February 20, 2016 The British Ban Against Boycotts Of Israel Luke Ford No sacred cows.

The British Ban Against Boycotts Of Israel

Posted on February 20, 2016 by Luke Ford

REPORT: The government today announced new regulations preventing local councils, NHS Trusts, universities and other public bodies from boycotting trade and investment with any of 162 member countries of the World Trade Organisation. Of course Canada and New Zealand don’t require such sweeping safeguards to protect their trade deals, so you don’t need to be Ban Ki-moon to see this wide net has been cast to primarily protect just one state – Israel.

These new regulations curb councils through central government legislation, so the anti-democratic argument is clear.

The move also creates an almighty problem in terms of cross-party opposition to Israel boycotts. Before parliament spoke as one. Now, suddenly, boycotts are a party political hot potato.

Jeremy Corbyn stated this week that curbing council independence is “an attack on local democracy”. I may need to lie down in a dark room for agreeing with him. But despite the drawbacks and dangers, the government’s ends in this case justify its means. Just.

Because I don’t know an alternative to stem the ideological onslaught of Israel-hating and Jew-baiting, camouflaged as right-on political concern.

Because I don’t know of any other country – not Nigeria, Somalia or Sudan – targeted by a local council or an NHS trust or in recent times. The words Israel’ and ‘boycott’ ‘are now synonymous across parts of England, Scotland and Wales.

Because Britain has become the European capital of maniacal Israel bashing and its lunatic fringe – the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

Because the atmosphere is becoming uncomfortable – even intolerable – for British Jews, especially students, who are often on the receiving end.
This week the Jewish co-chair of Oxford University’s Labour Club quit, claiming a large number of fellow students “have some kind of problem with Jews” after the club endorsed Israel Apartheid Week.

Last week London’s King’s College pledged to punish pro-Palestinian thugs who set off fire alarms, smashed a window and hurled chairs at a Jewish Society event.

Of course Israel doesn’t need government intervention to protect it from bullsh*t boycotts. They have zero impact on a country the UK heavily relies on.

Annual trade between Israel and the UK is worth £4bn ($5.7bn). Business is booming and growing at a rapid rate. The UK is Israel’s biggest export market after the USA.

As I write this the UK and Israel are rubber-stamping a co-operation deal for defending national infrastructures such as banks, transport and power plants from cyber-attack. It’s a deal that makes every one of us safer.

The NHS relies on Israel. One in six of its drugs come from the Jewish state, including Azilect, the most advanced treatment available for Parkinson’s Disease. If there is a cure for cancer, you can be sure an Israeli scientist will bloody well find it.

The country’s irrigation and farming methods feed parched developing populations and show them how to reuse 80% of its wastewater.

No oil, just toil. That’s Israel.

All this is being accomplished in the middle of the world’s crappiest neighbourhood, where virtually every other country from Gibraltar to the Khyber Pass is a blotch on humanity that richly deserves a fair few boycotts, divestments or sanctions of their own.

Tel Aviv is a brief drive away from Hezbollah to the north, Hamas to the west and Isis and al-Qaeda to the east – where millions suffer under tyrannical systems that detest minorities, women who drive and people on Twitter. And Jews. My, how they hate Jews.

A casual onlooker would hold Israel in esteem, not contempt. But for Britain’s [often publicly funded] boycott movement, and sadly all too many on the left, no good deed goes unpunished when it comes to just one county. Facts come second to fanaticism for this batty bunch of book-burners.

As Brendan O’Neill, the editor of Spiked Online, powerfully puts it: “Israel-bashing brings together both intolerant, austere Islamist outfits with well-to-do white people from Islington who don’t believe in God. It makes partners of youthful politicos who fancy themselves as open-minded and diehard conspiracy theorists who believe Jews run the world.”

Would you want to be a member of that club?

Local authorities have no business turning their unexamined assumptions into divisive political statements. Clackmannanshire Council doesn’t need a foreign policy. That’s why these contentious new regulations are called for.

It might be like taking a javelin to lance a boil, but this abscess won’t clear up on its own without bursting.

Posted in Anti-Semitism, Israel | Comments Off

Israel boycott ban: Shunning Israeli goods to become criminal offence for public bodies and student unions

Posted on February 20, 2016 by Luke Ford

The Independent:

Local councils, public bodies and even some university student unions are to be banned by law from boycotting “unethical” companies, as part of a controversial crackdown being announced by the Government.

Under the plan all publicly funded institutions will lose the freedom to refuse to buy goods and services from companies involved in the arms trade, fossil fuels, tobacco products or Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.

Any public bodies that continue to pursue boycotts will face “severe penalties”, ministers said.

Senior government sources said they were cracking down on town-hall boycotts because they “undermined good community relations, poisoned and polarised debate and fuelled anti-Semitism”.

But critics said the move amounted to a “gross attack on democratic freedoms”.

A spokesman for the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said: “The Government’s decision to ban councils and other public bodies from divesting from trade or investments they regard as unethical is an attack on local democracy.

“People have the right to elect local representatives able to make decisions free of central government political control. That includes withdrawal of investments or procurement on ethical and human rights grounds.

“This Government’s ban would have outlawed council action against apartheid South Africa. Ministers talk about devolution, but in practice they’re imposing Conservative Party policies on elected local councils across the board.”

Significantly, and underlining the main target of the ban, the formal announcement will be made by the Cabinet Office minister Matt Hancock when he visits Israel this week.

Israeli companies, along with other firms which have investments in the occupied West Bank, have been among those targeted by unofficial boycotts in the past.

In 2014 Leicester City Council passed a policy to boycott goods produced in Israeli settlements in the West Bank while the Scottish Government published a procurement notice to Scottish councils which “strongly discourages trade and investment from illegal settlements”.

Posted in Israel | Comments Off

Steve Sailer: We Won’t Have ¡Jeb¡ to Kick Around Anymore

Posted on February 20, 2016 by Luke Ford

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* We might not have ¡Jeb! to kick around anymore, but this site has steadily lost track of Rubio, the open borders establishment’s pick for several months now. Time to kick it into high gear!

* Bush’s spiritual son, Rubio, appears ready to continue this race.

* Steve, when ¡George P! runs for president, can you get those exclamation marks right? It’s one up, one down. Or perhaps it’s a calculated microaggression on your part.

* Part of Rubio’s success is that the MSM, including Fox, does not dwell on his support of amnesty. One would think the ‘gang of 8′ affair would make him persona non grata to the GOP base. If the MSM focused on this issue, Rubio would be toast.

Trump really went after Bush, even when Bush was beyond out of it. It was probably tactical at first last summer, but then became personal as Bush used all that pac money to run ads against him.

Trump needs to turn against Rubio now and make sure all voters are aware of Senator Amnesty.

* It’s really nice to see Bush Jr’s legacy be publicly repudiated like this. I know that’s only part of what went into Jeb’s loss but still. Having Trump whip Jeb on his brother’s legacy like he did in the last debate, having Dubya show up in person in SC after that and then this loss … it just feels right and good.

* The Bush Family – has effectively committed suicide by giving too much away to the neofeudalist and neocon/pro-Israel wing while giving the middle finger to middle class Republicans. War in Afghanistan, war in Iraq, the failure to regulate Wall Street, the housing bubble, and the utter implosion of much of white middle class America.

Forget the defeat of the GOP establishment. The defeat of Jeb Bush implies there is a real price to be paid for betraying your voting base.

* The 22% voting for Cruz are probably the low-information Evangelicals who cannot be persuaded that he isn’t the second coming of James Dobson. But who are the 22% voting for Rubio?

I’m guessing they are the last rump of the SWPL, upper middle class, liberal leaning, reflexively anti-Russian and pro-immigrant, tax cutting Republicans represented by FOX News, Jonah Goldberg, George Will, and David Brooks. I didn’t think there were that many of them left, though.

These people will never vote for Trump. That in its own way is encouraging, for now we know that the decidedly anti-Trump vote is no more than 1/5th of the Republican electorate even in heavily favored South Carolina. When Cruz throws his support to Trump (and he will), Trump will have over half the vote locked up in every contest going forward, and will be unstoppable.

The worry is in the general election. The SWPL Republicans might very well vote Hill or Bernie. Trump will need to pick up enough crossover votes from the disaffected blocs on the Democratic side to make up the difference. This will be easier for him to do if Hillary is the nominee.

* George P. Bush is Texas Land Commissioner and likely has connections to real estate interests. The Bush Family will still probably try to push P. for Texas Governor in 2022. A Trump victory in 2016 & ’20 might push that back to 2026 or even further. Either way, P. needs to be kept away from the Texas Governor’s mansion or the US Senate for that matter.

* This was the first time I saw him with his midget wife by his side. He even made some stomach turning reference to sleeping with her at the end of his statement. Yuck!

I thought it was weird the other day when Jeb was on stage with Dubya and Laura with only little Lindsay Graham to keep him company. I guess Laura makes his mestizo wife feel uncomfortable.

Posted in America | Comments Off

Was The TV Show ‘Friends’ Sexist?

Posted on February 19, 2016 by Luke Ford

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* Apparently, Friends‘s worst sin is the fact that Chandler was hyper-upset and paranoid whenever people accused him of being gay. Apparently, being upset for being confused as gay isn’t allowed, since, according to the left, gays aren’t any less “manly” than straights, and there isn’t anything wrong with them, don’t you imply otherwise!!!

N.B. One writerly in-joke of the show was that Chandler was originally written as a gay man. Then they scrapped the idea before the pilot, but left in much of his characterization, and thus having him freak out about being less manly/gay was the a call back to his actual original demeanor.

* Friends used to be the ur-SWPL show. The characters were more or less my generation, though, so I watched it obsessively and occasionally still do.

* I remember Friends as being fairly PC in a 90s sort of way, that is to say with a sense of humour still. The characters were clearly meant to be the happy-progressive wing of Gen X and showed it, but I recognized them as an attempt to depict the non-rich Manhattan wing of my generational tribe.

I don’t remember them going out of their way to be diverse, nor to suggest any criticism of diversity. Much like normals in that decade would have been. I don’t recall any noteworthy gay or tranny humour, but then I probably wouldn’t have thought it memorable if there had been. [It’s coming back to me now- there was the whole Chandler/Joey ‘are they secretly gay’ gag that popped up now and again, but back then such humour was not assumed to be anti-gay, and it certainly was not presented as such. That must be it.]

If it’s not the Chandler/Joey thing, I expect [I am not about to read the WaPo article] we are now to regard it as racist, sexist and cissexist on the grounds the characters were all white and seemed to have few interactions with non-whites [Jews were overrepresented- both Gellers and Rachel Green for sure], the women were on the ditzy side [the men were also losers, of course], and all 6 were straight.

I guess I’ll have to go out and buy the whole series now and binge-watch while waving a Confederate flag and knocking back rye and cokes and reading heartiste.

* At the rate things are going, all recordings of TV dramas and sitcoms will have to be destroyed once they’re five years old, lest any sensitive person stumble upon them and be offended.

* If “Friends” is offensive for its lack of mandatory diversity, then I wonder how long Disney will be operating the Jungle Book Cruise at Disney World for its insensitive portrayal of the tropical natives as cannibals? I guess that is a little too much diversity for this day and age.

* One of the greatest videos on Youtube is the Watergate tape of Nixon recounting a new show he saw, All in the Family.

“So there’s this average Joe, conservative blue collar guy, works hard, Abert or something. And he’s got this hippy son, a fag, who’s always berating him about his terrible ideas. And they present the whole thing like the old guy’s a laughable buffoon for what he believes. Pure propaganda.”

Something like that. Then they talk about the episode meant to deal with homosexuality where of course Archie’s oldest friend, the high school football star who looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger on a particularly masculine day, turns out to be gay.

* I hated that show with a passion because it was so PC and the characters were so self absorbed. What does that make me now that it is viewed as being unPC? Oh yeah, an iSteve fan.

Funny, but the other day I was thinking about how much I hated the show and googled the number of children the cast members have. The average child per cast member is .66. My guess is that real world equivalents to the characters (PC and self-absorbed) have about the same fertility rate. Good riddance.

* I don’t like political correctness any more than the next guy but I’d really love to see the cast of Friends put on trial for their crimes. We need a neo-Maoist reality TV trial of the bunch of them. The hostesses of the show should be some mocha-coloured girls with difficult hair. Ideally it would be university undergrads who can really get themselves worked up. Does anyone know where we could find some?

Posted in Hollywood | Comments Off

Williams College cancels “Uncomfortable Learning” talk by controversial author John Derbyshire

Posted on February 19, 2016 by Luke Ford

REPORT:

WILLIAMSTOWN — The president of Williams College has ordered the cancellation of a student-organized speaking engagement by an author characterized by many as a white supremacist.
In a letter to the college community on Thursday, Adam Falk said the views espoused in the writings of John Derbyshire have no place in the school’s discourse.
“We have said we wouldn’t cancel speakers or prevent the expression of views except in the most extreme circumstances,” Falk wrote. “In other words: There’s a line somewhere, but in our history of hosting events and speeches of all kinds, we hadn’t yet found it. We’ve found the line.
“Derbyshire, in my opinion, is on the other side of it,” he wrote. “Many of his expressions clearly constitute hate speech, and we will not promote such speech on this campus or in our community.”
Derbyshire is a former columnist for National Review magazine whose writings have been condemned by some as racist.
The move raised protests from the leader of the student group, Uncomfortable Learning, which had arranged for the appearance scheduled for Monday night.
In an interview with The Eagle, Derbyshire said he reacted to the cancellation with “a shrug.”
“The colleges today are dreadful,” he said. “Nothing surprises me anymore. Hence the shrug.”
He characterized Falk’s statement as full of “empty phrases.”

Here is an excerpt of the column that got John Derbyshire fired from National Review in April of 2012:

There is much talk about “the talk.”
“Sean O’Reilly was 16 when his mother gave him the talk that most black parents give their teenage sons,” Denisa R. Superville of the Hackensack (NJ) Record tells us. Meanwhile, down in Atlanta: “Her sons were 12 and 8 when Marlyn Tillman realized it was time for her to have the talk,” Gracie Bonds Staples writes in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
Leonard Greene talks about the talk in the New York Post. Someone bylined as KJ Dell’Antonia talks about the talk in The New York Times. Darryl Owens talks about the talk in the Orlando Sentinel.
Yes, talk about the talk is all over.
There is a talk that nonblack Americans have with their kids, too. My own kids, now 19 and 16, have had it in bits and pieces as subtopics have arisen. If I were to assemble it into a single talk, it would look something like the following.
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
(1) Among your fellow citizens are forty million who identify as black, and whom I shall refer to as black. The cumbersome (and MLK-noncompliant) term “African-American” seems to be in decline, thank goodness. “Colored” and “Negro” are archaisms. What you must call “the ‘N’ word” is used freely among blacks but is taboo to nonblacks.
“There is a talk that nonblack Americans have with their kids, too.”
(2) American blacks are descended from West African populations, with some white and aboriginal-American admixture. The overall average of non-African admixture is 20-25 percent. The admixture distribution is nonlinear, though: “It seems that around 10 percent of the African American population is more than half European in ancestry.” (Same link.)
(3) Your own ancestry is mixed north-European and northeast-Asian, but blacks will take you to be white.
(4) The default principle in everyday personal encounters is, that as a fellow citizen, with the same rights and obligations as yourself, any individual black is entitled to the same courtesies you would extend to a nonblack citizen. That is basic good manners and good citizenship. In some unusual circumstances, however—e.g., paragraph (10h) below—this default principle should be overridden by considerations of personal safety.
(5) As with any population of such a size, there is great variation among blacks in every human trait (except, obviously, the trait of identifying oneself as black). They come fat, thin, tall, short, dumb, smart, introverted, extroverted, honest, crooked, athletic, sedentary, fastidious, sloppy, amiable, and obnoxious. There are black geniuses and black morons. There are black saints and black psychopaths. In a population of forty million, you will find almost any human type. Only at the far, far extremes of certain traits are there absences. There are, for example, no black Fields Medal winners. While this is civilizationally consequential, it will not likely ever be important to you personally. Most people live and die without ever meeting (or wishing to meet) a Fields Medal winner.
(6) As you go through life, however, you will experience an ever larger number of encounters with black Americans. Assuming your encounters are random—for example, not restricted only to black convicted murderers or to black investment bankers—the Law of Large Numbers will inevitably kick in. You will observe that the means—the averages—of many traits are very different for black and white Americans, as has been confirmed by methodical inquiries in the human sciences.
(7) Of most importance to your personal safety are the very different means for antisocial behavior, which you will see reflected in, for instance, school disciplinary measures, political corruption, and criminal convictions.
(8) These differences are magnified by the hostility many blacks feel toward whites. Thus, while black-on-black behavior is more antisocial in the average than is white-on-white behavior, average black-on-white behavior is a degree more antisocial yet.
(9) A small cohort of blacks—in my experience, around five percent—is ferociously hostile to whites and will go to great lengths to inconvenience or harm us. A much larger cohort of blacks—around half—will go along passively if the five percent take leadership in some event. They will do this out of racial solidarity, the natural willingness of most human beings to be led, and a vague feeling that whites have it coming.
(10) Thus, while always attentive to the particular qualities of individuals, on the many occasions where you have nothing to guide you but knowledge of those mean differences, use statistical common sense:
(10a) Avoid concentrations of blacks not all known to you personally.
(10b) Stay out of heavily black neighborhoods.
(10c) If planning a trip to a beach or amusement park at some date, find out whether it is likely to be swamped with blacks on that date (neglect of that one got me the closest I have ever gotten to death by gunshot).
(10d) Do not attend events likely to draw a lot of blacks.
(10e) If you are at some public event at which the number of blacks suddenly swells, leave as quickly as possible.
(10f) Do not settle in a district or municipality run by black politicians.
(10g) Before voting for a black politician, scrutinize his/her character much more carefully than you would a white.
(10h) Do not act the Good Samaritan to blacks in apparent distress, e.g., on the highway.
(10i) If accosted by a strange black in the street, smile and say something polite but keep moving.
(11) The mean intelligence of blacks is much lower than for whites. The least intelligent ten percent of whites have IQs below 81; forty percent of blacks have IQs that low. Only one black in six is more intelligent than the average white; five whites out of six are more intelligent than the average black. These differences show in every test of general cognitive ability that anyone, of any race or nationality, has yet been able to devise. They are reflected in countless everyday situations. “Life is an IQ test.”

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* From the way the VDARE post was written, it sounds like Derb was informed of the cancellation by being sent a link to a public notice by a third party. Did Falk even bother contacting him? I wonder. I suspect not–what a jerk!!

In the old days, they used to let mobs try to intimidate people (viz, John O’Sullivan at Yale). I think they have lost courage in their positions now. Falk is, I believe, a physicist, so should be facile enough with numbers and research to know what’s up. A cancellation is an implicit admission not that Derb has unhinged views that can be easily countered but that anyone like him is potentially going to wake students up to the fact that reality goes against the narrative.

* Hate speech? He’s never called for violence. I’ve never seen him use a slur. This would outrage me if anything outraged me anymore.

* * In the Free Speech era (ca. 1960-1970) colleges invited George Lincoln Rockwell (the head of the American Nazi Party) to give speeches so they could see what all the fuss was about.

It was a more confident and inquiring culture back then.

* Yes, back then they were confident George Lincoln Rockwell would sound foolish to the students, so no harm done. Today’s college administrators are afraid John Derbyshire would make a great deal of sense to their students, and he would. That’s the problem.

Posted in Academia, Censorship, John Derbyshire | Comments Off

Should We Lower Lending Standards For Blacks, Hispanics?

Posted on February 19, 2016 by Luke Ford

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* I feel bad for that 24 year old Hispanic. I remember graduating from high school and getting from the principal that deed for my first home along with my high school diploma… what a happy moment for me… It’s so unfair that the minorities in my high school did not share in this time-honored American tradition.

* “QUESTION: I actually purchased a home six months ago and I can relate because the amount of hoops that I had to jump as a 24-year-old Hispanic were just unprecedented. So thank you for that.”

Probably not even 10% of white 24-year-olds own a home, but a 24-year-old Hispanic buys a home and complains that he had to ‘jump through hoops.’

Welcome to adulthood, pal. We’re on our second home and we had to jump through hoops both times. My parents are aged, reasonably well off white folk in their late sixties and they’re still jumping through hoops.

Incidentally, on our last mortgage application – filled out on-line – my wife and I marked that we were black and ethnically Hispanic (we didn’t want to put anything, but the form said the loan officer would have to enter her best guess if we didn’t mark anything). They still had no problem pre-approving us.

* A 24 year old who could afford a house in Las Vegas probably has a lot of “irregular” income that wouldn’t be reported on a W-2. Don’t ask any questions about that though, or you’re a racist.

Posted in Blacks, Latino, Mortgages | Comments Off

The Decline Of Anti-Semitism

Posted on February 19, 2016 by Luke Ford

Guy Sorman writes this ridiculous essay at City Journal:

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is Jewish. Does anyone care? We hear nothing about it in the campaign; voters seem uninterested. Things would have been different a generation ago: remember that, up to the 1960s, American universities imposed a de facto quota on Jews. In France, Laurent Fabius, the new president of the Constitutional Council, the nation’s highest court, is of Jewish origin, a fact that has escaped notice. The new Minister of Culture is Jewish—could this have been imagined in the country of the Dreyfus affair and of Marshall Pétain, the Nazis’ most enthusiastic collaborator? In Spain, the descendants of Jews expelled in 1492 can now have their original nationality restored, if they request it. It is true that, especially in France, in places where the Jewish community is mostly of North African origin, Jews are victims of violent criminal acts. But these remain quite rare, committed by young Arabs who reenact the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in their sections of Paris or Marseille. And anti-Zionism shouldn’t be confused with anti-Semitism.
Anti-Zionism is based on a real situation: the Palestinians are not a mythical people, nor are their demands mythical, however difficult they may be to satisfy. Anti-Semitism, on the other hand, is entirely mythical: the Jew was not a real person but a mystical and political construction. The extermination of Jewish communities, which began in France and Germany around A.D. 1000, and continued in the wake of the Crusades, was almost always set off by an accusation of ritual crime: a Christian child supposedly had his throat slit in order to mix his blood in with the ingredients of bread for the Jewish paschal feast. The pogroms in Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century similarly took off from this myth. For 1,000 years in the West, the Jew was the standard scapegoat for explaining bad harvests, economic crises, and bank failures. Jews, thought to be rich when almost all lived in poverty, were expelled, massacred, and stripped of their possessions.
Anti-Semitism was also based on the accusation of “deicide,” until Vatican II erased this reference from the Easter liturgy. The mythic character of anti-Semitism is demonstrated by the lack of correlation between the number of Jews and the virulence of anti-Semitic feelings. When the Dreyfus affair broke out, less than 60,000 Jews lived in France, and they held mediocre ranks in society. Dreyfus himself was only a modest colonel. Germany was home to fewer than 100,000 Jews when Hitler seized power in 1933. In Poland, where one still finds anti-Semitic currents on certain radio stations and in certain newspapers, Jews themselves have disappeared. Jews are not necessary for anti-Semitism to flourish—as shown by its persistence in Poland, as it persisted in Stalinist Russia and even in France in the immediate aftermath of the war. Some of my lycée professors (high school teachers) were openly anti-Semitic.
The emigration of 7,000 French Jews each year, some argue, proves that being a Jew in France is unbearable. But this figure, representing about 1 percent of France’s Jewish population, is misleading, since it mixes together economic exiles (who are not only Jews) with those who, for religious reasons, wish to pursue their life in Israel, and perhaps some who fear the hostility of young Arabs.
It is time to admit that Jews are no longer scapegoats—in fact, they are hardly distinguishable from the non-Jewish population. Is this because Jews have assimilated? Jews have always shown a surprising patriotism wherever they lived: in 1914, my ancestors, Austrian Jews, fought in the Austrian army, and my Russian ancestors in the Army of the Czar. I did not yet have French ancestors, but they likely would have rushed to the front just as Dreyfus did. It is not Jews who have changed but Western society. Of course, the discovery of the Shoah in 1945 made it forever clear that anti-Semitism is diabolical, but I would date the end of anti-Semitism to the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961. This “banality of evil,” according to Hannah Arendt, made it so that after this trial no bureaucrat (“I am a bureaucrat who obeyed orders,” Eichmann said in his defense) and no intellectual could call himself an anti-Semite. Anti-Semitism, which had been an elegant position in Europe among Christian intellectuals on the right and anti-capitalists on the left, became grotesque after Eichmann. Then, in 1962, came Vatican II, whose influence remains fundamental. The church became sincerely philo-Semitic.
Because of the persistence of attacks that mix old-fashioned anti-Semitism with contemporary anti-Zionism, some in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands will consider me too optimistic. But I remember that in 1940, the French police deported my family. Today, they protect us. It’s a very different world, and we need to keep that truth in view.

Guy Sorman apparently has never heard of Leon Blum or Pierre Mendes-France. Blum was imprisoned in Buchenwald and survived WWII even though he was a Jew. And Mendes-France was important in the French involvement in the Suez campaign of 1956.

France has had Jews in positions of power for many decades.

Since Guy Sorman obviously knows little of France, why would anything else he writes be more accurate?

COMMENTS:

* There is certainly unreasoning, libelous hatred of Jews out there (often channeled through anti-Zionism), but, as we seem to agree, there is much reasonable resentment of behavior which it is within the power of Jews to change. Since we need to talk openly about Islam, and Muslims as a group, we open the door for similar discussions about Jews–discussions we can’t, and should’t, try to shut down by reflexive charges of anti-semitism. This is easier for me than for others, I admit, because I recognize that leftism, especially the the current “victimary” or “politically correct” version of leftism to which most Jews remain addicted is deadlier to Jews than any ideology since Nazism. We should bail out while there is time.

* [Re: Spotlight] Nothing like a crusading Jewish editor taking it on himself to bring low the cabal of papist pederasts to show those urban Catholic knuckle-draggers how a true fighter for justice acts! What? These priest-ridden ingrates somehow don’t come to love us Jews more and more for rescuing them from their oppressors?

* I wouldn’t call Sailer and Derbyshire philo-semites, even “semi,” but they’re not anti-semites either and we Jews should listen to what they and others on the alt-right have to say about that “bizarrely oblivious” Jewish behavior Hanoi Paris Hilton refers to. For starters, stop insisting that an open borders policy is some Jewish “Tikkun Olam” imperative, or a prophylactic against barriers to entry of some future wave of Jewish refugees, to be imposed on the rest of society.

* Certainly Mr. Sorman is familiar with the accession of Leon Blum as the Prime Minister of France for three terms beginning in the late 1930s, and the ultimate failure of his Popular Front. (Blum was far more engaged in specifically Jewish issues than Senators Sanders ever was or will be.) Didn’t turn out so great for French Jewry after all, ehhh?

Sorman’s thesis that anti semitism is dead or dying is whistling past the graveyard, as anybody who follows the excellent writings of conservative semi-philosemites like Steve Sailer or John Derbyshire (or of actual Jews like Robert Weissberg) who’ve been crowbarred from the more PC quarters of the right, and now are accessible mostly through much dodgier venues like Unz and Taki, where the comments threads are very thinly moderated.

Luke Ford is a special case: originally an evangelical Christian, thence a convert to Reform and more lately to Orthodox Judaism, whose little-read blog often has much to say —both about and from— that wide swath of the gentile intelligentsia who are neither paleo- nor neo-Nazis, but who cut very little slack for bizarrely oblivious Jews who continue undermining the national self-confidence and cultural identity of majority populations.

Posted in Anti-Semitism | Comments Off

The Donald

Posted on February 19, 2016 by Luke Ford

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* Since he entered the race, I’ve heard people talk about The Donald as a bumbler, a clown, a fool, an idiot. Well, he’s no idiot, and that should have been obvious from the start. As to the rest, for some reason I’m reminded a bit of Casablanca where Strosser and Renault are discussing the blundering Americans.

Major Strasser: You give him credit for too much cleverness. My impression was that he’s just another blundering American.

Captain Renault: We musn’t underestimate “American blundering”. I was with them when they “blundered” into Berlin in 1918.

* Hey iSteve, doesn’t the whole migrant invasion sound like a Gremlins movie? A few Gremlins show up and the Chancellor adopts them, but then they start mysteriously growing in numbers.

* I wonder why the communist Pope Francis didn’t take the opportunity when he was in Mexico, a country that is nominally 80+% Roman Catholic, to criticize Mexico for its restrictive immigration laws, which I understand are much more restrictive than those of the U.S. His words might have had much more effect in a country which is more than 3X Catholic than the U.S. (percentage-wise) and thus more inclined to follow the wisdom of their Holy Pontiff and more likely to accept his criticism that such restrictive immigration policies are not “Christian.” Where did the Church find this left-wing buffoon who insists in intruding into political matters that have little connection to the Church’s mission?

* An old line in politics is that some candidates are blessed to have great enemies. Clinton was the last guy who fit this role. Newt Gingrich was a great foil for Clinton and probably saved his presidency. A Speaker who was smart and restrained could have made Clinton’s life hell. Instead, the ridiculous Newt made Clinton look like Churchill and reminded everyone that you could do worse than the soft-core Caligula.

Trump has also been blessed with some useful enemies. Jeb was a great a foil. Cruz, surprisingly, has been a great enemy of Trump because Cruz is the one guy everyone agrees is a s-bag, even if you like him. His friends say he is a d-bag. When the charge against Trump is that he is aesthetically unacceptable, having that charge made by a guy who reminds everyone of a young Montgomery Burns is manna from heaven.

Of course, big personalities attract a lot of crazies so maybe the the law of averages just kicks in for guys like Trump.

* FNC is claiming that a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll shows Cruz leading Trump in SC.

Funny how a poll commissioned by both the Globalist Sociopaths at the WSJ and the Cultural Marxists at NBC could be so wrong.

Trump keeps gaining momentum not to mention millions in free advertising with these bogus polls. FNC not to mention CNN and the rest of the dinosaur news networks have no other choice but to quote Trump telling the world that they are full of it.

In response to Pope’s latest idiocy I would love to have Trump sit down for a one on one with Bill Warner the retired college professor who runs the website Political Islam. Almost single handedly Warner has stopped the construction of several Saudi financed mega mosques across middle America.

The Cultural Marxist Media would have the vapors over the lastest antics of our soon to be “President Sh*tlord”.

* Pope Francis is warning of a surge of drug trafficking in Argentina, saying he hoped his native country could stave off “Mexicanization,” in a letter he sent to an Argentine lawmaker.

“Hopefully we are in time to avoid Mexicanization. I was speaking to some Mexican bishops, and it is a thing of terror,” the pope wrote in an email to lawmaker Gustavo Vera, in response to a letter Vera had written to him expressing concern about drug trafficking in Argentina.

* Maybe this is good that we can have a discussion on the history of Arabs/muslims and Europeans. Too many people think it is about the French colonizing North Africa. Too few realize that for the past 1300 years the muslims have had the upper hand over the Europeans more often than not. I am surprised at how many people I know who didn’t realize the long occupations of Spain or Eastern Europe, or the millions of Europeans taken into slavery.

* Donald Trump may not regard Muslim immigrants as invaders but I sure do. That opening of minds and hearts you refer to is a very one-way business. The penalty for apostasy to Islam, to the best of my knowledge, remains death. “Extremist” Muslims are the Muslims most faithful to the dictates of their religion. They’re free to practice it in Islamic countries, and I wish them the best, but it is increasingly obvious that they cannot mix peacefully in Western countries.

Insofar as the division of authority between popes, kings and emperors, this was a constant struggle in the Middle Ages (e.g., the Investiture Controversy). Early popes acknowledged the spiritual as well as the secular authority of the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Emperor. The Church was a huge landowner and bishops had considerable secular authority.

* It’s not so much Trump’s Luck, it’s that he picks his enemies so well.

During his initial entry, he made Jeb his #1 enemy, and had a battle plan laid out on how to attack him. He could have spent his time taking on Cruz (the presumptive intellectual candidate), Christie (the former lobbyist with the quick tongue) or Rubio (the minority with the mostest—sorry Ben), but instead concentrated his fire on Jeb, the awkward, inept, weak beta male next to whom Trump looked golden. Then he hammered Jeb with hilarious lines and got big by beating him up. He could have ignored Jeb and concentrated on clearing the field, but he picked Jeb to highlight his own strengths and make himself look strong.

Similarly, Trump could have ignored this sally by Pope Francis (the “pope’s opinion is religious, not political” or some other meaningless pablum) but realized (1) the pope isn’t popular amongst traditionalist and conservative Catholics, as he’s basically a liberation theologist; (2) the pope is setting himself up for YUGE hypocrisy (both with the Vatican walls and the Mexican wall between it and Guatemala) that Trump’s own followers would notice; (3) the pope was inadvertently propping up the old American Protestant fears of Catholics being less loyal to the U.S than Protestants—which carries more weight in evangelical states like, say, SOUTH CAROLINA WHERE THE PRIMARY IS.

And, most importantly, just like with !Jeb!, Trump knew he could win this battle.

So he pounced and made Francis his enemy-of-the-moment, and slaughtered him politically.

Make no mistake that Trump picks his battles to make himself look like a winner. He ignores others that are losers. He picked it with Megyn Kelly to make himself look independent of Fox News and prop himself up with male, anti-pc voters. He picked it with Jeb to make himself look tall, strong, and alpha. And he picked it with Francis to make himself seem loyal, American, and consistent, while the pope looks hypocritical.

* Scott Adams has this amusing take on the Francis-Donald dispute on his dilbert blog:

“I could write a long essay about this Pope versus Trump situation, but I think it will be funnier to summarize it instead. What follows is – as far as I can tell – an accurate description of what happened.

1. The Pope criticized Donald Trump.

2. The Pope’s credibility declined.

If this were fiction, no one would believe it.

I predict that the Pope will issue a public apology to Trump for questioning his faith, as opposed to his policies. [Update: And here it is, sort of.]”

* Brilliant headline in the Telegraph today: “Trump forces pope to climb down”. Turns out it was just an opinion piece, but good God! Donald Trump is Victory!

* It is of course the height of hypocrisy for the pope to go to Mexico and criticize Trump’s proposed immigration policies, when Mexico’s actual policies are many times more racist, xenophobic, brutal, and harsh. And of course, the Pope himself allows zero muslim refugees to wander into the Vatican.

However, buffoon? Perhaps not. How about whore. Remember, the Catholic church needs donations from reach people. And rich people love cheap labor. If the pope was not carrying water for the people making all that money from cheap foreign labor (I hear that Merkel is proposing to force the refugees to work for big German companies for a euro an hour!!!! How profitable is that!), then donations to the Catholic church would like decrease significantly.

It’s hard to go too wrong in analyzing politics, than by following the money.

* British America dates back to around 1607. That’s 400 years of history of which we’ve only been a nation for 240 of those years. There were parts of Spain that were occupied for 700 years! Parts of Greece and the Balkans for 450 years! That’s longer than the entire English experience in the New World. Throw in a couple million European slaves and suddenly the narrative loses its power to all who are not already insane.

* Good thing His Holiness is protected by infallibility in regard to faith and morals. That allows him to be right about something.

* To my knowledge the instructions contained in Deuteronomy haven’t been enforced recently. Donald Trump’s daughter converted to Judaism–I haven’t noted his call for her execution for apostasy. I have read of sentences of death for apostasy in Afghanistan. Yes Muslims are a continuum, but enough of them are at the extreme end to constitute a genuine menace. Even “moderate” Muslims support the ultimate goals of Islam: the Ummah of the One True Faith, in which non-believers are tolerated only so long as they remain in dhimmi status. Moderate Muslims just disagree with more energetic Muslims about how to get there. I can see why moderate Muslims are frustrated; in a few generations they will be so numerous in the west that they can use the existing political process to impose the sharia–the more energetic faction alerts the dhimmis to their eventual fate.

You distinguish the United States from Western countries–upon what basis? The U.S., it is true is slipping into Latin America status, but the tradition of the United States is rooted firmly in the West–representative government, the common law, etc. As for terrorist incidents in the U.S., you should check with the relatives of the almost 3,000 people killed on September 11. Or how about Major Hassan, Soldier of Allah, gunning down fellow soldiers while shouting “Allahu Ahkbar?” Or that business in San Bernardino? Or the recent attack by a machete-wielding Somali in Ohio? What does it take to convince you these people are a threat, As Kipling put it, you just never know “When the gods of his far-off land, shall repossess his blood.” We have a colossal surveillance state and are stripped of our dignity every time we board a commercial aircraft, largely to avoid terrorism by Muslims.

And what do they bring us? How many couscous cooks and rug merchants do we need? They come from a culture that peaked around 900 A.D. and hasn’t amounted to much since. If we really need immigrants (which I very much doubt) there are better choices than the results of recurring counsin marriages since the Bronze Age.

There are numerous Muslim majority countries. If you find these people so noble and interesting, by all means go and live with them. You have my sincere best wishes. But they are little but trouble when they try to mix in Western (and I include the U.S.) countries.

* And if anyone doubts the power of “game”, the dark arts, learned charisma, etc., or still thinks of it as some gimmick for socially awkward losers, watch and learn from Senor Trump, the true MOST INTERESTING MAN IN THE WORLD. After blows and controversies that would have folded most candidacies, Trump looks like he actually will wrap-up the GOP nomination.

And in true Trump alpha fashion I hope he uses this little dust-up with His Holiness to keep pushing farther, harder, deeper. Don’t apologize. Don’t back-down. Reframe. OWN IT.

CNN Anchor Erin POZette: “How do you feel about being hated by the leader of the world’s largest religion?”
TRUMP: “I’m not hated. And look, I’m doing so well in the polls, and I have such a good message, that all the world’s leaders are talking about me. President Obama talks about me. Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders in their debates talk about me. The British Parliament holds a special session to talk about me. And now the Pope talks about me. When was the last time you had all the leaders of the world talking about someone who isn’t even out the primaries yet? They talk about me imore than the guy currently in the White House [tin laugh].”

Yeah, like a lot of you and our gentilious host I too would prefer a Presidential style less down the road to Idiocracy, but that horse has long left the barn. If Trump is a blowhard or buffoon what does that make the other candidates?:

Yeb: Invasion is an act of love.
Kasich: Single moms are the real heroes of our society.
Rubio: And Obama knows exactly what he’s doing…
Christie: Since we can’t not let Muslims in, let’s pretend to do something by attacking Russia so we can start pretending we’re doing something by attacking Syria.
Clinton & Sanders: Mmmm… refugees good, smugglers BAD!
Sanders: My first act as President will be to smash the Syrian refugee for-profit smuggler industry and then organize the refugees into employee-owned, LGBT-friendly, migration co-ops so that these poor Syrian families can get to Europe and America in a carbon-neutral manner…
Clinton: My first act as President will be to send Navy ships into the Mediterranean. My second act will be to give the State Dept. nuclear weapons to destroy those Navy ships, so that State Dept. personnel can unimpeded begin issuing green cards.

* Massive European immigration was a disaster for the first natives. Massive African immigration was a disaster for the recent European immigrants. And even the newer waves of European immigration had major negative consequences (introduction of ethnic voting blocks and continental preferences for leftist politics, flooded industries with massive supply of labor to kill wages and set off union/capital wars, gave us the Mafia, etc.) despite a shared Western heritage.

* Muslims deserve to have their own countries, where they ought to remain, or who ought to help there fellow religionists.

Western countries should refrain from dropping bombs on them. They need to be contained in those nations.

* We agree that:

1) There can be substantial negative consequences to large-scale immigration,

2) Kosovo is an example of very negative consequences natives from large-scale immigration, and immigration by Europeans to the New World is another,

3) It is sometimes possible to assimilate small numbers of Muslim immigrants without large negative consequences,

4) It is difficult or impossible to come up with examples of non-harmful large-scale Muslim immigration.

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WP: The so-called ‘Islamic rape of Europe’ is part of a long and racist history

Posted on February 18, 2016 by Luke Ford

I guess Muslims don’t rape European women at a high rate? Or is it that we should not notice?

Ishaan Tharoor writes in the Washington Post:

A popular right-wing Polish newsweekly, wSieci or “The Network,” published a deeply provocative magazine cover this week. It shows a young blonde woman, garbed loosely in the flag of the European Union, being groped by three men. Only the six swarthy arms and hands of the assailants are in view, but the message is clear and barely needs the brutal cover line: “The Islamic rape of Europe.”
According to the Daily Mail, the Polish magazine said it was focusing on “what the media and the Brussels elite are hiding from the citizens of Europe.” An editorial in its pages, entitled “Hell Europe,” inveighed against a culture of “tolerance and political correctness” that supposedly led to the grim scenes on New Year’s Eve in the German city of Cologne and other northern European town centers.
Groups of men, many apparently of Arab or North African descent, went on a shocking criminal rampage that led to hundreds of complaints to the police of rape, sexual harassment and other abuse. The incidents fed into an already growing backlash against European policies welcoming migrants and refugees, particularly an influx from war-torn Syria.
Breitbart, the far-right American news website, picked up on wSieci’s cover story and detailed its message of a clash of civilizations:
Outlining the fundamental differences between eastern Islam and western Christianity — “culture, architecture, music, gastronomy, dress” — the editorial explains these two worlds have been at war “over the last 14 centuries” and the world is now witnessing a colossal “clash of two civilisations in the countries of old Europe”. This clash is brought by Muslims who come to Europe and “carry conflict with the Western world as part of the collective consciousness”, as the journalist marks the inevitability of conflict between native Europeans and their new guests.
The narrative of an Islamic or Arab takeover of Europe, though hardly new, has gained real traction in recent months, propagated by both xenophobic activist groups as well as populist political leaders and parties.
To be sure, there are legitimate security concerns posed both by the surge in new arrivals as well as the continuing instability and conflicts in the Middle East. The attacks in Cologne, writes the Algerian novelist Kamel Daoud, were a reminder to the West of the Muslim world’s “sick relationship with women” — a product both of patriarchal and religious norms as well as the stifling legacy of authoritarian rule.
But perverse, misogynist behavior is not the province of just one culture or society. And much of Europe’s anti-refugee hysteria, as my colleague Adam Taylor charted this week, has been overblown and fueled by often misleading innuendo and rumor circulating on social media.

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May A Jew Pray On His Knees?

Posted on February 18, 2016 by Luke Ford

Is it OK for a Jew to pray to God spontaneously while on his knees? Or is that too goyish? Asking for a friend who grew up a goy and got used to praying on his knees.

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