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July 2021

WHY CHARLES MURRAY’S NEW BOOK IS HIS WEAKEST .. despite that he is 1) brilliant and 2) not a bigot. John McWhorter

https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/why-charles-murrays-new-book-is-his

I come not to bury Charles Murray, but not to praise him, either.

He has a new book out, Facing Reality. It’s a doozy.

His books have a way of being doozies, going up against ideas sacred to the American intelligentsia on race as well as class.

He is also one of America’s most brilliant thinkers.

To many familiar with Murray’s work, I have already revealed myself as a “racist” in engaging his work at all, and/or not calling him one.

However, Murray’s work is too carefully reasoned and too deeply founded on scholarly sources to be dismissed as “racist,” except by people whose definition of “racist” is “That which people of the black American race don’t like for any reason.”

Rather: I salute Murray’s brilliance while being disturbed by many of his arguments. What many will call racism is what I call being able to walk and chew gum at the same time.

* * *

Yet Facing Reality is seriously disturbing. Murray gives a great deal of evidence for two points. One is that black people aren’t, on the average, as intelligent as other people. The other is that black people in America are more violent than others.

Those who on some level celebrate the latter as black people getting back at the white man in the only way they can, should know that the facts don’t lend themselves to that vigilante justice analysis. More specifically, black people kill each other more than members of other groups kill each other.

For Pride month, the U.S. Navy marches under a different flag By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/07/for_pride_month_the_us_navy_marche

When Winston Churchill was First Lord of the Admiralty and proposed some much-needed reforms, the pushback he received claimed the reforms ran afoul of Naval tradition. Churchill snapped back, “Naval tradition? Naval tradition? Monstrous. Nothing but rum, sodomy, prayers, and the lash.” More than 100 years later, it appears that the United States Navy is embracing that sodomy tradition. How else to explain that officers at a Naval Seabees unit allegedly forced everyone to attend a “Diversity Hike,” while waving a “stars and rainbow-stripes” flag as they went.

Matt Walsh first broke the news, which he received from a naval wife whose active-duty husband was one of the people forced on the march:

In the flyer announcing the hike – a flyer complete with not one, but two gay flags – the reason given for the hike was “We will support our brothers and sister [sic] whom [sic] are a part of the Pride community.” For attire, hikers were told to wear “Pride attire, colorful clothing.”

The only flag flying was this one, the stars and rainbow stripes:

Indeed, the Navy was so proud of the march and the flag that it put up a Facebook post boasting that, “In honor of Pride Month, Construction Battalion Maintenance Unit 303 went on a Pride Hike at Sunset Cliff on June 25, 2021.” It even highlighted the flag in its Facebook photos:
I won’t comment here on whether the military’s switching from “don’t ask, don’t tell” to openly LGBTQ+ service was a good thing or not. However, I see absolutely no reason why the Navy, or any branch of the American military, should be celebrating the LGBTQ+ cohort.

If people under the LGBTQ+ flag want to celebrate themselves, that’s fine, but to make it official American military policy to revel in the fact that people fornicate with people of the same sex and with people of every sex, or with people who can’t figure out their own sex is a joke. The military is about creating a force capable of defending this country at a moment’s notice. It should never be about making people who constitute a minority of American sexual identity feel good about themselves

How Biden funds Palestinian terrorists Moshe Phillips

https://www.jns.org/opinion/how-biden-funds-palestinian-terrorists

The pro-Palestinian wing of the Democratic Party will make sure that the money flows to Gaza, come hell or high water.

 The next generation of Palestinian Arab terrorists is being raised right now, and it’s being underwritten by the Biden administration.

Not intentionally, of course. President Joe Biden undoubtedly is as opposed to terrorism as every other reasonable-minded American citizen. But in three specific, concrete ways, the administration’s policies will have the practical impact of contributing significantly to the training of young Palestinian Islamic terrorists.

In April, Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced that the U.S. will be sending $150 million to the Palestinian Arabs in the form of a grant to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), which the previous U.S. administration had suspended. After the Hamas missile war against Israel in May, Blinken pledged an additional $38.5 million for Gaza, through UNRWA.

UN Watch has documented in its devastating report, “Poisoning Palestinian Children,” that “school teachers, principals, and other employees of UNRWA incite to terrorism or antisemitism.” The report, which includes examples from UNRWA schools in Gaza, shows how teachers and other staff members openly celebrate terrorism against Israel — including kidnapping Israeli children and firing missiles into Israeli neighborhoods; using maps which erase Israel’s existence; posting photos of Adolf Hitler and praising him; and posting “overtly antisemitic videos, caricatures, and statements.”

Some of the Hamas recruitment drives for summer camps that train children in Gaza to become terrorists are even being held on UNRWA school campuses.

When challenged at a Congressional hearing on June 8 about the renewal of funding for UNRWA despite its Jew-hatred, Secretary Blinken said that the administration is “determined that UNRWA pursue very necessary reforms in terms of some of the abuses of the system that have taken place in the past.”

Western Silence as Gaza Summer Camps Train Future Terrorists By Lawrence J. Haas

https://www.newsweek.com/western-silence-gaza-summer-camps-train-future-terrorists-opinion-1605704

The teenage boys of Gaza, some of whom are still in junior high, are learning how to shoot guns, launch anti-tank missiles and protect themselves while peering around walls.

The boys are attending summer camp, but it’s not the swimming and softball, hiking and cookouts that many of us fondly recall. It’s camp as run by the terrorist groups Hamas, which controls Gaza, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ). It aims “to fan the flames of jihad among the generation of liberation, instill Islamic values and prepare the long-awaited army for the liberation of Palestine,” as the Izz Al-Din Al-Qassam Brigades of Hamas put it.

Through these camps, which Hamas and PIJ have run for more than a decade, the terrorist groups glorify military operations against Israel and recruit the next generation of terrorists – all of which suggests that Israeli-Palestinian peace will remain as elusive as ever.

One might expect that the terrorist-run camps in Gaza would engender some attention among Western intelligentsia, for which the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is always a front-burner issue. That the camps, in fact, attract so little notice shows just how committed leading media and academic institutions are to a narrative of Israeli oppression and Palestinian victimization.

Information about the camps isn’t hard to find, if one is willing to look. The terrorist groups promote them on social media, announce their openings at news conferences and post pictures and videos from them.

Moreover, the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), which brings news from the region to non-regional audiences, has written reports about the camps while posting pictures and videos, and distributes its reports for free.

Ban Ki-Moon Gets It Wrong Shoshana Bryen

https://www.newsweek.com/ban-ki-moon-gets-it-wrong-opinion-1605816#slideshow/183474

Ban Ki-moon, former secretary-general of the United National, has had a thought. It is, unfortunately, not a good one. Acknowledging that the Oslo Accords are a failure (true), he then posits two things.

First, that the Israelis and Palestinians must recognize “the fundamental asymmetry between [them]. This is not a conflict between equals that can be resolved through bilateral negotiations, confidence-building measures or mutual sequencing of steps—the traditional conflict-resolution tools.” (Both untrue and true.)

Second, the negotiation failure is because “Israel has pursued a policy of incremental de facto annexation in the territories it has occupied since 1967, to the point where the prospect of a two-state solution has all but vanished.” (Just untrue.)

It is not a “conflict between equals,” but it is true that “confidence-building” and so forth will not work—because the Palestinians remain in a self-avowed state of war with Israel. It is the last remnant of the pan-Arab war against the Jewish state that began before 1948 and is now slowly resolving as follows: “Termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgment of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force.”

Those words should sound familiar to Ban because they are from UN Resolution 242, adopted in the wake of 1967’s Six Day War. Starting with Egypt and Jordan, followed by the Sunni Gulf states, then Sudan and Morocco openly as well as other Arab and African countries quietly, the normalization movement represents precisely the “new approach” Ban seeks.

Op-Ed: Jews becoming commonplace in conservative ‘new media’Benyamin Korn (2011)

Excerpt:

Significant relative newcomers include bloggers such as Ted Belman of IsraPundit, Dan Greenfield of SultanKnish and Ruth King of Ruthfully Yours, along with sites such as Israel Matzav, YidWithLid, Yeshiva World News and the Yiddish-titled but English-language Vos Iz Neias? (What’s New?).

Psychoanalysis in the Age of Apology Stephen Rittenbarg, M.D.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/07/psychoanalysis_int_he_age_of_apology.html

The age of apology has now extended beyond the political world to the psychotherapeutic consulting room. The American Psychoanalytic Association has offered a heartfelt mea culpa for trauma caused to LGBTQI patients.

Ever since it emerged from the Viennese consulting rooms of Sigmund Freud, political Utopians have used psychoanalysis to diagnose and cure social ills. From early Freudo-Marxists like Alfred Adler and Wilhelm Reich to Herbert Marcuse and Paul Goodman in the 60s, they argued that neurosis would disappear once the repressive chains of capitalism were broken. Unlike Freud, who viewed human beings as the authors of their own psychological misery, the Freudo-Marxists viewed happiness as the natural human condition, corrupted by external institutions like religion and capitalism. It is therefore the duty of psychoanalysts to align themselves with their patients’ struggles against those patriarchal institutions. Despite their efforts, utopia never arrived and so, like other revolutionaries, they turned on one another, demanding confessions and apology. In the Soviet Union, those who did not share the utopian faith were themselves ‘analyzed,’ given psychiatric diagnoses and locked up in mental hospitals. So far in this country, dissidents have not been hospitalized. Instead. they must confess to having been misguided and been the cause of the very pain they supposedly sought to cure. If they don’t they risk expulsion from the ‘woke’ community of analysts.

Utopian yearnings never die, but since they can never be realized, scapegoats must be found.

Recent Petitions Singling Out Israel for Condemnation Are Anti-Semitic by Alan M. Dershowitz

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17519/israel-petitions-antisemitic

The bigots who promote these petitions, and the useful idiots who sign them, cannot possibly be motivated by a concern for universal human rights. If they were, they would focus on nations with really horrendous human rights records, such as Iran, which hangs gays, China, which imprisons Muslim dissidents, Russia, which murders dissenters, Saudi Arabia, which oppresses women, Syria, which gases its own people, as well as Palestinians, and many other nations that face no external threats.

Israel, on the other hand, faces existential threats, and acts in self-defense. It does more to protect innocent civilians than any country faced with comparable threats. Yet it is the only country that is subject to petitions by teachers unions, faculty senates, student bodies, and other groups….

“Criticizing Israel is not anti-Semitic, and saying so is vile. But singling out Israel for opprobrium and international sanction out of all proportion to any other party in the Middle East is anti-Semitic, and not saying so is dishonest.” — Thomas L. Friedman.

There is an old joke about a Hitler rally in which the Fuhrer shouts out a rhetorical question: “Who is to blame for all of Germany’s evils?” And before the crowd can shout “the Jews,” a man in the front row screams out: “The bicycle riders.” Hitler stops and turns to the man and asks him, “Why the bicycle riders?” To which the man responds, “Why the Jews?” …. There is no good response.

Therefore, let us stop pretending that these hateful, one sided and mendacious petitions are anything but what they are: anti-Semitic bigotry, pure and simple. History will judge the bigots behind them harshly. So should all decent people today.

Let there be no doubt that the recent spate of one-sided petitions singling out Israel for condemnation are motivated by hatred of Israel, precisely because it is the nation state of the Jewish people.

The bigots who promote these petitions, and the useful idiots who sign them, cannot possibly be motivated by a concern for universal human rights. If they were, they would focus on nations with really horrendous human rights records, such as Iran, which hangs gays, China, which imprisons Muslim dissidents, Russia, which murders dissenters, Saudi Arabia, which oppresses women, Syria, which gases its own people, as well as Palestinians, and many other nations that face no external threats. Israel, on the other hand, faces existential threats, and acts in self-defense. It does more to protect innocent civilians than any country faced with comparable threats. Yet it is the only country that is subject to petitions by teachers unions, faculty senates, student bodies, and other groups that seem to focus more on Israel than on their own mission to improve the lives of their members.

Defund the FBI  Republicans need to abandon their longtime, reflexive  loyalty to the FBI. By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2021/07/01/defund-the-fbi/

It’s been a gold star week for the men and women of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Nearly six months after the events of January 6, the FBI, under the direction of Joe Biden’s vengeful Justice Department, is accelerating the nationwide manhunt for anyone involved. Since June 23, agents have arrested 17 people from Florida to California. Charges range from assaulting police officers and criminal trespassing to something called “destruction of property in special maritime and territorial jurisdiction and aiding and abetting.”

The dragnet is part of the nonstop campaign of terror unleashed by the Biden regime against the political Right. Attorney General Merrick Garland, who compares January 6 to the Oklahoma City bombing and Capitol protesters to terrorists, pledged the “Capitol breach” probe would be his top priority. Garland last week bragged in a press release that his department reached the “benchmark” of arresting 500 people and warned he would “hold all January 6 perpetrators accountable” for their actions that day. His prosecutors routinely ask the courts to keep the accused behind bars awaiting trials that won’t start until late this year or perhaps even 2022; dozens have been held for months in a D.C. jail that specifically houses January 6 defendants.

FBI Director Christopher Wray, despite assurances his agency treats all protesters the same regardless of partisan affiliation (LOL), is happy to assist Garland in his mission. Wray insists “domestic violent extremists”—code for Trump supporters—pose the greatest security threat to the country.

When Collaboration Is Capitulation “Consensus” in the American education establishment is not a recommendation. It is a warning. By Peter W. Wood

https://amgreatness.com/2021/07/01/when-collaboration-is-capitulation/

In response to my article “Counterfeit Civics,” and in defense of Educating for American Democracy (EAD), Paul Carrese and James Stoner are not only eloquent but also persuasive on one important point: they personally uphold the good intentions of this plan to transform American education. Beyond that we enter into disagreements, both over the general intellectual tenor of EAD and what the alternatives to it might be. They also attribute to me several views that I do not hold.

But let’s start with a point of easy agreement. Carrese and Stoner urge that “Conservatives should read the Educating for American Democracy documents for themselves, not be led by repeated caricatures that give no indication of having studied and digested the entire project.” I agree. In fact, I provided links to those documents in my article for American Greatness and called for a “close” reading of the same. Anyone who recognizes the importance of this major public policy proposal really should devote the time to read it in its entirety, including the footnotes, and not just the Roadmap, but also the full report.

Better still would be to go further by digging into some of the source material and the controversies that underlie EAD. The proposal did not spring up from the deliberations of the steering committee, the six task forces, the two working groups, the advisory council, and the corresponding principal investigators without drawing deeply from the well of collective wisdom in contemporary educational theory and practice. That, of course, is part of the problem. 

EAD represents “consensus”—“a national-consensus, collaborative effort across philosophical and political differences,” as Carrese and Stoner put it. That is to say, EAD represents the views of the same educational establishment that has brought ruin to much of American K-12 education. “Consensus” in this case is not a recommendation. It is a warning.