Fox News Keeps It In The Tribe

Posted on August 15, 2016 by Luke Ford

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

Posted on August 15, 2016 by Luke Ford

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?

Posted on August 15, 2016 by Luke Ford

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……

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Will Hillary Have A Sister Souljah Moment?

Posted on August 14, 2016 by Luke Ford

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

Posted on August 14, 2016 by Luke Ford

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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