Forever Pure – Beitar Jerusalem

Posted on June 11, 2017 by Luke Ford

Published on Apr 16, 2017: “Documentary which follows events at Israel’s most notorious football club. Beitar Jerusalem FC is the most popular team in Israel and the only club in the Premier League never to sign an Arab player. Midway through a season the club’s owner, Russian-Israeli oligarch Arcadi Gaydamak, brought in two Muslim players from Chechnya in a secretive transfer deal that triggered the most racist campaign in Israeli sport and sent the club spiraling out of control.

Forever Pure follows the famous football club through the tumultuous season, as power, money and politics fuel a crisis and shows how racism is destroying both the team and society from within.”

Hollywood Reporter:

In 2008, Russian oligarch Arcadi Gaydamak was hoping to become the new mayor of Jerusalem. His ownership of Beitar, secured a few years earlier, could potentially have been used as a campaigning tool but Gaydamak finally received just a few percent of the votes. Zinshtein’s on-camera interviews with the oligarch, who barely seems to speak any Hebrew, are chilling to behold, as the man has no problems in admitting what his plans were.

What is less directly addressed, but nonetheless suggested through the expert editing credited to Justine Wright and Noam Amit, is how the owner’s political defeat is related to his decision to bring on board to young Chechen players for the 2012-13 season. Foreign players aren’t unusual in Israeli soccer — and indeed Beitar already had a player from Latin America — but Gaydamak’s unexpected move was a shock for the core group of Beitar fans, known as the Familia. They pride themselves on the fact that their club is the only national soccer team that has never signed an Arab player — the film’s title is their proud chant that underlines the club’s “racial purity” — and they are now confronted with not one but two Muslim players at once. A form of revenge? Possibly. A way to thoroughly agitate Israeli sports and society at large? Certainly.

Zinshtein’s film intelligently dissects the many contradictions at play here, starting with the fact that it is absolutely shocking that Israelis, just a couple of generations after the Holocaust, want to pride themselves on any kind of racial purity to the explicit exclusion of others. The way in which different things get conflated — “Muslim” and “Arab” are two distinctly different things and Chechens are Muslims but definitely not Arabs — so they can be boiled down into angry and hateful rallying cries is a tragic and recurring theme.

It is shocking to see how the core group of supporters manages to turn the legions of fans against the club they profess to love so much. And all this only because of the arrival of two largely innocent pawns, 19-year-old Dzhabrail Kadiyev and 23-year-old Zaur Sadayev, the devoutly religious Chechen players who clearly had no clue what they were in for. (One of the film’s best scenes shows them holed up in their hotel room, like caged animals unable to understand what’s going on around them.)

The supporters’ loudly voiced anger and incitements to hatred finally result not only in practically empty stadiums but also physical threats and completely demotivated players.

Variety:

When Arcadi Gaydamak, the Russian billionaire owner of the Israeli soccer team Beitar Jerusalem, known for being the only team in the league without Arab players, hires two Chechen Muslims in the middle of the 2012-’13 season, it sparks a catastrophic battle between the team leadership and its right-wing, extreme nationalist fan base. Granted amazing access to all parties in the story, producer-director Maya Zinshtein, a Russian-born investigative journalist, smartly places her shocking portrait of a team and its fans in a broader sociopolitical context, allowing it to surpass its token subject matter and explore issues such as racism and mob rule. Indeed, it provides a cautionary tale for countries like the U.S., where politicians have failed to thoroughly condemn hate speech. Loaded with stranger-than-fiction incident, this documentary should find robust festival play before seguing into international broadcast.

Zinshtein opens with a brief history of the team, founded in 1936 and one of the Israel Premier League’s most controversial because of its multitude of outspoken fans who provide the players with plenty of love, but who also incur penalties for the team because of their bad behavior in the stands. Traditionally the team of choice for those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and Jews descended from communities in the Middle East, it is also known for a supporter’s group called La Familia that took over the eastern bleachers in Beitar’s Teddy Stadium back in 2005 and became notorious for chants that insult Arab players. The film’s title, “Forever Pure,” comes from a logo on one of their banners…

The members of La Familia take pride in being the most racist fans in the league and are able to instigate a boycott of the stadium. Certainly their absence seems preferable to their return when they boo their own team, fight with its new players, and threaten to kill the chairman.

Posted in Israel | Comments Off on Forever Pure – Beitar Jerusalem

Parasha Shelach (Numbers 13-15)

Posted on June 11, 2017 by Luke Ford

This week’s Torah portion covers the 12 spies sent in to the land of Israel, ten of whom come back with negative reports.

Listen here.

* We don’t see the world as it is. We see the world as we are. Didn’t God and Moshe know who they were sending out to spy on the land? If they knew they were sending fearful people, they should expect a fearful report.

* It was weird that Moses sent tribal leaders rather than trained spies. The mission was doomed from the start. In Josh. 2:1, Joshua sends two trained spies to scout out Jericho.

* Yes, I am sure Russia spies on America and tries to interfere in American affairs, just as America spies on other countries and interferes in their affairs. Spying on competitors is just how the world works. I’m not outraged when foreigners spy on America and try to hack into our databases. I know we do the same thing to them. Life is war. If you’ve got something good, other people will try to take it.

* If only there were some clues, some coded hints in appearance, that let you know who was different and therefore likely had different interests. Did these Hebrew spies have any morphological differences from the natives in the land and therefore did the natives know that it was ok to fear people who look different? Or were the Canaanites living under some terrifying form of political correctness that condemned noticing patterns?

* Nature has color-coded people for our advantage. A wise man notices patterns.

* LAT: “A grim pattern in European attacks: Missed chances to pinpoint terrorism suspects beforehand”

* WP: “In Duterte’s home town, martial law is wildly popular — the selfies prove it”

* John J. Mearsheimer recommends that America do everything it can to slow the rise of China (including the removal of all Chinese students studying in America), because the more relatively powerful China gets, the more it will flex its muscles to push us out of its zones of influence.

* The Alt Right case for ISIS.

* Num. 13:32: A land that devours its people. Jacob Milgrom: “Thus this idiom can only mean that the nature of the land is such that it will perpetually keeps its inhabitants at war, perhaps a reflection of the geopolitical position of Canaan as a land bridge whose city-states were either fighting each other or stemming invasion fro Asia or Africa.” Wherever Jews go in the world, there is this perception that they tend to increase social tensions and division and multi-culturalism.

* Nobody can read the Torah and regard the Israelites as impressive. In Num 14:1: “They wept that night.” Num. 14:4: “They said to one another, “Let us appoint a leader and let us return to Egypt!” Is there any other people or religion that has a sacred text that makes their own group look so bad? I can’t think of one.

Stoicism is not typically a trait one associates with Middle Eastern peoples. They tend to be more emotional than Northern Europeans and they tend to have less shame about using their emotions to try to manipulate a competitor just as women tend to have less compunction about using emotional manipulation than do men.

* “Let us return to Egypt.” As a chronic under-earner, I’ve often preferred to return to under-earning jobs and abusive relationships because they were familiar. The older I get, the more I like routine. We have a profound affect on how other people treat us. If we’re willing to sell ourselves short, there will be no end of takers. I have friends who have noted to me that when it comes to interacting with others, I’m not flexible. I need to have things my way. That isolates me. It’s a reaction to growing up in foster care. Routine gives me a feeling of safety. The Israelites seem to have PTSD. They seem like losers. There wasn’t PTSD until that diagnosis was made popular, then large numbers of people had PTSD.

* I’ve never dated a woman above an 8. I just felt that 9s and above were out of my league. On the other hand, a GF who was a 6 asked me, “Why do you keep trying to date women who are out of your league?”

* Num. 14:5: “Moses and Aaron fell on their face before the entire congregation…” Can you imagine Winston Churchill or Charles DeGaulle or Adolf Hitler doing this?

* Num. 14: 11-20. Moshe manipulates God with an emotional appeal. How do you prefer to think about God? Through dogmatic theology or through stories? Christianity emphasizes theology, Judaism emphasizes stories.

* Num. 14:34. God sounds like Donald Trump: “Thus you shall know what it means to thwart me.”

* Num. 15:16. One law for everyone. But this will only work if the people are homogeneous. If the people are diverse, they will chafe against the law. Some will find it too strict, others too loose. If America is to have one law, it will be the white man’s law and other peoples will hate it.

* Num. 15:32-36. They find a man gathering wood on the Sabbath and they put him to death. This is an army on the march. They need discipline. The Torah is not libertarian.

Published on Apr 16, 2017: “Documentary which follows events at Israel’s most notorious football club. Beitar Jerusalem FC is the most popular team in Israel and the only club in the Premier League never to sign an Arab player. Midway through a season the club’s owner, Russian-Israeli oligarch Arcadi Gaydamak, brought in two Muslim players from Chechnya in a secretive transfer deal that triggered the most racist campaign in Israeli sport and sent the club spiraling out of control.

Forever Pure follows the famous football club through the tumultuous season, as power, money and politics fuel a crisis and shows how racism is destroying both the team and society from within.”

Posted in Torah | Comments Off on Parasha Shelach (Numbers 13-15)

Trump’s Judicial Picks Are Keeping Republicans Happy—and Quiet

Posted on June 9, 2017 by Luke Ford

The New Republic:

In a rare show of competency, he’s tapped five times as many judges as Obama had at this point—and conservatives are delighted.

The most critical government document released on Wednesday—the one that’ll have the most wide-ranging impact in the future—was not James Comey’s prepared testimony for the Senate Intelligence Committee about his interactions with Donald Trump. It was a simple press release, issued by the White House, announcing a “fourth wave” of judicial nominations since the Trump inauguration. The eleven nominations included four district court judgeships, three for the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, three for the Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims, and one for the Court of Federal Claims. Conservatives were uniformly delighted.

All told, Trump has nominated 22 judges to fill vacancies across the federal bench. Thus far, only two—Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch and Sixth Circuit Court Judge Amul Thapar—have been confirmed. But the prospect of filling vacancies over time explains a lot about why congressional Republicans have stood by Trump, despite the erratic and stormy start to his presidency. As long as Trump keeps funneling a steady supply of conservative jurists to the Senate, in a bid to dramatically reshape the federal courts, Republicans can go to bed happy that they’re fulfilling at least one major element of their political project.

Judicial nominations are the one area where the Trump administration is “running like a fine-tuned machine,” as the president boasted in February. In fact, Trump’s team has far outstripped the efforts of his predecessor. By this date eight years ago, President Obama had made just four judicial nominations: Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, and three nominations for the Court of Appeals.

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57yo Australian Conservative Pundit Andrew Bolt Fights Back Against Antifa

Posted on June 9, 2017 by Luke Ford

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* Some background on Bolt for the benefit of Steve’s readers:

Bolt is one of Australia’s best-known conservative commentators, and the most prominent in Melbourne. No other commentator is excoriated as much by the SJW left and its MSM enablers. It is therefore no surprise that leftist thugs would want to target him in particular.

A few years ago, Bolt was sued under a notorious law (section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, which operates much like section 13 did in Canada until Mark Steyn succeeded in getting it repealed) for two newspaper columns he wrote. In them he exposed the racket whereby middle-class individuals with small amounts of Aboriginal ancestry manage to win large numbers of government grants and jobs reserved for Aboriginal people, supposedly to compensate for their entrenched poverty and disadvantage.

Bolt lost the case due largely to the judge, a creature of the leftist political machine in this city, who perversely interpreted Bolt’s comments in a way that enabled them to be found in breach of section 18C.

While Bolt is understandably bitter about the case, he hasn’t slowed in his efforts to expose the hypocrisies and lies of the left, and champion conservative values. He is particularly concerned about the Muslim and African influx which has led to instances of terrorism and an endless wave of serious crime.

I long knew of his moral courage, but the physical courage he showed in the face of this attack on a Melbourne street is a revelation.

* Andrew Bolt’s masterful counter-attack starting at 40 seconds into the video must be taught as a fighting method. The Bolt Method was great. Bolt first pushed the first masked anti-free speech scumbag out of the way while preparing to deal with the other. This created the necessary torque in the torso to deliver a straight jab right to the face of the second masked anti-free speech scumbag.

Antipodean Andrew Bolt has had enough of the anti-free speech dirtbags. Bolt has made all Australia proud. I don’t know nothing of Bolt nor his politics, I don’t care. Bolt was sneakily attacked while his back was turned by masked anti-free speech rats. Andrew Bolt fought back brilliantly.

Bolt now begins the pushback period for Western Civilization. The masked anti-free speech rats have gone too far. Boltism in Australia is now combining with Based Stick Manism in the United States to form a new resistance to anti-free speech tyranny.

* Who took the video of the attack on Andrew Bolt? It opens with Bolt being attacked from behind, then shows him brawling with the masked men, successfully fighting back, one-against-two. Then a bystander shows up, and the assailants run down the sidewalk.

An accomplice must have filmed the incident, then posted the video on Facebook. But it sure paints Bolt as brave and effective, while his two (three) attackers start off by looking cowardly, and then graduate to weak.

Presumably this is antifa virtue signalling (“some of our family in solidarity were attacked by Andrew Bolt while they were protesting today”). They must see things somewhat differently than an outsider like me.

* There is no Second Amendment in Australia, or most other Western Countries… the Left controls the governments and self-defense is a crime in many jurisdictions, so the Left owns the streets.

Unfortunately, the same is pretty much true in ultra-leftist American cities like New York, D.C., and San Francisco.

Places where Second Amendment rights are ironclad (e.g., West Virginia, Indiana, Oklahoma, Arizona) don’t have any antifa problems whatsoever.

* The old cuckish Right couldn’t stand up to these Thugs.

Now the Right is getting a testosterone boost. One punch in self-defense and these clowns scatter.

* I live in rural Oklahoma and almost every person I know is armed. When a white police officer in Tulsa was recently acquitted after killing a black man there was some whining, but no street violence.

White men in Oklahoma (with the exception of a few hipster and yuppie enclaves in Tulsa and OKC) are still a pretty rough bunch. Nothing like the effete pansies I see portrayed in virtually every tv program or commercial I see.

* I’m from Seattle, and for years I watched these guys get away with all sorts of crimes. The only lefties who get treated with a rough hand are those who actually threaten the institutions that provide these cities with money and power. For example, a few leftist environmentalists sabotaged a biotech lab at the University of Washington about 15 years ago, and they got hammered. Every single one of them was picked up and prosecuted. One is still in prison, and another suffocated himself while in federal detention. This happened because the UW is Seatttle’s single largest employer and the largest recipient of tax funds in the state of Washington. If these guys had simply rioted and smashed up a bunch of franchises run by small businessmen the city would have looked the other way.

Given that white people who so much as verbally threaten blacks get up to 20 years in the slammer, you’d think the antifas who routinely violate people’s civil rights with actual criminal violence could at least spend a couple years behind bars, but it doesn’t happen. It’s obvious that Democrats have neither any interest in nor desire for prosecution if the victims are not clearly on their side.

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Jews are not nihilists

Posted on June 7, 2017 by Luke Ford

Audacious Epigone: On their most recent podcast, Kevins Grace and Steel asserted, in the context of a long discussion on George Soros, that Jews are particularly nihilistic.

If so, they sure are diligent, deliberate, and effortful in attaining meaningless worldly success. Come to think of it, Kefka’s character was based in large part on Soros!

The percentage who “strongly disagree” with the statement “In my opinion, life does not serve any purpose”, by religious identification (n = 3,756):

Generally belief in God and nihilism are inversely correlated but irreligious Jews are less nihilistic than religious goys are. So the GSS results are in line with that assertion.

COMMENTS:

* And that’s why Jews are so overwhelmingly represented in idealistic/outright utopian social/political movements. “Humanism” is mostly disdained by real conservatives, and hell, in the most gentile friendly wing of Leftism (Gaia), there is often animosity towards people for taking a dump on nature.

Gentiles are more likely to believe in limits to human ability and understanding; as is now depressingly obvious, cucks for the last 30-40 years have driven from influence grouchy paleos who believe that liberal elite driven intervention in both domestic and foreign affairs is bound to fail due to it’s ignorance of human nature and potential.

The highest IQ people (e.g., Jews), especially the most verbally oriented ones (e.g., Jews) are better at fooling themselves and the a lot of other people that one should be dedicated to the goal of “getting involved” so as to feel better about their sense of purpose in life.

I would think that proles and less verbally oriented groups don’t hear as much utopian blather so they’re more concerned with the nuts and bolts of day to day survival than they are with lofty socio-political goals. In other words, paying bills and not having my car or house get broken into are more important than gaining social status by spouting the most Marxist feel good crap possible.

And go figure, modern Protestants have cucked hard for Jews and also have been heavily involved in Neo-Conjobs. Prots are more involved in paranoid culture regarding good works to be done so that one can be saved in the Second Coming than are Catholics and of course, non-believers. Jews consider high social status among liberal elites to be their savior.

Derbyshire said some years back that conservatives started to falter when they ran from their pessimistic streak, making them susceptible to the kind of naive dreaming that should stick with the liberals where it belongs.

Attributing these problems to a knowing Jewish conspiracy to crap on everything is not something I necessarily agree with. I think the uniquely pernicious Jewish skill set of high IQ and high verbal orientation allows them to weave dense webs of pollyanna sophistry regarding human potential. And, as is often pointed out, if Jews really understood what they were doing, then they sure as hell would not want Muslims anywhere near them. Yet they insist on flooding Jew friendly Western countries with ethnic groups who detest Jews.

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