Luke Ford | No sacred cows.

Astonishing Acts Of Generosity

Posted on November 25, 2015 by Luke Ford

* From Hot 96.7 FM: “L.A. business man Shlomo Rechnitz saw 400 American troops about to eat their brown bag lunches at an airport in Ireland earlier this month. He chose to buy them all a HOT meal instead. He gave each of them $50 to get whatever they wanted at the food court. That’s $20,000.”

* Jewish Journal 2013: Philanthropist donates $250,000 to Mount Zion cemetery repair

Shlomo Rechnitz, a Los Angeles businessman and philanthropist, has donated $250,000 to restore the badly vandalized Mount Zion Cemetery in East Los Angeles.

* Jewish Journal 2013: Doheny Meats buyer Shlomo Rechnitz on business, philanthropy

Fifteen years ago, Shlomo Rechnitz co-founded TwinMed, a wholesaler of medical supplies serving nursing homes. Since then, Rechnitz has founded, or bought, and grown a number of other businesses, including Brius Healthcare, now the largest operator of nursing homes in California.
Along the way, Rechnitz, 41, also became a major philanthropist, giving away millions of dollars — to Jewish charities and also directly to people in need. On more than one occasion he’s come to the aid of a major Orthodox organization, offering gifts or loans in times of crisis.
It was a combination of these two attributes — business expertise and an expansive view of philanthropy — that led Rechnitz to buy Doheny Glatt Kosher Meat Market, the scandal-ridden Los Angeles kosher meat distributor and retailer that closed its doors last month.
“The Rabbinical Council of California [RCC] approached me and said, ‘Shlomo, could this be one of your charity things?’ ” Rechnitz recalled in an interview with the Journal earlier this month. “Kosher meat is expensive enough.”

…Rechnitz calls himself “a nondenominational giver” and said that at times he reaches out to those who aren’t coming to him. Last year, Diana Aulger, a pregnant woman in Texas, decided to have her doctors induce labor so that her husband, Mark, who was dying of cancer, could meet their child. Mark got to hold their daughter, Savannah, for 45 minutes before he died.
Rechnitz saw the story online and sent Aulger a check for $20,000.
He also sends $10,000 checks to the families of police officers who are shot while on duty in Southern California. Those gifts are inspired in part by an urge to assist individuals who put themselves into harm’s way for the public good, but Rechnitz said he’s also driven by another motive.
“I don’t think that [non-Jews] should ever look back at the Jewish people and say, ‘You only care about your own,’ ” he said.

* From Wikipedia: Rechnitz reportedly spends half of his day overseeing the Shlomo & Tamar Rechnitz Charitable Foundation which distributes funds to over 1,100 institutions yearly. He is known in the Los Angeles area for opening his home every Saturday night to listen to the needy and to hand out charity.[7] Rechnitz donated $5 million to the Mir Yeshiva in November 2011 when the head of the Mir Yeshiva in Jerusalem, Rabbi Nosson Tzvi Finkel, died suddenly, leaving the institution with $15 million in debt. Rechnitz donated $5 million to support the yeshiva and encourage others to come to its aid. Soon after Rechnitz’s donation others followed suit and the debt was paid in full within three months.[1][8] In December 2011, Rechnitz purchased a creditor’s note against Chabad of California’s headquarters in Westwood for $2.35 million in order to help the organization avoid foreclosure[1] After Hurricane Sandy, Rechnitz gave $1 million to aid in the rebuilding of Orthodox Jewish day schools and to assist the families whose children attend those schools.

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Jewish Groups Push For More Islamic Immigration

Posted on November 25, 2015 by Luke Ford

Nathan Guttman writes for the Forward:

Since the November 13 terrorist attacks in Paris by the Islamic State group, also known as ISIS, Republican presidential candidates, led by Donald Trump, have mainstreamed everything from proposals for registering Muslims nationwide to setting up Christians-only religious tests for Syrian refugees. But on November 19, even the Orthodox Union — a group that has often opposed the Obama administration — clearly articulated the theme driving many Jewish groups to oppose such measures.
“Just a few decades ago,” the group noted in a statement, “refugees from the terror and violence in Hitler’s Europe sought refuge in the United States and were turned away due to suspicions about their nationality.” Anti-Semitism was common at the time, and tied frequently to fears about letting socialists, communists and anarchists into the country. But “in fact,” the OU noted, “the Jewish immigrants that ultimately came to these shores fully adopted American values and have contributed greatly” to the country. Responding to the November 19 passage of a bill in the House of Representatives that would effectively halt the resettlement of refugees from Syria and Iraq, the OU urged Congress to work with the president to iron out any problems in the U.S. vetting system with the aim of “getting to yes” on a bipartisan admissions program.
“We’re not saying ‘open the doors wide and come one, come all,’” said Jason Isaacson, associate executive director of the American Jewish Committee, which also joined in the communal consensus. “But to say that people fleeing persecution cannot escape to the United States after they are properly checked, that is cruel.”
The measure must now also be approved by the Senate, and President Obama has threatened to veto it if it reaches his desk. But in the House vote, Jewish members showed the same sense of solidarity as Jewish communal groups — and often cited the same reasons.
Still, there, too, exceptions existed.
“My No. 1 priority is to keep New Yorkers safe,” said Rep. Steve Israel, a Jewish Democrat in New York, explaining his vote in favor of the House bill. “To do that, we must defeat ISIS to protect our national security and prevent the hateful terrorist attacks.”
Israel, a member of the House’s Democratic leadership who represents a district in Long Island, and Representative Jared Polis of Colorado were the only two Jewish Democrats to support the legislation out of 18 total. Together they constituted 11% of the House’s Democratic Jewish members. That compared with some 25% of Democrats overall who voted for the measure. Many cited fears stoked by the Paris attacks and the discourse from GOP presidential candidates, which sparked a spike in constituent pressure to block the refugees. Representative Lee Zedlin of upstate New York, the body’s sole Jewish Republican, also backed the bill, which passed overwhelmingly, 289 to 137.
But for the majority of Jewish lawmakers, there was no dilemma. If anything, there was anger at those who tried to tie the Paris attacks to President Obama’s plan to settle 30,000 Syrian refugees in America over the next two years. This would be above and beyond their much smaller presence in the planned total of 70,000 refugees worldwide to be admitted to the United States during this period.
“I am appalled by the actions of this House and by some of the words of my colleagues today,” New York Democrat Jerrold Nadler said on the House floor. Asked later by the Forward how he views the vote of fellow Jewish Democrats Israel and Polis, Nadler said: “I was frankly surprised when I saw those votes.”
…Jewish activists did not dispute the notion that Syrian refugees coming to America are likely to be biased against Israel and possibly against Jews, mainly because of their upbringing under the Assad dictatorship, which promoted such ideas.
Isaacson argued that proper integration of refugees in their new homelands could help uproot any hostile sentiments they might carry with them from the country they are fleeing.
“Before we turn our back on a humanitarian crisis, let’s be serious about the need to integrate migrants in the society,” he said.
As the anti-refugee bill moves to the Senate its opponents hope that “cooler heads will prevail” and that the legislation will be prevented from moving forward. Jewish groups, including AJC, the Anti-Defamation League and HIAS, the largest Jewish immigration and resettlement agency, as well as the Reform Movement, have been speaking to members of Congress and to governors and state legislators in an effort to counter the current wave. Most continue to believe that the bill will never become law and that its House passage was no more than a political statement.
If the current wave indeed subsides, the Jewish community will, in fact, return to its previous immigration priority: significantly increasing the quota for resettlement of Syrian refugees beyond Obama’s plan.

Posted in ADL, Immigration, Islam, Orthodox Union | Comments Off

The Jewish Journal Wants To Bring More Muslims To America

Posted on November 25, 2015 by Luke Ford

Danielle Berrin writes the Jewish Journal cover story:

On Nov. 19, less than a week after the deadly series of terrorist attacks in Paris, Mark Hetfield, president and CEO of HIAS, the 134-year-old refugee resettlement organization, was summoned to the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington, D.C., to testify before Congress. The topic was the swelling Syrian refugee crisis.
Hetfield, 48, a lawyer and policy specialist in refugee and immigration resettlement, had been tracking the Syrian crisis since it began in 2011. What started as a civil war between Syrian president Bashar Assad and a handful of rebel groups seeking to unseat him had morphed in large part into a religious war with the self-declared Islamic State (ISIS) leading the rebellion, internally displacing 11 million Syrians and pushing another 4.1 million out of the country.
Hetfield hoped to convince Congress to take in 100,000 Syrian refugees “over and above” the United States’ annual refugee quota of 70,000, a number far exceeding the additional 10,000 Syrians President Barack Obama had already agreed to welcome. (In Hetfield’s address to Congress, he called the American gesture “tepid.”) Hetfield knew a green light was unlikely: In the week after the Paris attacks, the revelation that a fake or stolen Syrian passport may have been used by one of the terrorists to infiltrate the refugees streaming into Europe set off panic among some Americans that Syrian refugees are indistinguishable from the Islamic State terrorists they are fleeing. As the U.S. election cycle continues to heat up, the refugees have become a political flashpoint, with distortions and fear-mongering shifting focus away from their desperate situation.
As civil discourse last week descended into talk of Muslim registries and permitting only Syrian Christians to enter the U.S., Hetfield prepared to fight the toxic political climate of xenophobia and fear.
“Politicians who fixate on the refugee crisis — it’s perplexing,” Hetfield said from his office in New York the night before his hearing. “They do it because it’s easy. Refugees are defenseless; they don’t have a constituency, they don’t vote. And it’s lot easier dealing with refugees than it is dealing with ISIS.”

Posted in Immigration, Islam | Comments Off

Germany Cannot Reject Refugees

Posted on November 25, 2015 by Luke Ford

Here is a translation of a German news report:

Germany cannot afford to reject refugees, says Josef Schuster, head of the Central Council of German Jews (Zentralrat der deutschen Juden). It (Germany) has brought “evil” upon others and is indebted to other nations.
According to the President of the GJCC, Josef Schuster, Germany is “the last land that can afford to reject refugees and persecuted people.” It has brought so much evil [“perdition”] upon the world and it is deeply in debt with so many countries, he said on Sunday during a memorial ceremony marking the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camp at Dachau on Apr 29, 1945.
He asks himself, when today, again, some citizens hunt [agitate] against refugees or talk in a demeaning way about Jews, how deep the need for protecting human dignity is anchored in people´s minds.
Dachau´s prisoners would have known, Schuster noted, how fast human civilization could be laid into ruins. “How a people from a supposedly [sic!!] cultured nation (Kulturvolk] became barbarians.” Fundamental values such as tolerance, respect, humility and responsibility should always be re-exercized and defended.

“I get sick when I see that in Dresden not less than 10,000 people cheer up an Islamophobe and right-wing populist like Geert Wilders” (he spoke there once), said the doctor from Würzburg. Growing numbers of refugees and Islamic terrorism are “not a reason to fight for a Christian-Jewish West without Muslims”, or to threaten to murder politicians.
Schuster said that Holocaust survivors´ memories are nowadays “more precious than ever.” What happened moves always further away; for many young people, NS terror and the Shoah are “only historical dates/facts” without a personal relationship (to them): “Distance grows, and empathy (levels) drops — except when you set foot on this place” [i.e., Dachau].
On these grounds, visiting a concentration camp memorial should be compulsory for all junior high school students. He hopes that his suggestion will be discussed again in the Bavarian Parliament. Chancellor Angela Merkel participated also in the ceremony. The Dachau concentration camp was created on March 22, 1933. Around 200,000 people from all over Europe were kept prisoners in Dachau and in several of its satellite camps , at least 43,000 were murdered there.

Posted in Germany, Immigration, Islam | Comments Off

In Six Months, I Turn 50

Posted on November 25, 2015 by Luke Ford

Feeling sentimental, I looked at my blog posts from my 40th birthday:

Cathy Seipp writes:
Not long ago I was so pleased to find myself linked in the same sentence with Mark Steyn — in John Birmingham’s Sydney Morning Herald article about witty righties and humorless lefties — that I immediately ordered Birmingham’sout-of-print book, “How to Be a Man.” I figured this would be the perfect 40th birthday present for Luke Ford, especially because of the Australian connection. And indeed it was, at least in my opinion. Luke isn’t very gracious about presents, but I assume he’ll at least learn something from it. It’s a good book, as of course I read it first. (Along with Maia and Grandpa, who were both quite glued to it.)
…Someone else gave Luke some AMC movie passes, so Monday he took me and Maia to see “United 93,” which we all liked very much, although Maia thought it was too sad and Luke had to march around my backyard afterward for a good 20 minutes, demanding that we all imagine him saying manly things like “Scramble those jets” and “I want action, not answers” and (of course) “Let’s roll.” He only stopped when my Dad finally came
outside and distracted him with a dirty joke.
One good thing about Luke: He’s an appreciative audience and when he laughs, he laughs so long and loud you think his sides actually might split. He also cackled happily for quite a while at the pre-movie commercial about some bed-wetting product.
Luke’s “let’s roll” dialogue fantasies were at least a relief from his conversation on the way to the movie, which consisted almost entirely of him saying things like, “Do you think I’m exploitative of women?” “Am I self-centered and narcisstic?” “People say I’m manipulative — am I?”
He wouldn’t let me change the subject, and just saying “yes, yes, yes” gets boring after a while, so eventually I reminded him that, you know, some women charge 95 cents a minute for these kinds of conversations.
From My 40th Birthday Party Thrown By Holly Randall
Crystal,
Luke Crystal,
Luke Crystal,
Luke Lexxi,
Luke Lexxi,
Luke, Rich Lexxi,
Luke, Rich Lexxi,
Luke Holly,
Derrick Luke
Derrick,
Lexxi, Luke Luke,
Crissy
Luke

My writing seems more spontaneous and creative ten years ago. It crackles and shocks and some of it embarrasses me.

I didn’t own a computer when I turned 30, but a year before that, I had a camera and produced interviews like this:

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Never Buy A Cheap IPad

Posted on November 25, 2015 by Luke Ford

Posted in Blacks | Comments Off

Don’t Hang Out With Guys Named Antwan

Posted on November 25, 2015 by Luke Ford

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* Meanwhile, another football player shot, while hanging out with a guy named Antwan.

Moral: don’t hang out with guys named Antwan. Your chances of not being shot go up exponentially.

* Steve, one point that you miss, and it is perhaps the most important point of all is the *moral* right of the white west to remain the white west, regardless of politicians, economists, professional liars, and any other faux ‘justification’ of race replacement.

At root, this is the only point that really counts.

* In America I think conservatives have more kids than liberals. But liberals control the indoctrination of the youth through education. Thus many kids from conservative homes become liberal. If a conservative couple has three kids they are lucky if one remains conservative after 12 years of school.

Does this not exist in Israel? How do conservative Israelis go to school and not become indoctrinated? Or are their history books just not written by the Howard Zinns of this world?

* Also, is the right/left divide the same in Israel as it is everywhere else? I doubt if the Israeli left goes on about Jewish privilege or indulges in the ethnomasochism that defines the left in the US and Europe. I think there’s a consensus across the political spectrum that the country is by its founding principles a Jewish state. Can you imagine an Israeli socialist candidate squirming uncomfortably if a journalist asked him if he intends to serve Jewish interests, the way a white Western politician (Orbán excepted) would do in the equivalent situation?

* A real tour de force, Steve. Particularly the comment about conservatives being the second most liberal people on earth.

What I am amazed at is that nowadays most everyone knows, through the power of the internet, that in every white country on earth the immigration level is increasing at a worrying rate and they have a good idea that it will bring about our genocide – though not in those terms. A decade ago I thought that we would require a compelling documentary to bring about this understanding. I would not have thought likely that people similarly as literate and intelligent would be writing comment after comment in the major online newspapers displaying the understanding I had back then and found it extremely challenging to communicate.

The unfortunate thing is that rather than deal with these problems openly through rigorous debate, the left and mainstream right have attempted to use all manner of dirty tricks to prevent this debate from occurring… in all white countries. Globalization of thought, of media, of elite and their ideas have seen to this. So we have this pressure cooker situation building. Elites have doubled down on immigration for various purposes. Immigrants have been dispersed everywhere possible. And it is this as much as anything… our lying eyes conveying the reality of what is transpiring, that is bringing about a mass conversion of attitudes. Everywhere.

The analogy to a pressure cooker is the same as to a bomb. You can pour a can of gunpowder on the ground, light it, and you will get a flash but the reaction is harmless from a few feet away due to the ease in which it is dissipated. Put that same gunpowder into a thick steel sphere with an inconsequential hole to introduce the initial spark of the reaction – a vast difference. The reaction has nowhere to go at first. But it is a mistake to think that one is preventing anything in the nanoseconds that the steel sphere contains the reaction. No, all that is done by this is ensure that the reaction is continued to the furthest possible extent as it pushes against the mutual constraint of the shell, finding no outlet. When the containing shell eventually bursts as it must, an immensely powerful, outwardly focused shockwave is the only possible result, and this must destroy everything in its path for a good radius.

How to diffuse this situation? The governments of the world must act firstly to stop cramming the steel shell of Europe and Anglosphere with more powder. Then they must act to remove the existing gunpowder from what is now a bomb of their own construction. Good luck with that.

* Antagonistic nationalist governments arise as proxies or byproducts of imperial conflict. The German Empire stoked Irish nationalism in their conflict with the British Empire, the British stoked Arab nationalism against the German allied Ottomans, the Russian Empire stoked the Armenians against the Ottomans and the Serbs against the Austro-Hungarian and German empires, the Third Reich stoked Eastern European and Indian nationalism against Russia and Britain, Imperial Japan stoked SE Asian nationalists against the European empires, the US stoked SE Asian nationalism against Japan, etc.

The problem now is that there has been too much state peace. Immigration and low-intensity conflict and crime is not enough to generate antagonistic nationalist governments. For that you want major conflict and war, and at this point that’s only really possible with Russia or China.

* Conservative whites have more kids than liberal whites, so overall the white electorate is moving away from the left. However, the fertility rate for blacks and latinos is still above that of whites so on the whole the left still has a great future ahead of it provided it turns out voters. We’ll probably have much more overtly racial politics as well.

Nature selects for those that are more aggressive in maintaining their advantages, so what’s going to happen to the soft, self-loathing whites who populate the left and refuse to defend their own group’s values and culture when blacks and latinos finally seize the reins of the Democratic Party? I suspect they will go the way of Woodrow Wilson at Princeton – despite their progressive bona fides they will join the list of people to be shamed and shunned for real or perceived offenses against the oppressed.

Posted in Blacks, Crime, Diversity | Comments Off

Liberals Aghast as US’s “25 Most Dangerous Neighborhoods” All Happen to be Black

Posted on November 25, 2015 by Luke Ford

I remember one Shabbos morning at YICC circa 2000, the bloke making the announcements noted a soul food restaurant opening up nearby. “Either they know something we don’t or we all need to sell our homes as fast possible.”

From The New Observer:

Liberals across America are reported to be aghast at a new survey by real estate website NeighborhoodScout.com which showed that the nation’s 25 most dangerous neighborhoods all just happen to be in black areas.

“Using exclusive data developed by NeighborhoodScout, and based on FBI data from all 17,000 local law enforcement agencies in America, we here report those specific neighborhoods in America that have the highest predicted rates of violent crime per 1,000 neighborhood residents of all,” that website reported.

“Violent crimes include murder, forcible rape, armed robbery, and aggravated assault. These neighborhoods are the epicenters of violence in America, where social issues are likely to ignite into violence and spread.”

Rank 25: Chicago, IL (S Indiana Ave / E 60th St)

Violent Crime Rate (per 1,000): 65.77

Chances of Becoming a Victim Here (in one year): 1 in 15

Rank 24: Tulsa, OK (E Apache St / N Quaker Ave)

Violent Crime Rate (per 1,000): 66.88

Chances of Becoming a Victim Here (in one year): 1 in 15

Rank 23: Memphis, TN (Saint Paul Ave / Walnut St)

Violent Crime Rate (per 1,000): 67.26

Chances of Becoming a Victim Here (in one year): 1 in 15

Rank 22: St. Louis, MO (Cass Ave / N 9th St)

Violent Crime Rate (per 1,000): 67.75

Chances of Becoming a Victim Here (in one year): 1 in 15

Rank 21: West Memphis, AR (E Broadway St / Stuart Ave)

Violent Crime Rate (per 1,000): 68.9

Chances of Becoming a Victim Here (in one year): 1 in 15

Rank 20: Indianapolis, IN (North Indianapolis)

Violent Crime Rate (per 1,000): 69.02

Chances of Becoming a Victim Here (in one year): 1 in 14

Rank 19: Flint, MI (Chambers St / Stonegate Dr)

Violent Crime Rate (per 1,000): 70.05

Chances of Becoming a Victim Here (in one year): 1 in 14

Rank 18: Nashville, TN (8th Ave S / Wedgewood Ave)

Violent Crime Rate (per 1,000): 70.59

Chances of Becoming a Victim Here: (in one year): 1 in 14

Rank 17: Indianapolis, IN (N Meridian St / E 34th St)

Violent Crime Rate (per 1,000): 72.71

Chances of Becoming a Victim Here (in one year): 1 in 14

Rank 16: Chicago, IL (S Ashland Ave / W 76th St)

Violent Crime Rate (per 1,000): 73.05

Chances of Becoming a Victim Here (in one year): 1 in 14

Rank 15: Houston, TX (Sauer St / Mcgowen St)

Violent Crime Rate (per 1,000): 75.89

Chances of Becoming a Victim Here (in one year): 1 in 13

Rank 14: Rockford, IL (Kishwaukee St / Grove St)

Violent Crime Rate (per 1,000): 77.6

Chances of Becoming a Victim Here (in one year): 1 in 13

Rank 13: Chicago, IL (S Homan Ave / W Roosevelt Rd)

Violent Crime Rate: (per 1,000): 80.17