Displaying posts published in

February 2019

Corbyn’s road map to a communist Britain Giles Udy

http://standpointmag.co.uk/february-2019-features-giles-udy-jeremy-corbyn-britain-road-to-socialism

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 it seemed that communism, as a force in politics, was finally dead. The ideas that had inspired radicals around the world had lost their shine. As Marxism seemed discredited, market economies prospered. Only an older generation of greying revolutionaries remained to tend the faltering flame of world revolution. While they continued to squabble over minutiae of revolutionary history, the world moved on. By the turn of the millennium British students, once the vanguard of radicalism, were decried for their political apathy. The 2001 9/11 terrorist attacks ended that.

Fear took over from complacency. As the 2003 Iraq war loomed, the fractious British Left, in a rare moment of unity, formed the Stop the War Coalition and brought a million people out on the streets. Few of the unwitting participants knew that the march’s organisers’ ultimate goal was the overthrow of parliamentary democracy; none could have guessed that, 15 years later, the movement’s first two leaders, the British Communist Party member Andrew Murray and left-wing activist Jeremy Corbyn, would be within reach of forming the first communist government in British history, Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party, Murray appointed as his “Special Adviser”.

The crash of 2007 shook Western confidence still further. Left-wing commentators such as Guardian journalist Seumas Milne, an old communist comrade of Murray’s, openly voiced nostalgia for the “huge social benefits” enjoyed under Soviet communism in the USSR and Eastern Bloc. Milne is now Corbyn’s Director of Strategy and Communications.In 1920 Lenin urged British communists to enter the Labour Party to subvert it from within. In 1936, Trotsky told his followers to do the same, but successive generations of Labour leaders resisted this “entryism”, most famously in Neil Kinnock’s 1980s campaign against the Trotskyite group Militant. Two young members of a group which tried to thwart Kinnock’s campaign were Corbyn and Jon Lansman, later the founder of Momentum. That failure, reinforced by Tony Blair’s New Labour reforms, convinced many leftists that the only option left was bring the government down by extra-parliamentary action. This was the context when John McDonnell, now Corbyn’s Shadow Chancellor, made his call for “insurrection”, a general strike and street protests in 2013.

Ruthie Blum False hopes, unwarranted hysteria

https://www.jns.org/opinion/false-hopes-unwarranted-hysteria/

The glee with which the “anybody but Bibi” camp responded to the national and international outcry of the prime minister’s nod towards the Otzma Yehudit Party was uncontainable. Then the news turned towards peace …When U.S. President Donald Trump’s senior adviser, Jared Kushner, told Sky News Arabia on Monday that Washington’s yet-to-be-revealed Israeli-Palestinian peace plan includes a “redrawing of boundaries and resolving final-status issues,” right-wing campaign rhetoric went up a notch.

For days, those to the left of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had been happily slamming the merger he helped broker between the Jewish Home and National Union parties, together with Otzma Yehudit, an offshoot of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane’s outlawed Kach Party. The glee with which the “anybody but Bibi” camp responded to the national and international outcry was uncontainable. Finally, here was a move—made to ensure that the votes for right-wing parties at risk of not passing the electoral threshold are not lost—that would be the nail in Netanyahu’s political coffin. The feeling was that if the prime minister’s legal troubles didn’t topple him, the wrath of American Jewry might just do the trick.

Virtue Signals Welcome Here A pro-refugee sign popular among progressives has troubling origins.Steven Volynets

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272972/virtue-signals-welcome-here-steven-volynets

In newly affluent Brooklyn neighborhoods like Ditmas Park, replete with organic food, cafes, and a bar that doubles as a flower shop, posters bearing the message “Refugees Are Welcome Here”—illustrated with a sketch of an Arab man tucking a child inside his jacket—is a signature of progressive politics. The refugee sign has been appearing in local storefronts since the onset of the civil war in Syria, a conflict that has unleashed the worst such crisis in recent history. Created by Brooklyn-based artist Micah Bazant, the image on the poster is drawn from a photograph of a Syrian man and his son, taken at a refugee camp. “I wish I knew who that father was,” Bazant told Newsweek.

Most people of goodwill share that sentiment, but what few realize is that the group that popularized “refugees are welcome” is far more radical than such a message suggests. The poster quickly spread beyond the New York area thanks to Jewish Voice for Peace, an advocacy group with chapters in multiple cities. Even Lin-Manuel Miranda, creator of Hamilton, once tweeted a photograph of it with a caption: “Seen at my local bodega. God bless. Good morning!”

The Reparations Primary

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/democratic-primary-reparations-discussion/

There is a strange political conversation under way as the 2020 Democratic presidential primary gets under way, and it goes like this: One group of Democrats proposes something daffy, vague, and impractical, and another group of Democrats says, “Of course that’s daffy, vague, and impractical — but at least they started a conversation!” This is said in the tone kindergarten teachers use with toddlers who test the maxim that there is no such thing as a dumb question. It’s something to see: a political party condescending to itself.

None of the Democratic 2020 contenders currently talking up reparations for slavery is serious about the project. Those of them who are serious about anything are serious only about winning the party’s nomination and the role that flattering a small but influential congregation of left-wing intellectuals might play in that.

Call it the Ta-Nehisi Coates primary.

It’s an unserious proposal, but we’ll do its authors the courtesy of offering a serious answer, anyway.

Paying reparations for slavery is a terrible idea because there is no one to pay reparations and no one to pay them to. There are not any slave-owners left among us and haven’t been for some time. There aren’t any liberated slaves, either. Slavery was a terrible crime and, like all such enormities, it was carried out by real people who inflicted unconscionable suffering on real people — specific people, individuals.

The Left’s Next Target: Noncitizen Voting By Rep. Jeff Duncan(R- S.C. District 3)

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/noncitizen-voting-the-lefts-next-target/

The practice has a history, but today its ideology is flawed

The impermanent nature of politics being what it is, what was unthinkable in the past becomes debatable in the present and conventional wisdom in the future. Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s call for a borderless hemisphere in the 2016 election has given way to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s declaration that illegal aliens are actually more American than those who would strengthen our borders, which has in turn given way to former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams’s endorsement of noncitizens’ voting in American elections.

This latter idea may strike many conservatives as another example of the Left’s new leaders embracing radicalism, but the history and ideology of this issue are more interesting than that. I strongly oppose noncitizen voting, and have introduced a bill to ban all federal funding for states and municipalities that allow the practice, but I fear that, unless we understand the history of noncitizen voting and the ideology that underpins it, conservatives will be ill-equipped to oppose future waves of activism in this area.

Noncitizen voting was actually the status quo for much of U.S. history. It wasn’t until 1926 that Arkansas became the last state to ban noncitizens from voting, and 1928 that the first federal election without enfranchised aliens occurred. Since Article I of the Constitution provides that those who can vote in elections for the most numerous house of their state legislature may vote in elections for the U.S. House of Representatives, many congresses in our history have seen members elected from constituencies with significant populations of alien voters.

A Young Woman from Libya By Jay Nordlinger

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/a-young-woman-from-libya/

I’ve done a podcast, a Q&A, with Asma Khalifa: here. She is in Mexico City, participating in a meeting of the Oslo Freedom Forum. Asma is an extraordinary person. She is a young woman from Libya, a Berber. She is a democracy leader and human-rights activist.

Last year, I heard her tell a very moving story. I asked her to tell it again, on this podcast. During the Libyan Civil War, she sided with the rebels against the dictator Muammar Gaddafi. After a close friend of hers was killed — executed, along with many others — she decided to join up: as a field nurse. She witnessed many terrible things.

She did not like what was happening to her. She was engulfed in hatred. “That’s not me,” she said. So she asked a doctor to assign her to a particular ward of a military hospital: a ward where enemy soldiers — Gaddafi’s forces — were kept. Almost no one went there.

Sweeney Agonistes: Tommy Robinson Turns the Tables on the BBC By Bruce Bawer

https://pjmedia.com/trending/sweeney-agonistes-tommy-robinson-turns-the-tables-on-the-bbc/

Tommy Robinson’s courageous truth-telling about Islam has not only resulted in years of harassment by the British authorities, an endless cascade of death threats, and, last year, a thoroughly unjust prison term that might have spelled his demise, but also, of course, a pattern of coverage by the mainstream media that has been almost uniformly deceitful and poisonous. When he heard that the BBC series Panorama, which is the UK’s answer to 60 Minutes, was planning a story on him with the working title “Tommy Takedown,” and that its producers were collaborating with the vile group Hope Not Hate (HNH), which is Britain’s version of the Southern Poverty Law Center — i.e., a shady far-left smear machine masquerading as a noble monitor of bigots, fascists, and hate groups — he decided to go on the offensive.

The key to Tommy’s plan was Lucy Brown, a former employee whose job with him had ended in a shouting match. After their split, she was offered £5,000 by HNH to badmouth Tommy for a cover story, and had to contact a lawyer to prevent a major daily from falsely claiming she’d accused Tommy of sexual allegations. When Panorama reporter John Sweeney asked her to talk to him for what he promised would be a “definitive documentary” uncovering Tommy in all his “horribleness,” Brown got in touch with Tommy and agreed to wear a hidden camera when she met with Sweeney to discuss his plans.

Doctors Insist Canadian 14-Year-Old Needs No Parent Consent For Trans Hormone Injections Maxine’s rapidly changing identities seem like a coping mechanism or phase. Her father thinks doctors should hold off on pumping her full of hormones.By Jeremiah Keenan

http://thefederalist.com/2019/02/26/doctors-insist-canadian-14-year-old-needs-no-parent-consent-trans-hormone-injections/

Clark* first found out that his 12-year-old daughter Maxine was being treated as a boy by her school when he saw her new name in her class’s grade seven yearbook. “Quinn” was the new name her counselor had helped her pick out, and Maxine’s school district in Delta, British Columbia, Canada, had decided that “Quinn” should be treated, for all intents and purposes, as a boy.

The district apparently felt justified in leaving Maxine’s father completely out of the loop. Maxine’s school district was operating by the BC Ministry of Education’s Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (SOGI) Policy, according to which Clark had no right to know his daughter’s “preferred sex, gender, or name” at school.

Presented with a fait accompli from the school district and a daughter who was becoming increasingly passionate about her transgender identity, Clark found himself in a difficult situation. He did not want to reject his daughter’s newfound passion outright but, at the same time, he was cautious about her moving into transgenderism too quickly.

Ever since her parents separated in 2013, Maxine had struggled emotionally to cope, experiencing behavioral problems and depression which Clark felt left her “very vulnerable” and searching for a place to belong. During the same school year that she took on a transgender identity, Maxine had apparently also gone through a lesbian phase. Clark couldn’t help but wonder if her new transgender identity might likewise come and go.

How do you cover a ‘national emergency’? Depends who’s president… Compare the media’s coverage of the border wall to Obama’s 2011 Libya strikes. The contrast is shocking Barbara Boland

https://spectator.us/national-emergency-president/

When Trump declared the border situation a national emergency, you couldn’t move for breathless headlines questioning the constitutionality of his order. But has the mainstream media always held this deep commitment to reporting on the limits of power of the nation’s chief executive?

Trump is hardly the first president to make use of an executive order in order to circumvent Congress. Back in February, 2011, President Obama began contemplating strikes against Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi. Article I, Section 8, of the US Constitution grants Congress the power to declare war. But a search of contemporaneous headlines quickly reveals that extremely few news stories from the time mentioned the device by which the President would impose strikes on Libya – an executive order.

After Obama decided on military action without Congressional approval, almost no stories mention ‘executive order’ or national emergency or the Constitutionality of this decision; in stark contrast to stories on Trump’s border decision, which has always been framed by in these terms.

Former Federal Prosecutor Sidney Powell: The Entire Russia Collusion Narrative Was Made Up By Tim Hains

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2019/02/25/former_federal_prosecutor_sidney_powell_the_entire_russia_collusion_narrative_was_made_up.html

Journalist Sharyl Attkisson, the host of “Full Measure,” interviews former federal prosecutor Sidney Powell about her allegation that the “entire Russia collusion narrative was made up” by anti-Trump political partisans in the FBI and Department of Justice:

SHARYL ATTKISSON, FULL MEASURE: Nearly two years ago, Special Counsel Mueller was named to investigate whether President Trump broke the law by somehow conspiring with Russian President Vladimir Putin to win the presidency. We still don’t know the outcome of that. But we’ve learned a lot about what some in our intelligence community have been up to. And some argue that’s proving to be an equally important— and chilling— story.

From Trump associate Roger Stone to former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, and ex-Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, the Trump-Russia probe has indicted or convicted 34 people so far. And although Special Counsel Robert Mueller has yet to publicly pinpoint illegal Russia collusion on Trump’s part he’s still looking. Meantime, former federal prosecutor Sidney Powell is making an explosive allegation. She’s among those who believe there’s now compelling evidence pointing to a parallel scandal.

In the simplest of terms if possible, what do you think is the story that’s been uncovered in the past two years?