I’m assuming here that The Washington Post has not already ruled the Muslims who blew up the Istanbul Airport to be self-hating gays infected by America’s culture of homophobia.
It turns out, Omar Mateen, the Orlando nightclub shooter, also wasn’t a self-hating gay, despite media excitement over that rumor. The FBI has now run down every alleged gay partner of Omar’s, searched his phone and computers, and the alleged gay lovers either had the wrong guy or were lying, and there’s no evidence he was on any gay websites or apps.
As a Muslim immigrant explained in a curbside interview videotaped by Tony Vera at the Los Angeles International Airport recently—before she was arrested—”that’s what we do, we bomb people.”
With impeccable timing, three days before the Istanbul bombing, the liberal Guardian (UK) ran an article sneering at Brexit supporters for wanting out of the European Union before Turkey became a member and the door was thrown open to unlimited migration from this Muslim country that shares a border with Syria, Iraq and Iran.
Liz had a lot of fun with the Brexit-supporting ninnies, so relieved that “the Turks are no longer coming.” She referred to Turkey as “the country whose people Britons are apparently petrified of,” despite the fact that “it turns out Britain and Turkey are not so different after all.”
One way they’re a little different is that Britain has fewer Muslims on hand to blow things up. The attack this Tuesday, which left dozens dead and more than 100 wounded, is the seventh major terrorist bombing in Turkey so far this year, with a total death count in the hundreds.
As with the British media, the American media keep telling us that all these Muslim terrorist attacks have nothing to do with Muslims, and Donald Trump’s suggestion that we impose a temporary moratorium on Muslim immigration is madness, bigoted, racist.
Western governments have devoted incalculable resources to developing some diagnostic test other than “Muslim” to predict terrorism. As the New York Times reported earlier this year:
“What turns people toward violence—and whether they can be steered away from it—are questions that have bedeviled governments around the world for generations. Those questions have taken on fresh urgency with the rise of the Islamic State and the string of attacks in Europe and the United States. Despite millions of dollars of government-sponsored research, and a much-publicized White House pledge to find answers, there is still nothing close to a consensus on why someone becomes a terrorist.” [Who Will Become a Terrorist? Research Yields Few Clues, By Matt Apuzzo March 27, 2016]
I have a possible indicator! M-U-S-L- …
After the July 7, 2005, London subway bombing by Muslim terrorists that killed 52 people, the British MI5 undertook its own highly sophisticated study, examining hundreds of cases. But the UK’s security agency discovered that terrorists are a wildly diverse lot. They worshipped at a variety of different mosques, for example.
Some terrorists were very religious Muslims and some barely practicing. Most were men, but some were women. There were young and old terrorists, highly educated as well as uneducated, some loners and some married with children.
So, according to MI5, the predictive power of every factor is very low—other than: Is a Muslim.
The researchers claimed their work would “challenge the stereotypes” about who becomes a terrorist, but it pretty much confirmed mine.
Republicans who are furious with Trump for proposing that we hit the pause button on this one category of Third World mass immigration have nothing at all to say about the census report this week showing Teddy Kennedy’s 1965 immigration act has so transformed the country that a majority of babies born in the United States today are not white.
The only thing Republicans can do is denounce Obama for not using the words “radical Islamic terrorism.” (As long as they brought up Words Politicians Refuse to Use, when will the eunuchs work up the nerve to say “illegal alien,” “anchor baby” and “amnesty“?)
Obama is a hapless fool, but what is so special about the words “radical Islam”? Maybe it’s not radical Islam. Maybe it’s just “Islam.”
The reason Republicans obsess over Obama’s language is that they can’t go on TV and say nothing, and no one but Trump will say anything useful. To wit: Let’s stop dumping a million Muslim immigrants on the country every year, some percentage of whom we know will commit mass murder.
Posted inAmerica, Ann Coulter, Islam|Comments Off on This Hidden Fact Predicts Terrorism: “Muslim Immigration”
* For centuries, thousands have given their lives for England, as have thousands for France, Poland, and Germany. I wonder if you could even fill a conference room in Brussels for those who would die for the European Union. You’d probably have better luck filling it with native Esperanto speakers.
* Great column. Thoughts:
1. You can’t keep the Germans down, and you can’t make them likable. (Kind of like their old ex-enemies. 😉 ) They’re too smart, too organized, too neurotic, and too arrogant as a result. The irony is they’ve managed to conquer Europe through transnationalism just after failing to do so through nationalism. Funny how that works.
2. Elite-populace conflicts have been around since civilization, things are just now slipping toward the populace and the elite is beginning to react.
* This is from the Guardian. Could someone please translate it into English:
“If David Cameron had opted for the genuine participation of citizens, he would have obtained a much clearer view of what people really wanted, a powerful list of shared priorities, an agenda for further negotiations, and created much less distrust between the masses and the ruling class. On top of that, he would have gained global admiration for daring to tackle a complex challenge by an innovative process that values people’s voices instead of counting their votes. He could have set a new standard for democracy, rather than serving as its gravedigger.”
* Translation: The job of the politician is to pretend to be pro democratic, but ignore the voters.
* The best I can tell it means that Cameron failed in telling people what they wanted rather than allowing them a direct voice, which because it yielded the “wrong” result is not democracy and indeed is the antithesis of democracy.
I don’t even think it’s sophistry – the sophist knows he’s drawing the wrong conclusion and doing it for his own purposes. This is more of an inability to reconcile a vestigial or rhetorical commitment to participatory democracy with the outcome demanded by the elite view of the “inevitable right side of history.”
The Brits who voted Leave likely saw the immigration endgame. If – as proposed generally and supported by PM Cameron – Turkey were to be admitted to the EU it could grant millions of economic migrants from MENA posing as refugees citizenship status in Turkey and then let them loose on the Continent and then into Great Britain.
In contrast, the Remain vote seems to consist of the young who have become accustomed to visa-free travel on the Continent and low cost roaming charges for their mobile phones as well as people who derive some benefit from the free flow of capital. The idea of perfunctorily acquiring a visa to travel on the Continent is apparently unbearable to the extent that avoiding the paperwork is worth an existential crisis for Britain.
* The political elites in the West appear to be blind to the great trend of the last 40+ years, and that is the disaggregation of conglomerate political organizations (breakup of: the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia). The more regulation-heavy and bloated the EU has become, the more it has become perceived as sclerotic, undemocratic, and past its prime.
Even in the business world, the old multi-product conglomerates of the 60′s-70′s broke up because they were vastly more inefficient together then the smaller single product lines were separate. You’ve also wrote about how it used to fashionable to think of trusts and monopolies as not healthy for competition. Large trusts and monopolies become more inefficient as the incentive to change spurred by competition is dampened. Same applies to the political realm.
Large, centrally-controlled multi-ethnic empires never last (graveyard: Greece, Rome, Persia, China, Austria-Hungary, Britain, and etc.), so why do the elite think that growing the EU and amassing unaccountable powers to its bureaucracy will be different? Eventually, the managing structure at the center becomes way too inefficient to handle the proliferating burden of more disparate polities (your language example, to take one instance). The management is not nearly as competent to take care of it all as they think they are. Heck, even Diocletian split Rome into the Eastern and Western Empires, with two Emperors to manage it, having realized it was too big for one god-emperor to handle.
My pet prediction is that the US will eventually suffer this fate. We’re too big to govern a continent-wide nation with so large a population with a one-size-fits-all single federal approach to every political issue. Combine that with our winner-take-all Presidential process, which increasingly disenfranchises the losing party, and we’re set up for an eventual split or some form of regional break-up. It will take time as regional politics consolidates around new political first principles, followed by a slow then increasing internal migration as people move to their preferred location, followed by agitation and pressure to leave DC behind. Already see it in small fits and starts in places like NorCal, Texas, some Western states. etc.
* Surprisingly, the biggest casualty of brexit so far has been the Labour Party, which campaigned to stay in, yet most of whose voters wanted out.
Tired old bearded loon, Jeremy Corbyn has ‘lost the confidence of the vast majority of the parliamentary party, yet still retains the support of paid up members. He refuses to go. A truly bizarre, dysfunctional crisis of a meltdown.
Where this will end no one knows.
I can’t help thinking that Labour is reaping the bad karma from millions of Britons over decades due to anger and frustration at their lunatic Economist inspired policy of massive immigration.
I’m not a superstitious man, but brexit day was marked, in London at least, by unseasonably bad weather, torrential rain, flooding and heavy thunderstorms.
The anger of the gods mirrored the anger of the English people.
“Lone wolf jihadists should target white Americans so no one mistakes their terror attacks for hate crimes unrelated to the cause of radical Islam, Al Qaeda writes in the latest edition of its online magazine.”
* Productivity is the key statistic that determines an economy’s first/third world status.
Most citizens of America and Europe intuitively grasp that if gains in productivity do not outpace population growth, then the average citizen will be poorer tomorrow than he was yesterday. This, and not jingoistic or retrograde nativism is why they oppose immigration. People also object to the loss of space due to overcrowding–an irredeemable loss that cannot be easily quantified or modeled and so is ignored.
* I do think nationalism is ultimately unavoidable and I think the nationalist reaction to globalism has been held back for quite a while, which means it is going to be dramatic when it reemerges. And the various articles by the elite lackeys (aka MSM) insisting that globalism is good for you and that cultural particularism is somehow evil are remarkably unpersuasive.
I also am not surprised that the elites and their media servants have all of a sudden decided that democracy is not all it’s cracked up to be. This is nothing new. This is how populist and fascist movements gain traction, and yet the elites still refuse to do anything for the Great Middle or to even recognize their concerns, about immigration, and about their own lives.
* I am very taken with Scott Adams’ point about sowing idea bombs so that people can be deprogrammed from progressive views by having their inner doubts repeatedly confirmed.
Merkel’s Boner was awful but useful in being so obviously wrong and destructive – few semi-serious people could, in their hearts, defend it.
The problem in much of Europe is that the press is a lickspittle thing: counter narratives are more likely to be screened off. The howl of outrage and astonishment in the German press over Brexit is extraordinary after Merkel’s B. Did none of them not see that as soon as we saw the Islamic cohorts marching into the heart of Europe something had broken, even if it was not quite clear what.
People really need to start pointing out that picking up opportunists off the coast of Africa to bring them into Europe is laughably moronic.
* Germany has been destined to be the dominant state in Europe since the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-’71. Perhaps we should’ve skipped the unpleasantness of 1914 (to say nothing of 1939!), and just embraced this reality at any earlier stage? Frau Merkel could’ve wound up as a Lutheran Deaconess, or some such relatively harmless thing.
* When the pendulum starts swinging back the other way, I hope the Jews manage to rejigger their existential rhetoric to accommodate it.
It really shouldn’t be that hard, particularly for Israelis. From its very inception, Zionism has been perfectly compatible with nationalism, socialist nationalism, religious nationalism, even racial nationalism. Zionism, in essence, is Jewish Nationalism: it is not enough to BE a Jew, we must also rule Jewish soil.
The Jews that are going face very real difficulties as the pendulum reverses direction are not Israeli Jews but galut Jews, with their cognitively dissonant “nationalism for me but not for thee”.
God bless ‘em, I hope they start modifying their rhetoric before all Holocaust sympathy runs out. I suspect it’s going to take a newer, younger generation to make the rhetorical transition. Miller, perhaps? The Abe Foxmans, I fear, are too old to moderate their thinking.
* “The Last Whites of the East End” is a wonderful and recent documentary by the BBC that looks at the racial cleansing of whites from the East End of London with remarkable sympathy.
I recommend it to get a sense of what is happening in London.
* Canadians and Americans can wander around each others’ countries without bothering with visas. Canadians don’t even need to apply for the perfunctory ESTA visa waiver that Europeans do.
In light of the current migrant situation, Britain might decide to require visas from Continentals, or Continentals might decide to require visas for Brits as an act of retaliation for daring to declare themselves independent; but it’s not a given that anything more than a passport will be required to travel between the UK and the Continent.
What Brits will, at least in theory, have to do is go through border controls and customs lines that EU citizens do not have to endure. To object to sovereignty for your own country simply because it requires you to wait in a few lines now and again is the height of spoiled entitlement and decadence.
* George Soros is one of the very few people whose native language was Esperanto (strange but true).
* There’s already a very aggressive campaign underway to de-legitimize the referendum due to the age skewer, because old people’s opinions don’t matter. I predict that, should they somehow succeed in ignoring the result they (meaning both Labour and Tory) will do everything possible to jack up immigration even more, so as to prevent this from ever happening again.
* As long as decisions are made by professional politicians, the EU has an irresistible momentum. The EU is a senior tour for politicians, quite literally a tour as they can wine and dine at meetings around the continent.
* Here’s an article that says that Trump supporters are more likely than Hillary supporters to believe that blacks are “violent”, “criminal”, and “lazy” than whites.
But, forgetting about the factual basis of any of these beliefs, the numbers are striking. Apparently about half of Trump supporters believe these scurrilous things, but about a third of Hillary’s supporters do as well.
And here’s the highly pertinent fact that doesn’t get mentioned in this account: the vast majority of blacks themselves are, of course, Hillary supporters. How many of Hillary’s supporters are black? Since 13% of the US is black, I’d guess about 25%. How many of her supporters are white? Well less than 75%, given that most Hispanics and Asians support her. So how different are the whites supporting Hillary in their attitudes from whites supporting Trump? Not much I’d guess. Or if indeed they are still pretty different, than it would have to be, say, Hispanics who have these attitudes toward blacks — which would also not be a very inspiring story.
* When respectful disagreement is outlawed only outlaws will respectfully disagree…
Steve Sailer writes: An anonymous commenter speculates on why Bill Clinton refuses to give up his membership in Trump National Golf Club-Westchester, Trump’s personal golf club, even though many institutions (NBC, the golf tours, Macy’s, etc.) that aren’t actually married to the presumptive Democratic nominee are boycotting the presumptive Republican nominee:
Three possibilities: Bill really thinks Hillary is going to win, so he intends to keep his membership and say, “Hey, no hard feelings,” after the election and simply wait until Trump gets over his sulk about losing, and then they pat each other on the back and Bill can continue golfing and schmoozing.
Second idea is that Bill isn’t very concerned if Hillary loses because he isn’t keen on being Mr. Hillary Clinton. He’s got an ego, and he’s in two minds about playing second fiddle his wife. He doesn’t want to say to her, “Mrs. President,” and see her in the most important place in every social function they’re required to attend. This would probably feel great to Hillary after Bill humiliated her with all his affairs, and she intends to rub her new, higher status in his face if she wins, and he knows it. It’s part of the psychological warfare inside their marriage, and for all I know, it may be one of her primary motivators for running for the office. Some women say, living well is the best revenge once they’ve dumped the cheating spouse, but in Hillary’s case, I think the best revenge on her hubby is becoming president herself and staying married to him so she can rub his face in it. You know, the “I’m somebody!” notion. Or, “they like me better than you,” referring to the American public.
Third possibility is that if the Clintons lose, Bill still wants political influence, and he intends to patch things up with Trump and intends to be an ‘adviser’ and big influence. After all, what way to arrange for big donors to give to the Clinton foundation by saying to them, “You know, I may be able to do something for you via my good friend, President Trump.”
Hardened politicos like Bill never cut loose anyone who can be useful to them.
Posted inHillary Clinton|Comments Off on Why Won’t Bill Clinton Boycott Trump National Golf Club?
Jennifer Williams: “GOP politicians should focus on creating equality of opportunity, not locking the transgender community out of the American dream.”
Posted inTrans|Comments Off on Washington Post: ‘I’m a transgender Republican. My party has betrayed me.’
What about the goyim? Won’t anyone think about the goyim? What percentage of the Academy are goyim?
Los Angeles Times: “In 2012, The Times reported that Oscar voters were 94% white and 77% male, and by this year those numbers had budged only slightly.”
We hear a great deal about white over-representation in Hollywood, but what about Jewish over-representation? How come that is not fit for public discussion?
The Jews are so dominant, I had to scour the trades to come up with six Gentiles in high positions at entertainment companies. When I called them to talk about their incredible advancement, five of them refused to talk to me, apparently out of fear of insulting Jews. The sixth, AMC President Charlie Collier, turned out to be Jewish.
As a proud Jew, I want America to know about our accomplishment. Yes, we control Hollywood.
Tears of joy. We can’t vouch for everyone, but that was a common reaction among the 683 actors, directors and other movie pros who were invited to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. After enduring the #OscarsSoWhite uproar, the academy selected a class of 2016 that is 46% female and 41% people of color. Overall, though, it moves the needle only a few percentage points for both groups. Check out the full list and how The Times’ own suggestions for members stacked up.
I think he’s signalling he’d like to publish more about the Jewish angle on this story but can’t.
Posted inHollywood, Jews|Comments Off on LAT: Idris Elba, Emma Watson, Ice Cube among 683 invited to join the movie academy — the largest, most diverse class ever
From 1986: Will’s defense of the civil rights revolution in terms of classical conservatism is an erroneous application of a traditionalist principle. “But the enforcement of the law,” he writes, “by making visible and sometimes vivid the community values that are deemed important enough to support by law, can bolster these values.. . . Of course, nothing in a society, least of all moral sentiment, is permanent and final. Indeed, there have been occasions when the law rightfully set out to change important and passionately held sentiments, and the law proved to be a web of iron.” One such occasion was the abrogation of the rights of owners of public accommodations to deny service to blacks, enacted in the civil rights legislation of the 1960s. The exercise of this right became “intolerably divisive” and therefore had to be abridged by congressional action.
“The most admirable achievements of modem liberalism — desegregation, and the civil rights act — were explicit and successful attempts to change (among other things) individuals’ moral beliefs by compelling them to change their behavior. The theory was that if government compelled people to eat and work and study and play together, government would improve the inner lives of those people.”
“Moral sentiment” does indeed change, but absolute moral values do not, and only if we believe that egalitarian values are superior to the rights of property can we accept the legislation Will is defending as legitimate. Nor it is clear that the civil rights revolution has really improved our inner lives or even changed our external conduct to any great degree, and if it has, the change has derived not only from government but also from social and nonpublic sanctions as well.
That “stateways” can make “folkways,” that coercive imposition by an apparatus of power can eventually alter patterns of thinking and conduct, is true. The Christian emperors of Rome after Constantine certainly did so, as did Henry VIII and his successors in the English Reformation. What the conservative wants to know, however, is by what authority a state undertakes such massive transformations and whether what is gained adequately compensates for the damage that is inevitably done. In the case of the suppression of paganism and its replacement by Christianity, Christian conservatives will have little doubt of the authority and ultimate value of the revolution. The processes by which the civil rights revolution was accomplished are more questionable. It is not clear that they have led or will lead to more justice and tolerance or to greater racial harmony. They certainly did damage to the Constitution by allowing the national legislative branch to ovemde state and local laws. They also damaged the political culture by popularizing and legitimizing the idea that every conceivable “minority” (women, sexual deviants, and all racial and ethnic groups) may use the federal government to satisfy its ambitions at the expense of local jurisdictions, the public treasury, and the social order. Nor is it clear on what authority Congress overrode traditional property rights to impose new rights. The exploitation of the national government to abrogate and create rights by which the ambitions and private dogmas of a faction may be satisfied is no less an instance of the degeneration of modernism than the abuse of government by the constituencies of the welfare state. The civil rights revolution and the welfare state are not, then, reactions against the tendencies of modernism as Will presents them, but rather their fulfillment.
Indeed, for all his expostulations in favor of the high-minded and aristocratic enforcement of virtue, Will repeatedly expresses his deference to the conventional and the popular. The rights of proprietors in 1964 “had become intolerably divisive,” so conservatism properly understood accepts the will of those who initiated the division. “An American majority was unusually aroused,” so authority must follow the majority. The welfare state is an idea whose time “has now come,” so conservatives must accept the idea and must not resist the times. “If conservatism is to engage itself with the way we live now,” it must adapt itself to current circumstances, and perish the thought that we might really change the way we live now by rejecting the legacies of liberalism, dismantling its power structure, and enforcing and protecting the real traditions of the West rather than indulging in Will’s elegant pretense that that is what he is doing and expressing open contempt for the only force in American politics that has ever seriously sought to do it…
Although Will is sometimes called a “neo-conservative,” he is not one. Neoconservatives typically derive more or less conservative policy positions from essentially liberal premises. Will in fact does the opposite: he derives from more or less unexceptionable premises of classical conservatism policy positions that are often congruent with the current liberal agenda. It is because he accepts, and wants to be accepted by, the “achievements” of modem liberalism that he ignores or sneers at the serious conservative thinkers and leaders of our time who have sought to break liberal idols and that he voices no criticism of the powers that support liberalism. It is therefore not surprising that his commentary is welcomed in and rewarded by liberal power centers. They have little to fear from him and his ideas and much to gain if his version of “conservatism” should gain currency. He enjoys every prospect of a bright future in their company.
COMMENTS AT RADIX:
* The key phrase that gives away Will’s thought process is where he says, “Once politics is defined negatively…” Politics has supplanted theology as the so-called queen of the sciences, but it uses the same methods, terminology, and metaphysics that the former queen used, and largely written by the same philosophers. Defining God apophatically is the theological equivalent to Will’s expression of a negative definition of politics. And apophatic theology is the most humble and conservative ways of approaching God. It is also the most humble and conservative way of approaching politics. The unspoken alternative offered up by Will is cataphatic, or positive theology/politics, in which positive declarations are made about the nature of God and the world. It is brash and unconservative. And Will’s method of justifying this change (!) in approach is not to justify it on it’s merits, but to punch to the right. He knows in his heart, if one indeed he has, that what he is doing is against all tradition and solid thought, and that in order to get his way he cannot rely on argument, but must destroy any as yet unseen opposition by preemptive proscription. This methodology is the mark of a truly evil man. I wish I could have seen this more clearly years ago.
Posted inGeorge Will|Comments Off on Sam Francis On George Will
Being a liberal-minded, extremely pro-European Londoner, who lived for many years in France, I’ve been in a state of shock and dismay since the referendum results were announced. Would I now need a visa to visit my beloved Paris? French friends I saw over the weekend, who only moved to this country a few months ago, were already worrying what their status would be once the UK’s “divorce” from the EU is finalized.
To me, the Leave victory is representative of a disturbing reactionary trend, of a more insular, less tolerant, “small island” mentality prevailing. Leave supporters were shown on television news crying with emotion, saying: “We’ve got our country back.”
But what “country” have they “got back” exactly? Is this nostalgia for some mythical all-white, Anglo-Saxon, Christian utopia that maybe existed hundreds of years ago – if it ever existed?
As a British Jew – whose grandfathers came to this country in the 1930s from Germany and Hungary respectively to escape the Nazis – the kind of jingoistic, anti-immigrant rhetoric that has characterized some of the Leave campaigning has made me feel distinctly uneasy.
Nigel Farage, leader of UKIP, the far-right United Kingdom Independence Party, unveiled a huge poster during the campaign showing a large line of mainly non-white migrants and refugees, with the caption: “Breaking point: the EU has failed us all.” Although other political leaders condemned this poster as an incitement to racial hatred, the fact that Farage even felt comfortable enough to use this kind of racist publicity stunt speaks for itself.
The whole Brexit campaigning has clearly shown up bitter and divisive splits in the country, with the tragic low-point, the murder of a young, pro-Remain Labour member of parliament, Jo Cox, in broad daylight on the streets of her local constituency.
Mike Katz, National Vice-Chair of the Labour Jewish Movement, an affiliate of the Labour Party, argues that Remain is “the natural position” for progressive-minded Jews. He makes a strong pro-immigrant argument: “Immigrants are the essential glue of society. We understand the huge contribution that immigrants make to our life… we ourselves, our forefathers, benefited in the past from being able to make a life here.”
Katz foresees that British Jews, along with all other ethnic minorities, will be affected by the wave of racism that the Leave campaign seems to have unleashed.
There has already been a sharp spike in hate crimes against ethnic minorities reported since the Leave campaign triumphed. Just over the weekend, cards stating “No more Polish vermin,” and “Leave the EU” were distributed in homes and shops in Cambridgeshire.
Posted inBrexit, Israel, Jews|Comments Off on Jewish Tears Over Brexit
The results of the vote shocked to the core. Londoners, who voted 60-40 in favor of staying, were despondent and bewildered. All of the employees at the hotel where I stayed, every one of whom was a foreigner, gave voice to a mix of anger and fear. They came to London in search of opportunity, education and stability. They no longer knew where they stood in their adopted country. Similarly, everyone I met in shul and at Shabbat dinner later that evening, to a person, was aghast at the self-inflicted wound of the British, shuddering at the prospect of Boris Johnson as Britain’s next prime minister. Many of us could not avoid asking ourselves: If so many of the British pulled the lever as they did, couldn’t Americans do the same and allow the unimaginable to happen in November?
…What we are witnessing is not the venting of the wrath of British voters alone. We are witnessing a global phenomenon, a wide-scale pushback against the post-World War II ideal of liberal democracy. One sees this throughout the Continent, from Greece to Hungary, Spain to Poland, from Russia to Great Britain, and reaching across the Atlantic to the United States. One can even see the grave threats to the democratic order in Israel, to which politicians such as former Prime Minister Ehud Barak and former Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon have ominously referred, as part of this trend.
The current democracy deficit has many causal factors, though two in particular seem worthy of mention. Each derives from a different version of liberalism. First, globalization, the idea of open global economic borders without national restraints, once upon a time seemed to be the perfect system for the fleet, wireless and borderless 21st century. It turns out, though, that globalization can and has run roughshod over the economic and social orders of old, rendering obsolete the local worker, shop and customs. What Britons who supported the Leave campaign said the day after the vote was that, at last, they had their country back. The sense of ceding power — and of a lost cultural identity — was profound.
That feeling of cultural, economic and political loss results from a second factor: the extraordinary movement of populations in the world todday. Not since World War II have we seen as high a number of refugees: an estimated 65 million in 2015 (compared with 40 million in the 1940s), according to the United Nations. The arrival of new immigrants and refugees into Western countries, often from the Middle East or Central Asia, was initially welcomed — or at least permitted — in the name of a humanitarian, pluralist liberalism. There was a sense that the developed world had a responsibility to the developing world, a moral obligation to extend a hand to the less fortunate as a basic human right.
Posted inBrexit|Comments Off on Brexit and the global democracy deficit
Strangely, neither the ADL nor the Museum of Tolerance and other such Jewish institutions push for gay marriage in Israel. One would think love is love, after all.
June is LGBT Pride Month. To understand the LGBT movement, it’s important to appreciate the meaning of pride. Pride, according to Merriam-Webster, is “a feeling that you respect yourself and deserve to be respected by other people.” How does this translate into LGBT pride or pride amongst any other group of people such as African Americans, Jews, women or immigrants? Especially for groups of people who have been oppressed, marginalized, discriminated against and targeted for bullying, harassment and violence, pride is key. Pride is a group of people standing together and affirming their self-worth, their history and accomplishments, their capability, dignity and their visibility. It is a vocal and powerful statement to themselves and the world that they deserve to be treated with respect and equality. Pride is a way out.
The LGBT Pride Movement began at Stonewall in the summer of 1969. On June 28, a police raid of the Stonewall Inn, a gay club in NYC, turned violent when customers and local sympathizers rioted against the police. The riot embodied the mounting of anger and weariness the gay community felt about the police department targeting gay clubs and engaging in discriminatory practices, which occurred regularly during that time. And yes, it also represented their pride. The Stonewall riot was followed by days of demonstrations in NYC and was the impetus for the creation of several gay, lesbian and bisexual civil rights organizations. One year later, the first Gay Pride marches took place in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, commemorating the Stonewall riots. The Pride movement was born.
Posted inADL, Homosexuality|Comments Off on ADL: ‘With #HeterosexualPrideDay trending, let’s reflect on why #Pride for LGBT is so important’
"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)
