Displaying posts published in

April 2019

The Passover Massacre and Anti-Semitism in America Courage and bravery in the face of murderous hate in a small city in California. Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273613/passover-massacre-and-anti-semitism-america-daniel-greenfield

John T. Earnest came to a small synagogue in a small California city of 50,000 with a rifle and big dreams of killing Jews. In a manifesto posted on 8chan, he boasted, “I would die a thousand times over”.

The Neo-Nazi wannabe killer listed Adolf Hitler as his inspiration. “My act will inspire others to take a stand as well,” he wrote in his manifesto. “And when this revolution starts gaining traction (if I am not killed) I expect to be freed from prison and continue the fight.”

Inside, an elderly Rabbi, a 60-year old woman, an 9-year-old girl, and other Jewish worshipers celebrating the final day of Passover showed him the true meaning of courage.

The older congregants in the sanctuary of Chabad of Poway, the city’s sole Orthodox Jewish synagogue, were reciting Yizkor, the prayer for deceased loved ones, an occasion that can summon even the most secular Jew to the synagogue, while the younger children were playing in the synagogue’s hall.

Had Earnest opened fire in the sanctuary, many of the congregants asking the Lord to embrace their parents and grandparents, and unite their souls with those of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and all of their forefathers, would have joined them in death. But instead, the Neo-Nazi was drawn after the Rabbi and the congregation’s children who embodied the innocence and goodness he was driven to destroy.

The Neo-Nazi stopped in the lobby and opened fire on Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein and the children.

A fake apology from fake news New York TimesBy Ethel C. Fenig

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/04/a_fake_apology_from_fake_news_new_york_emtimesem.html

After being severely criticized for running an unsigned anti-Semitic cartoon about their most hated subjects — Jews, Israel, Trump, US of A — in their international print edition and then mocked for its pathetic excuse on numerous media sites (including American Thinker), the New York Times belatedly attempted an apology on Sunday. And once again failed. Because the Times is not sorry about printing an “offensive” cartoon; as the latest apology attempt demonstrates, it was just sorry it was caught and couldn’t get away with it this time.

Printing the unsigned cartoon with its euphemistically labelled “anti-Semitic tropes,” as the nameless Times opinion writer originally stated, was the not the NYT’s fault — oh my goodness, no! — but rather the result of a “faulty process a single editor working without adequate oversight” according to the latest bleat. In other words, not my fault because of a “faulty process!

Master of the Craft In his new book, Robert Caro teaches the art of nonfiction writing. Lance Morrow

https://www.city-journal.org/robert-caro

Working, by Robert Caro (Knopf, 207 pp., $25)

In Working, Robert Caro tells us how, exactly, it is done. “Truth takes time,” Caro writes. He began his epic study of Lyndon Johnson in 1976, and now, 43 years later, having published four volumes, he is at work on the fifth, which tells of LBJ’s presidency and the disaster of Vietnam. He has interrupted that labor to offer Working.

If I were teaching journalism or nonfiction writing, especially the writing of history and biography, I would build a course around Caro, with Working as my primary text and scenes from his Johnson books as case studies. I would tell my students: “In a given situation, ask yourself, ‘How would Caro handle this?’” The course would teach Caro’s instincts and methods. It’s possible that he is all the education that a writer in this line of work requires.

First, choose the right subject, he advises. Read all available books on the subject. Then read all magazine and journal articles. After that, all national newspaper coverage of the subject—then local coverage. Plunge now into the documents: “turn every page,” as a newspaper editor advised the young Caro long ago. You never know what you might stumble upon. Luck emerges from diligence. In the LBJ Library in Austin, pages from 32 million documents awaited turning. Caro and his wife Ina, his research partner, spent years there, turning pages—panning for gold.

The Lessons of Alberta and Ontario James Allan

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2019/04/the-lessons-of-alberta-and-ontario/

Despite the massive increase in political correctness in Australia since I arrived here in 2005 there is nevertheless no doubt that we lag far behind my native Canada in the PC stakes. Okay, maybe today’s Jacinda Ardern Kiwis give the Canucks a run for their money when it comes to ‘don’t say anything, true or otherwise, that might give any group lest they be offended’. But I suspect there’s still enough South Island, sheep-farming, blunt-speaking types still around – a type I spent many enjoyable days with during my eleven years in New Zealand – that Canada would prevail in the PC Olympics.

It’s a little surprising, therefore, to observe what is happening in Canadian politics. Only some four years ago, when Justin Trudeau (trust fund son of the former lefty Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, who managed to dodge serving in WWII) became the left-wing prime minister, the country’s provinces were almost all governed by left-wing premiers and parties. (Note: In Canada the Liberal Party is, and always has been, on the left side of politics, in some ways to the left of our Labor Party.) Out of Canada’s population of 37 million, some 33 million-odd inhabitants then lived in provinces governed by lefties. Today, not much more than a thousand days on from the mainstream media’s rapturous hysteria which greeted the victory of virtue-signalling, PC-revelling Trudeau fils, the number of those living in provinces run by the Liberals is down to under two million. The biggest province by far, Ontario, fell to a populist incarnation of the Tory Party led by Doug Ford (brother of the drug-taking Toronto mayor, the late Rob Ford). The Ontario Liberal Party was decimated, not even winning enough seats to retain official party status. Quebec also rid itself of the Libs. Last week, Prince Edward Island, the tiniest Canadian province and fictional home of Lucy Maude Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, tossed out the Libs in favour of a minority Conservative-Green Party grouping.

What I Saw at Middlebury College written by Dominic Aiello

https://quillette.com/2019/04/27/what-i-saw-at-middlebury-college/

“At a meeting last week at Middlebury College, students upset and angry that conservative Ryszard Legutko had been invited to speak on campus were calmed and reassured by three administrators who apologized to the students for their feelings of discomfort, agreed that they had every right to feel aggrieved, and assured them there’s steps underway to ensure controversial right-wing speakers are not easily invited to campus in the future,” reported Jennifer Kabbany of The College Fix this week. “That according to a 40-minute recording of the meeting recorded surreptitiously by a student in the room…who said the three administrators at the meeting were Sujata Moorti, the incoming dean of the faculty, as well as Dean of Students, Baishakhi Taylor, and Renee Wells, director of education for equity and inclusion.”

The “student in the room” cited in this report—that was me. But before I discuss the controversy over Legutko, let me offer a brief flashback to February 6, 2019.

At the time, I was beginning my first semester of college as what Middlebury calls a “Feb”: Along with about 80 or 90 classmates, I was beginning my college education a semester late. I moved in while most of the campus was away on break, and spent the week getting to know the other Feb freshmen. It was essentially a week full of fun activities and bonding on an idyllic private liberal-arts college campus in rural Vermont. Along with everyone else, I was encouraged to believe that this is what the whole Middlebury experience would be like. And maybe, in times of yore, it was. But not in this era, when students are encouraged to experience campus life as one long sequence of ideologically-inflicted psychic traumas.

Keynote speaker at Harvard diversity conference says Christians should be mocked and run out by Alexander Pease

https://www.thecollegefix.com/keynote-speaker

Christians ‘deserve to be mocked viciously and run out of the public square’To celebrate a “Decade of Dialogue” in its annual diversity conference, Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts & Sciences invited a straight white man to give the keynote lecture.But not just any straight white man.Tim Wise, an “anti-racism writer, educator and activist,” has denigrated Christians as “Jeezoids” and fascists and called Pope Francis evil. He has tweeted that “people who believe in a God of hell/damnation deserve to be mocked viciously and run out of the public square.”Those who base their morality on the Hebrew Scriptures “deserve to be locked up,” he said in 2015, claiming to be “sorta kidding but not by much.”

NYT’s anti-Semitic cartoon was carefully crafted to pander to prejudices of Muslims and neo-NazisBy Thomas Lifson

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/04/nyts_antisemitic_cartoon_was_carefully_crafted_to_pander_to_prejudices_of_muslims_and_neonazis.html

The anti-Semitic cartoon that was published by the New York Times for readers of its international edition, many of them journalists, politicians, and opinion leader all over the world, was not causally or inadvertently offensive.

It was carefully crafted to appeal to the prejudices of Muslims and neo-Nazis.

And despite the NYT deleting it from its online version, the newsprint version that arrived on many desks and in front of the doors of upscale hotel rooms in foreign capitals and principal cities, still carries the cartoon:

Photo credit: Tom Gross Media

Portraying Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of the world’s only Jewish state, as a dog speaks to the deep hatred of dogs espoused by Mohammed, who is, according to Muslims, the most perfect human being ever to walk the earth, someone to be emulated in all respects. On man’s best friend, he was quite emphatic:

Below are a number of Hadith on various aspects involving dogs. All Hadith are from the Sahih collections of Bukhari and Muslim, or the Sunan of Abu Dawud. After the Quran, Bukhari’s set of Hadith are regarded to be the second most important books in Islam, followed closely by the Hadith of Muslim…. [T]hese Hadith are not just a few isolated or unsupported cases. (snip)

It’s Not Trump Derangement Syndrome By Karin McQuillan

https://amgreatness.com/2019/04/27/its-not-trump-derangement-syndrome/

The Democrats’ behavior after 2016 is not mass delusion or mass hysteria or Trump Derangement Syndrome, or any of the other psychobabble explanations that dominate our political commentary. My first career was as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, and I am not impressed with spraying around clinical terms as a substitute for looking at what is in front of us. Trump Derangement Syndrome is a colorful description for political behavior. It is not an analysis of what causes it.

Under Barack Obama, ordinary Democrats became enamored of the narrative that they were the Good People, hence entitled to crush anyone in their way, because everything they do is in the service of social justice.

The derangement we are facing is not Orange Man Bad; it is America Bad.

The Democrats don’t believe in our two-party system anymore. They utterly reject American civic norms of treating the president with a modicum of respect and cooperation. They don’t want to alternate presidential power every four or eight years. They think theirs is the only party that deserves to be elected.

The Demon in Democracy By Ryszard Legutko

https://amgreatness.com/2019/04/27/the-demon-in-democracy/
Earlier this month, Polish political philosopher Ryszard Legutko was supposed to deliver a lecture at Middlebury College in Vermont. A few hours before the event took place, college administrators called off the event, explaining the decision was based “based on an assessment of our ability to respond effectively to potential security and safety risks for both the lecture and the event students had planned in response.”

Legutko is a professor of philosophy at Jagellonian University in Krakow, Poland, specializing in ancient philosophy and political theory. He has served as a Polish government minister and a member of the European Parliament. He’s also an ardent anti-Communist with traditionalist views. That was enough, evidently, to make him a “threat” to the “safety” of Middlebury students.

Legutko gave a lecture anyway to a small group of students in a political science class. “All this was done in defiance of the college administration,” he later told the American Conservative’s Rod Dreher. “I was smuggled in a student’s car to the campus and entered the building through the backdoor.” Encounter Books editor and publisher Roger Kimball writes about the incident and its aftermath here.

In 2016, Encounter published Legutko’s latest book, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies. In it, Legutko argues that liberal democracy “tends to develop the qualities that were characteristic of Communism: pervasive politicization, ideological zeal, aggressive social engineering, vulgarity, a belief in inevitability of progress, destruction of family, the omnipresent rule of ideological correctness, and the severe restriction of intellectual inquiry.”

Want to Fix the Universities? Here Are Two Options By Roger Kimball

https://amgreatness.com/2019/04/27/want-to-fix-the-universities-here-are-two-options/

Once upon a time, long, long ago—in May 2005, in fact—I wrote an essay for The New Criterion with the optimistic title “Retaking the University: A Battle Plan.” That was back when I believed that the educational establishment in this country could be rescued from its wasting captivity in the arid pandemonium of political correctness.

I know, I know, it all seems so naïve now when the totalitarian, politically correct ideologues ruling most of our distinguished colleges and universities have succumbed utterly, indeed proudly, to The Narrative about race and sex, the putative evils of America, and, oh, so much else, and dissenting opinions, and the persons espousing them, are strictly excluded from the desolate though expensive eyries of insanity that define what we still call, without irony, our institutions of “higher education.”

A couple of years ago, students at Middlebury College (total freight-on-board, some 74,000 of the crispest per annum) covered themselves in shame by loudly protesting the great social scientist Charles Murray, first preventing him from talking, then violently mobbing him and one of his female faculty handlers, sending her to the hospital. I wrote about that disgusting incident in these pages at the time. “What happened at Middlebury,” I wrote, “was a declaration of spiritual bankruptcy.”

Every student who can be identified in that video should be expelled and Laurie Patton [the college’s president] should resign. The former have violated the basic compact of respect upon which liberal education rests and the latter has vividly demonstrated her incompetence.

Neither happened, of course, nor did anyone follow up on my concluding suggestion that “the college should be closed and its facilities repurposed as something useful—a menagerie, perhaps, in homage to the strange, intolerant creatures that cavorted there when it pretended to be an educational institution.”