Kahanists Embrace Trump — But Are Divided on ‘Alt-Right’

Posted on February 1, 2017 by Luke Ford

The Forward:

A Twitter user known as AltRabbi wrote online, “Closest thing jews have had to alt right was kahane.”

AltRabbi is known online as a religious Jew who is sympathetic to the “alt-right.”

“Secular Jews in US are so severly [sic] SJW that they are lost,” he wrote, using an acronym for “social justice warrior,” a pejorative term for activists.

Hundreds of people watch Torah classes organized by Baron, who admires the ways the “alt-right” has harnessed the internet.

“There are some lessons to learn from them in the way they reach out,” he said.

A recent flare-up in Whitefish, Montana, brought the generational divisions of the movement into sharp relief.

Neo-Nazis pledged to carry out an armed march against local Jews in Whitefish, where Spencer lives part time. Spencer did not endorse the march, and quietly distanced himself from the anti-Semitic campaign, but the clear ideological links between the “alt-right” and Nazism were laid bare.

This caused members of the older JDL generation to take a stand.

Meir Weinstein, national director of Canada’s JDL, told the Forward he was more than willing to confront Spencer and neo-Nazis in person.

“That guy’s going to get his head kicked in. He’s a Nazi, this guy’s a Nazi,” Weinstein said of Spencer in a phone interview.

But others, like Stern, are taking a more tempered approach: “We’re not going to work with Nazis — God forbid — but there are factions within the ‘alt-right’ where there is a commonality.”

Stern hopes that Spencer might “denounce all forms of Nazism.” Spencer has complicated views on Jews and Israel and does not call himself a Nazi — preferring instead white “identitarian.” Still, it is unlikely that he will “disavow” any of his neo-Nazi supporters.

In an email to the Forward, Stern asked: “Why shouldn’t we associate ourselves with a charismatic and extremely popular rising figure within the MAGA movement who agrees with us on most issues, but has some problematic followers?”

In Stern’s eyes, “white nationalism is not akin to Nazism,” and white nationalists “do not necessarily hate Jews or non-whites.” Sterns message went on: “They simply want the best for their race. And Jews are white too btw, so why should we object to that?”

“We are looking to make an alliance with people on the right, but that doesn’t include people who you would call Nazis,” Baron said, trying to clarify the Kahanist camp’s position. “We do connect to people who have an American nationalist viewpoint.”

While it is unlikely that Spencer will develop a formal alliance with Kahanist elements, both they and the more established JDL movement are part of a swell of nationalist groups angling for revivals, according to researchers who monitor radical groups.

“This time seems to be ripe for extremist movements of all types,” said Oren Segal, the director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism. “I wouldn’t be surprised if we see this Kahanist ideology grow online.”

Faybyshenko has high hopes for his re-energized movement.

“It’s something being reborn,” he said. “Especially after the election results, we now see that people are waking up.”

Posted in Alt Right, R. Meir Kahane | Comments Off on Kahanists Embrace Trump — But Are Divided on ‘Alt-Right’

White Supremacist Cheers Trump’s ‘De-Judification’ of Holocaust

Posted on January 31, 2017 by Luke Ford

The Forward writes:

Richard Spencer, the leading ideologue of the “alt-right,” Donald Trump’s Holocaust Remembrance Day statement that failed to mention Jews or anti-Semitism was an important, perhaps revolutionary, step.

Spencer dubbed it the “de-Judification” of the Holocaust.

Jewish activists, Spencer wrote in a short post for his new website Altright.com, have long insisted on making the Holocaust “all about their meta-narrative of suffering” and a way to “undergird their peculiar position in American society.”

The Holocaust, in Spencer’s eyes, has become a sort of moral bludgeon — used against white nationalists like himself.

“We can’t limit immigration, because Hitler. We can’t can’t be proud of ourselves as a Europeans, because Holocaust. White people can be Christian, but not too Christian, because Auschwitz,” he wrote.

Spencer went on: “Effectively, any policy, idea, or belief that is markedly right-wing and traditional — that evokes identity, power, hierarchy, and dominance — must be regulated by the possibility that it could potentially lead back to the German Führer.”

Spencer, a onetime Duke University PhD student, popularized the term “alt-right,” a broad label that defines a new generation of white nationalists.

While other influential members of the movement, like Andrew Anglin, clearly identify with Nazis (Anglin’s Daily Stormer website is named after the Nazi propaganda sheet Der Stürmer), Spencer says he is not a Nazi and denies the label that is often attributed to him, preferring the term “identitarian,” a reference to a far right political movement that has roots in France.

Spencer dismissed Jewish responses to Trump’s statement as “kvetching,” using a Yiddish term for complaining.

In speaking about Hitler and the Holocaust, Spencer has also elided Jewish suffering, telling the Daily Caller that “terrible things were done to many different people during that terrible war.”

He also does not outright condemn Hitler, calling him a “historical figure.” “He’s done things that I think are despicable,” Spencer told the Daily Caller, but did not go into details. “I’m not going to play this game.”

In Spencer’s eyes, the “de-Judefication” of the Holocaust is a quintessentially “Trumpian” statement. Spencer championed Trump through the presidential campaign — and though he has been critical of the president at times, seems to have come around to Trump.

“Trump is a white nationalist, so to speak, he is alt-right whether he likes it or not,” Spencer in a recent interview on “The David Pakman Show.”

I agree with this Richard Spencer essay:

This week, the activist Jewish community in the United States forcefully reminded the world that, no matter how much we might moralize the Holocaust, no matter how much we might glean from it lessons about man’s fallen state or dehumanization in the modern world, the Holocaust is all about the Jews. It is all about their meta-narrative of suffering, and it shall undergird their peculiar position in American society, and theirs alone.

In 2005, the UN deemed January 27 to be International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and the occasion has annually elicited soulful statements by sitting presidents. President Trump’s press release was as seemingly banal as any other:

“It is with a heavy heart and somber mind that we remember and honor the victims, survivors, heroes of the Holocaust. It is impossible to fully fathom the depravity and horror inflicted on innocent people by Nazi terror.

“Yet, we know that in the darkest hours of humanity, light shines the brightest. As we remember those who died, we are deeply grateful to those who risked their lives to save the innocent.

“In the name of the perished, I pledge to do everything in my power throughout my Presidency, and my life, to ensure that the forces of evil never again defeat the powers of good. Together, we will make love and tolerance prevalent throughout the world.”

But the kvetching came quickly. . .

Hitler and the Holocaust are the negative moral center of the liberal universe.

In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevsky famously put forth the maxim that “Without God, all is permitted.” That is, without a singular moral authority, life descends into hedonistic violence, nihilism, chaos, and degeneracy.

Dostoyevski didn’t quite foresee that the post-God 21st century—the American Age and “End of History”—would arrive at its own hyper-morality, this time as a negation: “Because Hitler, everything is forbidden.”[1]

We can’t limit immigration, because Hitler. We can’t can’t be proud of ourselves as a Europeans, because Holocaust. White people can be Christian, but not too Christian, because Auschwitz. Und so weiter . . . Effectively, any policy, idea, or belief that is markedly right-wing and traditional—that evokes identity, power, hierarchy, and dominance—must be regulated by the possibility that it could potentially lead back to the German Führer.

This trend leaves activist Jews in a difficult position. Hitler and the Holocaust define postmodern global morality, and yet both have peculiar resonances for Jews, in particular, for their senses of identity and “apartness” from European society. Thus, there has always been an uncertainty and worry over the spread and predominance of “Because Hitler. . . morality.” In academia, the rise of “genocide studies” (I was actually a Teaching Assistant for such a course in grad school) has, on the one hand, cemented the Holocaust as the moral paradigm . . . and simultaneously threatened its uniqueness, threatened to make the Holocaust “just another genocide,” which is unimaginable for Jewish activists.

Trump’s statement on Holocaust Memorial Day is, on the surface, utterly defensible within the current moral paradigm: Hitler is depicted as quintessential evil, with modern society revolving around this dark center. But when viewed from the perspective of Jewish activists, Trump’s statement becomes outrageous, as it dethrones Jews from a special position in the universe.

It is especially Trumpian of Trump to bring this contradiction to the fore.

Note

  1. The Marxist philosopher Slavoj Žižek reached a similar conclusion:Without God, all is forbidden. “Everything is permitted to today’s hedonistic Last Man—you can enjoy everything, BUT deprived of its substance which makes it dangerous.” ↩︎

Update

The Trump administration has doubled-down on its “de-Judification” of the Holocaust.

CNN:

The White House statement on International Holocaust Remembrance Day didn’t mention Jews or anti-Semitism because “despite what the media reports, we are an incredibly inclusive group and we took into account all of those who suffered,” administration spokeswoman Hope Hicks told CNN on Saturday.

Hicks provided a link to a Huffington Post UK story noting that while 6 million Jews were killed by the Nazis, 5 million others were also slaughtered during Adolf Hitler’s genocide, including “priests, gypsies, people with mental or physical disabilities, communists, trade unionists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, anarchists, Poles and other Slavic peoples, and resistance fighters.”

Asked if the White House was suggesting President Donald Trump didn’t mention Jews as victims of the Holocaust because he didn’t want to offend the other people the Nazis targeted and killed, Hicks replied, “it was our honor to issue a statement in remembrance of this important day.”

Posted in Alt Right, Holocaust | Comments Off on White Supremacist Cheers Trump’s ‘De-Judification’ of Holocaust

In Rare Unity, Orthodox and Liberal Denominations Are Critical of Trump Refugee Ban

Posted on January 31, 2017 by Luke Ford

JTA:

Two large groups representing Orthodox Jews responded to President Donald Trump’s executive order barring migrants from seven mostly Muslim countries and refugees from around the world by warning against policies that would place any limits on immigration based on religion.

With the combined statement by the Orthodox Union and Rabbinical Council of America, all four major American Jewish denominations have criticized the executive order in some form. The Reconstructionist movement condemned the statement ahead of its signing Friday, while the Reform and Conservative movements condemned it on Saturday and Sunday, respectively.

The Orthodox statement came Sunday night. It was first issued in December 2015 after Trump called for banning the entry of Muslims into the United States.

It is extremely rare for all four movements, which have split on everything from LGBT rights to Israel policy, to unite in opposing a presidential action.

While the Orthodox organizations said they recognize the need for protections against terrorists, they urged the administration to protect religious freedom.

“We call on all Americans to reaffirm that discrimination against any group based solely upon religion is wrong and anathema to the great traditions of religious and personal freedoms upon which this country was founded,” the statement says, and calls on “the United States government to recognize the threats posed by radical Islamists, while preserving and protecting the rights of all people who seek peace, no matter how they worship God.”

Trump has denied that Friday’s executive order is a ban on Muslims, although the statements by the Reform and Conservative movements both assert that the policy is tantamount to a religious test for refugees, travelers and migrants. The executive order prohibits for 120 days all refugees from entering the country, with an indefinite ban on those from Syria. Citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries, including Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen, are barred from entry for 90 days.

A range of Jewish groups have opposed the order, and Jews joined protesters at airports across the country on Saturday to protest the ban.

The Zionist Organization of America appears to be the only major Jewish group to unreservedly support the executive order.

Posted in Jews, Orthodox Union | Comments Off on In Rare Unity, Orthodox and Liberal Denominations Are Critical of Trump Refugee Ban

How Do You Make Sense Of Trump’s First Days In Power?

Posted on January 31, 2017 by Luke Ford

If you go by what the TV networks and major newspapers say, Trump is blowing it. And yet when I weed out the propaganda and just concentrate on his actions, I am ecstatic.

So while I read the LA Times, NY Times, and Washington Post every day, my main ways of understanding this new world come through the following sources:

* Drudge Report
* Steve Sailer (and his commenters)
* Twitter

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* I remember the “Freedom for Soviet Jews” banners outside of every synagogue way back when. Of course, every liberal will say there’s a philosophical difference between a preference and a ban, but is there, really? Those who areprefered take the place in line of those who aren’t. And I don’t think the Constitution recognizes the difference between a preference and a ban. Regardless, the Constitution doesn’t apply to those who don’t live here. The “We the people,” phrase is a lie by omission. The more complete phrase reads, “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union….”

* “Save Soviet Jews” was a big enough phenomenon to become a meme,which was hard to do back in the late 70′s. But one would find it jokingly scribbled on men’s room walls everywhere in the form of a coupon promotion: “Save Soviet Jews – win valuable prizes!”

* Hold on now! You’re telling me that Julia Yoffe and Eugene Volokh were not expelled from their native villages and forced to live in the steppes? They weren’t gang-raped by Cossacks? They didn’t see their families tortured in front of them?

Are you telling me they were actually well-connected cosmopolitans with very good college educations and great prospects in Russia who abandoned their homeland because moving West (and NOT to Israel) was good for their careers?

And here I thought they were really suffering.

* Well, I suppose that if being asked to reimburse the state which provided them with a world-class tertiary level education the cost of said education prior to emigrating was persecution, they were persecuted, the poor souls.

* Is it just me, or has Ann Coulter become the primary conduit through which iStevean ideas reach our political discourse?

* I knew many Soviet Jews back in the ’70′s, the vast majority of them were not religious, nor, IIRC, were they particularly “Jewish” in the sense that many had non-Jewish spouses. Basically they came here because the career opportunities in Russia sucked, and this was a way out for them. But then the career opportunities sucked for a lot of people in Russia.

One can try to say that the definition was not “religious” but rather “ethnic” yet that doesn’t really change the equation; one could just as easily conflate “Muslim” and “Arab” in the present instance, in many cases it makes no difference (not for all, e.g., Iran, Sudan). The fact is, there was preferential open door policies for Jews for decades, and since Jews are both an ethnicity and a religious group, the same concept applies.

Furthermore, one could argue that Jews are an ethnicity only in terms of their religion, because it is the religion that encouraged endogamy; remove the religio-cultural taboo, and Jews marry out at the same very high rate as, say, Germans and Irish in America. Moreover, the idea of Soviet Jews getting out was so they would migrate to Israel, where “ethnicity” or “race” is defined and decided by religious authorities, which reinforces the link.

* I’d say Julia Ioffe is fairly good looking but that tweet she sent out alleging — even as a joke — incest in the Trump family was completely perverse. That would give me second thoughts about her even if I was in the market for a date.

* Dude, I use to work as a background investigator carrying fed creds. A statement like she made should immediately signal she’s got major emotional and psychological issues if not a full subscription and for you to stay the fuck away. A person like this would be capable of destroying your life pretty quickly and not give it a second thought. I’ve seen it over, and over, and over again. If you see just one tiny puff of smoke you can be sure there’s a raging inferno. As they say, reputation is based more on what’s hidden than on what’s done. Some people are good at hiding things, but it’s not possible in marriage unless one spouse chooses to ignore the obvious (vincible ignorance).

Forget eHarmony and the idea of compatibility. That’s bullshit. There’s only one criterion: marry someone with a good disposition and a rock solid moral character. Which assumes a clean record and a functional and normal family upbringing (mother and father still married and more siblings the better).

* The unifying theme of the “black bloc” types last night at Berkeley was cowardice.

Cowardly mob with sticks beating a single unarmed man.

Cowardly clocking a man from behind with a bike lock as he calmly looks the other way.

Pepper spraying the woman as she speaks to the reporter.

Breaking windows of the student union, and attempting to throw a flare through the hole from a distance, rather than having the gonads to run up and push it through.

All with masks on.

These people fear cops, even nice Berkeley cops with lots of video being recorded, even in Alameda county with its lax prosecution of crime.

Posted in America | Comments Off on How Do You Make Sense Of Trump’s First Days In Power?

Conservative, bisexual, and latino: Professor forced to quit hellish teaching experience

Posted on January 31, 2017 by Luke Ford

From Red Alert: Even when conservative professors earn tenure, the academic experience can get unbearable.

Professor Robert Lopez of California State University-Northridge was happy to receive his tenure in May 2013. The achievement is particularly difficult for conservative professors. Three years later, however, Lopez was ready to leave, writing about the “salvation” he’s found and how he’s “quitting because I found the will to live.”

Lopez, who is bisexual and Latino, has written about problems he faced on campus months after obtaining tenure for expressing his conservative views. In October 2013, “The Devil Comes Home to Cal State Northridge” was published for American Thinker. “I confessed that I admired Palin to a colleague, and he immediately compared me to Hitler,” Lopez wrote.

The reactions against Lopez didn’t stop with the Hitler comparison. People were rude and denounced him. His applications for benefits were rejected, as were department newsletter submissions. He couldn’t get on committees, and faculty members whom he called “the Marxist Brothers” held closed-door meetings about him.

Lopez “had people carve threatening lines over the Army stickers on my door, tear my American flag, and throw flyers at me.”

He was not allowed to use university resources for anything political, but his colleagues were held to different standards.

“Anything I did, on the job or off, that alluded remotely to my not being a leftist counted as political and was therefore grounds for complaint and possible sanction,” he wrote.

As Lopez chronicles his worsening experiences, a common theme is “the constant stream of ‘it has come to my attention’ messages.”

Last month, American Thinker published “The True Story of a Conservative Refugee.” Lopez describes how he became convinced that someone had been going through his personal items, which he had suspected for years. He described more of the complaints against him, including one which led to a tribunal:

The epic Title IX tribunal over my conference at the Reagan Presidential Library is still now, to this day, open and undecided after 600 days. The case was based on a gay student claiming he had a nervous breakdown because of anti-gay “targeting” at the Reagan Library and a woman who claimed I did not nominate her for an award because she alleged that the five female speakers at the Reagan Library were “anti-female.”

The investigation of Lopez, and the risk of suspension, highlights the hypocrisy of campus culture. At other universities, professors who made anti-Republican comments received pay raises, a stark contrast to Lopez being forced out.

Lopez felt forced to teach a certain way because he couldn’t trust his students and “was teaching like a robot.” He also suspected that his colleagues were “planting students in my class to annoy me.” Lopez went through lengths of only accepting digital papers, of no longer providing comments on papers, and of letting students write about whatever they wanted.

Lopez told The College Fix that he stood up for “racial and ethnic diversity in literature and staffing.” With calls for diversity from students, particularly when it comes to assigned literature, there could have been common ground for Lopez and his detractors.

It wasn’t enough for those out to get him.

Posted in Conservatives | Comments Off on Conservative, bisexual, and latino: Professor forced to quit hellish teaching experience

Churches & The Left

Posted on January 31, 2017 by Luke Ford

Robert Oscar Lopez writes:

When we were fighting against gay marriage, we made a huge tactical error in thinking we had to fight in the courts and media first, trusting that the churches would be safe. I fell for this delusion as well. As I pointed out in a recent conference in London (“The New Normal”), I followed many others’ leads and minimized the churches’ influence on my position, for fear of being tied in people’s minds to “old church ladies telling people what to do.” After half a decade of this, I’ve realized that “old church ladies” are the most important group to get on our side, and we have to have their confidence first. Why? Unlike everybody else, they show up and bring food. On their often unacknowledged labor rested most of the breakthrough moments I saw in the fight against leftist propaganda, not only in the United States but also in France and the United Kingdom.

It is alluring but fanciful to dream of winning over secular feminists and prestigious men in suits, but these would-be partners are notoriously slippery. I tried, for instance to open up a dialogue with innumerable liberal feminists in hopes we could build a coalition. Queer feminists Yasmin Nair, Claire Potter, Cathy Brennan, Sheena Malhotra, and others all reacted to my attempts to engage them in authentic conversation with paranoid recoil, feeling the need to repudiate or even viciously attack me in public lest their liberal allies think they were really in league with me. Other liberal feminists such as Claudia Corrigan D’Arcy and Laura Kipnis were hot & cold interlocutors, willing at times to share thoughts but then prone to close doors on key positions such as defense of life and/or the opposition to sodomy.

From time to time, there would be gay men who looked willing to engage in real discussion. I brought queer theorist Tim Dean to my campus to deliver a speech on Tom Jones in 2013. I agreed to speak on a panel hosted by playwright Tony Abbatemarco after a performance of Forever House. I even exchanged some messages with Frank Ligtvoet, a gay adoptive father, and hired a gay actor to play the lead in the premier of the play I co-wrote with Michelle Shocked, Sunlight. All these attempts ended up leaving me drained and exhausted, because in the end, such crossover discussants always wanted a veto to block discussion of the central issues they considered non-starters. I call this phenomenon “lefty creep.”

Highly esteemed conservative straight men can be nearly as frustrating. If they have sinecures or some kind of emeritus status in the movement, most likely they only want new advocates to emerge if they have personally mentored them. The effect of this is that the movement remains small, incestuous, and dull.

The beauty of church-focused social movements is that they offer a quick route to the grassroots and rely on long-established networks of trust and familiarity. Churches are a good offense against propaganda because of the physical resources alone: for instance, the multitude of multipurpose rooms, reading rooms, furniture, and props that spend much of the American workweek unused. Additionally, churches are a badly needed defensive theater, because the left has spent large amounts of money on promoting a false theology favorable to their pet causes like same-sex marriage. If churches at the local level block people with false theological grounding from taking over pastorates, this will protect the whole conservative movement as anti-propagandists fight on other fronts, such as…

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Queer Theory and BDS: The Odd Couple

Posted on January 31, 2017 by Luke Ford

Rivka Edelman writes:

For the past two years Boycott Divest Sanction, (BDS) the growing college campus movement against Israel, has put every Jewish student and many faculty in its crosshairs. It is the latest incarnation of anti-Semitism to garner the rubber stamp of approval in the academy, a stamp usually reserved for the very PC fields like feminism, Queer Studies and LGBT rights.

The queer movement and BDS actually flow from a shared cultural source, a zeitgeist. That these two movements go hand in hand should not strike anyone as odd considering both movements share, not only toxic tactics, (calling people genocidal murders as they try to make their way from class to class), but also revisionist history of faux victimization, (think of that widely circulated photograph of the dead baby, who was killed by the Israelis in 2007, and killed again in 2009, and yet again in 2014) and violent rhetoric.

The connection runs deeper. They also share a spokesperson, Professor Judith Butler, an Americ academic version of a public intellectual. Judith Butler, once Professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at Berkeley, is a literary theorist and a political activist, best known for coining the phrase, “gender is performative” (an observation that was made in the Talmud centuries before Butler). If it were the 1970s and the humanities had rock stars Butler would be their Mick Jagger. BDS was lucky to book her for their gigs. As Cary Nelson, former president of the American Association of University Professors, states:

“Judith Butler, who has become the movement’s premier philosopher and political theorist, is perhaps the foremost among them. Her work, which carries significant authority among humanists, helps us get to the heart of the movement’s guiding principles.”

As an advocate for BDS, Butler’s has cachet, publications and a background of political “activism.” In this case it is a brand of activism that seems to channel the American conviction “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.” She lends a thin veneer of legitimacy to the unsavory notion that if gilt in postmodern jargon, the attitude of “really pissed off, STFU pissed off” is an ethical and philosophical position based on some agreed truth.

Posted in Homosexuality, Israel | Comments Off on Queer Theory and BDS: The Odd Couple

When Gangs Killed Gay Men for Sport: Australia Reviews 88 Deaths

Posted on January 31, 2017 by Luke Ford

So how would these Australian gangs figure out who were the gay men to push off the cliffs? The New York Times article doesn’t describe the anonymous sex that must’ve been going on in these gay hangouts above the cliffs.

New York Times:

SYDNEY, Australia — On a December day in 1988, a teenager on a spearfishing expedition found a body at the bottom of one of the wild, honey-colored sandstone cliffs that line Sydney Harbor.
Naked, torn and battered by the rocks, the dead man was a promising American mathematician, Scott Johnson. His clothes were found at the top of the cliff in a neat pile with his digital watch, student ID and a $10 bill, folded in a small plastic sheath. There was no wallet, and no note.
The police concluded that Mr. Johnson, 27, had committed suicide, and a coroner agreed. Fatal leaps from the cliffs around Sydney into the fierce sea below were not uncommon, then or now.
But 28 years later, a new inquest into Mr. Johnson’s death has begun. His brother, a wealthy Boston tech entrepreneur, has pressed the Australian authorities for years to revisit the case, arguing that Mr. Johnson was murdered because he was gay and that the police failed to see it.
If so, it appears Mr. Johnson may not have been the only one.
During the 1980s and 1990s, the Australian authorities now say, gangs of teenagers in Sydney hunted gay men for sport, sometimes forcing them off the cliffs to their deaths. But the police, many of whom had a reputation for hostility toward gay men, often carried out perfunctory investigations that overlooked the possibility of homicide, former officials and police officers say.
Now the police in New South Wales, the state that includes Sydney, are reviewing the deaths of 88 men between 1976 and 2000 to determine whether they should be classified as anti-gay hate crimes.
About 30 of the cases remain unsolved, and the police have not said how many of the killings were tied to gangs. About a dozen victims were found dead at the bottom of cliffs or in the sea, the police say.
The review and the inquest into Mr. Johnson’s death are casting light on a shocking chapter of Sydney’s history, one that some say has yet to be fully revealed.
“We can now see that predators were attacking gay men,” said Ted Pickering, who was the police minister for New South Wales in the late 1980s. “And they were doing it with the almost-certain knowledge that the police would not have gone after them. That was the police culture of the day.”

Robert Oscar Lopez writes:

In Proverbs 7, Solomon embarks on an extended fable of a young man being sexually enticed by a “loose woman,” who stands as a counter-symbol against “Wisdom.”

In this chapter the Bible continues the personification of Wisdom as a woman, though this time, it is specified as a “sister”: “Say to wisdom, you are my sister, and call insight your intimate friend; to preserve you from the loose woman, from the adventuress with her smooth words” (7:4-5).

Often we have a habit in everyday speech of associating sexual experience with “knowledge” or even “wisdom,” such as when we say someone has a lot of carnal knowledge or someone’s got “wisdom beyond their years” because they started having sex at a young age.

Here, however, wisdom is cast as antithetical to sexual adventure. Yet the loose woman, lacking as she is in wisdom, does not present herself as unwise, as in transparently naive or stupid. Rather, she is wily and falsely wise, or disordered in her use of knowledge. Solomon says that he looked through the lattice of window to see “a young man without sense, passing along the street near the corner, taking the road to her house, in the twilight, in the evening, in the time of night and darkness” (7:7-9).

With this framework, we are set up to read the young man as someone who is largely to blame for his sexual ruin, because he is violating many of the ideas that have preceded in Proverbs 1-6. He has not the sense to understand that he cannot trust himself in vulnerable contexts. It is the fool who thinks he can wander close to a lusty woman’s home when it is dark outside. The temptation is too grave.

Yet much of the sexual fall results from the loose woman’s own carefully selected words. She misrepresents herself consciously because she is “dressed as a harlot, wily of heart” (7:10). After grabbing the boy and kissing him, she states, “I had to offer sacrifices and today I have paid my vows, so now I have come out to meet you, to seek you eagerly” (7:14-15). Why this line about the loose woman claiming that she has partaken dutifully in her vows and rites?

It would seem that Solomon includes the line about the loose woman’s ruse of holiness because he wants the vulnerable to understand that seducers often misrepresent themselves as pious, thereby taking their victims off guard. The woman appeals to the young man’s love of sensual pleasures and fineries, as she mentions her perfume and the Egyptian linen of her bed. Also, she mentions that her husband is away on business, having taken a bag of money with him.

The man cannot resist her talk and her ruses, so “all at once he follows her, as an ox goes to the slaughter, or as a stag is caught.” (7:22-23).

For the ex-gay Christian the fable resonates even without the heterosexual dynamic of the older woman seducing a young, innocent man. The underlying problem of sexual vulnerability is that those with the intent to despoil others sexually have usually had a great deal of practice and often embark with a careful strategy. Only arrogance can lead someone to believe that they can stand alone, dancing with sin, without getting dirty.

Posted in Australia, Homosexuality | Comments Off on When Gangs Killed Gay Men for Sport: Australia Reviews 88 Deaths

Jews Love Being Jewish, Blacks Love Being Black

Posted on January 30, 2017 by Luke Ford

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* I think Steve has remarked before that blacks really like being black. And it seems true. Blacks really seem to enjoy being black. They’re obsessed with being black. This whole victim stuff lets blacks enjoy being black and nurse their obsession while holding the moral high ground and not come across as completely self-absorbed and gloating (even though that’s manifestly obvious to any non deluded individual) which normally detracts from one holding the moral high ground.

* Salma Hayek can have ALL my Pokemon Points anytime she wants.

* When considering Hayek’s carefully argued position on identity and privilege, two points really stand out.

* Hey Salma, come on over to my place and let’s get “intersectional” while listening to some Barry White, who’s both White and black.

* Mexico is not exactly well-known for color blind casting:

Mestizo actors conspicuously absent from commercial ads in Mexico

Light-skinned actors get the vast majority of roles in television commercials in Mexico, laying bare the racism that persists in this majority mestizo nation.

“Commercials for consumer products require an aspirational profile, and that is white with light eyes, medium height and between 25 and 45 years old. The international Latino type,” actor Rodrigo Franco, president of the National Interpreters Association, told EFE.

The 51-year-old Franco, who is 1.56 meters (5-foot-1) in height and has “typical Mexican” features, said he had faced repeated discrimination in the advertising and acting worlds.

He said that unfair treatment had included being asked by a director to furnish an acting degree at an audition for a part as a construction worker and being kicked off a set by a security guard who said he could not be part of the cast because of his appearance.

Options for the “native Mexican” are restricted to commercials on government programs, which make up just 5 percent of television ads, Franco said.

In August 2013, a casting call sparked outrage. Mexico’s flagship air carrier, Aeromexico, said it was looking for actors and actresses for one of its commercials but specified that it wanted “nobody dark-skinned.”

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Steve Sailer: Actual Muslim Protester Women Turn Out Not to be Shepard Fairey’s Orientalist Hijab Fantasy

Posted on January 30, 2017 by Luke Ford

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* From where I sit, far from commenting on the actual flag-desecrator’s pulchritude, our host is pointing out something important about the Official Left (TM) purveyors of anti-US/anti-nationalist images and discourse:

They aren’t representing and celebrating the Other.

They depict westernized features and fetish when representing melanistic women, and ask us to believe they are celebrating the Other. Because of some Edge they introduce into the image to distract us from their game.

For starters, the flag-desecrator in the photo/video has a near-unibrow, no cheekbones to speak of, chipmunk cheeks, gappy teeth, and rather coarse skin texture. She looks Mexican to me (and I just notice since typing that that there are signs in Spanish in the background). But she looks like a lot of the chubby Mexicano studenten I see around Pugetopolis who aspire to a sinecure in the Grievance Studies business.

By contrast, the fetishized flag-desecrator in the poster looks more like a supermodel than a chubby Wise Latina who picks the rotting strawberries (the supposed poster children for open borders).

It is important that the artist didn’t trust himself to represent, say, a dumpy or older or leathery Muslim or Hispanic woman, but instead a sultry young woman with highly westernized features and Gaze.

This image is about sexual fetish. Not politics, or national policies involving borders, or vetting immigrants, or anything else. Like nearly all advertising in the (((Age of Bernays))), this one is designed to tweak libido. That is a strategy for restructuring the reproductive or consumer or resource-use urges of those the advertiser is trying to influence.

Even the artist knows this. One of the standard bodice-heaves of 1980s academic postmodernism was how disgusting it was that artists represented women looking at the viewer–The Male Gaze it was called. It was considered a form of rape (seriously) by the more lefty elements.

How interesting, then, that the Left is now representing brown women with the same Male Gaze they used to revile in Renaissance painting. Except now the pleasure principle involves throwing open borders so that white men can have fetishes about/mate with brown women with approval/without guilt, because Trump fascist Hitler imperialist racist something something.

* In the movie The Godfather, there’s a scene where Don Corleone is giving Michael some advice about life. He says, “I spent my whole life trying not to be careless. Women and children can afford to be careless, but not men.” It’s a great line and it was true for most of human existence. The role of males in society has always exposed them to the greater risk. That and male competition has often been for keeps. When the stakes are high the room for error is smaller so men have always had to be the less reckless of the sexes…We live in a soft age where women run most things so that means we live in a careless age as well. All sorts of silly and ridiculous things are indulged because the margin for error seems endless.

But the “margin for error” isn’t endless — it just seems so — women are extremely foolish and careless in these and other matters.

I posted before that women voted overwhelmingly for the Green candidate in the recent Austrian election — even though the Greens are the absolute worst on the migration issue — here is a link to the twitter page of Simone Peter — she is a leader of the Greens in Germany — take a look at her twitter page — is there even a hint that she cares about Germans?

* This fantasy about veiled women has been around for a while. I seem to recall that Mark Twain wrote about his infatuation with veiled Muslim women. That is, he felt that way until he actually visited the Middle East, as chronicled in his travel novels. As I recall, he wrote that the reality of Muslim women was so far from the fantasy, that he lauded Muslim men for their fortitude in actually marrying more than one.

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