black Lives Matter. But now, some of those groups are having trouble reconciling their support with the movement’s stance on Israel. In the days following the platform’s publication, a number of establishment Jewish groups have spoken out against it, condemning the coalition’s support of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.

But even among the smaller, more liberal organizations, many were angered by the platform’s language—specifically, the decision to label Israel’s actions a “genocide.”

One of those groups is T’ruah, a Jewish activist organization that also advocates for the rights of Palestinians. But the group argued that Israel’s actions cannot be compared to genocides like the Holocaust—or to other 20th-century genocides, such as those in Rwanda and Armenia.

“While we agree that the occupation violates the human rights of Palestinians, and has caused too many deaths,” the group wrote in a statement, “the Israeli government is not carrying out a plan intended to wipe out the Palestinians.”

The Union for Reform Judaism also denounced the Movement for Black Lives’ stance, arguing that supporting Israel and fighting systemic racism should not be mutually exclusive. American Jews should not have to choose between the two movements, Rabbi Jonah Dov Pesner wrote on behalf of the group, calling the platform’s language “offensive and odious.” “It’s never helpful, never helpful to use phrases like ‘complicit in genocide,’ which is patently false, or to make unfair analogies to apartheid,” Pesner told The Washington Post.

Yet since at least 2014—when Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, Mo.—the Black Lives Matter movement and the Palestinian human rights movement have been, in some ways, inextricably linked. While the movements had never forged an official affiliation, activists from both began to draw parallels and express solidarity, as Moment’s cover story explored earlier this year. By 2015, over 1,000 activists had signed a Black Solidarity Statement with Palestine.

The new platform marks the first time such a prominent faction of the Black Lives Matter movement has codified its stance on Israel and Palestinian solidarity. And now, some Jewish groups say that the platform precludes their support entirely.

On Wednesday, Boston’s Jewish Community Relations Council announced that it would dissociate itself from the Black Lives Matter platform altogether. “To conflate the experiences of African-Americans and Palestinians,” the group writes, “oversimplifies complex matters and advances false equivalencies that diminish the unique nature of each.”

But why, others argue, should Jewish groups—even those who disagree with the platform’s position on Israel—denounce the movement in its entirety?

“We are appalled at the actions of the white U.S. institutional Jewish community in detracting and distracting from such a vital platform at a time when Black lives are on the line, simply because the organizers chose to align their struggle with the plight of Palestinians,” the Jews of Color Caucus said in a statement.

And when Jewish groups denounce the Movement for Black Lives’ new platform, what does that mean for black Jews?

Those critiques, the group writes, send a message: “that the lives of Black Jews (along with Black gentiles) directly affected by US police brutality are less important than protecting Israel from scrutiny.”

Jewish Voice for Peace, an activist group that supports the BDS movement, also expressed disappointment with the responses from critical Jewish groups. In a statement, the group wrote that it “endorses the Movement for Black Lives platform in its entirety, without reservation.”

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NYT: “The Secret of Jamaica’s Runners: It’s About Culture, Not Genetics.”

Comments:

* Its amazing that the NYT is still pushing this BS. Yeah, its all about “Culture”. That’s why 1 Billion Chinese and 1 Billion Indians and 1 billion whites can’t find a sprinter that can outrun a West African black.

Next time you look at a running event in the Olympic finals from 1500m and under you’ll see that almost everyone looks the same – from the neck down.

If you don’t have that build or shape, you won’t win. Its 90% genetics and 10% training.

* Of course it’s always about covering up racial disparities. We cannot have whites noticing differences in the races.

Still many do notice it anyway, but are smart enough to keep their mouths shut in polite society about it. They know what can happen to them if they blurt it out in public.

It’s worse than outing yourself as a cannibal that ate homeless people as a hobby. Really, being a white racist seems to be the worst thing in the world according to the elites. Heck even being a member of ISIS is more acceptable.

So we’re forced to engage in some sort of pathetic kabuki dance explaining away why some people are better at certain activities than others while ignoring the elephant in the room.

Orwell would get a big kick out of it and then probably cry.

* Isn’t it funny that you could go to a local animal shelter and find a least a half-dozen dogs– who haven’t been training and who have been lying around all day– who could go out and blow by Usain Bolt in the 100 yard dash first time out. Maybe even after making a quick pit stop to do some grass sniffing. A little comparison: Usain Bolt has been clocked at top speed at 23 mph. A little border collie can top 30 mph.

* Right, the one drop rule of the British world means that blacks tend to be pretty black by ancestry, while the color continuum of the Spanish/Portuguese world means people are more mixed.

I looked at a lot of sprinters in the 1990s and they were very black (with the exception of Frankie Fredericks of Namibia, who looks a little like Alec Guinness). For example, Carl Lewis is pretty bourgeois in affect, but he is very black.

* How about Mexicans who have won a grand total of zero medals of any kind in Rio. Even Fiji has won more medals than Mexico and Fiji has a smaller population than the city of Austin. Mexico has the 11th largest population on the planet.

* Speaking of West African fast twitch muscle fibres. The West Indian cricket team from 1970 to 1994 produced more genuinely fast cricket bowlers than any other country. In the late 1980s they were able to field 3-4 guys who could bowl over 90 miles an hour, an unprecedented feat in cricket history. In contrast India, with a population of over a billion arguably hasn’t produced a single genuinely fast bowler.

However, things went downhill for the West Indians in the late 1990s as talented West Indians were drawn to other sports like basketball and running.

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