RUTHFULLY YOURS

Anthony Dillon identifies as a part-Aboriginal Australian who is proud of both his Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal ancestries. Originally from Queensland, he now lives in Sydney and is a researcher at the University of Western Sydney

The first and saddest reaction of far too many Indigenous activists and spokesmen is to see the past as a crushing burden, one that can only be lifted by profuse apologies and, the most recent demand, a re-written Constitution. It is an attitude no less destructive than delusional.

Many people have asserted that the problems Aborigines experience today are largely due to the influence of the past. Specifically, colonisation is assumed to be the cause of much of the suffering as James Cook University Associate Professor Gracelyn Smallwood has stated . Aboriginal people, she says, remain buirdened by “the trans-generational scourge of violent colonisation”. The Creative Spirits website takes up the same theme, blaming colonisation for causing “all the known social disadvantages and trauma.” Interestingly, despite a past said to be causing such havoc today, there are many Aboriginal people — many thousands in fact — who not only survive but thrive.

It was Palestinian who hurt themselves: When Israelis were not able to hire Palestinian workers, they simply turned to foreign workers, prefabricated construction and other industrial innovations.

If the boycott of goods made in the settlements is successful, thousands, if not tens of thousands of Palestinians will find themselves unemployed, hungry, and ripe for radicalization.

The world will never give up its computing, medical, agricultural and start-up products for us. The Israelis will continue to prosper. They have already found other markets.

Mahmoud Abbas is afraid of Hamas and afraid to enter the Gaza Strip. As a result of rumors that Hamas was working privately to reach a cease-fire agreement with Israel, Abbas is threatening to dissolve the national unity government.

We Palestinians continue to miss one opportunity after the other. Now, we are about to miss yet another opportunity for peace.

The guy who spent twenty years listening to Reverend Jeremiah Wright preach the gospel of racial hostility has decided it is just too much trouble to keep his black-on-white resentment all bottled up.

So the president put it on full display last week at the eulogy for the pastor who was a victim in the Charleston mass murder.

And what we saw was quite a bit different than the fresh-faced, new-vision, ‘put race behind us’ guy who electrified the country with his speech to the Democrat National Convention in 2004.

Remember that guy? “This is why you go into this business, to watch a speech like that.” said David Brooks on PBS immediately following the speech. “It’s a shame the networks aren’t covering this tonight because they just missed a bit of history.”

The left-wing media establishment is turning against Hillary Clinton.

It’s happening long after the rest of us understood that Mrs. Clinton bore a unique responsibility for the tragic and avoidable disaster in Benghazi that cost the lives of four brave Americans, so please: there is no need for applause. After all, the New York Times, the Washington Post, CBS Sixty Minutes, and NBC News are just doing their jobs. Finally.

Well, almost doing their jobs. For most of these, the Clinton “story” is all about process. As more emails turn up that Hillary “overlooked” when she scoured her personal server, the New York Times wonders if any serious discrepancy will emerge, and gives Hillary’s spokesperson’s effort to bury the story far more credit than he deserves.

The stereotyping of “Latino voters” and what it distracts us from.

Whenever the discussion on news programs turns to immigration and politics, invariably the issue of the “Latino Vote” will be raised within the first two sentences of the conversation. It is truly remarkable that the same participants in the discussions on programs who are quick to invoke the concept of block votes — such as the “Latino voters,” “black voters” or “Jewish Voters” — are just as quick to condemn any sort of profiling done by law enforcement.

A few other things to ban besides the Confederate flag .

The return of the Confederacy was averted in the summer of 2015 when major retailers frantically scoured through their vast offerings to purge any images of a car from the Dukes of Hazzard. If not for their quick thinking, armies of men in gray might have come marching down the streets of New York and San Francisco to stop off for an Iced Mocha Frappucino ™ at a local Starbucks before restoring slavery.

Yassin Salhi, who beheaded his boss and tried to blow up the chemical plant where he worked, is likely to face terrorism charges – yet despite a considerable amount of evidence to the contrary, he denies that he was motivated by jihad terror at all.

Reuters reported Monday that Salhi “told investigators he was not a jihadist and repeated earlier statements that he committed the act outside the southeast city of Lyon on Friday after a row with his wife the day before and his boss a few days earlier.” In response to these “personal difficulties,” he sawed off the head of Herve Cornara, his boss at the American company Air Products in Grenoble, and then hung it on a fence outside the plant, with black flags inscribed with the Islamic profession of faith on either side.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) upstaged ‘em all at a rally in Madison, Wis., on Wednesday night.

In fact, he put the number of people who showed up for Hillary Clinton’s official campaign announcement to shame.

Sanders nearly filled the Veterans Memorial Coliseum at the Alliant Energy Center, which seats 10,231 people; the Associated Press put a 10,000 estimate on the crowd. About 5,500 people were on New York’s Roosevelt Island for Clinton’s carefully orchestrated launch.

From what he bizarrely frames as a conservative perspective, Joseph Curl has penned a Washington Times op-ed ripping the purportedly out-of-touch reaction by Republican presidential candidates to the Supreme Court’s same-sex marriage (SSM) ruling.

Mr. Curl takes Ted Cruz, Carly Fiorina, Bobby Jindal, Mike Huckabee, and Scott Walker to task over their harsh criticism of the ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges. A bare 5-4 majority of the justices compelled all fifty states to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Thus have five unelected lawyers wrested control over the definition of marriage from the people of the states, to whom the Constitution commits it.

Vienna
With Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif’s one-day trip back to Tehran for consultations with supreme leader Ali Khamenei, it was a slow day for the nuclear talks here in the Austrian capital. Journalists are shuttling back and forth between the press tent and the lobby of the adjacent Marriott where Iranian intelligence officers, many of them posing as journalists, unabashedly photograph and film anyone that catches their attention. I opted out and spent the morning wandering around the city.

It’s a small city, say Viennese. It’s a very small city, several Viennese have now told me. It’s true Vienna has only 1.5 million residents, but it’s the former capital of a mighty empire. And the scale of the city—its monumental architecture, and broad avenues— is appropriately imperial. But for current residents, Vienna perhaps resembles the enormously oversized wardrobe of an ancestor with exquisite, if impossible, taste. That is, Vienna isn’t small—it’s the Austrians that got smaller. The country is unable to project power even in its near abroad and thus its foreign policy is driven entirely by business concerns. And that’s one reason why the Austrians are happy to host this round of the P5+1 talks—an agreement over Iran’s nuclear program means business opportunities for Austrian industry.