Dr. Catherine Chatterley on Anti-Zionism: The New Face of Anti-Semitism
CAMERA
Thursday, December 3, 2015 from 6:00 PM to 9:00 PM (EST)
FOR INFORMATION ON THIS EVENT WRITE TO: lori@camera.org or call 516- 484-4848
CAMERA
PO Box 35040
Boston, MA 02135
Catherine Chatterley
Historian of Modern Europe; Founding Director, Canadian Institute for the Study of Antisemitism (CISA)
Antisemitism presents a serious challenge for the global community today. The last decade has seen a shocking growth in antisemitic rhetoric and agitation, and routine acts of violence against Jews have returned to European cities 70 years after the Holocaust.
The battle between Israel and the Palestinians has become intractable, and the idea of a “peace process” that might finally resolve the issues is not taken as seriously as it was years ago. This fact does not bode well for Israelis or Palestinians, and given the obsessive focus on this conflict by the media and by both pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel activist organizations, the lack of resolution and mounting frustration is an ongoing concern for all of us.
On Wednesday, Nov. 4, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) chaired a hearing of the Judiciary’s Subcommittee on Oversight, Agency Action, Federal Rights and Federal Courts titled “Justice Forsaken: How the Federal Government Fails the American Victims of Iranian and Palestinian Terrorism.”
This hearing focused on the federal government’s failure to support the American victims of Islamic terror in their search for justice.
“The history of Palestinian and Iranian terrorism against Americans is extensive and continues to this day. Americans have long been the targets of Palestinian hijackings, suicide bombings, and assassinations, in part because of our nation’s close relationship and friendship with Israel,” Sen. Cruz said.
rack Obama’s career has been one characterized by displays of brazenness. In a figure on the rise, this audacity is an attractive trait. Obama even adopted that word as his personal mantra, naming his second auto-biography after it and self-styling his 2008 presidential campaign on his bold refusal to sit on the sidelines amid the “fierce urgency of now.” With Barack Obama’s promise fully exhausted, that bold impertinence isn’t nearly as appealing as it once was.
The staleness of the president’s routinized audacity was perhaps most acutely felt by everyone who was not in the room with the president at a Democratic fundraising event in New York City on Monday night. There, the president quipped snidely about the field of Republican presidential aspirants and the CNBC debate moderators who were widely chided for their displays of bias and haplessness. What could the president’s speechwriters have been thinking when they sent him up onto that stage armed with the following dud:
“When people stand before the complete collapse of what they believe in, they enter a state of denial,” wrote Yigal Carmon, in a Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) article titled “The Emperor Has No Clothes.”
Carmon, MEMRI’s president, was referring to the response of politicians and journalists to the nuclear deal with Iran, which he claims was never approved by the Islamic Republic.
“What is mistakenly perceived as an agreement under the title of ‘Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action’ (JCPOA), that was concluded on July 14 in Vienna, and celebrated by the White House as an ‘historic agreement,’ is neither a contract nor even a real agreement between Iran and the P5+1,” he wrote. “It is a set of understandings and disputes compiled into a single document.”
“For example, regarding the sanctions, it stipulates that there will be a snap-back in case of Iranian violations, yet the next sentence says that Iran will regard such a snap-back as a violation of the agreement by the West,” Carmon told The Algemeiner on Tuesday.
A new NASA study says that an increase in Antarctic snow accumulation that began 10,000 years ago is currently adding enough ice to the continent to outweigh the increased losses from its thinning glaciers.
The research challenges the conclusions of other studies, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 2013 report, which says that Antarctica is overall losing land ice.
According to the new analysis of satellite data, the Antarctic ice sheet showed a net gain of 112 billion tons of ice a year from 1992 to 2001. That net gain slowed to 82 billion tons of ice per year between 2003 and 2008.
“We’re essentially in agreement with other studies that show an increase in ice discharge in the Antarctic Peninsula and the Thwaites and Pine Island region of West Antarctica,” said Jay Zwally, a glaciologist with NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and lead author of the study, which was published on Oct. 30 in the Journal of Glaciology. “Our main disagreement is for East Antarctica and the interior of West Antarctica – there, we see an ice gain that exceeds the losses in the other areas.” Zwally added that his team “measured small height changes over large areas, as well as the large changes observed over smaller areas.”
Sift through the Tom Wolfe papers and you get a picture of a writer who, from Sixties hippies to Eighties “masters of the universe”, has been a correspondent on the frontline of American society, reporting on its changes, its absurdities and its hypocrisies — and in doing so, helping a country make sense of itself.
In December 1969, Tom Wolfe received an invitation to the Park Avenue apartment of Leonard Bernstein and his wife Felicia. They were holding a party for guests “to meet and hear from leaders of the Black Panther Party and lawyers for the New York Panther 21”.
Wolfe was 38 and becoming famous as the Man in the White Suit. He had published a bestselling and ground-breaking book about the hippie movement, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968), as well as two collections of essays, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (1965) and The Pump House Gang (1968). With his wit, his powers of observation, his application of the novelist’s tools to non-fiction writing, and an unmistakable style, he turned himself in a few short years from a just another newspaper reporter into a journalistic sensation. And it was after this metamorphosis, at the end of 1969, that Wolfe found himself on the guest list for the Bernsteins’ glittering fundraiser.
The “Panther 21” were facing trial for conspiracy to blow up department stores, a police station and the Bronx Botanical Gardens and they need money to post bail and pay for lawyers. But Tom Wolfe left his chequebook at home and instead packed his notebook.
The result of his reporting that night was an article published several months later in New York magazine. “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s” is an evisceration of the Bernsteins and other socialites who had taken to hobnobbing with the leaders of radical movements. It is the trivial concerns of those at the gathering and the shallow motivations for their involvement that Wolfe satirised so savagely:
I was in Malmö, Sweden, a month ago, and struck by tensions in the social fabric caused by the remorseless tide of “refugees” from “Syria”. Yesterday Rossleigh from the “Australian Independent Media Network” suggested that it was all confusion on my part and the bearded Muslims were, in fact, “hipsters”. Whether or not they’re hipsters, they’re now going to be the world’s least lonesome cowpokes.
The High Chaparral, presumably named after the Sixties telly show, is a Wild West theme park in southern Sweden (see right). And, because everywhere else in the country is filled up with as many Muslims as the fire code allows, the chaps at the Chaparral are now opening their swinging saloon doors to the new settlers and their covered wagons – whoops, covered wives. My old chums at the Telegraph report:
Few fleeing the civil war in Syria would have imagined they would end up spending the winter in a Wild West theme park complete with potted cacti, mock 19th century furniture, and cowboy murals.
But Sweden’s Migration Agency is now so desperate for rooms in which to house this autumn’s unexpected surge in refugees that it has signed a deal with High Chaparral, an amusement park in rural southern Sweden, to house 400 people.
Emil Erlandsson, the park’s manager and co-owner, said that the park had initially refused to lease out its accomodation for fear of damaging its brand.
“They have asked us five times and I have constantly turned them down,” he said. “But when we saw on the TV that refugees are now supposed to live in tents in Malmo, we took a decision that we should help.”
At the High Chaparral the only people living in tents are the Canadian Indians Mr Erlandsson uses as extras. Instead, the “refugees” will have a grand old time:
“They can learn to ride horses. Maybe they can look for jobs in the summer. We will see.”
He said many of the rooms where refugees would be housed had been decorated in a Wild West theme.
“They have Wild West sofas, and the rest of the furniture is in an authentic, old-fashioned style. The wall painting is also authentic,” he said…
“We have a real native American village with real native Americans,” Erlandsson said. “And in the Mexican village we have real Mexicans. Everything is authentic. It’s just like it was in the 19th century.”
And now in the American settlers’ village they’ll have real Muslims. Maybe they can change their name to the High Chaparallah. Coming attractions: Gunfight at the OK Koran.
The Iran nuclear deal agreed in Vienna on July 14, 2015, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), will be the focus of furious debate for the remainder of President Barack Obama’s term in office and beyond. The White House and other proponents will argue its merits and proclaim it to be a “good deal” in the best interests of the United States and our allies and friends. They will also warn that the only alternative to the Vienna deal is war. Opponents will claim that if the deal goes into effect as it is currently structured, it will prove to be a catastrophic mistake and will make the Middle East and the world at large a far more dangerous place. They will argue that the alternative to this deal is a better deal.
Perhaps the underlying reason for this glaring disparity can be found in a phrase that often afflicts strategic thinkers and political decision-makers: We don’t believe the world we see; we see the world we believe. As the great liberal philosopher Karl Popper argued, the always-difficult search for truth is guided in part by “the gradual discovery of our prejudices.[1]
The Obama Administration has avoided such a voyage of discovery, signing a nuclear deal based on a belief system and a series of assumptions that, in the President’s own words, provide “a historic chance to pursue a safer and more secure world.” Hence, the fundamental question is this: “Does the President’s conclusion match up to the world as it is, or is the conclusion based on series of profoundly false assumptions?”
What an unpalatable irony. The 1783 Treaty of Paris ended the Revolutionary War and created the United States. The 2015 Treaty of Paris could end what’s left of our democratic USA – and complete the “fundamental transformation” that the Obama Administration intends to impose by executive fiat.
Meanwhile, as a prelude to Paris, October 24 marked a full ten years since a category 3-5 hurricane last hit the United States. (Hurricane Wilma in 2005; Sandy hit as a Category 2.) That’s a record dating back at least to 1900. It’s also the first time since 1914 that no hurricanes formed anywhere in the Western Atlantic, Caribbean Sea or Gulf of Mexico through September 22 of any calendar year.
Global temperatures haven’t risen in 18 years and are more out of sync with computer model predictions with every passing year. Seas are rising at barely seven inches a century. Droughts and other “extreme weather events” are less frequent, severe and long-lasting than during the twentieth century. “Vanishing” Arctic and Greenland ice is freezing at historical rates, and growing at a record pace in Antarctica.
But President Obama still insists that dangerous climate change is happening now, and it is a “dereliction of duty” for military officers to deny that climate change “is an immediate risk to our national security.”
