Displaying posts published in

April 2018

The “Moderate” Muslim Scholar Industry by Majid Rafizadeh

I have lived for years in these places in the Middle East and seen with my own eyes the cruelty and abuse that takes place under extremist Islamic law. I have heard the screams of families as their loved ones were tortured and slaughtered for the simplest acts — singing, dancing, voicing an opinion, or simply being a non-Muslim — all of which are crimes.

If we play the game of misinforming and misleading people about Islamism, by making irrelevant analogies to whitewash the violence and terrorism which are generated by Islamic fundamentalism, we are indoctrinating the literally millions of innocent children who will be either the perpetrators or victims of the next radical Islamic terror attacks — including Muslims.

Meanwhile the real scholars of Islam, such as Robert Spencer, who are trying to warn the public about these apologists, are called “Islamophobes,” poisoned, often fired from work, censored on social media and barred from entering democratic countries such as Britain.

When I was new to the United States, a so-called “moderate” Muslim scholar pulled me aside and gave me some “friendly” words of advice:

“In the West, there is a trend unfolding. If you follow it, you will find great success, more than you can imagine. It is very easy, all you have to do is stick to a few simple rules. No matter what your personal views are, you must be a Muslim apologist — an apologist for radical Islam — and present yourself as a ‘moderate’ Muslim scholar. If you can accomplish this, they will lap it up. You will never want for anything again. You will easily gain wealth and become the most in-demand ‘moderate’ Muslim scholar in the West!”

It sounded reasonable enough. “As you have the advantage of being from the region,” he continued, “you will come across as authentic.”

Easing German-Israeli Tensions New German foreign minister vows to fight anti-Semitism.Joseph Puder

Angela Merkel’s Germany has a new coalition government and a new Social Democrat Party (SPD) Foreign Minister, 51-year old Heiko Maas, who replaced his controversial predecessor, Ingmar Gabriel. Last week was Maas’ first official trip to Israel, which began at Yad V’shem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial. In the visitors book Maas wrote “Germany bears the responsibility for the most barbarous crime in the history of humanity.” He also vowed that Germany would continue to fight against anti-Semitism and racism “everywhere and every day.” On this, his preliminary foreign trip, Maas arrived in Jerusalem following visits to Paris, Warsaw, and Rome. On his two day trip he was visiting Ramallah for talks with Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority (PA), and he met with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Reuven Rivlin.

In recent months, the relationship between Germany and Israel has been pretty frosty, and the new foreign minister seeks to change that. In his inaugural speech in Berlin, Maas announced that he would travel to Israel to mark Israel’s 70th anniversary of independence, and pointed out that, “Personally, the German-Israeli history is not just one of historical responsibility, but it also represents a deep motivation in my political decision-making.” He added, “I didn’t go into politics out of respect for Willy Brandt or the peace movement, I went into politics because of Auschwitz.”

Maas’ statement about his motivation to enter politics is certainly commendable, considering that 42-years ago (1976), an Air France airplane from Israel bound for Paris was diverted it to Entebbe by German hijackers. Once there, the Germans initiated a Nazi-like selection, which separated Jews and Israelis from the rest of the passengers. German soil saw the murder of 11 Israeli athletes during the 1972 Munich Olympics. Earlier in the 1960’s, German scientists helped Egypt’s Dictator Abdul Nasser develop missiles aimed to destroy the Jewish state. Given (Nazi) Germany’s murder of Six-Million European Jews, Germany’s moral responsibility to the Holocaust survivors in the Jewish state was not upheld. Blood money was indeed paid by the West German government, but at the same time, its scientists sought to finish Hitler’s work against the Jewish state.

The Campaign To Destroy Laura Ingraham David Hogg’s totalitarian tactics aim to frighten a TV host’s advertisers away. Matthew Vadum

The left-wing lynch mob that has been trying to destroy conservative commentator Laura Ingraham for her gentle mockery last week of David Hogg has already succeeded in frightening advertisers away from the host’s Fox News Channel show.

Since launching his career in big-money leftist televangelism weeks ago, Hogg has been spewing hatred and venomous lies about anyone who doesn’t toe the party line. His belligerent in-your-face activism has also been driving up sales of firearms and ammunition and boosting the membership rolls of groups like the National Rifle Association and Gun Owners of America.

Hogg has been especially focused on accusing his enemies of wanting children to die. “It just makes me think: What sick f**kers are out there that want to sell more guns, murder more children, and, honestly, just get reelected?” Hogg told The Outline. “What type of person are you, when you want to see more f**king money than children’s lives? What type of shitty person does that?”

Hogg has also called the NRA “child murderers,” NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch “disgusting,” and Republicans “sick f**kers.”

Hogg is a student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Broward County, Fla., where former student Nikolas Cruz massacred 14 students and three school employees on Valentine’s Day.

Ingraham has blamed “mental illness” and “broken or damaged families” for the massacre, which is consistent with the evidence, given that Cruz has serious psychiatric problems and had a difficult upbringing, losing his sole remaining parent in the months before the attack. Others have pointed out the multiple failures at every level of government that kept Cruz out of the criminal justice system, as well as the left-wing Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative (JDAI) that helped to make the young man the mass murderer he is today.

Ingraham said a March 14 student walkout for gun control was not an “organic outpouring of youthful rage.” It was “nothing but a left-wing, anti-Trump diatribe.” This comment angered a lot of left-wingers.

Yale Panel Condemns ‘White Saviorism’ in ‘Nonprofit Industrial Complex’ By Tyler O’Neil

Last week, a student panel at Yale University suggested that white supremacy is central to nonprofit charities. According to Yale students, the “white savior” mentality turns charities into a racist and oppressive “nonprofit industrial complex” keeping people of color down.

“The nonprofit industrial complex is very real and very alive in New Haven and needs to be dismantled just like any other oppressive system,” Kerry Ellington, organizer for People Against Police Brutality, argued. “White folks are centering themselves in these spaces and don’t know how to listen to the communities they serve.”

The U.S. Health Justice Collaborative, an initiative started by students in Yale’s health professional schools, organized and hosted the event. The panelists included a journalist, nonprofit directors, and several organizers. Each of them discussed how their careers in nonprofits involved “white saviorism.”

Over 1,300 people said they were “interested” in the event on Facebook, and many attendees were turned away at the door, organizer Robert Rock, a senior with the class of 2018, told the Yale Daily News. Those turned away could watch the event livestreamed on Facebook.

Barbara Tinney, executive director of the New Haven Family Alliance and a member of the panel, described her initial shock at the “audacity” of the event’s title: “Paved With Good Intentions: White Saviorism and the Nonprofit Industrial Complex.” Even so, Tinney said the panel echoed themes she had previously discussed with her colleagues over her long career in the New Haven nonprofit scene.

Tinney suggested there is a conflict between the work nonprofits do and “many of the oppressive power dynamics they can help maintain.”

Panelists lamented the predominance of white people at the head of nonprofits, and launched into a discussion of “white fragility,” a term referring to the alleged widespread avoidance of difficult racial discussions in order to prevent “white discomfort.”

“When my white allies use their claws, they could get pushback,” Kica Matos, director of immigrant rights and racial justice at the Center for Community Change, said on the panel. “When I hiss, I could get shot.” Even so, she suggested that discomfort should not stop “white allies from showing up to support people of color,” the Daily News reported.

Journalist Jordan Flaherty half-jokingly referred to Batman as a “white savior,” the Daily News reported, “because he is a rich white man who dedicates his money to gadgetry and vigilante justice, rather than investing in his community.”

The “white savior” panelists suggested that many nonprofits, led by white people, misunderstand the needy communities they aim to serve, entrenching poverty rather than alleviating it. CONTINUE AT SITE

Hungary and the Strongman Voters will have to defend their democracy since Brussels can’t.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/hungary-and-the-strongman-1522795619

A mayoral loss for Mr. Orban’s Fidesz party in an urban stronghold in February was a warning that voters are growing disenchanted with his rule. Mr. Orban’s rhetoric about a George Soros -led conspiracy to inundate Hungary with migrants seems to be turning off many undecided voters. Corruption allegations against Fidesz politicians and supporters, which they deny, also weigh on support.

If Hungarian voters deal Mr. Orban a blow, they’ll have to do it without much help from the country’s opposition parties. The electoral system makes Fidesz beatable if voters choose the single most viable alternative candidate in each district. But many parties are reluctant to stand down their candidates for fear that they may win too few seats to make it back into parliament. The two most prominent opposition parties are also at opposite ends of the political spectrum—the Greens, and Jobbik, a formerly far-right party that claims to have remade itself as a center-right group. That leaves voters to figure out how to vote tactically in each district.

The stakes are high for Hungarians and their European and NATO partners. Mr. Orban has eroded freedom of the press by withholding government advertising from unfriendly media and encouraging his friends to buy newspapers and TV stations, and new laws target funding for civil-society groups that challenge his actions. Mr. Orban is a close friend of Vladimir Putin within the EU and NATO, where Hungary enjoys the same veto as other members. A supermajority would allow him to further entrench his power.

An embarrassment is that the EU hasn’t been more effective at blocking Mr. Orban’s authoritarian moves. Mr. Orban has been shrewd in befriending political groups in Brussels, and the EU doesn’t have much authority to punish countries determined to stray from democracy. That leaves Hungarian voters to defend their democracy as best they can, while they can.

The Divine Frenzy of Feminism By David Solway

If the spirit of the classical Greek playwright Euripides could be summoned from the grave and observe our feminist age, he would not be surprised. In The Bacchae (premiered circa 405 B.C.), he told the story of Pentheus, the unfortunate ruler of Thebes, who resisted the ritual incursion of Dionysus, the androgynous god of wine, ecstasy, passionate delirium, and the oracular Mysteries.

In the play, Dionysus returns to Thebes, the city of his birth, accompanied by a retinue of bacchants, or drunken revellers. Finding himself mocked, he infects the women of the royal household with an access of divine frenzy, whereupon they flee into the forest to perform paroxysms of fevered worship. Pentheus wishes to preserve the functioning of the state and recognizes that the upsurge of visionary dementia and phobic irrationality exemplified by the maenads or “raving ones” — the RadFem hordes of the day — would lead to the disruption of the political order and the destabilization of civil society.

Pentheus intends to put an end to the insanity but, influenced by Dionysus, falls prey to curiosity and is persuaded to disguise himself in women’s clothing, enter the forest and witness the maenadic revels from a perch in a tall fir tree. He is spotted by the tribe of hysterics, brought to the ground and ripped to shreds, the mordancy of the scene enhanced by the fact that it is his own mother, Agave, who tears off his head and carries the trophy back to Thebes.

Of course, the play is far more complex than this short synopsis would indicate. Euripides treats the perennial conflict between the Olympian gods and the maternal Furies, between man and woman, between social order and individual enthusiasm, between Apollo, the god of reason and light, and Dionysus representing the darker forces of emotion and rapture — or as we would say today, of libido.

This theme was famously addressed by Euripides’ great predecessor Aeschylus in the Oresteian Trilogy, where the female goddesses the Eumenides (or Furies) are pitted against the male Olympians. Both forces, Aeschylus felt, the visceral and the rational, were necessary to the proper conduct of the state and in the life of the individual, but must be contained in a condition of approximate balance to avoid a descent into anarchy. The message of The Bacchae, however, is ambiguous insofar as the conclusion of the play suggests the desired victory of the Dionysian infatuation, yet the disintegration of public order and Apollonian statecraft would have been obvious to Euripides’ audience. We recall that Plato’s Republic, in which music, art, and trance-like phenomena were to be the prohibited by law, appeared circa 380 B.C., only 25 years after the initial performance of The Bacchae. Both sides of the dynamic had their dedicated votaries.