I have right-wing Orthodox friends who now refer to Ann Coulter as a “vile anti-Semite.”
If someone as pro-Israel and pro-Jewish as Ann Coulter can get called a “vile anti-Semite” despite her many years of support for Jews and the Jewish state, then it seems there is no reason for gentiles to seek Jewish approval because it can be snatched away for the smallest of reasons.
I’ve struggled with saying “Merry Christmas.” Until the past week, I have deliberately refrained from saying “Merry Christmas” because all the Orthodox rabbis I consulted concurred with my analysis that to say “Merry Christmas” grants the appearance of giving legitimacy to the claims that Jesus of Nazareth, the historic person, was the Christ (Messiah). I don’t see how an informed and identifying Jew should do that.
On the other hand, I choose to live in the diaspora and it seems rude to me to not say “Merry Christmas” when it is the major holiday of my country.
From a Jewish perspective, Christianity is idolatry. We don’t rule that way in Jewish law because if we did, it would be very difficult to live around Christians. We couldn’t do business with them. We’d have to shun them. So the Ashkenazi consensus is that for purposes of Jewish law, we do not regard Christianity as idolatry, but we Jews know that this is purely tricky legal reasoning for public relations and to make our lives better, but of course — not to say it in front of the goyim — Christianity is idolatry (the consensus of Sephardim).
From the authentic Christian perspective, Jews crucify Jesus anew each day with their unbelief.
From an authentic Muslim perspective, Jews and Christians must be forced to submit to Islam (through during that process Muslims are free to dissemble about their intentions).
Every group wants to rule the world. Muslims are more willing to kill and die in the process than any other group so Islam is the most powerful religion in the world now.
Part of what makes Dennis Prager interesting is the way he balances conflicting values, such as between being Jewish and being an American. There’s nothing in Judaism that endorses “Merry Christmas” but it is — until recently — the American thing to do.
American religions have in general toned down their claims for divine truth in the spirit of tolerance. They’ve given up authenticity for getting along.
The nearly universal change from wishing fellow Americans “Merry Christmas” to wishing them “Happy Holidays” is a very significant development in American life.
Proponents of “Happy Holidays” argue that it’s no big deal at all, and that proponents of “Merry Christmas” are making a mountain out of a molehill, especially when proponents say that the substitution of “Happy Holidays” is part of a “war on Christianity.”
But the “Happy Holidays” advocates want it both ways.
They dismiss opponents as hysterical while, at the same time, relentlessly pushing to rid America of “Merry Christmas.”
So, then, which is it? Is the substitution of “Happy Holidays” for “Merry Christmas” important or not?
The answer is obvious.
It is very important. That’s why the anti “Merry Christmas” crowd has worked so hard to make this greeting a thing of the past.
And they have been extraordinarily successful.
I have been wished “Happy Holidays” by every waiter and waitress in every restaurant I have dined; by every one of the young people who welcome me when I go to the gym; by every flight attendant and pilot on every one of my flights; and by every individual I have dealt with on the phone.
When I respond “Thank you. Merry Christmas,” I sometimes sense that I have actually created some tension. While many of those to whom I wish “Merry Christmas” may actually be happy that someone felt free to utter the C-word, all the sensitivity training that they’ve had to undergo creates cognitive dissonance.
“Christmas” has also been eliminated by many — probably the majority — of our elementary schools, high schools and universities. Thus, for example, they no longer have a “Christmas vacation,” but a “winter vacation.”
The opponents of “Merry Christmas” and other uses of the word “Christmas” know exactly what they are doing. They are disingenuous when they dismiss defenders of “Merry Christmas” as fabricating some “war on Christianity.”
Of course it’s a war on Christianity, or more precisely, a war on the religious nature of America. The left in America, like the left in Europe, wants to create a thoroughly secular society. Unfortunately, most people do not realize that the left believes in secularism just as fervently as religious Christians believe in Christ.
That’s why “Merry Christmas” so bothers the anti-religious left. It is perhaps the single most blatant reminder of just how religious America is — and it must therefore be removed from public discourse. Here’s a safe prediction: The ACLU and other secular activists on the left will eventually move to have Christmas removed as a national holiday.
Dennis Prager goes after the secular left in his essay but he fails to identify the enemy, which is elite Jews. It is elite Jews of the media and academia who are driving the war on Christmas and the war on America’s white Christian core.
Ironically, in his previous column, Dennis Prager went after Republicans for not accurately naming the enemy:
Why Don’t Republicans Identify What They Are Fighting?
American conservatives are rightfully annoyed with the Obama administration, and Democrats generally, for refusing to name radical Islam or Islamism as the major source of terror.
When Nidal Hasan murdered 13 fellow soldiers at Fort Hood ,the administration refused to label the mass murder — committed by a Muslim in the name of Islam — an act of Islamist terror, or even terror at all. Instead it was officially declared a “workplace shooting.”
And when President Obama convened an international conference on terror, he refused to include the word “terror” or any form of the word “Islamist” in the title. Instead the conference — which took place a month after the Islamists’ massacre of the Charlie Hebdo writers and editors and Jews at a Paris shop — was ridiculously named “The White House Summit on Countering Violent Extremism.”
But conservatives and Republicans do the same thing. They, too, almost never identify what they are fighting — namely, leftism and the left. (Note to left-wing websites that monitor conservative writings: This is not a comparison of the left with Islamic terrorists; it is about not naming an ideological foe.)
Republicans — from the highest ranking politicians to rank and file members of the party — fight Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Hillary Clinton and all other Democrats. But they don’t fight the left and leftism.
The implication is that if only we could defeat this or that Democrat, we would be on our way to a much better America.
But it’s not true. If extraterrestrials came to our planet and absconded with every Democrat holding office from Barack Obama down to every Democratic city councilman in America, nothing would change. Other Democrats with the same left-wing views would take their place.
Leftism is ruining America. But almost no Republican ever — let alone repeatedly — says this.
The universities of this country have become a laughingstock. They have degenerated into anti-intellectual, anti-Western, anti-rational institutions with their ludicrous “safe spaces,” trigger warnings that infantilize students, and all the lies about the racism and a rape culture that allegedly pervade the campuses and American society.What is responsible for that? Leftism.
Again, Dennis Prager uses euphemism. He really means Jewish elites. Neoconservatism is a Jewish intellectual movement but its campaign to impose democratic values around the world by force is like something from Trotsky and the left. All Jewish intellectual movements seek to build up the fringe against the white Christian core of the West. Prager’s description of universities is simply the logical extension of the tactics of the Anti-Defamation League to make all expressions of anti-Jewish sentiment and white identity pathological.
A Jewish friend told me recently: “I think it is worth observing with all the goings on about trigger warnings, micro-agressions, hate speech and the like, that the first persons to claim the right to shut down discussions they disagreed with were Jews who wanted any questioning of the Holocaust to be banned. In fact Holocaust denial remains a crime in some European countries. The ADL was the first group that decided that it would go on the offense when any ‘anti-semitism’ regardless of how slight comes to light.”
As I posted September 20, 2015 about Ann Coulter:
Jewish Activists Go All In To Crush Ann Coulter
They don’t bother making coherent arguments. They simply seek to destroy her.
Fox News had Ann Coulter on right after the second GOP debate:
I’ve been talking to various Jews about this controversy and this is a summary of what I’m hearing:
It will be very interesting to see how this plays out. It is the typical ADL playbook where the slightest innocuous comment is used to wholly discredit someone.
Does making the comment, even if it were “vile” which I don’t think it is, justify destroying a person’s career? How many books has she written? How many columns has she written? Who among pundits has been as influential in bringing an issue to the fore in American politics as she has with immigration? How many commentators are unwilling to debate persons with whom they disagree because somehow or other that would legitimize them? Ann Coulter will debate anybody on any topic anywhere.
It is interesting that she was dropped for the column she wrote for National Review in the aftermath of 9-11 (when she said invade their countries, kill their religious leaders and Christianize them.) She also survived the kerfuffle when in her interview with Donnie Deutsch she said that Christianity is in effect perfected Judaism. This is of course the correct theological view from the standpoint of Christians, regardless of denomination, but Jews are so used to politicians and columnnists buttering us up that they couldn’t handle this.
Anyway, we shall see how this plays out. The problem is that the people who are condemning her have so much invested in wresting either contrition from her or marginalization of her, that if they fail, it may weaken them and open the door to much more biting criticism that may in fact be anti-Semitic.
It is good that you are sticking up for her by highlighting all of the out of control condemnations of her.
It is important to really figure out what she was saying.
When she asked rhetorically how many fucking Jews are there in this country, that is open to two interpretations: (1) that despite their small number Jews wield too much influence, especially in the Republican party or (2) the Republicans are needlessly pandering to the Jews, Jewish interests, Israel and Evangelicals since there is no need to dwell on the confluence of views of Republican candidates.
Neither is anti-Semitic although the first interpretation does call in question Jewish power and influence, something that organized Jewry has consistently (1) downplayed and (2) pounced upon and punished those who espouse such views by labeling them anti semites and getting them ostracized.
You are a firm believer in free speech and in fearlessly pointing out where there is Jewish influence and power.
What bugs me about Coulter’s critics are:
In the case of “conservatives”, they criticize leftists, liberals and Democrats as being too politically correct and afraid of honest discussion, calling them “pearl clutchers, delicate little flowers” and people who go their “fainting couches” when confronted with micro-aggressions.
What Ann wrote is not especially offensive, especially in the context of her string of tweets during the debate, yet the “conservatives” feel the need to distance herself from them. This leads me to believe that many of the “right wing websites” PJ Media, Hot Air, Powerline, American Thinker, are in fact basically what pretend to be American conservative promoting sites, but in reality are simply pro Israel sites with the American political stuff serving simply as window dressing.
In the case of the Jewish Press and Jewish Rabbis condemning Coulter, I wonder how many of them publish her or read her with any regularity. I do realize she was a featured columnist for IJR) and if they do, if they share any views with her. Jews are traditionally liberal, consistently voting for Democrats and almost all elected national officials are Democrats (Sanders, Boxer, Feinstein, Franken, Blumenthal) and the Obama administration has many Jews in appointed positions, most significantly for financial decisions, Jack Lew and Janet Yellen. So I suspect that many if not most of the criticism of Coulter is coming from persons who don’t share her political views and are using this as an opportunity to either take her down a notch or sideline her permanently (a la Joe Sobran)
In the case of the liberal press, it is also seen as a means to marginalize Coulter and her views.
I realize you are a small voice against this, but you are an Orthodox Jew. She has been supported by others who are not widely read, such as Ilana Mercer, and by Mickey Kaus, but they are hard pressed to influence the conventional wisdom once the juggernaut is under way.
The rabbis don’t bother to argue that this immigration will be good for America. That argument does not come up in their essay. That does not interest them. What does interest them? “Success in dealing with the first wave of immigrants will help build bipartisan support for other refugees from the Middle East to come to America.”
Their rabbinic agenda is to flood America with refugees.
They have no interest in what is good for America.
That they wrap themselves in the mantle of “As rabbis” is obnoxious. Judaism legislates nothing about how gentile countries should handle immigration.
Donald Trump’s proposal for a temporary ban on Islamic immigration is only bizarre if your agenda is to destroy the United States of America. For those who want Americans to be safe, the proposal is common sense.
What is the immigration policy of Orthodox rabbinic groups? This is representative: “Finally, in the area of immigration, Agudath Israel urges that American borders continue to be open to Jewish and other refugees who seek to come to the United States after escaping from oppressive political environments. The United States is a nation of immigrants and has long been distinguished by its generosity toward refugees from all across the globe. It is essential that such generosity continue to be maintained in today’s era of international volatility. Agudath Israel accordingly opposes any efforts to impose caps or quotas on refugees seeking safe haven in the United States. Agudath Israel further supports the provision of welfare benefits to needy non-citizen immigrants.”
They want immigration without limit and welfare without question.
This essay isn’t really about bringing more beleaguered Christians to America. It’s about bringing more Muslims to America, people who will rape, torture and kill us until they eventually succeed in setting off a nuclear weapon and take out American cities.
Why do so many rabbis want to bring more Muslims to America? They have such an addiction to hating white Christian goyim that they don’t care about how many Jews are slaughtered in the process.
By ABRAHAM COOPER and YITZCHOK ADLERSTEIN
Donald Trump’s bizarre proposal to bar all Muslim immigrants from the U.S. has overshadowed a more legitimate concern regarding religion and immigration: Middle East Christians who are desperate to escape the genocidal campaign against them by Islamic State.
Islamist terror attacks like the ones in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif., have underlined the need for more and better vetting of refugees from the Middle East who seek safety in the U.S. But with tens of thousands pushing at the gate, who should to get first preference?
In our view, as rabbis, any immediate admissions should focus on providing a haven for the remnants of historic Christian communities of the Middle East. Christians in Iraq and Syria have been suffering longer than other groups, and are fleeing not just for safety but because they have been targeted for extinction. In a region strewn with desperate people, their situation is even more dire. Christians (and Yazidis, ethnic Kurds who follow a pre-Islamic religion) have long been targeted by Muslim groups—not only Islamic State, or ISIS—for ethnic cleansing. Churches have been burned, priests arrested.
In the worst cases, Christians have been tortured, raped and even crucified. Mosul, Iraq, which was home to a Christian population of 35,000 a decade ago, is now empty of Christians after an ISIS ultimatum that they either convert to Islam or be executed. In Syria, Gregorios III Laham, the Melkite Greek Catholic Patriarch of the Church of Antioch, said in 2013 that “entire villages” have been “cleared of their Christian inhabitants.”
Unlike some others, Middle East Christians have nowhere else to go. As a result of turmoil not of their making and beyond their control, these Christians are the region’s ultimate homeless. Should some sort of peace ever return, the likelihood is that maps will be redrawn, carving up the pie among larger ethnic groups. There will be no place for Christians among hostile Muslim populations.
The animosity toward Christians is illustrated by a horrific incident earlier this year off the Italian coast. In April, Italian police investigating events on a boat that had departed from Libya said 12 Christian refugees who were attempting to cross the sea to Europe were thrown overboard by Muslim migrant passengers, and drowned.
The U.S. can do much good for Christian refugees. Their religious heritage establishes an important basis of commonality in the many Christian communities in our country.
When Secretary of State John Kerry announced in September that the U.S. will accept as many as 100,000 refugees by 2017, many of them Syrian, the State Department provided a list of more than 300 agencies in 190 locations that would assist on the local level. Of those agencies, no less than 215 are Christian. It makes sense to play to the strengths of those agencies.
Success in dealing with the first wave of immigrants will help build bipartisan support for other refugees from the Middle East to come to America.
Tragically, present policy does not take into account the uniquely precarious situation of displaced Christians. Instead of receiving priority treatment, Christians are profoundly disadvantaged. For instance, the State Department has accepted refugees primarily from lists prepared by the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner on Refugees, which oversees the large camps to which refugees have flocked, and where they are registered. Yet endangered Christians do not dare enter those camps.
Notice that the rabbis say nothing about Israel needing to take in these people, only the gentile countries must feel this moral imperative.
COMMENTS POSTED AT WSJ:
* Refugees – It is hard enough for civilized people who Speak English to immigrate. Seems like the government’s reasons for admitting refugees is more for socio-political reasons than humanitarian reasons.
* Why is there so much reluctance to admit Syrian refugees? Because a large majority are Muslim and jihad is a moral obligation for every Muslim. Jihad almost always translates to some of the most inhumane and barbaric behavior ever – as exemplified by recent events in Paris and San Bernardino – with little or no outrage expressed by so called “moderate” Muslims.
My point is that would not be the case with Mideast Christians who morally, ethically, and ideologically have more in common with our western values than Muslim refugees and are even more violently treated / threatened by their mideast Muslim brothers than fellow Muslims. The deliberate persecution of Christians by Muslims should be something we, as a Christian nation, should respond to and act on.
Of course this line of reasoning would simply fall on deaf ears in Obama’s administration that is much more interested in building the dems future voting base than taking rational steps to ensure our national security or protect mideast Christians from extinction. They’d rather leave that to Slovakia that shows more courage as a nation than we do.
* All you have to do is read this:
“Donald Trump’s bizarre proposal to bar all Muslim immigrants from the U.S. has overshadowed a more legitimate concern regarding religion and immigration: Middle East Christians who are desperate to escape the genocidal campaign against them by Islamic State.”
To know that Abraham Cooper and Yitzchok Adlerstein are liars through omission.
* To be on the fair side. Should the two rabbis present the case to the Israeli government instead of that of the United States?
* “Deserve” is now politically correct newspeak. Everyone on the losing side of most every political/economic/social problem/issue is now “deserving.”
* “Deserve” infers “earn.” How does a Christian “deserve” something by the mere act of living in a location?
* What is bizarre about barring a group of people that contains a real and present threat until we can ascertain how to properly vet them? Isn’t that a) common sense and b) the position of the US government? You undermine the seriousness of your article by gratuitously smearing Trump. Maybe that’s the price of getting in the WSJ. They have had a steady campaign against Trump since he came out against open borders.
* Dear Rabbis, your opening sentence is a head scratcher because the remainder of your column lays out the argument to ban all Mohammedans from entering the U.S. This tolerance of the intolerant is simply baffling.
* Everyone got their panties in a wad over Trump’s proposed moratorium on Muslims entering the US but totally overlooked the US government’s refusal to consider mid-Eastern Christians as targets of Genocide that, among other benefits, gives them some assurance that they can reclaim their property when hostilities are ended.
But now the US government, rather than aiding the mid-Eastern Christians who are being tortured and killed, has joined with its Muslim friends in a total ethnic cleansing of Christians from the region and all we hear from the media and unfortunately, from mainstream pulpits, is silence.
Elections do have consequences.
* “Donald Trump’s bizarre proposal to bar all Muslim immigrants from the U.S.”
Keeping America safe is bizarre? Millions of Americans disagree.
Yes! Use the free FBPurity.com app to control your Facebook experience.
* I find it very frustrating and annoying and confusing to see the same stuff over and over, and then have to change it to Most Recent constantly to find stuff.
* This is from the help pages:-
To see stories on your News Feed in the order they were posted:
Click Home in the top menu
Click next to News Feed in the left menu
Select Most Recent
Note: News Feed will eventually return to the default Top Stories setting.
Take heed of the last line. Does not matter what you do it will eventually default back to Top Stories. Facebook have what I call ‘Don’t give a shit syndrome’.
* My feed switches constantly to Top Stories and I have to turn it back to Most Recent.
I knew in the past anytime I used my smartphone to access FB it would switch over, now wondering if my phone app, since it shows a number on the desktop icon, is doing this every time it polls my page, I bet this is why, do others affected have this on a device other than a PC?
* Frustrating, mine will not even stay on “Most Recent” for an hour. Fine, but why bother to pretend you are giving us an option?!
* I had to get in the habit of checking that every single time I log on or update the newsfeed etc. FB will sneak in & change it back to the latest news if you blink.
By Abraham Cooper and Harold Brackman:
Betty Friedan was a twentieth-century American revolutionary who, in word and deed helped empower women everywhere. She was author of The Feminine Mystique (1963), founded the National Organization of Women (NOW), and “mother” of Second Wave Feminism that transformed the U.S.
What would have this feminist leader thought of the recent 653 to 80 vote by the National Women’s Studies Association to join the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement? The resolution condemned Israel for “injustice and violence, including sexual and gender-based violence, perpetrated against Palestinians and other Arabs in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, within Israel and in the Golan Heights.”
The resolution contained nary a word about the Palestinians’ current “stabbing Intifada,” most of whose victims have been Jewish women and children. Nor was there a single whereas about last summer’s unprovoked massive rocket onslaught launched from Gaza’s Hamastan using or about terror tunnels burrowed into Israel proper. Not a syllable about Palestinian curriculum and media, including cartoon anti-Semitism, venerating suicide bombers and enlisting youngsters into a culture of death.
What would Betty Friedan, that spunky Jewish housewife and mother who devoted her book and life to fighting what she called in the 1950s “the problem without a name,” have thought about American feminists who “include out” Israeli women targeted by terrorists from their movement?
Gil Troy’s book, Moynihan’s Moment—about how then U.S Ambassador, Daniel Patrick Moynihan spearheaded the fight against the adoption of the infamous 1975 UN “Zionism Equals Racism” resolution—contains a chapter focusing on Friedan’s realization that her fight for the feminist cause and commitment to Zionism were “indivisible.”
She was not an outspoken Zionist until 1975 when she attended the International Women’s Year World Congress in Mexico City, where she was shocked by the unholy trinity of “anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism, and anti-Zionism” among the delegates. In her article, “Scary Times in Mexico City,” Friedan recounted how dissenting voices among American delegates had their microphones turned off and their speeches shouted down. Israeli prime minister’s wife, Leah Rabin, was booed and boycotted, as the “Declaration on the Equality of Women” became one of the first international documents to label Zionism as a form of racism. For those of us who later experienced the same tactics at the UN’s Anti-Racism Conference in Durban in 2001, just days before 9/11, Friedan’s account reads like a piece of our own history.
Friedan declared that there a “larger never-ending battle for human freedom and evolution. Women as Jews, Jews as women, have learned in their gut, ‘if I am not for myself, who will be for me (and who can I truly be for). If I am only for myself, who am I?’” Back in New York, she formed an Ad Hoc Committee of Women for Human Rights in which Margaret Mead, Nora Ephron, Lauren Bacall, Beverly Sills, and Gloria Steinem, among others, joined her battle against the the odious “Zionism Equals Racism” resolution which the UN finally repealed in 1991.
The anti-Israel, anti-Jewish forces prevailed again at the 1980 International Women’s Conference in Copenhagen—where delegates met in a hall festooned with a larger-than-life portrait of Ayatollah Khomeini! —but at Nairobi in 1985 Friedan and her allies succeeded in ensuring “every reference to Zionism was gone.”
Later as the head of delegation of American Jewish women who participated in a US/Israel dialogue, entitled “Women as Jews, Jews as Women,” organized by the American Jewish Congress, Friedan inspired the founding of the Israel Women’s Network.
Rabbis Abraham Cooper and Yitzhock Adlerstein write:
US Attorney General Loretta Lynch infuriated many Americans when she told a Muslim gathering that the Justice Department would “take action” against individuals who “lift the mantle of anti-Muslim rhetoric.” Lynch, the highest legal official of the nation, seems to have had a momentary lapse about our Constitution, which guarantees Americans freedom of expression, including hate speech.
Her instincts about the potential damage from hate speech, however, were correct. Speech shapes attitudes, and attitudes lead to action. Free (hate) speech often comes at a hefty price for minorities targeted by hate on the streets and online. FBI statistics on hate crimes spawned by race and religion are topped by African Americans and American Jews, respectively, every year. When people paint all Muslims in deathly black hues, hatred and contempt are sure to follow. And sometimes bigotry translates into bullets or arson.
There is no gene for hatred. Youngsters learn it from others—from parents and peers; from sermons and social media. So Americans would do well to heed calls to oppose hateful barbs aimed at our Muslim neighbors.
It also follows that officials should be vigilant about attitudes of refugees seeking to emigrate to the United States. The Syrian people are trapped in a black hole of civil war, a criminal regime, wholesale slaughter and ISIS barbarity. The world has witnessed a desperate exodus with migrants and refugees literally washing up on mostly European shores. Here in the U.S, the President finds himself caught in a fierce debate with critics demanding that we know more about each applicant, lest there be ISIS operatives amongst them. Others object to questions visa applicants are asked, including: “Have you ever been a member of a terrorist organization?” Clearly, the entire vetting system needs a reboot.
A good place to start is in understanding the values the American-wannabees carry in their luggage.
Syria, before its descent into chaos, formalized a twelve-year educational system in 1967. Despite the secular tendencies of the Baath Party that controlled Syria for the last half-century, it included mandatory religious education. An overriding goal was convincing the majority Sunni population that the small governing Alawite sect were also good Muslims. The religious education incorporated by the Ministry of Education hewed to a strict – albeit not fundamentalist – Sunni interpretation, to the exclusion of all others.
Only a small number of studies of Syrian textbooks have been published, although they stop around 2003. Nonetheless, they give us a good picture of what Syrians who may soon be our neighbors were taught for decades.
According to one of the most cited studies, Prof. Joshua Landis at University of Oklahoma found that the Syrian textbooks do not malign Christians, unlike those of other Arab countries. However, Jews – not Israel – are singled out for contempt and extermination. A tenth grade text book teaches: “The logic of justice requires the application of a single inescapable verdict on the Jews; namely, that their criminal intentions be turned against them and that they be eliminated.”
All other religions are treated even more poorly. Landis’ summary: “Islam accepts only two choices for pagans [i.e. disbelievers, or members of any religion other than those that revere the Bible]: that they convert to Islam or be killed.”
Do attitudes of intolerance affect behavior? In a recent interview with La Stampa, Syed Farook, the father of San Bernardino mass murderer Syed Rizwan Farook, spoke of his efforts to convince his son that taking up arms was not necessary. His message to his son was hardly a model of tolerance and understanding. “Certain problems disappear on their own,” he said. “In two years Israel will not exist anymore. Geopolitics is changing: Russia, China and America don’t want Jews there anymore. They are going to bring the Jews back to Ukraine.”
Do attitudes determine behavior? Not always. But we owe it to ourselves to learn as much about pervasive attitudes in other societies, and figure out their impact on any candidate seeking admission to the US.
It can be done. Through carefully prepared, objective evaluative tools, applicants for intelligence work are screened for loyalty and likelihood of committing. The psychological community has similar exams that pick up on antisocial traits, deceit, paranoia, elitism, narcissistic qualities, ethnocentric delusions and other characteristics which would make some candidates excellent choices for admission, and others less so. That kind of screening, alongside medical evaluation, should serve as the cornerstone of the process.
COMMENTS:
* Polls show that most Muslims in all the Muslim countries hate America, Jews, and our civilization. Thousands Muslim clerics everywhere in the world teach masses of Muslims that Islam commands to murder non-Muslims. Muslims wage a war for our destruction. We should ban entry of Muslims. Otherwise, they will destroy us from within.
This ban has not against a freedom of religion, like an arrest of a murderer is not a violation of human rights. It is not based on religious or antireligious considerations. It is based on real facts of life, which show that Muslims use their religion as a justification for a war for a destruction of all non-Muslims and for committing innumerable crimes against humanity.
Ezra Levant, a smart Canadian Jewish lawyer, writes:
We’ve told you before about Germany’s national suicide.
About how Angela Merkel the German chancellor, wracked by liberal guilt over the Holocaust, has decided that as some sort of karmic punishment, Germany must now be handed over to Muslim migrants.
She actually blames Europe in part for creating ISIS.
As Germany kills itself, sharia police have filled the void.
Muslim theocrats, walking through the city of Wuppertal at night, wearing jackets saying “Sharia police,” bully people into following sharia law.
No drinking, no music, no breaking Mohammed’s laws, just like they do in Iran and Saudi Arabia.
I’ll tell you about the notorious leader of these sharia police, and how Germany’s courts have actually granted him permission to set up this parallel police force.
PS: I’ve got a few comments on TIME magazine choosing Merkel as their “Person of the Year” as well.
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* Mexico has immigration laws. It’s very easy to enforce them if you want to. And it’s humane, too. We don’t have byzantine bureaucracy delaying everything for decades. You can walk up to the border from Guatemala and just ask for a visitors’ permit and have an interview a few hours later but you can’t get away with taking a higher paying Mexican job because people will rat you out and the police do care, eventually. It’s the opposite of the USA where you can’t come legally without a phalanx of lawyers but there’s no enforcement at all if you come illegally.
* Net immigration between the USA and Mexico has been in the Mexican direction every year since 2007. That counts Mexicans coming to the USA, Mexicans going back, Gringos going to Mexico, Gringos going back, and foreigners moving between both countries. If you throw out the foreigners who are citizens of neither country, the net migration is even higher toward Mexico.
If it weren’t for the astonishingly high number of family reunification visas drawing people north, the net numbers would be even higher in the southerly direction; Mexicans who are only in El Norte for work are returning home in ever higher numbers. The long backlog of family green cards will keep migration north artificially high for years still. Those arrivals will resent America for the waiting and for making them commit to a move they wouldn’t even make by the time the free green card comes through.
And Mexicans are going south because Mexico is pretty great. Political reforms, neoliberal growth policies, education policy, and environmental reforms have delivered big improvements. Mexico’s life expectancy for nonsmokers is higher than the USA’s. Middle class Mexicans can afford to raise a family in a good school district. Mexican men are strong and confident while women are sweet, pleasing, and not emasculating Gringa harpies. Median young college educated Mexicans earn more (adjusted for cost of living) than median USA young college grads. Oh, and December isn’t miserable.
* In 1967, I accompanied my parents to look at the American retirement colony at Lake Chapala (where Fred Reed lives now, I believe). It was pretty nice.
Mexico is not doomed by nature to misery. It’s one of the more favored landscapes on earth.
And there are a lot of fairly easy steps to make it a better place, like more traffic stoplights.
I stayed in a hotel overlooking the main drag in Mexico City, the Paseo de la Reforma. The intersection below had no stop light even though it was one of major crossroads of the capital. It was fascinating to watch long lines of cars play Perpendicular Chicken with each other, but all the honking was kind of hard on the ears.
Jorge Castaneda implies that things like no stoplights are justified as keeping wimpy gringos out of Mexico. He says, however, that Mexicans would find they like not having to take their lives in their hands every time they try to walk across the street.
* Getting excited over ethnic food is so pre-2010s. More like 1990s and earlier.
Ditto “exotic” ethnic women. Wow, short, spindly, black hair and dark brown eyes, complexion varying shades of brown. So exotic. Not.
* So Frum points out that Republican insiders have been pushing wall-to-wall Latino vote strategy since 2012. They claim it’s the way back to the White House and the future of the party. And they never lose focus on that message.
Then they suggest that mass immigration is the way to appeal to Latino voters. Of course, mass immigration harms Latino citizens more than any other demographic. There is no one with most ruined neighborhoods, worse crime, or more competition for jobs from mass immigration than Latino US citizens. Making more of something they’re uneasy about isn’t going to win them over.
Of course, Republicans already run securely the governors’ offices, the Senate, and the House. And the national presidential race runs through states with very little Mexican-American influence. So there’s no obvious target that Republicans could reach even if they could win more Mexican-American vote.
So why are we getting such a narrative from Republican insiders? It might be just to push the donor class status signalling immigration explosion on fence sitters. Or it could be they’re stupid and nobody cares enough to explain it to them. I doubt Frum will make any impact.
Mexico would be a pretty easy place to improve. The Mexican concern is that they if they make it less cruddy it would get overrun by gringos.
* You can’t easily improve a high crime narco state like Mexico. Also Mexico’s racial demographics work against them. Mexico does not even make the list of the top 5 Whitest countries in Latin America percentage wise. Mexico has a glass ceiling due to it not being a majority White country. You can’t turn a country first world with only a 9 percent White population.
Mexico is San Bernardino on a much larger and worse scale. San Bernardino goes bankrupt after political power switches from White Gringo hands to Mexican hands. Mexicans don’t run cities like a well oil machine.
* San Bernardino is full of Walmarts and other national chains that are decently run by a mostly Mexican workforce. It doesn’t seem like Mexico couldn’t attain a Walmart level of prosperity and safety (although Owen would no doubt find it a change for the worse). Walmart itself was got off the ground by a bunch of hillbillies who figured out how to make things straightforward.
* A lot of things are getting better in Mexico. For example, the last time I checked (2011), used cars were really expensive in Los Angeles because as of 2006 Mexico had opened its border to American used cars, so they were vanishing from the Los Angeles market. But that means Mexico City’s fleet of cars is slowly turning into Los Angeles’ old fleet of cars, and Los Angeles cars have outstanding pollution controls. So residents of Mexico City have recently started to notice for the first time in decades as the smog lifts that they are surrounded by snow capped volcanos.
* At least one of the ethnic supermarkets in St Paul’s pan-Asian Frogtown (“pagodabodegas”?) uses Mexican stock boys. Is that a job young Asians won’t do? Or once you go outside your ethnic group, there’s no loyalty to race, at least among Asians?
For authenticity, though, the checkout girls are all Asian.
* Most Mexicans would rather work in a Nabisco (Mondelez) factory near their home and family instead of having to move to Chicago to work in that same factory. Even if they make less, their cost of living is lower too and they don’t have to live in a cold alien place full of uptight gringos and dangerous Negros. So, it seems like net Mexican migration has slowed to a crawl or even reversed.
The problem is that you still have Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, etc. where even Wal-Mart prosperity seems out of reach. Mexico is #67 in GDP rank but you have another another 130 countries below them. Places like Liberia and Somalia where the GDP/capita is less than $3/day and the main question is not whether you can afford a cheap flat screen TV for your hut but whether you will eat today.
* Technically, the worse a place is the easier it is to improve. The better it gets, the harder it is to improve further. But Mexico is on an upward trend so simple momentum might be enough for a while. Lately I’m enjoying the president’s Telecom Reform that is hoovering cash back from Carlos Slim’s wallet into mine at a pleasing pace.
* If the net flow of migration is southwards, how come all the border counties have been complaining about getting swamped the last two years? And why are there more and more native Spanish speakers that can’t speak a goddamned single word of English every year?
Hell, I was at Disney World a couple of weeks back, and some of the help at the Magic Kingdom couldn’t speak any English at all. And I’m talking about people in greeter-type roles, not just the people scrubbing the toilets.
The idea that Mexicans are leaving the country in droves is ludicrous on the face of it, and cannot be believed.
* I am currently living in Merida, Yucatan (population ~ 1 million; annual homicide rate ~ 2 per 100,000) and I think we have about 4 WalMarts here as well as Costco, Sam’s Club, Home Depot, Auto-Zone, Staples, Office Depot, McDonalds, Burger-King, Dairy Queen, etc., etc.
I, personally, don’t much like the heat and humidity; therefore, my (Mexican-born) wife and I are planning to eventually move back to Montana. But in terms of the people and the culture, it’s a toss-up between living here versus living in the USA.
In fact, if I had to live in some hell-hole part of the USA, like Southern California, then preferring to live in Mexico would be a no-brainer. It’s peaceful and idyllic here — especially now that all the Mexican criminals are in the USA.
* “Raven’s Standard Progressive Matrices test was administered to a representative sample of 920 white, Mestizo and Native Mexican Indian children aged 7–10 years in Mexico. The mean IQs in relation to a British mean of 100 obtained from the 1979 British standardization sample and adjusted for the estimated subsequent increase were: 98·0 for whites, 94·3 for Mestizos and 83·3 for Native Mexican Indians.”
And then let’s compare this to the racial composition of Mexico:
98.0: Mexican Whites
94.3:Mexican Mestizos
83.3: Mexican Amerinds
According to the CIA FACTBOOK, Mexico’s racial breakdown is:mestizo (Amerindian-Spanish) 60%, Amerindian or predominantly Amerindian 30%, white 9%, other 1%
Things are not looking good Mexico way…..
Now, let’s turn to real world achievements.Mexico and the Nobel prize. According to WIKIPEDIA, three people of Mexican origins have won a Nobel:
Alfonso García Robles: With Alva Myrdal, got the Peace Prize in 1982. For what it’s worth, he looks very White in his WIKIPEDIA photo.
Mario J. Molina: Along with Paul J. Crutzen and F. Sherwood Rowland, he got the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for studying the threat posed to the ozone layer by CFCs. Looks pretty White in his WIKIPEDIA photo.
Octavio Paz: 1990 Nobel in Lit. Based on WIKIPEDIA photo, he might have some Amerind ancestry (or he might not).
So, Three prizes. Total. As compared to 10 for Scotland, 15 for Australia, 23 for Canada, 74 for England , 306 for the USA, …..
Now, all of these figures are from WIKIPEDIA, so I’m sure that one could argue about the margins…but the overall portrait of Mexican achievement is pretty dire.
How about Fields Medalists?:
United States 12
France 10
Soviet Union (3) / Russia (6) 9
United Kingdom 7
Japan 3
Belgium 2
West Germany (1) / Germany (0) 1
Australia 1
British Hong Kong 1
Finland 1
Israel 1
Italy 1
Norway 1
New Zealand 1
Sweden 1
Vietnam 1
Iran 1
Brazil 1
(None Stateless) 1
I’ve left out Manjul Bhargava. His background is complicated.
So, Mexico has zero. Hell, all of Latin America has exactly one, which ties them with New Zealand.
Race creates the foundation upon which culture is built.Mexico’s racial mix produces mediocrity.In contrast, America’s overwhelming European racial stock allowed her to thrive.Mass immigration by Hispanic Amerinds and Mestizos is changing that.Soon, the USA will be as mediocre as Mexico.
“I worry greatly that the rhetoric coming from the Republicans, particularly Donald Trump, is sending a message to Muslims here … and … around the world, that there is a ‘clash of civilizations.’”
So said Hillary Clinton in Saturday night’s New Hampshire debate.
Yet, that phrase was not popularized by Donald Trump, but by Harvard’s famed Samuel Huntington. His “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order“ has been described by Zbigniew Brzezinski as providing “quintessential insights necessary for a broad understanding of world affairs in our time.”
That Clinton is unaware of the thesis, or dismisses it, does not speak well of the depth of her understanding of our world.
Another attack on Trump, more veiled, came Monday in an “open letter” in The Washington Post where four dozen religious leaders, led by Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, charge “some politicians, candidates and commentators” with failing to follow Thomas Jefferson’s dictum:
“I never will, by any word or act … admit a right of inquiry into the religious opinions of others.”
Intending no disrespect to Jefferson, if you do not inquire “into the religious opinions of others” in this world, it can get you killed.
“We love our Muslim siblings in humanity,” said the signers of Cardinal McCarrick’s letter, “they serve our communities as doctors, lawyers, teachers, engineers, journalists, first responders, and as members of the U.S. Armed forces and Congress.”
Undeniably true. But, unfortunately, that is not the end of the matter.
Did the worst attack on the United States since Pearl Harbor, 9/11, have nothing to do with the Islamic faith?
Did Fort Hood and the San Bernardino massacres, the London subway bombings and the killings at Charlie Hebdo, as well as the slaughter at the Bataclan in Paris, have nothing to do with Islam?
Does the lengthening list of atrocities by terrorist cells of ISIS, Boko Haram, al-Qaida, al-Shabaab and the Nusra Front have nothing to do with Islam? Is it really illiberal to inquire “into the religious opinions” of those who perpetrate these atrocities? Or is it suicidal not to?
There has arisen a legitimate question as to whether Islamism can coexist peacefully with, or within, a post-Christian secular West.
For, as the Poet of the Empire, Rudyard Kipling, wrote: “Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet, Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat.”
As of 1960, the Great Wave of immigration into the United States from Southern and Eastern Europe had been halted for 35 years. And the children of these millions had been largely assimilated and Americanized.
Yet, 50 years after the Turkish gastarbeiters were brought in the millions into Germany, and Algerians and other North Africans were brought into France, no such wholesale assimilation had taken place.
Why not? Why are there still large, indigestible communities in France where French citizens do not venture and French police are ever on alert?
What inhibits the assimilation that swiftly followed the entry of millions of Catholics, Orthodox Christians and Jews into the United States from 1890 to 1920? Might it have something to do with Islam and its inherent resistance to a diversity of faiths?
Set aside faith-based terrorism and Islamist terrorism, and consider the nations and regimes of the Middle and Near East.
Iran holds presidential elections every four years, but is a Shiite theocracy where the Ayatollah is a virtual dictator. Saudi Arabia is a Sunni kingdom and home to Wahhabism, a Sunni form of puritanism.
Those ruling regimes are rooted in Islam.
And while secular America embraces expressions of religious pluralism and sexual freedom, homosexuality and apostasy are often viewed as capital crimes in Afghanistan, Iran and Saudi Arabia.
Where Islam is the ruling faith, the Quran is secular law.
Catholic historian Hilaire Belloc saw our future on its way, even before World War II: “[I]n the contrast between our religious chaos and the religious certitude still strong throughout the Mohammedan world … lies our peril.”
Historically, Christianity came to dominate the Roman Empire through preaching, teaching, example and martyrdom. Islam used the sword to conquer the Middle and Near East, North Africa and Spain in a single century, until stopped at Poitiers by Charles Martel.
And this is today’s crucial distinction: Islam is not simply a religion of 1.6 billion people, it is also a political ideology for ruling nations and, one day, the world.
To the True Believer, Islam is ultimately to be imposed on all of mankind, which is to be ruled by the prescriptions of the Quran. And where Muslims achieve a majority, Christianity is, at best, tolerated.
Nor is this position illogical. For, if there is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his Prophet, all other religions are false and none can lead to salvation. Why should false, heretical and ruinous faiths not be suppressed?
Behind the reluctance of Trump and other Americans to send another U.S. army into a region that has seen wars in Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan leave us with ashes in our mouths, lies a wisdom born of painful experience.
There is no such sin as sexism or racism or homophobia. These are made-up moral categories that did not exist prior to the 20th Century.
“Republican frontrunner Donald Trump used a campaign stop in Michigan on Monday to make astonishingly sexist attacks against Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton,” the left-leaning ThinkProgress wrote. “… ‘Schlong’ is a well-known reference to a man’s genitals. There are no alternative definitions for the word, according to Merriam-Webster.”
Sexism for Trump, however, is nothing new. In an email to The Washington Post, Harvard University’s Steven Pinker, a noted researcher on language and cognition, pointed out that Trump, using a term that comes to English via Yiddish and Middle High German, may simply have been trying to say something else.
“Given Trump’s history of vulgarity and misogyny, it’s entirely possible that he had created a sexist term for ‘defeat’ (as far as I know there is no such slang verb in Yiddish),” Pinker wrote. “But given his history with sloppy language it’s also possible that it’s a malaprop.”
Trump’s problem? He’s a gentile who, linguistically, wandered too far from home.
“Many goyim are confused by the large number of Yiddish terms beginning with ‘schl’ or ‘schm’ (schlemiel, schlemazzle, schmeggegge, schlub, schlock, schlep, schmutz, schnook), and use them incorrectly or interchangeably,” he wrote. “And headline writers often ransack the language for onomatopoeic synonyms for ‘defeat’ such as drub, whomp, thump, wallop, whack, trounce, clobber, smash, trample, and Obama’s own favorite, shellac (which in fact sounds a bit like schlong). So an alternative explanation is that Trump reached for what he thought was a Yinglish word for ‘beat’ and inadvertently coined an obscene one.”
…Only one use of “schlonged” as a verb came from a respected political source. In 2011, NPR’s Neal Conan made this observation (to The Post’s Chris Cillizza) on the 1984 Walter Mondale/Geraldine Ferraro campaign: “That ticket went on to get schlonged at the polls.”
Respected by who? By people on the left? People on the right don’t respect NPR. They regard it as the enemy.
The reporter’s name? Justin Wm. Moyer. What kind of person uses a name like that? Is he a commie or a homo or just a garden-variety beta male?
