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Hagia Sophia and Turkey’s Supremacism by Burak Bekdil

Posted By on July 14th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16230/hagia-sophia-turkey-supremacism

Why now? Erdoğan possibly thought the move could reverse the ongoing erosion of his popularity due, among others, to a looming economic crisis. All the same, it appears to be wrongly timed, as presidential and parliamentary elections are three years from now and Turks are notorious for not having a good memory. Praying at the Hagia Sophia Mosque will not turn a hungry man into a happy man.

“This is against the Quranic commandments… Prophet Mohammed never converted a Jewish or Christian house of prayer into a mosque.” — Cemil Kılıç, Muslim theologian, t24.com.tr, July 12, 2020.

An Islamist leader decides to convert a monumental cathedral into a mosque, and his fans, are spilling out hatred against Jews. This is Turkey’s new normal.

According to his fans and political allies, Turkey’s Islamist president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, conquered Istanbul for the second time when he signed a decree to convert the monumental Hagia Sophia cathedral in Istanbul, built in 537, into a mosque. With that logic, he became the first statesman who conquered a city that already belongs to his country.

“First, you should fill Sultanahmet (Blue Mosque, Istanbul) … This is a plot, this is sheer provocation,” Erdoğan told a crowd as recently as in March 2019 when party fans demanded the conversion of Hagia Sophia into a mosque. He was right. Most of Istanbul’s nearly 3,000 mosques (one mosque per 5,000 population) do not attract crowds. Sixteen months later, Erdoğan changed his mind.

In this theater-like play, he said the supreme court would decide on the fate of Hagia Sophia. Under a constitutional amendment in 2010, Erdoğan won the authority to appoint all members of that court, the Council of State. Erdoğan said he would respect the court’s verdict in “whichever direction it comes.”

And, unsurprisingly, the verdict came in the direction Erdoğan wanted: On July 9, the Council of State decided to void a cabinet decision, signed in 1934 by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey, designating Hagia Sophia as a museum, in a show of respect for Christianity. Only an hour after the verdict was announced, Erdoğan signed a decree for the conversion into a mosque of the monument on UNESCO’s World Heritage List.

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MY SAY: Cancel culture coming for Broadway’s most famous hits? By Ruth King

Posted By on July 14th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/07/cancel_culture_coming_for_broadways_most_famous_hits.html

Broadway has been depressingly dark for months, so Disney produced Hamilton on TV for a large and grateful audience. However, the PC monitors, who never rest, criticized the play for portraying principals who were slave owners.

When the lights go on again, will they come for the theater?

Could Driving Miss Daisy ever be performed again? It is a heartwarming tale by Alfred Uhry about the relationship of an elderly Southern Jewish woman, Daisy Werthan, and her black chauffeur, Hoke Coleborn. It enjoyed wide praise in various iterations on stage and in a movie, but today it would raise the hackles of political correctness officers.

South Pacific?  No way! “There is nothing like a dame” is male chauvinism writ large. Could it be saved if the original song is performed by a chorus of female soldiers? Or if the lyrics were changed to “there is nothing but a they.”

“Climb every mountain, Ford every stream.” That’s not The Sound of Music for the disabled. Really what were they thinking?

Goodbye to Jerome Kern and Showboat: “Tell me he’s lazy, tell me he’s slow, tell me I’m crazy, (maybe I know). Can’t help lovin’ dat man of mine.”

That is a subliminal racist stereotype. These lyrics are insensitive… although Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald and Shirley Bassey and Barbra Streisand recorded great renditions without getting the vapors.

Guys and Dolls, a masterpiece by Frank Loesser based on Damon Runyon stories, is sexist right in the title.  Are you kidding? Binaries and trans maybe but rhyming is hard. And it’s about the Salvation Army and gamblers… not hip.

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America, Warts and All -Reflections on the most interesting country in the world By Joseph Epstein

Posted By on July 14th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/07/27/america-warts-and-all/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first

I grew up in a household in perennially corrupt Chicago, where all politicians were considered guilty until proven innocent. This seems to me even now a sensible standard, and well beyond the city limits of Chicago.

The one exception to this standard chez Epstein was during World War II, when my father was a strong supporter of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Even here, though, he was less for Roosevelt than against the American isolationism, which he detested, of Roosevelt’s opposition. Eager for the United States to join the war against the Nazis, not least to help stop the mass murder then in progress of European Jews, my father was so passionate about this that he would not allow Colonel McCormick’s isolationist Chicago Tribune in the house. He used to tell the story of one day having a flat tire when a driver in a Tribune truck pulled up to help him. “Get the hell out of here, I don’t need your goddamn help,” my father told the guy. Recounting the story, my father commented, “That’s how stupid politics can make you!”

Politics, I know, has made me stupid more than once during my life. Happiness is often cited as the end of politics, but politics hasn’t brought all that much happiness into the world. The more intensely political the time, the less happiness seems available. Nor is truth another leading by-product of politics. I used to say that I have never lost a political argument, a claim whose remarkableness is offset only by the sad fact that neither have I ever won one. As for politics and rational argument, Jonathan Swift nailed it nicely when he remarked that it is useless to attempt to reason a man out of something he wasn’t reasoned into. 

This is truer than ever today, when our politics seems more divisive than I and most other people can remember. The politics of rivaling interests of an earlier time — labor versus management, big versus small government, urban versus rural — seemed more sensible, certainly less heated. Today our politics presents us with rivaling virtues, which is, somehow, more poisonous. “I’m for social justice, for eliminating poverty and all traces of racism and making the world the better place I know it can be,” says the new progressive, adding, “unlike you, Schmuckowitz, with your pathetic greed, belief in a decadent capitalism, and total failure of imagination.” The conservative replies: “Without liberty, the spirit of entrepreneurship and its resultant prosperity, and proper respect for our country’s best traditions, we are nowhere, and your naïve utopianism, Schlepperman, not to mention indignation and anger, are no help.” So they go on, Schmuckowitz and Schlepperman, back and forth, each informing the other that, let’s face it, I am a much better person than you. 

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Christians in Hong Kong, under the Thumb of the Chinese Communist Party By Alessandra Bocchi

Posted By on July 14th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/hong-kong-christians-fear-reprisals-chinese-communist-party/

The restrictions under which they may practice their faith increasingly resemble those of their coreligionists living in the mainland.

Hong Kong’s Christians fear reprisals from China’s Communist Party. A national-security law was passed on June 30 by China’s Standing Committee, superseding Hong Kong’s legislature. For China’s Communist Party, this measure was necessary to guarantee stability after more than a year of protests in Hong Kong. The new law ends the region’s autonomy and the hope that the demands of pro-democracy protesters will be met any time soon. Christians who participated in the demonstrations now believe that they will be targeted if they don’t toe the party line.

In mainland China, Christians who defy the Chinese government’s attempts at control of their churches reportedly face persecution, arrest, and detention. Underground churches are destroyed and crosses burned. Translations of the Bible must be approved by China’s Communist Party and often modified to meet its demands. In Hong Kong, however, Christians enjoyed religious freedom guaranteed by the region’s legal independence, which provided its citizens basic rights including freedom of expression and religion. Christians, more than 10 percent of Hong Kong’s population, held peaceful rallies during the protests by singing hymns to affirm their faith. Thousands took to the streets, and many Protestants and Catholics united to defend a common cause with pro-democracy protesters.

The national-security law in Hong Kong now prohibits secession, sedition, terrorism, and collusion with foreign forces. Those terms are so broadly defined that they can be used arbitrarily to prohibit any form of dissent. What worries religious minorities, and Catholics and other Christians in particular, are the law’s collusion and subversion and clauses.

The sedition clause effectively prohibits Christians from criticizing the Chinese government. Before the national-security measure was passed, many Christians in Hong Kong had spoken out against injustices in mainland China. “Now, many refrain from voicing any concerns toward issues that can be defined as ‘state secrets,’” a Catholic lawyer who works in a financial-regulatory body told me. Like others quoted in his article, she asked for anonymity, for fear of reprisals.

P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

A Cultural Hijacking Leftist shenanigans at the National Book Critics Circle. Bruce Bawer

Posted By on July 14th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/cultural-hijacking-bruce-bawer/

Never underestimate the determination of left-wing ideologues to take over social, cultural, and political institutions – or the willingness of fools and knaves to whitewash the history of those takeovers. Joe McCarthy has become a symbol of unjust persecution, but there were Stalinists in the State Department. The Blacklist has become a byword for political intolerance, but the Hollywood Ten were all Party members, taking orders from Moscow and fiercely dedicated to the overthrow of American democracy. In the years between the wars, Communists took control of one trade union after another, often succeeding simply because, relentless and brutally unscrupulous in their lust for power, they managed either to wear their enemies down or terrify them into submission.

In his fascinating 2015 book Hollywood Traitors, Allan H. Ryskind writes that during World War II, “a cabal of top Communist writers” taught newbies how to work Stalinist ideas into scripts. Seven of the Hollywood Ten – the screenwriters, all Party members, who were blacklisted for refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947 – were part of this cabal. The protégés got career boosts; the anti-Communist holdouts often suffered professionally. But while Blacklist victims are still celebrated as heroes, Hollywood writers whose anti-Communism damaged their livelihoods got bupkus.

Ryskind also recalls the powerful Screen Writers Guild (SWG), which, while consisting in 1940 of about 400 members, was run by a small board dominated by Stalinists like Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett. When in 1944 anti-Communist filmmakers formed the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (MPA), the SWG joined other Moscow-directed unions in attacking it – with flagrant dishonesty – as “fascistic and anti-Semitic.” So effective was this savage campaign in damaging the MPA’s reputation that Ryskind’s father, Morrie, writer of Penny Serenade and His Girl Friday, felt compelled to defend the MPA in an article for the Saturday Review of Literature. It didn’t help: the smear continued.

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Leftists’ War to Cancel American History Pelosi excuses mob destruction of statues: “People will do what they do.”Joseph Klein

Posted By on July 14th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/leftists-war-cancel-american-history-joseph-klein/

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi last week reached a new low in recklessness, even for her. She dismissed as no big deal the toppling of a Christopher Columbus statue by a mob who then tossed it into a nearby harbor in her hometown of Baltimore. “People will do what they do,” Pelosi said. “I don’t care that much about the statues.” Pelosi evidently doesn’t care much about mob rule either.

Most Americans do care about preserving the statues and other monuments dedicated to our nation’s heroes. Most Americans certainly do not believe that mobs should decide who does or does not deserve to be honored as part of America’s heritage. But leftists don’t trust the American people. The cancel culture crowd think they are entitled to cancel the American story of great progress towards a more perfect union and replace it with their own alternative of dystopian fiction. According to CNN anchor Don Lemon, for example, young people “have asked for decades” for the removal of certain statues and now “the chickens are coming home to roost.” Lemon said that Americans for too long have been taught “propaganda” and added that “some things you have to un-learn so that you can become a better citizen.” That sounds like what the Chinese Communists were saying during their cultural revolution.

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The Latest ‘Racists’: White Rape Victims of Muslims Leftists and feminists denounce European rape victims for “fanning the flames of racial hatred” and “murder.”

Posted By on July 14th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/latest-racists-white-rape-victims-muslims-raymond-ibrahim/

The widespread notion idea that, whenever the races clash only minorities can ever be victims, is hardly limited to the recent protests/riots in America.  Elements of such thinking often appear in other, especially bizarre contexts.

For example, British women, including actual rape victims, who draw attention to the phenomenon of “Asian” (Muslim Pakistani) sex grooming gangs, are also under attack by the “woke” establishment.

Recently in the UK, Sarah Champion (pictured above), a Labor politician and MP for Rotherham (the epicenter of sex grooming), was accused of “fanning the flames of racial hatred” and “acting like a neo-fascist murderer.”  Her crime?  She had dared to assert that “Britain has a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls.”

The same elements accusing Champion of being a “murderer” also characterized the UK’s anti-extremism program, Prevent, as being “built upon a foundation of Islamophobia and racism.”

A few weeks earlier, an article titled, “I was raped by Rotherham grooming gang—now I still face racist abuse online,” appeared.  In it, a British woman (alias, “Ella”) revealed that her Muslim rapists called her “a white c*nt, a white wh*re, and a white b*tch,” during the more than 100 times she was raped in her youth by the Pakistani grooming gang.

“We need to understand racially and religiously aggravated crime if we are going to prevent it and protect people from it and if we are going to prosecute correctly for it,” she said in her recent interview: 

Prevention, protection and prosecution—all of them are being hindered because we are neglecting to properly address the religious and racist aspects of grooming gang crimes….  It’s telling them that it’s OK to hate white people.

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UC Death to Cops Communist professor Joshua Clover still on the job after calling for killing of police officers. Lloyd Billingsley

Posted By on July 14th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/uc-death-cops-lloyd-billingsley/

On June 2, retired St. Louis police captain David Dorn, 77, was guarding a friend’s pawn shop when he was gunned down in a murder reportedly live-streamed on Facebook.

“Our highest respect to the family of David Dorn, a Great Police Captain from St. Louis, who was viciously shot and killed by despicable looters last night,” tweeted President Trump. “We honor our police officers, perhaps more than ever before. Thank you!” On July 4, at the White House, the president paid tribute again.

“We are especially moved to be joined by the family of a great man – fallen officer David Dorn,” Trump said. “A 38-year veteran of the St. Louis Police Department who was killed last month in the city he devoted his life to defending.” Among Democrats, support for Dorn was hard to find, and the case marks a stark contrast to the killing of a police officer in Davis, California.

On January 10, 2019, convicted criminal Kevin Limbaugh gunned down Natalie Corona, only 22 and a rising star in the Davis police department. Officers from across the country, joined by thousands of locals, attended a memorial service for Corona. Over at UC Davis, on the other hand, one professor openly supported the murder of police officers.

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Has Democratic Party’s Far Left Hijacked Joe Biden’s Presidential Campaign?

Posted By on July 14th, 2020

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/07/14/has-democratic-partys-far-left-hijacked-joe-bidens-presidential-campaign/

Former Vice President Joe Biden seems quite content to run for the presidency from the depths of his home basement. Maybe that’s not so surprising, given recent indications that he no longer actually controls his presidential campaign.

Sadly, even with the help of a Teleprompter, Biden seems incapable of speaking these days without losing track, going wildly astray and muttering nonsense as he tosses one word salad after another.

Two recent examples stand out.

Queried in late April by a Miami TV newsman about his son Hunter’s highly questionable and possibly illegal business dealings with Ukraine, Obama’s former No. 2 responded: “My son’s business dealings were not anything where everybody that he’s talking about, not even remotely, number one.”

That’s an exact transcription. Go ahead. Make sense of it.

Just weeks earlier, speaking on ABC’s “This Week,” he had this to say about the COVID-19 pandemic:

“We cannot let this, we’ve never allowed any crisis from the Civil War straight through to the pandemic of 17, all the way around, 16, we have never, never let our democracy sakes second fiddle, way they, we can both have a democracy and elections, and at the same time correct the public health.”

We’re not poking fun here. This may or may not be incipient signs of senility or a more serious medical condition in someone who is, after all, now nearing 78 years old.

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Biden’s Foreign-Policy Blast From the Past He thinks liberal multilateralism will tame China, Russia and woke Democrats. By Walter Russell Mead

Posted By on July 14th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bidens-foreign-policy-blast-from-the-past-11594680389?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

Optimism is a rare commodity in this difficult year, but I came away from a conversation with Anthony Blinken, Joe Biden’s senior foreign-policy adviser, believing the former vice president’s campaign is confident that the old-time Democratic policy playbook will bring success abroad and at home.

This sort of optimism, the belief that working hard and sticking to your principles will bring results, is a defining characteristics of the American spirit. Pessimists don’t change countries and cultures in hope of building a better life. And a nation of pessimists produces few world-class innovators and entrepreneurs.

In foreign affairs the case for optimism is limited. A nation of pessimists wouldn’t have come up with the Marshall Plan—but neither would it have overthrown Moammar Gadhafi, certain a more peaceful Libya would emerge.

Team Biden’s optimism reflects a faith in the classic pillars of Cold War-era Democratic policy: At home, a regulated market economy and government that attends to the concerns of key Democratic interest groups can produce the middle-class affluence that makes the U.S. model admired and envied around the world. Abroad, the principles of liberal multilateralism—supplemented when absolutely necessary by the American military and a willingness to use it—can bring a critical mass of the world’s powers into broad alignment with core U.S. objectives.