“Why do you hate science?”
That’s the question leftists have taken to asking non-leftists. Leftists claim to love science, insofar as anyone can love a method for testing a hypothesis, and accuse their enemies of hating it.
How can anyone love or hate an indifferent set of techniques? And how can an ideology that believes technological civilization is destroying the planet really claim to love the science behind it?
But swap out “science” for “god” and the question, “Why do you hate science” makes perfect sense. So do the constant assertions of love for science. These aren’t scientific assertions, but religious ones.
Actual science doesn’t care whether you love or hate it. That’s not how you engage with the theory of relativity. But religion is measured by love and hate. Either you love a deity or you hate it.
No one loves or hates science. But they do love Scienticism.
Scienticism is science without skepticism. It takes the ideas of science and uses them to create an infallible belief system that gives our lives meaning and dictates how we should live those lives.
In other words, a religion.
Contrary to popular disbelief, a religion doesn’t need a god. It does need some things. A creation myth that explains our lives. An enlightened leadership. The conviction that every person’s actions matter. Redemption, salvation and damnation. Miracles. An imminent apocalypse. A prophesized golden age.
Scientism offers all these things and more. Its creation myths inevitably lead to philosophies about our place in the universe. Its miracles are technological. Its heroes have super powers or spaceships. Global warming is on its way to destroy us. And only recycling and green energy can save us from the climate apocalypse. Its truths are infallible because they are prophesized by PhD’s wielding hockey stick graphs.
Its god is Homo Progressivus, born an ape and ascending to singularity synthesis. Its heaven is a social services agency. Its saints died for social progress. And if you want angels, why not try UFOs?
But what about the devil? In the early days of Scientism, superstition was the great antagonist of modernity. Technological progress had made a new sort of civilization possible. And Scientism was born out of that thrilling encounter with the future. We no longer believed in confessing to clergy. Instead we had our minds scientifically psychoanalyzed by Freudians. The imminent apocalypse had nothing to do with heaven, but everything to do with the class conflicts of capitalism. Our legends would no longer be about the past, but the wonders of the future. Our enemy was the past, with its tradition and ignorance.
The past is dead.
Religion is vanishing in Europe and America is catching up. Morals are as outdated as phrenology. No one believes in the golden future anymore. Least of all the worshipers at the chrome altar of Scientism.
Scientism had created a god of endless progress. A collectivist human engine of innovation. Now it turned him into the devil. Like Zoroastrianism, Scientism became a dual religion of two gods.
One good and one evil.
The Ahriman of scientism builds nuclear power plants, drills for oil, drives an SUV, launches spaceships and shops with plastic grocery bags. Its Ahura Mazda rides a bike, saves trash for compost, eats locally farmed food (I recently passed a downtown Manhattan restaurant which promised that its food came exclusively from the local farms for which the island is renowned) and gets his power from the sun.
Scientism both worships and demonizes science. It loves and hates it. Its mission is to save us all from the ravages of science. And if you question this mission, you’re accused of hating science.
The Scientism of 1918 and 2018 are both snapshots of a philosophical schism that tore the left apart.
The 1918 left reviled the capitalist, but admired the collectivist order of his factory. Its vision was to turn all of society into a factory without a capitalist owner. Social problems would be solved by experts. Organizations would impose efficiency. Global governments would end war, hunger, and euthanize people with flawed genes. The priesthood of public service would replace the service of god.
The 2018 left reviles the factory. Its scientism is an ugly half-breed, half hippie and half technocrat. It’s convinced that science makes it superior. And equally convinced that science is a cold, sterile philosophy of dead white men that cuts us off from the true intensity of feeling of the noble savage and pothead. It romanticizes rural living, handicrafts and religions that behead their daughters. And then it retweets Neil DeGrasse Tyson or Bill Nye to tell off those stupid science-hates who don’t believe science is destroying the planet. Don’t they realize that science has scientifically proven that science is evil?
Confused? So are they.
Technocracy, the factory model extended through the latest internet innovations and their philosophical afterbirths, is still at the heart of left. Despite its hippie affinity for local farms in Manhattan, trendy crafts, raw food and farmhouses in Vermont that no farmer can afford, it doesn’t actually want to move to a commune. Its urban and suburban efforts to mesh yuppie and hippie reflect a mixed-up culture.
And so the left wants us all to live in big cities and bike to work. It loves traveling on jet planes to get back to unspoiled nature. It can’t stop lecturing us on how much it loves science between its meditation classes and protest against nuclear power. It wants a government to use the latest technology to control every detail of our lives so that all the oppressed can finally be free.
Scienticism’s schizophrenia is due to the left trying to reconcile the factory and the commune in erratic and hypocritical ways. Its mind is with the factory, but its heart is in the commune. The technocratic system it’s inflicting on everyone uses false appeals to science as proof of its practical infallibility.
And that’s what the left always loved and truly loves about science.
Science gives it an unfounded sense of practical infallibility while its projected empathy gifts it with an even more unfounded moral infallibility. Between the two, the left is convinced that everything it does is bound to succeed and is the absolutely right thing to do. Even though history shows the exact opposite.
Every crackpot leftist theory from Marxism to Global Warming is cloaked in an inevitable something. The revolution of the working class can’t be stopped. The world is bound to run out of food, oil and sanctimony. The rise of the oceans can’t be stopped (except by electing Democrats). Science says so.
But science is the opposite of infallible. Its strength is its fallibility.
Science offers a crab walk forward, because it’s willing to admit and correct errors. But Scientism never admits it’s wrong. Instead it claims that scientific testing has found it absolutely true. Then it hides its data and tries to pass laws banning anyone from questioning its absurdly premature conclusions.
Scientism strips science of its greatest strength and builds a cargo cult around wearing a lab coat.
The left loathes real science because it hates skepticism. But it loves infallibility. And that is all that’s left of its science. What was once the soul of secularism, a belief system bestriding civilization, now exists solely to offer infallibility to whatever loathsome nonsense the left believes at any given moment.
The rest of utopia has melted into a slimy soup of machine politics, identity politics, elitist snobbery and random tantrums by the sort of unstable people that cults tend to attract like flies to roadkill.
The left doesn’t love science. It loves its own power.
Take anything else that the left claims to love or care about, replace it with those words and you’ll have the right answer. The left doesn’t care about black people, it cares about power. It doesn’t care about women, gays, Syria, recycling, offensive t-shirts, education or Gaza. It cares about power.
Scienticism is a cult of power. Its dualism of the god and devil of science battling each other is a philosophical breakdown which reconciles a schism within the left by offering it even more power.
The old Scienticism believed that our only god would be human progress. Then the new gods of the New Frontier and Great Society with their sociology degrees and colored charts stared into the mirror, they went into the counterculture and came back having found that they were not only gods, but devils.
(I'm dealing with a family medical emergency and will have difficulty answering non-urgent emails.)
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine at the following location
Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.
Thank you for reading.
Thursday, May 31, 2018
Tuesday, May 29, 2018
How the Liberal Jewish Establishment Failed to See Left-Wing Anti-Semitism Coming
The ADL has been irrelevant for 50 years.
Its full organizational name, the Anti-Defamation League, like that of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, is rarely used because that identity and mission lie in another era.
The ADL was founded in 1913 to promote the acceptance of Jews in mainstream society. Its founding charter was concerned with "the caricaturing and defaming of Jews on the stage, in moving pictures". Its original plan was to fight anti-Semitic prejudice by lobbying theater managers and newspaper editors.
Jews won acceptance in mainstream society over 50 years ago. Hollywood has more Jewish caricatures than ever. The revival of Murphy Brown means that CBS now will have three sitcoms featuring grotesque caricatures that play every negative Jewish stereotype for laughs. But that’s okay.
The ADL long ceased fighting that battle. And all the others. It’s an irrelevant organization on its last legs.
Its original mission became irrelevant when Jews won mainstream acceptance. Jews are the best liked (or perhaps least disliked) religious group in America. Yet anti-Semitic hate crimes dominate the roster.
How can both be true?
As anti-Semitism declined nationally, it receded to the racial and political margins. Instead of a lukewarm prejudice of many, it became the passionate creed of political extremists. The ADL shifted to combating anti-Semitism on the margins instead of in the mainstream. Instead of critiquing movies, it monitored hate groups. But, unlike mainstream lobbying, its monitoring of the margins was ineffectual.
Neo-Nazis wouldn’t be dissuaded by the ADL. Neither would any other fringe group. The ADL’s monitoring only fed into their anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and gave them an enemy to fight. But the ADL also needed an enemy to fight, a reason to exist and an incentive to keep the donations coming.
Meanwhile it was ignoring the threat of a breakout from the margins becoming mainstream.
The far right had been growing less relevant for most of the ADL’s existence. The Klan had gone from marching in the tens of thousands and dominating entire cities to being unable to fill a small room. But the far left had been steadily growing in influence. And its takeover would change everything.
By the sixties, anti-Semitism in America was profoundly changing. But the ADL didn’t change.
Anti-Semitic violence was now largely a feature of urban life. The new Jewish middle class, many of them Holocaust survivors and accented immigrants who had worked tirelessly in sweatshops to put their kids through college, was driven out of its comfortable urban enclaves by racial violence.
Jewish neighborhoods and businesses built by the immigrant generation vanished in riots, firebombs, muggings and stabbings. The second act of the civil rights movement was an anti-civil rights movement that, had it been directed at blacks, would have been met with protests and outrage. Instead the left defended the perpetrators and condemned the victims. Black leadership jettisoned Martin Luther King’s calls for equality and co-existence, replacing them with nationalism and racial supremacism.
And the left cheered.
That’s how Al Sharpton went from leading anti-Semitic pogroms to addressing the DNC. It’s why Obama and the Congressional Black Caucus met with Farrakhan. It’s why Bernie Sanders backed Jesse “Hymietown” Jackson despite his anti-Semitism. It’s why anti-Semitic black literature is celebrated.
That is how Tamika Mallory ended up in the audience at a Farrakhan speech. And that’s how Eric Holder likely contrived to help Mallory boot the ADL from Starbucks for calling out her anti-Semitism. When two black men were kicked out of Starbucks, there was outrage. When a Jewish organization was kicked out of Starbucks at the behest of the fan of a black supremacist who admires Hitler, there were shrugs.
The left has been dismissing concerns about black nationalist anti-Semitism for 50 years.
Defenders and condemners of this phenomenon will blame the unique issue of race in America. But that doesn’t hold up. The left did the same exact thing with pogroms in Russia. Whether it was Russian peasants or urban thugs, the left defended the violence as the outcry of an oppressed class or race against the privileged Jewish bourgeoisie, even though the targets were inevitably the Jewish poor.
American Jews, whose ancestors largely arrived from Russia before the Communist violence, were under the impression that anti-Semitic violence was a feature of Czarist life being combatted by the left. This distorted view of what was really going on was encouraged by lefty propaganda rags like The Forward.
Both sides opportunistically encouraged anti-Semitic violence (while occasionally condemning it) when it served their political interests. One mob would shout, “Death to the Jews and the Commissars!” The other mob would shout, “Smash the Jews and the bourgeoisie!” And often, they were the same mob.
Few American Jews have ever heard of the Glukhov pogrom by the Red Army in which leftists massacred 450 Jews, including children, to shouts of, "We are going to slaughter all the bourgeoisie and the Yids." The Communist Pravda described this anti-Semitic massacre as a victory over the “counter-revolution.”
Soviet anti-Semitism was not a break from its revolutionary principles, as some liberals liked to think. It was the execution of those principles. The Bolsheviks had repeatedly hounded their Menshevik rivals as the “yids” or “kikes”. As they consolidated power, they discouraged pogroms by individual bands and instead implemented a national Jewish pogrom of gulags, torture, execution and religious repression.
The attacks on Jewish neighborhoods and stores by black nationalists like Sharpton were a carbon copy of the pogroms that had been organized in Russia and Ukraine, by the same leftist ideology. A decade after the Glukhov pogrom, the Young Communist League and the Young Liberators were already working Harlem trying to stir up riots against Jewish storeowners.
The glamorization of Hitler in the black community did not begin with Farrakhan. Back in the thirties, Sufi Abdul Hamid, now known as a “pioneering labor leader”, but then dubbed the Black Hitler, was vowing, "an open bloody war against the Jews who are much worse than all other whites."
Neither Tamika Mallory, nor Sharpton, are a break with a mythological past dominated by a black-Jewish civil rights alliance that the ADL and its base are obsessed with, instead they are the fulfillment of a the long, ugly alliance between the left and anti-Semitic black nationalists that grew on the ADL’s watch.
The left’s anti-Semitic tactics have been consistent across countries and cultures. When its regimes rise, they persecute the Jews, whether it’s in the USSR, Nicaragua, Cuba, Venezuela or the United States.
But the ADL’s liberalism was its undoing. Like most American Jews, it viewed the rise of the left as a progressive phenomenon. It did not matter that the same mistake had been made countless times with the same outcome. There could be no harm in the Democrats leaning further and further to the left.
Except maybe to Israel.
The debate about lefty anti-Semitism centers largely on Israel. And that’s how the left wants it.
Unlike nationalist anti-Semitism, transnationalist anti-Semitism is cloaked in in abstractions. The Red Army pogromists were fighting the bourgeoisie. Sharpton was fighting racism. BDS is battling Zionism.
Leftist anti-Semitism identifies Jews with an ideological abstraction and then attacks the actual people.
The Red Army thugs, Sharpton’s thugs and BDS thugs are anti-Semitic. Capitalism, racism and Zionism are excuses. Lefty anti-Semitism neither began with Zionism nor will it end there. The Jews who were murdered by the Soviet Union, who fled Nicaragua and Brownsville, had nothing to do with Israel.
The ADL wants to be a lefty organization fighting anti-Semitism. Replacing Abe Foxman with Jonathan Greenblatt was meant to adapt it to the new landscape. But the left doesn’t want to fight anti-Semitism.
There is no future for an organization fighting anti-Semitism on the left.
The left has built its own Soros lobby coalition of anti-Jewish organization staffed by activists with Jewish last names. Like their counterparts in the Soviet Union, the Yevsektsiya or Jewish Section, they redefine anti-Semitism as a ‘bourgeois’ phenomenon that the left is immune to. These activist groups seek to destroy Israel and the Jewish community because they interfere with their task of mobilizing Jews as lefty activist cannon fodder. They defend lefty anti-Semitism and accuse the right of anti-Semitism.
Despite the ADL agreeing with 99% of their agenda, the left is determined to destroy or control it. And the ADL still refuses to confront the left because, like most liberals, it believes that it is on the left.
The leftward drift of the people who were once liberals had left them incapable of confronting lefty illiberalism. They know that they agree with the left’s causes, they only question some of its tactics. They talk a great deal about extremism, but they only whisper about the extremism on their own side.
And when the argument becomes about tactics, instead of worldview, the left wins.
The left’s tactical illiberalism isn’t impatience or passion; it’s the product of an illiberal worldview. Anti-Semitism isn’t an aberration on the left. It’s inevitable. A fundamental difference between liberalism and the illiberal left is that the latter defines solutions to social problems through destroying groups.
Destroy the bourgeoisie, smash the deniers, eliminate religion, crush whiteness and wipe out the Jews.
The left needs an “other” to personalize its abstract hatreds. Jews fill the traditional role of the “other” as scapegoat. And anti-Semitism serves the same function on the left as it did throughout history.
It’s no accident that the star of 1984’s Two Minutes Hate was Emmanuel Goldstein.
Multiculturalism doesn’t mean that there is no “other”. It means that there are a plethora of “others”. And when there are a thousand “others”, an “other” that everyone can agree on is urgently needed.
The left can make Jews embody capitalism, whiteness, nationalism, war crimes, exploitation and every evil. The Jews control the weather, a lefty councilman claims, and the left rushes to defend him. The Jews are killing Palestinian babies, stealing organs, training police to shoot black people and controlling the world’s wealth. It’s the same old bigotry in a keffiyah. And it serves the same tawdry function.
Anti-Semitism is the sewer, sausage factory and the boiler room of the leftist soul.
The ADL has tried to find common ground with the left. But the left is not in the common ground business. Where the left takes institutional power, in a country, a state, a college or a profession, ideological diversity quickly vanishes leaving behind its ruling activists and a silent majority.
As a liberal consensus vanishes, the ADL is becoming an organization with no base. The ADL is too pro-Jewish for the left and not pro-Jewish enough for the right. The left has its own collection of organizations that it wants to impose on the Jewish community. The Soros lobby’s JFREJ, Bend the Arc and If Not Now were hurled into action against the ADL. Eventually they will cannibalize the ADL.
The ADL failed to stand up the left. And like other liberal collaborators, it will be replaced with a leftist Yevsektsiya that will divide its time between condemning Israel and denouncing Jews as bigots who need to be reeducated about their privilege and their complicity in whiteness. And then it will get ugly.
When the ADL was founded, there was a mainstream consensus for it to influence. The consensus has been replaced by political and racial tribalism. The margins are becoming mainstream. And it’s dying.
The ADL may choose to shut down. Or like HIAS, it may jettison its Jewish identity and join the anti-Jewish left. Or it can do what it should have done all along. It tried colluding. It promoted Black Lives Matter and signaled softness on BDS. But its efforts to collude with intersectional anti-Semitism failed.
Now an irrelevant organization in its final years has one last chance to stand up to the left.
(I am coping with the second week of a family medical emergency and probably won't be up to answering any non-urgent emails.)
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.
Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.
Thank you for reading.
Its full organizational name, the Anti-Defamation League, like that of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, is rarely used because that identity and mission lie in another era.
The ADL was founded in 1913 to promote the acceptance of Jews in mainstream society. Its founding charter was concerned with "the caricaturing and defaming of Jews on the stage, in moving pictures". Its original plan was to fight anti-Semitic prejudice by lobbying theater managers and newspaper editors.
Jews won acceptance in mainstream society over 50 years ago. Hollywood has more Jewish caricatures than ever. The revival of Murphy Brown means that CBS now will have three sitcoms featuring grotesque caricatures that play every negative Jewish stereotype for laughs. But that’s okay.
The ADL long ceased fighting that battle. And all the others. It’s an irrelevant organization on its last legs.
Its original mission became irrelevant when Jews won mainstream acceptance. Jews are the best liked (or perhaps least disliked) religious group in America. Yet anti-Semitic hate crimes dominate the roster.
How can both be true?
As anti-Semitism declined nationally, it receded to the racial and political margins. Instead of a lukewarm prejudice of many, it became the passionate creed of political extremists. The ADL shifted to combating anti-Semitism on the margins instead of in the mainstream. Instead of critiquing movies, it monitored hate groups. But, unlike mainstream lobbying, its monitoring of the margins was ineffectual.
Neo-Nazis wouldn’t be dissuaded by the ADL. Neither would any other fringe group. The ADL’s monitoring only fed into their anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and gave them an enemy to fight. But the ADL also needed an enemy to fight, a reason to exist and an incentive to keep the donations coming.
Meanwhile it was ignoring the threat of a breakout from the margins becoming mainstream.
The far right had been growing less relevant for most of the ADL’s existence. The Klan had gone from marching in the tens of thousands and dominating entire cities to being unable to fill a small room. But the far left had been steadily growing in influence. And its takeover would change everything.
By the sixties, anti-Semitism in America was profoundly changing. But the ADL didn’t change.
Anti-Semitic violence was now largely a feature of urban life. The new Jewish middle class, many of them Holocaust survivors and accented immigrants who had worked tirelessly in sweatshops to put their kids through college, was driven out of its comfortable urban enclaves by racial violence.
Jewish neighborhoods and businesses built by the immigrant generation vanished in riots, firebombs, muggings and stabbings. The second act of the civil rights movement was an anti-civil rights movement that, had it been directed at blacks, would have been met with protests and outrage. Instead the left defended the perpetrators and condemned the victims. Black leadership jettisoned Martin Luther King’s calls for equality and co-existence, replacing them with nationalism and racial supremacism.
And the left cheered.
That’s how Al Sharpton went from leading anti-Semitic pogroms to addressing the DNC. It’s why Obama and the Congressional Black Caucus met with Farrakhan. It’s why Bernie Sanders backed Jesse “Hymietown” Jackson despite his anti-Semitism. It’s why anti-Semitic black literature is celebrated.
That is how Tamika Mallory ended up in the audience at a Farrakhan speech. And that’s how Eric Holder likely contrived to help Mallory boot the ADL from Starbucks for calling out her anti-Semitism. When two black men were kicked out of Starbucks, there was outrage. When a Jewish organization was kicked out of Starbucks at the behest of the fan of a black supremacist who admires Hitler, there were shrugs.
The left has been dismissing concerns about black nationalist anti-Semitism for 50 years.
Defenders and condemners of this phenomenon will blame the unique issue of race in America. But that doesn’t hold up. The left did the same exact thing with pogroms in Russia. Whether it was Russian peasants or urban thugs, the left defended the violence as the outcry of an oppressed class or race against the privileged Jewish bourgeoisie, even though the targets were inevitably the Jewish poor.
American Jews, whose ancestors largely arrived from Russia before the Communist violence, were under the impression that anti-Semitic violence was a feature of Czarist life being combatted by the left. This distorted view of what was really going on was encouraged by lefty propaganda rags like The Forward.
Both sides opportunistically encouraged anti-Semitic violence (while occasionally condemning it) when it served their political interests. One mob would shout, “Death to the Jews and the Commissars!” The other mob would shout, “Smash the Jews and the bourgeoisie!” And often, they were the same mob.
Few American Jews have ever heard of the Glukhov pogrom by the Red Army in which leftists massacred 450 Jews, including children, to shouts of, "We are going to slaughter all the bourgeoisie and the Yids." The Communist Pravda described this anti-Semitic massacre as a victory over the “counter-revolution.”
Soviet anti-Semitism was not a break from its revolutionary principles, as some liberals liked to think. It was the execution of those principles. The Bolsheviks had repeatedly hounded their Menshevik rivals as the “yids” or “kikes”. As they consolidated power, they discouraged pogroms by individual bands and instead implemented a national Jewish pogrom of gulags, torture, execution and religious repression.
The attacks on Jewish neighborhoods and stores by black nationalists like Sharpton were a carbon copy of the pogroms that had been organized in Russia and Ukraine, by the same leftist ideology. A decade after the Glukhov pogrom, the Young Communist League and the Young Liberators were already working Harlem trying to stir up riots against Jewish storeowners.
The glamorization of Hitler in the black community did not begin with Farrakhan. Back in the thirties, Sufi Abdul Hamid, now known as a “pioneering labor leader”, but then dubbed the Black Hitler, was vowing, "an open bloody war against the Jews who are much worse than all other whites."
Neither Tamika Mallory, nor Sharpton, are a break with a mythological past dominated by a black-Jewish civil rights alliance that the ADL and its base are obsessed with, instead they are the fulfillment of a the long, ugly alliance between the left and anti-Semitic black nationalists that grew on the ADL’s watch.
The left’s anti-Semitic tactics have been consistent across countries and cultures. When its regimes rise, they persecute the Jews, whether it’s in the USSR, Nicaragua, Cuba, Venezuela or the United States.
But the ADL’s liberalism was its undoing. Like most American Jews, it viewed the rise of the left as a progressive phenomenon. It did not matter that the same mistake had been made countless times with the same outcome. There could be no harm in the Democrats leaning further and further to the left.
Except maybe to Israel.
The debate about lefty anti-Semitism centers largely on Israel. And that’s how the left wants it.
Unlike nationalist anti-Semitism, transnationalist anti-Semitism is cloaked in in abstractions. The Red Army pogromists were fighting the bourgeoisie. Sharpton was fighting racism. BDS is battling Zionism.
Leftist anti-Semitism identifies Jews with an ideological abstraction and then attacks the actual people.
The Red Army thugs, Sharpton’s thugs and BDS thugs are anti-Semitic. Capitalism, racism and Zionism are excuses. Lefty anti-Semitism neither began with Zionism nor will it end there. The Jews who were murdered by the Soviet Union, who fled Nicaragua and Brownsville, had nothing to do with Israel.
The ADL wants to be a lefty organization fighting anti-Semitism. Replacing Abe Foxman with Jonathan Greenblatt was meant to adapt it to the new landscape. But the left doesn’t want to fight anti-Semitism.
There is no future for an organization fighting anti-Semitism on the left.
The left has built its own Soros lobby coalition of anti-Jewish organization staffed by activists with Jewish last names. Like their counterparts in the Soviet Union, the Yevsektsiya or Jewish Section, they redefine anti-Semitism as a ‘bourgeois’ phenomenon that the left is immune to. These activist groups seek to destroy Israel and the Jewish community because they interfere with their task of mobilizing Jews as lefty activist cannon fodder. They defend lefty anti-Semitism and accuse the right of anti-Semitism.
Despite the ADL agreeing with 99% of their agenda, the left is determined to destroy or control it. And the ADL still refuses to confront the left because, like most liberals, it believes that it is on the left.
The leftward drift of the people who were once liberals had left them incapable of confronting lefty illiberalism. They know that they agree with the left’s causes, they only question some of its tactics. They talk a great deal about extremism, but they only whisper about the extremism on their own side.
And when the argument becomes about tactics, instead of worldview, the left wins.
The left’s tactical illiberalism isn’t impatience or passion; it’s the product of an illiberal worldview. Anti-Semitism isn’t an aberration on the left. It’s inevitable. A fundamental difference between liberalism and the illiberal left is that the latter defines solutions to social problems through destroying groups.
Destroy the bourgeoisie, smash the deniers, eliminate religion, crush whiteness and wipe out the Jews.
The left needs an “other” to personalize its abstract hatreds. Jews fill the traditional role of the “other” as scapegoat. And anti-Semitism serves the same function on the left as it did throughout history.
It’s no accident that the star of 1984’s Two Minutes Hate was Emmanuel Goldstein.
Multiculturalism doesn’t mean that there is no “other”. It means that there are a plethora of “others”. And when there are a thousand “others”, an “other” that everyone can agree on is urgently needed.
The left can make Jews embody capitalism, whiteness, nationalism, war crimes, exploitation and every evil. The Jews control the weather, a lefty councilman claims, and the left rushes to defend him. The Jews are killing Palestinian babies, stealing organs, training police to shoot black people and controlling the world’s wealth. It’s the same old bigotry in a keffiyah. And it serves the same tawdry function.
Anti-Semitism is the sewer, sausage factory and the boiler room of the leftist soul.
The ADL has tried to find common ground with the left. But the left is not in the common ground business. Where the left takes institutional power, in a country, a state, a college or a profession, ideological diversity quickly vanishes leaving behind its ruling activists and a silent majority.
As a liberal consensus vanishes, the ADL is becoming an organization with no base. The ADL is too pro-Jewish for the left and not pro-Jewish enough for the right. The left has its own collection of organizations that it wants to impose on the Jewish community. The Soros lobby’s JFREJ, Bend the Arc and If Not Now were hurled into action against the ADL. Eventually they will cannibalize the ADL.
The ADL failed to stand up the left. And like other liberal collaborators, it will be replaced with a leftist Yevsektsiya that will divide its time between condemning Israel and denouncing Jews as bigots who need to be reeducated about their privilege and their complicity in whiteness. And then it will get ugly.
When the ADL was founded, there was a mainstream consensus for it to influence. The consensus has been replaced by political and racial tribalism. The margins are becoming mainstream. And it’s dying.
The ADL may choose to shut down. Or like HIAS, it may jettison its Jewish identity and join the anti-Jewish left. Or it can do what it should have done all along. It tried colluding. It promoted Black Lives Matter and signaled softness on BDS. But its efforts to collude with intersectional anti-Semitism failed.
Now an irrelevant organization in its final years has one last chance to stand up to the left.
(I am coping with the second week of a family medical emergency and probably won't be up to answering any non-urgent emails.)
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.
Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.
Thank you for reading.
Sunday, May 27, 2018
The Warrior's Tale
The warrior's tale is a simple enough thing. Strong as steel, but fragile as chance. It is the wind in his soul and the wall we build around ourselves to tell us who we are.
Before there were cities or nations, and railways and airports, computers and telephones-- the tale was told around campfires. Acted out in pantomime, dressed up in animal furs and cave paintings. But the tale was the same. The people were confronted with a threat and they called upon the best and strongest of their men to go out and fight it. These were their warriors. What they did in the face of that threat is the tale.
The tale has many variations. Sometimes there are many warriors, sometimes only a handful. They march into the village of the enemy in triumph, or they make a last stand on a rocky outcropping, spending the last of their heart's blood to buy time they will never know. There is the weak man who becomes strong, the strong man who becomes weak, the woman who mourns the man who will never return, and the man who goes off to battle with nothing to lose. These tales have been told countless times in the ages of men, and they will be told again for as long as men endure.
It is not only the warriors who need the tale, or those left behind. Future generation learn who they are from this tale. "We are the people who died for this land," is the unseen moral of each tale. "We bled for it. We died for it. Now it is yours to bleed and die for."
The warrior's tale tells each generation that they stand on the wall against a hostile world. And that the wall is made not of stones, but of their virtues. Their courage, their integrity and their craft. Theirs is the wall and they are the wall-- and if they should fail, then it will fail. And the land and the people will be swept away.
What happens to a people who forget the warrior's tale and stop telling it around their campfires? Worse , what of a people who are taught to despise the figure of the warrior and what he represents? They will not lose their courage, not all of it. But they will lose the direction of that courage. It will become a sudden unexplained virtue that rises to them out of the depths of danger. And their wall will fail.
It is the warrior's tale that makes walls. That says this is the land that we have fought for, and we will go on fighting for it. It is sacrifice that makes mere possession sacrosanct. It is blood that turns right to duty. It is the seal that is above law, deeper still to heritage. Anyone can hold a thing, but it is sacrifice that elevates it beyond possessiveness. And it is that tale which elevates a people from possessors of a land, to the people of the land.
Universalism discards the warrior's tale as abomination. A division in the family of man. Their tale is of an unselfish world where there are no more divisions or distinctions. Where everyone is the same in their own way. But this tale is a myth, a religious idea perverted into totalitarian politics. It is a promise that cannot be kept and a poison disguised with dollops of sugar. It lures the people into tearing down their wall and driving out their warriors. And what follows is what always does when there is no wall. The invaders come, the women scream, the children are taken captive and the men sit with folded hands and drugged smiles dreaming of a better world.
The warrior's tale explains why we fight in terms of our own history. The Great Swamp Fight. The Shot Heard Round the World. The Battle of New Orleans. Gettysburg, San Juan Hill, Belleau Wood, Pearl Harbor, Heartbreak Ridge, the Tet Offensive, Kandahar, and Fallujah. Generations of sacrifices must be defended. And those who wage war on us must be made to pay.
Universalism demands that war must answer to universal aims and objectives. That there is a universal law higher than war. But this is a children's story. The laws of men derive from their own interests. Those who can rule by force or coalition make their laws to serve their own ends. This is the way of the world.
Those who pretend to live by universalism will still fall to the law of steel. Rhetoric is no defense against fire and lead, and international codes have no defense against those who will break them. The talk may go on, but it is the warriors who will end it. It is still the warrior's tale to tell, even if all others have forgotten it.
The warrior's tale is no happy thing. It is bitter as bile and dark as death. But it is also a grand and glorious thing. For even in its full naked truth, it is the story of perseverance in the face of every agony and betrayal. It is the tale of how we live and why we die.
Even when all others forget their tale, the warriors remember. Even when they are called peacekeepers and turned into an army of clowns for the satisfaction of their political masters. The armies may decay, but warriors still remain in their cracks, on their edges-- men who are not wanted, but are needed because they are the only ones who can do the grim work and do it well. They may only be a hundredth of an army, or a thousandth. A fraction of a fraction. But without them there is no army, only empty uniforms.
When the warrior's tale is forgotten, then they become shadows. Dangerous men despised and feared. Thought of as killers, dismissed as monsters and stared at like beasts in a cage. But the society cannot deny them. It cannot deny that part of them. When the warrior diminishes, the energy is directed elsewhere. Sport becomes an obsession and matches end in bloody violence. Crime increases. Prisons fill up. So do police forces.
As the external war fades, the internal one begins. Barbarians come from without. Buildings burn, mobs rage and there is a savagery in the air.
No law can protect a society that has forgotten the warrior's tale. It will turn outward, and adopt the warriors tales of outsiders. The samurai will replace the cowboy. The sports star will be an outsider. Its heroes will become foreigners. Men who will do understand the virtue of violence and will do what their own have been forbidden. Who have the vital energy that a society without a warrior's tale lacks.
When a people give up their own warrior's tale for that of others, they lose the ability to resist them. For each people's warrior's tale says that we are people, and they are enemies. We are warriors and they are murderers. When a people have no other warrior's tale but that of their enemies, they will come to believe that they are monsters. And that their enemies are brave warriors.
The day will come when they are asked who they are, and they will not know. They will point to their possessions and the names of their streets and cities. They will speak of higher ideals and cringe for not living up to them. They will be asked why they fight, and they will say that they do not want to fight. That all they want is peace at any price.
Even the most powerful of civilizations with the mightiest of cities becomes prey when it forgets the warrior's tale. It takes more than weapons to defend a city, it demands the knowledge of the rightness of their use. It is no use dressing men in uniforms and arming them, if they are not taught the warrior's tale. And it is nearly as little use, sending them off to watch and keep, if the men above them discard the warrior's tale as violent and primitive gibberish.
An army of millions is worth little, without the warrior's tale. Strategy is technique, firepower is capacity, both begin and end with the human mind. "Why do we fight," is the question that the warrior's tale answers far better than any politician could. "We fight because this is ours. It is our honor, our duty and our war. We have been fighting for hundreds and thousands of years. This is what makes us who we are."
We are the people, says the warrior's tale. But we are every people, says the universalist's tale. All is one. There is no difference between us and them. And we will prove it by bringing them here. Then the walls fall and it falls to the warriors to make their last stand. To tell another warrior's tale with their lives.
This is the quiet war between the philosopher merchants who want trade and empire, and the warriors who know that they will be called upon to secure the empire, and then die fighting the enemy at home. It is how the long tale that begins with campfires and ends with burning cities goes. The story that begins with cave paintings and ends with YouTube videos. Whose pen is iron, lead and steel. And whose ink is always blood.
We have been here before. Told and retold the old stories. The forest, the swamp, the hill and the valley. And behind them the lie, the maneuver and the betrayal. The war that becomes unreasoning and the people who forget why they fight. And one by one the warriors slip away. Some to the long sleep in the desert. Others to secluded green places. And still others into the forgetfulness of a people's memory. The hole in the heart of a people who forget themselves and become nothing.
(I am coping with the second week of a family medical emergency and, I probably won't be able to answer non-urgent emails. Eight hours at the hospital doesn't leave a lot of time for correspondence.)
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.
Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.
Thank you for reading.
The tale has many variations. Sometimes there are many warriors, sometimes only a handful. They march into the village of the enemy in triumph, or they make a last stand on a rocky outcropping, spending the last of their heart's blood to buy time they will never know. There is the weak man who becomes strong, the strong man who becomes weak, the woman who mourns the man who will never return, and the man who goes off to battle with nothing to lose. These tales have been told countless times in the ages of men, and they will be told again for as long as men endure.
It is not only the warriors who need the tale, or those left behind. Future generation learn who they are from this tale. "We are the people who died for this land," is the unseen moral of each tale. "We bled for it. We died for it. Now it is yours to bleed and die for."
The warrior's tale tells each generation that they stand on the wall against a hostile world. And that the wall is made not of stones, but of their virtues. Their courage, their integrity and their craft. Theirs is the wall and they are the wall-- and if they should fail, then it will fail. And the land and the people will be swept away.
What happens to a people who forget the warrior's tale and stop telling it around their campfires? Worse , what of a people who are taught to despise the figure of the warrior and what he represents? They will not lose their courage, not all of it. But they will lose the direction of that courage. It will become a sudden unexplained virtue that rises to them out of the depths of danger. And their wall will fail.
It is the warrior's tale that makes walls. That says this is the land that we have fought for, and we will go on fighting for it. It is sacrifice that makes mere possession sacrosanct. It is blood that turns right to duty. It is the seal that is above law, deeper still to heritage. Anyone can hold a thing, but it is sacrifice that elevates it beyond possessiveness. And it is that tale which elevates a people from possessors of a land, to the people of the land.
Universalism discards the warrior's tale as abomination. A division in the family of man. Their tale is of an unselfish world where there are no more divisions or distinctions. Where everyone is the same in their own way. But this tale is a myth, a religious idea perverted into totalitarian politics. It is a promise that cannot be kept and a poison disguised with dollops of sugar. It lures the people into tearing down their wall and driving out their warriors. And what follows is what always does when there is no wall. The invaders come, the women scream, the children are taken captive and the men sit with folded hands and drugged smiles dreaming of a better world.
The warrior's tale explains why we fight in terms of our own history. The Great Swamp Fight. The Shot Heard Round the World. The Battle of New Orleans. Gettysburg, San Juan Hill, Belleau Wood, Pearl Harbor, Heartbreak Ridge, the Tet Offensive, Kandahar, and Fallujah. Generations of sacrifices must be defended. And those who wage war on us must be made to pay.
Universalism demands that war must answer to universal aims and objectives. That there is a universal law higher than war. But this is a children's story. The laws of men derive from their own interests. Those who can rule by force or coalition make their laws to serve their own ends. This is the way of the world.
Those who pretend to live by universalism will still fall to the law of steel. Rhetoric is no defense against fire and lead, and international codes have no defense against those who will break them. The talk may go on, but it is the warriors who will end it. It is still the warrior's tale to tell, even if all others have forgotten it.
Even when all others forget their tale, the warriors remember. Even when they are called peacekeepers and turned into an army of clowns for the satisfaction of their political masters. The armies may decay, but warriors still remain in their cracks, on their edges-- men who are not wanted, but are needed because they are the only ones who can do the grim work and do it well. They may only be a hundredth of an army, or a thousandth. A fraction of a fraction. But without them there is no army, only empty uniforms.
When the warrior's tale is forgotten, then they become shadows. Dangerous men despised and feared. Thought of as killers, dismissed as monsters and stared at like beasts in a cage. But the society cannot deny them. It cannot deny that part of them. When the warrior diminishes, the energy is directed elsewhere. Sport becomes an obsession and matches end in bloody violence. Crime increases. Prisons fill up. So do police forces.
As the external war fades, the internal one begins. Barbarians come from without. Buildings burn, mobs rage and there is a savagery in the air.
No law can protect a society that has forgotten the warrior's tale. It will turn outward, and adopt the warriors tales of outsiders. The samurai will replace the cowboy. The sports star will be an outsider. Its heroes will become foreigners. Men who will do understand the virtue of violence and will do what their own have been forbidden. Who have the vital energy that a society without a warrior's tale lacks.
When a people give up their own warrior's tale for that of others, they lose the ability to resist them. For each people's warrior's tale says that we are people, and they are enemies. We are warriors and they are murderers. When a people have no other warrior's tale but that of their enemies, they will come to believe that they are monsters. And that their enemies are brave warriors.
The day will come when they are asked who they are, and they will not know. They will point to their possessions and the names of their streets and cities. They will speak of higher ideals and cringe for not living up to them. They will be asked why they fight, and they will say that they do not want to fight. That all they want is peace at any price.
Even the most powerful of civilizations with the mightiest of cities becomes prey when it forgets the warrior's tale. It takes more than weapons to defend a city, it demands the knowledge of the rightness of their use. It is no use dressing men in uniforms and arming them, if they are not taught the warrior's tale. And it is nearly as little use, sending them off to watch and keep, if the men above them discard the warrior's tale as violent and primitive gibberish.
An army of millions is worth little, without the warrior's tale. Strategy is technique, firepower is capacity, both begin and end with the human mind. "Why do we fight," is the question that the warrior's tale answers far better than any politician could. "We fight because this is ours. It is our honor, our duty and our war. We have been fighting for hundreds and thousands of years. This is what makes us who we are."
This is the quiet war between the philosopher merchants who want trade and empire, and the warriors who know that they will be called upon to secure the empire, and then die fighting the enemy at home. It is how the long tale that begins with campfires and ends with burning cities goes. The story that begins with cave paintings and ends with YouTube videos. Whose pen is iron, lead and steel. And whose ink is always blood.
We have been here before. Told and retold the old stories. The forest, the swamp, the hill and the valley. And behind them the lie, the maneuver and the betrayal. The war that becomes unreasoning and the people who forget why they fight. And one by one the warriors slip away. Some to the long sleep in the desert. Others to secluded green places. And still others into the forgetfulness of a people's memory. The hole in the heart of a people who forget themselves and become nothing.
(I am coping with the second week of a family medical emergency and, I probably won't be able to answer non-urgent emails. Eight hours at the hospital doesn't leave a lot of time for correspondence.)
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.
Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.
Thank you for reading.
Thursday, May 24, 2018
Democrats Discover Culture is Downstream of Economics
"It is time to stop the pursuit of personal destruction and the prying into private lives and get on with our national life," President Bill Clinton once declared.
But switch on CNN or flip through the Washington Post and you will find the non-stop politics of personal destruction accompanied by Fortune 500 ads. Clinton supporters in the media aren’t just obsessed with Stormy Daniels or Russia conspiracy theories, but with destroying the lives of Trump supporters, from cabinet members to a random New York lawyer who once donated $500 to Trump.
Bill Clinton may have popularized the politics of personal destruction, but practicing its politics cost Hillary Clinton the ’16 election. Hillary’s message was that her opponent was a deplorable bigot who would move the White House to Moscow. Millions of Americans left behind by the crony socialism of the Obama economy and looking to change the change were not impressed with her hateful message.
And now the Democrats are making the same mistake all over again.
While the Republicans talked about the economy, the Democrats turned over their messaging to CNN, the Washington Post and the rest of the #resistance. While the media tethered its news cycle to Stormy Daniels and her lawyer, the economy boomed and tax cuts delivered. The Democrats went into spring with a solid advantage on the midterm ballot. Then the GOP broke even and has now taken the lead.
CNN thinks that the Stormy Daniels sleazefest matters, but even a majority of Democrats disagree.
The politics of personal destruction are deeply compelling to people who already believe that their opponents are utterly deplorable and must be destroyed. These days that’s the entire media and most of the beautiful people in the blue states who have the cultural influence and the real power. That’s why the media is a non-stop roll of interviews with Stormy’s lawyer, flowcharts of Russian conspiracy theories and breaking news reports claiming that EPA administrator Scott Pruitt eats stale bagels.
The #resistance demographic of yuppie urban elites made old media properties like the Washington Post and the New York Times profitable. CNN temporarily experienced a boom. #Resistance yuppies and hipsters weren’t very electorally significant as voters (except when they donated to obscure candidates in red state special elections), but they had lots of money to spare. That’s why media advertisers were willing to pay big bucks to reach them. And why the media kept feeding them anti-Trump clickbait.
In ’16, the media made the unwise decision to ignore everything except the big blue urban and suburban bubble. In ’18, it’s back to pandering to its bubble and ignoring the rest of the country.
Because the rest of the country doesn’t share its obsession with destroying President Trump.
The Democrats were hollowed out by the left. The big tent was deflated. Pro-gun, pro-natsec and pro-life politicians were shoved toward the exits. But the hollowing out of the left also meant that the party came to orbit around the tastes, obsessions and attitudes of a tiny percentage of the country.
It’s why the Democrats can’t stop shouting about impeachment and Russian conspiracies.
Efforts by Rep. Nancy Pelosi and other top Dems to shift messaging always runs into a ditch because Rep. Maxine Waters, Rep. Ted Lieu and other #resistance pols know that support from the most engaged portion of the base will pour in for any politicians who talks impeachment. If you threaten impeachment, CNN will give you 5 minutes. If you want to talk about the economy, you get 5 seconds.
The politics of personal destruction can entertain and influence most Americans, but it doesn’t drive them. Trump’s insults succeeded as entertainment because they were tactical stratagems that didn’t define a political worldview. However the left doesn’t just toss around insults. It believes that its abuse is reflective of a higher truth about the relative humanity of Democrats and Republicans.
And that’s why their politics of personal destruction keeps flopping against President Trump.
The difference between humor and malice lies in how seriously it’s meant. Stewart, Colbert and Oliver tried to get under the fence by being self-deprecating. But it’s not the deprecation of the self that matters. It’s the deprecation of the worldview of the joke. Liberating humor treats the entire world as a joke. Totalitarian humor is a contemptuous lecture, a bray of consensus, disguised as a gag.
To most Americans, personal attacks are a joke. But the left is entirely serious about them.
The cult of the left truly believes in its own moral authority. It expects Americans to vote based on its personal attacks. But most Americans are independent. They’re driven by self-interest, not ideology.
Both Middle America and the Blues are voting their economic interests. Trump is delivering more manufacturing jobs. The Dems promise more employment for sociology majors. But the Blues insist on cloaking their economic opportunism in moral preening. The politics of personal destruction and virtue signaling allows them to avoid any discussion about their own financial interests in politics.
Instead political campaigns are reduced to a struggle between ‘good’ and ‘evil’. And the triumph of ‘good’ will, incidentally, unleash a torrent of grant money for bad art, green energy and ethnic studies.
Follow the money.
Hillary Clinton ran on a negative message because it diverted attention from her corruption and lack of ideas. Her party is stupidly repeating the same trick in ’18 for the same sad reasons.
The Democrats are corrupt and have no new ideas. Their media megaphone allows them to shout at the rest of the country even as they have lost the ability to actually speak to ordinary Americans.
Doubling down on hating Trump has won a few special elections and created a constitutional crisis, but the midterm trend is moving toward Republicans because bigger tax refunds beat Saturday Night Live skits.
Politics may be downstream of culture, but they’re both downstream of economics.
There’s a reason that ‘Follow the Money’ is the timeless truth of politics. Individuals may vote contrary to their apparent economic interests, but groups rarely do. (Not never, there are always aberrations.) When it comes to politics, the ‘wisdom of crowds’ has a distinct dollars and cents bottom line.
The left bet everything on culture trumping economics in the midterm elections.
It assumed that it could override the economic self-interest of millions of Americans with conspiracy theories, Stormy Daniels and a thousand personal attacks. It failed in ’16. And it’s about to fail in ’18.
The left bet everything on hating Trump. And that’s about to cost it a second election.
(Personal note. I'm currently dealing with a family medical emergency, most of my time is eaten up by it and I may be unable to answer non-urgent emails for the duration. Thank you for understanding.)
But switch on CNN or flip through the Washington Post and you will find the non-stop politics of personal destruction accompanied by Fortune 500 ads. Clinton supporters in the media aren’t just obsessed with Stormy Daniels or Russia conspiracy theories, but with destroying the lives of Trump supporters, from cabinet members to a random New York lawyer who once donated $500 to Trump.
Bill Clinton may have popularized the politics of personal destruction, but practicing its politics cost Hillary Clinton the ’16 election. Hillary’s message was that her opponent was a deplorable bigot who would move the White House to Moscow. Millions of Americans left behind by the crony socialism of the Obama economy and looking to change the change were not impressed with her hateful message.
And now the Democrats are making the same mistake all over again.
While the Republicans talked about the economy, the Democrats turned over their messaging to CNN, the Washington Post and the rest of the #resistance. While the media tethered its news cycle to Stormy Daniels and her lawyer, the economy boomed and tax cuts delivered. The Democrats went into spring with a solid advantage on the midterm ballot. Then the GOP broke even and has now taken the lead.
CNN thinks that the Stormy Daniels sleazefest matters, but even a majority of Democrats disagree.
The politics of personal destruction are deeply compelling to people who already believe that their opponents are utterly deplorable and must be destroyed. These days that’s the entire media and most of the beautiful people in the blue states who have the cultural influence and the real power. That’s why the media is a non-stop roll of interviews with Stormy’s lawyer, flowcharts of Russian conspiracy theories and breaking news reports claiming that EPA administrator Scott Pruitt eats stale bagels.
The #resistance demographic of yuppie urban elites made old media properties like the Washington Post and the New York Times profitable. CNN temporarily experienced a boom. #Resistance yuppies and hipsters weren’t very electorally significant as voters (except when they donated to obscure candidates in red state special elections), but they had lots of money to spare. That’s why media advertisers were willing to pay big bucks to reach them. And why the media kept feeding them anti-Trump clickbait.
In ’16, the media made the unwise decision to ignore everything except the big blue urban and suburban bubble. In ’18, it’s back to pandering to its bubble and ignoring the rest of the country.
Because the rest of the country doesn’t share its obsession with destroying President Trump.
The Democrats were hollowed out by the left. The big tent was deflated. Pro-gun, pro-natsec and pro-life politicians were shoved toward the exits. But the hollowing out of the left also meant that the party came to orbit around the tastes, obsessions and attitudes of a tiny percentage of the country.
It’s why the Democrats can’t stop shouting about impeachment and Russian conspiracies.
Efforts by Rep. Nancy Pelosi and other top Dems to shift messaging always runs into a ditch because Rep. Maxine Waters, Rep. Ted Lieu and other #resistance pols know that support from the most engaged portion of the base will pour in for any politicians who talks impeachment. If you threaten impeachment, CNN will give you 5 minutes. If you want to talk about the economy, you get 5 seconds.
The politics of personal destruction can entertain and influence most Americans, but it doesn’t drive them. Trump’s insults succeeded as entertainment because they were tactical stratagems that didn’t define a political worldview. However the left doesn’t just toss around insults. It believes that its abuse is reflective of a higher truth about the relative humanity of Democrats and Republicans.
And that’s why their politics of personal destruction keeps flopping against President Trump.
The difference between humor and malice lies in how seriously it’s meant. Stewart, Colbert and Oliver tried to get under the fence by being self-deprecating. But it’s not the deprecation of the self that matters. It’s the deprecation of the worldview of the joke. Liberating humor treats the entire world as a joke. Totalitarian humor is a contemptuous lecture, a bray of consensus, disguised as a gag.
To most Americans, personal attacks are a joke. But the left is entirely serious about them.
The cult of the left truly believes in its own moral authority. It expects Americans to vote based on its personal attacks. But most Americans are independent. They’re driven by self-interest, not ideology.
Both Middle America and the Blues are voting their economic interests. Trump is delivering more manufacturing jobs. The Dems promise more employment for sociology majors. But the Blues insist on cloaking their economic opportunism in moral preening. The politics of personal destruction and virtue signaling allows them to avoid any discussion about their own financial interests in politics.
Instead political campaigns are reduced to a struggle between ‘good’ and ‘evil’. And the triumph of ‘good’ will, incidentally, unleash a torrent of grant money for bad art, green energy and ethnic studies.
Follow the money.
Hillary Clinton ran on a negative message because it diverted attention from her corruption and lack of ideas. Her party is stupidly repeating the same trick in ’18 for the same sad reasons.
The Democrats are corrupt and have no new ideas. Their media megaphone allows them to shout at the rest of the country even as they have lost the ability to actually speak to ordinary Americans.
Doubling down on hating Trump has won a few special elections and created a constitutional crisis, but the midterm trend is moving toward Republicans because bigger tax refunds beat Saturday Night Live skits.
Politics may be downstream of culture, but they’re both downstream of economics.
There’s a reason that ‘Follow the Money’ is the timeless truth of politics. Individuals may vote contrary to their apparent economic interests, but groups rarely do. (Not never, there are always aberrations.) When it comes to politics, the ‘wisdom of crowds’ has a distinct dollars and cents bottom line.
The left bet everything on culture trumping economics in the midterm elections.
It assumed that it could override the economic self-interest of millions of Americans with conspiracy theories, Stormy Daniels and a thousand personal attacks. It failed in ’16. And it’s about to fail in ’18.
The left bet everything on hating Trump. And that’s about to cost it a second election.
(Personal note. I'm currently dealing with a family medical emergency, most of my time is eaten up by it and I may be unable to answer non-urgent emails for the duration. Thank you for understanding.)
Wednesday, May 23, 2018
Lefty Anti-Semitism is a Serious Problem With a Long History
When D.C. Councilmember Trayon White came under fire for blaming Jews for controlling the weather, dumping a Holocaust Museum tour and donating to an anti-Semitic Nation of Islam event, the loudest voice in his defense came once again from the Working Families Party. The WFP is a spinoff of ACORN.
Rafael Shimunov, the WFP’s Creative Director, claimed that each exhibit of the Holocaust Museum was a “new trap” as the "under educated Black man was followed by rich white people waiting for him to say something offensive." Shimunov, a member of the anti-Israel hate group If Not Now, had previously also defended Keith Ellison and Linda Sarsour over their own anti-Semitic comments and history.
White isn't an "under educated Black man" victimized by the Holocaust Museum's exhibit “trap.” He has an MA in Public Administration and a BA in Business Administration. He’s a bigot. Not a victim.
But why would a senior figure in the WFP waste his time defending Trayon White’s anti-Semitism?
Before Trayon White made headlines for his bizarre claims of Jewish weather control, he had been backed by lefty activist groups that are political allies of the WFP. White had been endorsed by D.C. for Democracy along with other anti-incumbent insurgents. He also received the backing of Jews United for Justice. There aren’t a whole lot of Jews in Trayon’s district, but, despite its name, JUFJ isn’t really a Jewish group. Like the WFP, it’s a Soros organization. And it kept trying to cover for Trayon.
But this sort of thing keeps happening to the Working Families Party.
Laurie Cumbo, a WFP endorsed New York City Council candidate, explained black anti-Semitic violence by claiming that Jews with "bags of money" were trying to force black people out.
"We don’t want to ruin the lives of young people who are too young to understand," she said, of the attackers.
In early April, New York State Assemblywoman Diana Richardson allegedly made some nasty remarks about Jews. Richardson was the WFP's candidate. And its first big State Assembly win. The Jewish Press called on Richardson to resign. And I reached out to figures within the WFP to ask them to condemn her bigotry. There was no response. The WFP doesn’t condemn anti-Semitism. Instead it defends it.
Linda Sarsour had praised Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam. She even defended Farrakhan against accusations of anti-Semitism from, what she called, the “Jewish media.” Her efforts to marginalize Jews, celebrating stone throwing against Jews and BDS activism were met with Jewish protests. Four top WFP officials, Dan Cantor, its National Director, Joe Dinkin, its National Communications Director, and Bill Lipton, its New York State Director, signed a letter defending her.
Cantor and the WFP have also been enthusiastic proponents of Keith Ellison even though the longtime former Nation of Islam member had a very ugly history of anti-Semitism. The Minnesota Daily opinion editor, Michael Olenick, had even described Ellison’s writing as "a genuine threat to the long-term safety and well-being of the Jewish people." But that wasn’t a problem for the Working Families Party.
And these incidents keep popping up around the WFP and its candidates.
Some years ago one of the WFP’s field directors had to be fired from a state campaign over social media ugliness aimed at Israel. Next month, the Party pulled its support for the candidate’s campaign.
The WFP operates on the margins of the far left. And its candidates, like Cynthia Nixon, its pick for New York governor, who signed a BDS petition by the anti-Israel JVP hate group, tend to be on the anti-Israel side of the aisle. Bill Lipton’s social media and Rafael Shimunov’s activism make it rather clear that top figures in the radical group share the left’s traditional hostility to the Jewish State.
But the cases of Trayon White, Cumbo and Richardson show a comfort level with anti-Semitic bigotry in the black community that has nothing to do with Israel. Even Keith Ellison’s old history of defending anti-Semitism by Khalid Abdul Muhammed (“that old no-good Jew, that old imposter Jew, that old hooked-nose, bagel-eating, lox-eating… just crawled out of the caves and hills of Europe, so-called damn Jew”) to Joanne Jackson ("Jews are among the most racist white people I know") had nothing to do with Israel.
Women’s March leaders like Tamika Mallory have tried to change the topic from anti-Semitism to Israel. But Farrakhan’s anti-Semitism isn’t motivated by Israel. The Nation of Islam predates the rebirth of the Jewish State. The stereotypes that Cumbo, White and Richardson are drawing on are even older.
And the left has a long, ugly history of trafficking in those stereotypes.
"What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money. Money is the jealous god of Israel, in the face of which no other god may exist," Karl Marx ranted.
Like some of the WFPers, Marx had Jewish ancestors, but that didn’t interfere with his anti-Semitism.
The same idea was put forward by Pierre Leroux, who had coined the term ‘Socialism’, "When we speak of Jews, we mean the Jewish spirit, the spirit of profit, of lucre, of gain, the spirit of commerce."
Charles Fourier coined the term, "feminism". "The Jewish nation is not civilized," he wrote. "It devotes itself exclusively to traffic, to usury, and to mercantile depravity."
"Every government having regard to good morals ought to repress the Jews," he demanded.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the father of anarchism, made him seem downright benevolent. "The Jew is the enemy of the human race. One must send this race back to Asia or exterminate it.”
It’s not hard to see how the racial nationalism and socialism of the Nazis emerged. And it’s equally easy to see the same political elements at work among some of the WFP’s anti-Semitic allies.
The Working Families Party doesn’t have an anti-Semitism problem because of Israel. Neither does Jeremy Corbyn in the UK. The Labour Party’s ugly history of anti-Semitism goes back to its roots in the National Socialist Party and Henry Hyndman. "The attack upon the Jews is a convenient cover for a more direct attack at an early date upon the great landlords and Christian capitalists," the founder of England’s first Socialist political party had urged. Anti-Semitism is a class warfare political distraction.
When Rafael Shimunov defends anti-Semitism by talking about “rich white people”, it’s hard not to hear the historical echoes of the way that the left has always used class warfare to justify the hatred of Jews.
The conspiracy theories, Jews controlling the weather, may be goofier than ever, but Trayon White had fastened on a classic anti-Semitic obsession of the left. It’s the very same one that touched off the latest round of condemnations of Corbyn’s anti-Semitism in the UK. That’s not a coincidence. It’s a pattern.
The left knows that class warfare sells better when packaged with anti-Semitism. Israel is just an excuse. Using Jews as economic scapegoats appeals to the petty tribal bigotries of the districts that the WFP is after. The WFP tweets a lot about the Nazis even while it borrows their politics of racial resentment.
And that’s why the Working Families Party has an anti-Semitism problem.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine at the following link.
Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.
Thank you for reading.
Rafael Shimunov, the WFP’s Creative Director, claimed that each exhibit of the Holocaust Museum was a “new trap” as the "under educated Black man was followed by rich white people waiting for him to say something offensive." Shimunov, a member of the anti-Israel hate group If Not Now, had previously also defended Keith Ellison and Linda Sarsour over their own anti-Semitic comments and history.
White isn't an "under educated Black man" victimized by the Holocaust Museum's exhibit “trap.” He has an MA in Public Administration and a BA in Business Administration. He’s a bigot. Not a victim.
But why would a senior figure in the WFP waste his time defending Trayon White’s anti-Semitism?
Before Trayon White made headlines for his bizarre claims of Jewish weather control, he had been backed by lefty activist groups that are political allies of the WFP. White had been endorsed by D.C. for Democracy along with other anti-incumbent insurgents. He also received the backing of Jews United for Justice. There aren’t a whole lot of Jews in Trayon’s district, but, despite its name, JUFJ isn’t really a Jewish group. Like the WFP, it’s a Soros organization. And it kept trying to cover for Trayon.
But this sort of thing keeps happening to the Working Families Party.
Laurie Cumbo, a WFP endorsed New York City Council candidate, explained black anti-Semitic violence by claiming that Jews with "bags of money" were trying to force black people out.
"We don’t want to ruin the lives of young people who are too young to understand," she said, of the attackers.
In early April, New York State Assemblywoman Diana Richardson allegedly made some nasty remarks about Jews. Richardson was the WFP's candidate. And its first big State Assembly win. The Jewish Press called on Richardson to resign. And I reached out to figures within the WFP to ask them to condemn her bigotry. There was no response. The WFP doesn’t condemn anti-Semitism. Instead it defends it.
Linda Sarsour had praised Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam. She even defended Farrakhan against accusations of anti-Semitism from, what she called, the “Jewish media.” Her efforts to marginalize Jews, celebrating stone throwing against Jews and BDS activism were met with Jewish protests. Four top WFP officials, Dan Cantor, its National Director, Joe Dinkin, its National Communications Director, and Bill Lipton, its New York State Director, signed a letter defending her.
Cantor and the WFP have also been enthusiastic proponents of Keith Ellison even though the longtime former Nation of Islam member had a very ugly history of anti-Semitism. The Minnesota Daily opinion editor, Michael Olenick, had even described Ellison’s writing as "a genuine threat to the long-term safety and well-being of the Jewish people." But that wasn’t a problem for the Working Families Party.
And these incidents keep popping up around the WFP and its candidates.
Some years ago one of the WFP’s field directors had to be fired from a state campaign over social media ugliness aimed at Israel. Next month, the Party pulled its support for the candidate’s campaign.
The WFP operates on the margins of the far left. And its candidates, like Cynthia Nixon, its pick for New York governor, who signed a BDS petition by the anti-Israel JVP hate group, tend to be on the anti-Israel side of the aisle. Bill Lipton’s social media and Rafael Shimunov’s activism make it rather clear that top figures in the radical group share the left’s traditional hostility to the Jewish State.
But the cases of Trayon White, Cumbo and Richardson show a comfort level with anti-Semitic bigotry in the black community that has nothing to do with Israel. Even Keith Ellison’s old history of defending anti-Semitism by Khalid Abdul Muhammed (“that old no-good Jew, that old imposter Jew, that old hooked-nose, bagel-eating, lox-eating… just crawled out of the caves and hills of Europe, so-called damn Jew”) to Joanne Jackson ("Jews are among the most racist white people I know") had nothing to do with Israel.
Women’s March leaders like Tamika Mallory have tried to change the topic from anti-Semitism to Israel. But Farrakhan’s anti-Semitism isn’t motivated by Israel. The Nation of Islam predates the rebirth of the Jewish State. The stereotypes that Cumbo, White and Richardson are drawing on are even older.
And the left has a long, ugly history of trafficking in those stereotypes.
"What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money. Money is the jealous god of Israel, in the face of which no other god may exist," Karl Marx ranted.
Like some of the WFPers, Marx had Jewish ancestors, but that didn’t interfere with his anti-Semitism.
The same idea was put forward by Pierre Leroux, who had coined the term ‘Socialism’, "When we speak of Jews, we mean the Jewish spirit, the spirit of profit, of lucre, of gain, the spirit of commerce."
Charles Fourier coined the term, "feminism". "The Jewish nation is not civilized," he wrote. "It devotes itself exclusively to traffic, to usury, and to mercantile depravity."
"Every government having regard to good morals ought to repress the Jews," he demanded.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the father of anarchism, made him seem downright benevolent. "The Jew is the enemy of the human race. One must send this race back to Asia or exterminate it.”
It’s not hard to see how the racial nationalism and socialism of the Nazis emerged. And it’s equally easy to see the same political elements at work among some of the WFP’s anti-Semitic allies.
The Working Families Party doesn’t have an anti-Semitism problem because of Israel. Neither does Jeremy Corbyn in the UK. The Labour Party’s ugly history of anti-Semitism goes back to its roots in the National Socialist Party and Henry Hyndman. "The attack upon the Jews is a convenient cover for a more direct attack at an early date upon the great landlords and Christian capitalists," the founder of England’s first Socialist political party had urged. Anti-Semitism is a class warfare political distraction.
When Rafael Shimunov defends anti-Semitism by talking about “rich white people”, it’s hard not to hear the historical echoes of the way that the left has always used class warfare to justify the hatred of Jews.
The conspiracy theories, Jews controlling the weather, may be goofier than ever, but Trayon White had fastened on a classic anti-Semitic obsession of the left. It’s the very same one that touched off the latest round of condemnations of Corbyn’s anti-Semitism in the UK. That’s not a coincidence. It’s a pattern.
The left knows that class warfare sells better when packaged with anti-Semitism. Israel is just an excuse. Using Jews as economic scapegoats appeals to the petty tribal bigotries of the districts that the WFP is after. The WFP tweets a lot about the Nazis even while it borrows their politics of racial resentment.
And that’s why the Working Families Party has an anti-Semitism problem.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine at the following link.
Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.
Thank you for reading.
Thursday, May 17, 2018
The Religion of Racism
Obama once called slavery, “America’s original sin”. Jim Wallis, a member of Obama’s White House Faith Council, has a book out titled, "America's Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege".
Accusations of sinfulness usually tell us more about the values of the accuser than the accused.
If racism is America’s original sin, then its redemption lies in anti-racism. For liberal theologians, Christian and Jewish, who no longer believe in the traditional biblical sins, racism is a godsend. It provides the moral drama of damnation and redemption, confession and absolution, in a way that is compatible with the larger secular culture and their own political ambitions.
Fighting racism isn’t just a cause, it’s a religion. And all that remains of major religious denominations.
The most resonantly dramatic events for Christian and Jewish liberal denominations remain the fight against slavery and the struggles of the civil rights movement. They revisit and recreate them ceaselessly. And each protest movement, whether it’s Muslim migrants at airports, illegal aliens from El Salvador at the border or Black Lives Matter racists at coffee shops, is a religious revival experience.
The trouble is that the hunt for this particular sin has come to pervade our legal system, taint workplaces, terrorize campuses and unleash social media mobs on random offenders. We are not in a libertine age just because sexual morality is as dead as disco and drugs are on the verge of being legalized. The sins of traditional morality have been replaced by an even more ruthless moral code.
Employees, employers, students and businessmen still fear being fired, expelled and hounded out of society for offending the sensibilities of a fanatical sect and its zealous enforcers. They hide behind hypocrisy, denouncing others while living in terror that their own private offenses will be outed.
A drunken tweet, an indiscreet joke or a mere implication can end even the most respected career.
The religion of racism has become a twisted creed that has perverted its own origins. What began as a unitary effort to bring together different races around religion has instead become a cult that uses its beliefs to divide us with white people as perpetual sinners and black people as unstained saints.
Its fetishization of black victimhood is bad for black people and its conviction that white people are inherently sinful is bad for everyone. As real racism has diminished, its conviction in the ubiquity of this particular sin has not. Fighting the overt discrimination of segregation turned into hunting for covert bigotry by working backward through disparate impact creating a guilt through lack of association.
If black people weren’t visiting national parks or living in sufficient numbers in Utah, it was evidence that national parks and Utah were racist. Racism was no longer something to be discovered by witnessing its presence, but by noting the absence of some ideal multicultural diversity statistic. Civil rights shifted from lifting state sanctions that mandated discrimination against black people to imposing state sanctions that mandated discrimination on behalf of black people. Like the segregationists, they were abusing government power to impose the version of the ideal racial balance that they wanted to see.
The absence of the realization of this vision became its own evidence of racial sinfulness.
One fundamental difference between a free society and an oppressive society is that the former punishes bad behavior while the latter punishes the absence of good behavior. A free society, such as America, punishes theft. An oppressive society, such as the Soviet Union, punished the failure to work.
When civil rights shifted from punishing mandatory segregation to punishing the lack of integration, it ceased to be a movement pursuing freedom and instead became a totalitarian movement.
Racism diminished, but the religious, emotional and financial need for its existence on the part of the religion of racism did not. Their mission became manufacturing racism. The most mundane interactions were reinterpreted through the discriminating eye of the microaggression. Otherwise neutral institutions were accused of pervasive whiteness. Racism ceased to be an observable interaction between individuals and became the unseen gluonic binding block of all social matter in America.
The religion of racism had reached its logical conclusion. It was no longer the absence of black people, but the presence of white people that was racist. Racism was America’s original sin. White people carried it everywhere with them like radiation. To be white was to have your body and your mind, your thoughts, your writings and even the inanimate objects around you be infected by racial radioactivity.
Racism was no longer an objectively measurable phenomenon. It had taken on all the characteristics of metaphysics. It was everywhere and yet undetectable. It was transmitted by the immutable nature of race, a phenomenon that was paradoxically a construct and yet inflexibly inescapable.
Every tragedy, grievance and outrage was ultimately attributed to this primal evil and original sin.
Political opposition to Obama, poor water management decisions, infant mortality rates, environmental shifts, the vagaries of entertainment industry casting, gun violence and a thousand others could be put down to racism. The religion of racism, like all religion, had found something that explained everything.
To understand America, all you had to do was understand racism. And then you would know that we were a country perpetually divided between privileged white people and powerless minorities.
Implicit bias is the final catechism of a faith in racism. It is a pseudo-religious ritual whose purpose is to force its victims to confess their sins and assert its doctrinal belief in the innate racism of white people. Like all cults, it does this through the familiar brainwashing process of challenging and breaking down identity, through twisted reasoning and emotional abuse, and then reconstructing it in its own image.
To its believers, implicit bias is the truth that we are all racist. But that we can be saved from our racism by confessing it. Activism is penance. Denounce others and you too can make it to multicultural heaven.
The religion of racism has the right to believe in its hateful creed. What it does not have the right to do is enforce it on others. And yet the left has made a mockery of the separation of church and state by making its own secular religion, obsessed with planetary and racial damnation, into a national creed.
And, like all efforts at imposing a religion, it has led to a religious war which some call a culture war.
The religion of racism is less concerned with actual racists, than with racial unbelievers. The ultimate heresy, the one it’s rooting out with implicit bias and extreme prejudice, is that racism isn’t everywhere. And it’s not a burning national crisis that requires handing out unlimited witch hunting powers.
The theocrats of social justice prefer opposing views to skepticism. The existence of racists reaffirms their belief in the defining power of racism. It’s the skeptics of racism who are the real threat.
If you don’t believe that racism is significant, you challenge their entire reason for being.
And the religion of racism meets these challenges by manufacturing a racial crisis as it strings together anecdotal incidents from a Waffle House to a New York City apartment to a student dorm to a coffee shop, to support its unified field theory of universal bigotry and suppress skepticism about its powers.
The puritanical panic has less to do with fear of racism than the emotional needs of the witch hunters. Informing on your neighbors, denouncing fellow students and becoming the center of attention is emotionally fulfilling for the same psychological reasons that it was for the Salem accusers, the Parisian mobs of the French Revolution and the rampaging Communist students of the Cultural Revolution.
But beyond the twisted psychology of the activist accusers, the judges of kangaroo courts and the town criers of the media eager for scalps, the human sacrifice of the purge releases social tensions. This was the social function of human sacrifice. The shocking spectacle of bloodletting, the mob psychology and adrenaline release, relieved the fears and anxieties bedeviling society and left them feeling cleansed.
The constant hunt for scapegoats is a feature of an anxious society fearful for the future. Social justice scapegoating gives a generation on the edge of history a temporary sense of control by abusing others.
The left likes to believe that it’s a positive movement, defined by its utopian aspirations, not its brutal tactics. But it is a movement built on fear and hate, on a historical inevitability that is premised not on human progress, but on human collapse, on inescapable problems and necessarily ruthless solutions.
The religion of racism isn’t unique to America. But there is something special about it in this country. It stinks of the soured beliefs of liberal religious denominations, their loss of faith in God and man, and their growing conviction that salvation lies only in men wielding the unlimited power of their governments.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the following link at the Center's Front Page Magazine.
Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.
Thank you for reading.
Accusations of sinfulness usually tell us more about the values of the accuser than the accused.
If racism is America’s original sin, then its redemption lies in anti-racism. For liberal theologians, Christian and Jewish, who no longer believe in the traditional biblical sins, racism is a godsend. It provides the moral drama of damnation and redemption, confession and absolution, in a way that is compatible with the larger secular culture and their own political ambitions.
Fighting racism isn’t just a cause, it’s a religion. And all that remains of major religious denominations.
The most resonantly dramatic events for Christian and Jewish liberal denominations remain the fight against slavery and the struggles of the civil rights movement. They revisit and recreate them ceaselessly. And each protest movement, whether it’s Muslim migrants at airports, illegal aliens from El Salvador at the border or Black Lives Matter racists at coffee shops, is a religious revival experience.
The trouble is that the hunt for this particular sin has come to pervade our legal system, taint workplaces, terrorize campuses and unleash social media mobs on random offenders. We are not in a libertine age just because sexual morality is as dead as disco and drugs are on the verge of being legalized. The sins of traditional morality have been replaced by an even more ruthless moral code.
Employees, employers, students and businessmen still fear being fired, expelled and hounded out of society for offending the sensibilities of a fanatical sect and its zealous enforcers. They hide behind hypocrisy, denouncing others while living in terror that their own private offenses will be outed.
A drunken tweet, an indiscreet joke or a mere implication can end even the most respected career.
The religion of racism has become a twisted creed that has perverted its own origins. What began as a unitary effort to bring together different races around religion has instead become a cult that uses its beliefs to divide us with white people as perpetual sinners and black people as unstained saints.
Its fetishization of black victimhood is bad for black people and its conviction that white people are inherently sinful is bad for everyone. As real racism has diminished, its conviction in the ubiquity of this particular sin has not. Fighting the overt discrimination of segregation turned into hunting for covert bigotry by working backward through disparate impact creating a guilt through lack of association.
If black people weren’t visiting national parks or living in sufficient numbers in Utah, it was evidence that national parks and Utah were racist. Racism was no longer something to be discovered by witnessing its presence, but by noting the absence of some ideal multicultural diversity statistic. Civil rights shifted from lifting state sanctions that mandated discrimination against black people to imposing state sanctions that mandated discrimination on behalf of black people. Like the segregationists, they were abusing government power to impose the version of the ideal racial balance that they wanted to see.
The absence of the realization of this vision became its own evidence of racial sinfulness.
One fundamental difference between a free society and an oppressive society is that the former punishes bad behavior while the latter punishes the absence of good behavior. A free society, such as America, punishes theft. An oppressive society, such as the Soviet Union, punished the failure to work.
When civil rights shifted from punishing mandatory segregation to punishing the lack of integration, it ceased to be a movement pursuing freedom and instead became a totalitarian movement.
Racism diminished, but the religious, emotional and financial need for its existence on the part of the religion of racism did not. Their mission became manufacturing racism. The most mundane interactions were reinterpreted through the discriminating eye of the microaggression. Otherwise neutral institutions were accused of pervasive whiteness. Racism ceased to be an observable interaction between individuals and became the unseen gluonic binding block of all social matter in America.
The religion of racism had reached its logical conclusion. It was no longer the absence of black people, but the presence of white people that was racist. Racism was America’s original sin. White people carried it everywhere with them like radiation. To be white was to have your body and your mind, your thoughts, your writings and even the inanimate objects around you be infected by racial radioactivity.
Racism was no longer an objectively measurable phenomenon. It had taken on all the characteristics of metaphysics. It was everywhere and yet undetectable. It was transmitted by the immutable nature of race, a phenomenon that was paradoxically a construct and yet inflexibly inescapable.
Every tragedy, grievance and outrage was ultimately attributed to this primal evil and original sin.
Political opposition to Obama, poor water management decisions, infant mortality rates, environmental shifts, the vagaries of entertainment industry casting, gun violence and a thousand others could be put down to racism. The religion of racism, like all religion, had found something that explained everything.
To understand America, all you had to do was understand racism. And then you would know that we were a country perpetually divided between privileged white people and powerless minorities.
Implicit bias is the final catechism of a faith in racism. It is a pseudo-religious ritual whose purpose is to force its victims to confess their sins and assert its doctrinal belief in the innate racism of white people. Like all cults, it does this through the familiar brainwashing process of challenging and breaking down identity, through twisted reasoning and emotional abuse, and then reconstructing it in its own image.
To its believers, implicit bias is the truth that we are all racist. But that we can be saved from our racism by confessing it. Activism is penance. Denounce others and you too can make it to multicultural heaven.
The religion of racism has the right to believe in its hateful creed. What it does not have the right to do is enforce it on others. And yet the left has made a mockery of the separation of church and state by making its own secular religion, obsessed with planetary and racial damnation, into a national creed.
And, like all efforts at imposing a religion, it has led to a religious war which some call a culture war.
The religion of racism is less concerned with actual racists, than with racial unbelievers. The ultimate heresy, the one it’s rooting out with implicit bias and extreme prejudice, is that racism isn’t everywhere. And it’s not a burning national crisis that requires handing out unlimited witch hunting powers.
The theocrats of social justice prefer opposing views to skepticism. The existence of racists reaffirms their belief in the defining power of racism. It’s the skeptics of racism who are the real threat.
If you don’t believe that racism is significant, you challenge their entire reason for being.
And the religion of racism meets these challenges by manufacturing a racial crisis as it strings together anecdotal incidents from a Waffle House to a New York City apartment to a student dorm to a coffee shop, to support its unified field theory of universal bigotry and suppress skepticism about its powers.
The puritanical panic has less to do with fear of racism than the emotional needs of the witch hunters. Informing on your neighbors, denouncing fellow students and becoming the center of attention is emotionally fulfilling for the same psychological reasons that it was for the Salem accusers, the Parisian mobs of the French Revolution and the rampaging Communist students of the Cultural Revolution.
But beyond the twisted psychology of the activist accusers, the judges of kangaroo courts and the town criers of the media eager for scalps, the human sacrifice of the purge releases social tensions. This was the social function of human sacrifice. The shocking spectacle of bloodletting, the mob psychology and adrenaline release, relieved the fears and anxieties bedeviling society and left them feeling cleansed.
The constant hunt for scapegoats is a feature of an anxious society fearful for the future. Social justice scapegoating gives a generation on the edge of history a temporary sense of control by abusing others.
The left likes to believe that it’s a positive movement, defined by its utopian aspirations, not its brutal tactics. But it is a movement built on fear and hate, on a historical inevitability that is premised not on human progress, but on human collapse, on inescapable problems and necessarily ruthless solutions.
The religion of racism isn’t unique to America. But there is something special about it in this country. It stinks of the soured beliefs of liberal religious denominations, their loss of faith in God and man, and their growing conviction that salvation lies only in men wielding the unlimited power of their governments.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the following link at the Center's Front Page Magazine.
Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.
Thank you for reading.
Wednesday, May 16, 2018
Attacking Israel for $100, Defending it for $13
Hamas supporters in Gaza held the world’s first peaceful protest with hand grenades, pipe bombs, cleavers and guns. And Israeli soldiers peacefully defended their country leaving multiple Hamas attackers at peace. The Great Hamas March of Return came with instructions to, "bring a knife, dagger, or handgun, if you have one, and to leave them under your clothes and not use them or show them, except if you identify one of the soldiers or settlers."
"We will tear down the border," Hamas Prime Minister Yahya Sinwar had peacefully vowed. "And we will tear out their hearts from their bodies."
But the only hearts his terror thugs tore out were already bleeding with sympathy for Islamic terrorists and bile for the Israelis they were there to kill with those knives, daggers and guns.
The Hamas mob chanted, “Allahu Akbar” and the genocidal racist threat of, “Khaybar Khaybar, ya yahud," a reference to the primal Islamic massacre of the Jews. While IDF soldiers held back the invaders, the jets of the IAF targeted the snake’s head striking Hamas compounds and outposts. By 5.30 PM, the Hamas organizers changed course and began urging the thugs away from further fence attacks.
Hamas had offered $100 to every rioter. During previous violent assaults back in April, the Muslim Brotherhood terrorist group had been offering $200 to anyone shot by Israelis, $500 for severe injuries and $3,000 to the dead.
$100 a day may not seem like a lot, but the Israeli teen soldiers they’re trying to kill, earn $13 a day.
The Hamas supporting thugs are depicted as helpless, starving victims who can barely lift the firebombs they’re throwing at Israelis, but they make ten times as much as the Israeli soldiers they are there to kill.
Hamas can write all those checks to its aspiring killers because the cash is coming from Iran.
Last year, Senwar, whom Israel had released in exchange for captured Israeli hostage Gilad Shalit, had boasted that Iran was once again "the largest backer financially and militarily".
That comes out to an estimated $100 million a year.
With as many as 50,000 Hamas supporters in Gaza participating in the day’s attacks at $100 a head, over 1,000 allegedly injured at least $200 each, and another 52 allegedly killed at $3,000 each (there is no reason to treat Hamas casualty figures coming out of Gaza as anything other than propaganda), the whole thing cost Hamas and Iran $5.3 million. The unmarked cargo plane filled with foreign currency that Obama dispatched to Iran carried $400 million. That was part of a known $1.7 billion cash payment.
But the total Obama terror payments to Tehran may go as high as $33.6 billion.
Despite media misreporting, the Hamas mass fence attacks began back on March 30 and even though their Great March of Return was supposed to end in mid-May, the show proved to be unexpectedly popular in Tehran, Brussels and Berkeley, and the attacks will continue through at least June.
Even a single one of Obama’s cash smuggling runs to Iran is enough to fund attacks just like these for two and a half months. And the $100,000 that an Iranian group offered to anyone who blows up the embassy? That illegal cash run can pay for bounties on every American diplomatic facility in the world.
Lefties bemoaning Israel’s moral authority can look up and follow the money trail from Iran’s IRGC (the terror mothership whom Obama resisted sanctioning), to the unmarked cargo planes from Obama, and to their own greasy little fingers that pushed the button or marked the ballot for him. The Israeli teens in IDF khaki with rules of engagement for using force longer than some graduate thesis papers are dealing with a problem from hell created by Democrat voters who wanted to feel inspired by Obama.
The cost of that inspiration today ran to dozens dead. If the Israeli teens shooting in self-defense lack moral authority, where is the moral authority of the Obama voters whose votes financed the attack?
Those Israeli teens in green earn $408 a month if they're in a combat unit. Before a raise a few years ago, they weren't even earning $300. Support units earn $327 and rear units $225. Not only is that far lower than the average civilian salary, but if often hardly covers living expenses. Dodging the draft isn’t hard these days. The average red-shirted hipster does it easily, putting in a few years at a fake startup before heading to Berlin to protest Zionism. And those who serve know if that they make a single mistake, if they shoot an attacker who turns out not to be armed, Israeli leftists will see them jailed.
Hamas supporters charge at them for $100 a day. And IDF soldiers hold the line for $400 a month.
So why for $400 a month, do Israeli soldiers face down mobs of tens of thousands of Hamas supporters baying for their blood? The average IDF soldier who reports for duty comes from one of the Judean communities (slurred as settlements) under attack by Hamas or from development towns in the north under attack by Hezbollah. He is often a religious settler who sees the hand of G-d in the high hills or a descendant of Mizrahi immigrants whose recent ancestors were oppressed under Muslim rule.
When your family lives under fire, holding the line on the Hamas mob isn’t an abstract idea of duty.
The Hamas invaders were there to kill Israelis. The Israeli soldiers were there to protect Israelis. The attackers were invading someone else’s land while the defenders were protecting their own country.
That’s why Hamas has to pay its rioting thugs ten times as much as Israeli soldiers earn to attack them.
While the $100 a day thugs threw rocks and firebombs, the professional terrorists hung back waiting for a breach in the fence. Some were caught planting bombs. And killed. They are among the 10 known Hamas terrorists killed in the Gaza fighting and bemoaned by the media as victims of a Jewish massacre.
The $400 a month Israeli teenager with a rifle is there as the front line in case the fence is breached. Hamas wants to take more hostages to free more terrorists. If it can’t do that, it will kill them. And if the attackers make it past the soldiers, they will hit Israeli towns and villages hoping to kill anyone they find.
While the fence holds up, the Hamas terrorists and their supporters sent flaming kites in the hopes of setting Israeli farms and fields on fire. One such attack had already destroyed 400 acres of wheat.
A sympathetic New York Times piece from last week described the "flaming-kite squadrons" prepping hundreds of fire kites, but unfortunately, "The wind was blowing the other way."
“The wind is still against us,” Ismail al-Qrinawi whined. “We are waiting for it to pick up so we can fly tens of kites and burn their crops." Instead, "the direction of the wind not only thwarted the kites, but also blew copious amounts of Israeli tear gas toward the protesters."
Pharaoh and his legions had the same bad experience with the wind. G-d must be an Islamophobe.
Hamas organized the invasion. It urged its human shields to head to the fence telling them that the Israelis had run away. That was the same way Egypt’s Nasser had tricked Jordan’s King Hussein during the Six Day War. Instead of defeating the Israelis and salvaging Gaza, Nasser’s scheme led to the liberation of Jerusalem, along with Judea and Samaria by the indigenous Jewish people. And it also had disastrous consequences for this latest attempted invasion by Egyptian-Jordanian settlers into Israel.
While the Hamas supporters were destroying their own crossing point infrastructure, as they had previously trashed their own gas lines, the United States was inaugurating the opening of an embassy in Jerusalem. Despite media misinformation, the riots predated the embassy and will postdate it.
The media used contrasting photos of the embassy opening and the Pallywood fake photos of protesters crying for the cameras and pretending to limp on crutches to smear Israel and America. And as usual they missed the real story. While Israelis and Americans were building something, Muslim terrorists were destroying everything they could get their hands on. While Rabbis and Pastors blessed, Imams cursed.
Hamas Sheikh Iyad Abu Funun had sworn on the Koran that, "We will not leave a single Jew on our Islamic land." It did not matter, “whether left-Wing, right-wing, secular, religious, or extremist.”
That is what this is about.
The dedication of the embassy is a leap of faith. Faith in building rather than destruction. Faith in life instead of death. Faith in the G-d who watches over Jerusalem, not the Allah for whom Gaza burns.
UPDATE: New Israeli information states that it's a $100 subsidy per family for rioters.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.
Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.
Thank you for reading.
"We will tear down the border," Hamas Prime Minister Yahya Sinwar had peacefully vowed. "And we will tear out their hearts from their bodies."
But the only hearts his terror thugs tore out were already bleeding with sympathy for Islamic terrorists and bile for the Israelis they were there to kill with those knives, daggers and guns.
The Hamas mob chanted, “Allahu Akbar” and the genocidal racist threat of, “Khaybar Khaybar, ya yahud," a reference to the primal Islamic massacre of the Jews. While IDF soldiers held back the invaders, the jets of the IAF targeted the snake’s head striking Hamas compounds and outposts. By 5.30 PM, the Hamas organizers changed course and began urging the thugs away from further fence attacks.
Hamas had offered $100 to every rioter. During previous violent assaults back in April, the Muslim Brotherhood terrorist group had been offering $200 to anyone shot by Israelis, $500 for severe injuries and $3,000 to the dead.
$100 a day may not seem like a lot, but the Israeli teen soldiers they’re trying to kill, earn $13 a day.
The Hamas supporting thugs are depicted as helpless, starving victims who can barely lift the firebombs they’re throwing at Israelis, but they make ten times as much as the Israeli soldiers they are there to kill.
Hamas can write all those checks to its aspiring killers because the cash is coming from Iran.
Last year, Senwar, whom Israel had released in exchange for captured Israeli hostage Gilad Shalit, had boasted that Iran was once again "the largest backer financially and militarily".
That comes out to an estimated $100 million a year.
With as many as 50,000 Hamas supporters in Gaza participating in the day’s attacks at $100 a head, over 1,000 allegedly injured at least $200 each, and another 52 allegedly killed at $3,000 each (there is no reason to treat Hamas casualty figures coming out of Gaza as anything other than propaganda), the whole thing cost Hamas and Iran $5.3 million. The unmarked cargo plane filled with foreign currency that Obama dispatched to Iran carried $400 million. That was part of a known $1.7 billion cash payment.
But the total Obama terror payments to Tehran may go as high as $33.6 billion.
Despite media misreporting, the Hamas mass fence attacks began back on March 30 and even though their Great March of Return was supposed to end in mid-May, the show proved to be unexpectedly popular in Tehran, Brussels and Berkeley, and the attacks will continue through at least June.
Even a single one of Obama’s cash smuggling runs to Iran is enough to fund attacks just like these for two and a half months. And the $100,000 that an Iranian group offered to anyone who blows up the embassy? That illegal cash run can pay for bounties on every American diplomatic facility in the world.
Lefties bemoaning Israel’s moral authority can look up and follow the money trail from Iran’s IRGC (the terror mothership whom Obama resisted sanctioning), to the unmarked cargo planes from Obama, and to their own greasy little fingers that pushed the button or marked the ballot for him. The Israeli teens in IDF khaki with rules of engagement for using force longer than some graduate thesis papers are dealing with a problem from hell created by Democrat voters who wanted to feel inspired by Obama.
The cost of that inspiration today ran to dozens dead. If the Israeli teens shooting in self-defense lack moral authority, where is the moral authority of the Obama voters whose votes financed the attack?
Those Israeli teens in green earn $408 a month if they're in a combat unit. Before a raise a few years ago, they weren't even earning $300. Support units earn $327 and rear units $225. Not only is that far lower than the average civilian salary, but if often hardly covers living expenses. Dodging the draft isn’t hard these days. The average red-shirted hipster does it easily, putting in a few years at a fake startup before heading to Berlin to protest Zionism. And those who serve know if that they make a single mistake, if they shoot an attacker who turns out not to be armed, Israeli leftists will see them jailed.
Hamas supporters charge at them for $100 a day. And IDF soldiers hold the line for $400 a month.
So why for $400 a month, do Israeli soldiers face down mobs of tens of thousands of Hamas supporters baying for their blood? The average IDF soldier who reports for duty comes from one of the Judean communities (slurred as settlements) under attack by Hamas or from development towns in the north under attack by Hezbollah. He is often a religious settler who sees the hand of G-d in the high hills or a descendant of Mizrahi immigrants whose recent ancestors were oppressed under Muslim rule.
When your family lives under fire, holding the line on the Hamas mob isn’t an abstract idea of duty.
The Hamas invaders were there to kill Israelis. The Israeli soldiers were there to protect Israelis. The attackers were invading someone else’s land while the defenders were protecting their own country.
That’s why Hamas has to pay its rioting thugs ten times as much as Israeli soldiers earn to attack them.
While the $100 a day thugs threw rocks and firebombs, the professional terrorists hung back waiting for a breach in the fence. Some were caught planting bombs. And killed. They are among the 10 known Hamas terrorists killed in the Gaza fighting and bemoaned by the media as victims of a Jewish massacre.
The $400 a month Israeli teenager with a rifle is there as the front line in case the fence is breached. Hamas wants to take more hostages to free more terrorists. If it can’t do that, it will kill them. And if the attackers make it past the soldiers, they will hit Israeli towns and villages hoping to kill anyone they find.
While the fence holds up, the Hamas terrorists and their supporters sent flaming kites in the hopes of setting Israeli farms and fields on fire. One such attack had already destroyed 400 acres of wheat.
A sympathetic New York Times piece from last week described the "flaming-kite squadrons" prepping hundreds of fire kites, but unfortunately, "The wind was blowing the other way."
“The wind is still against us,” Ismail al-Qrinawi whined. “We are waiting for it to pick up so we can fly tens of kites and burn their crops." Instead, "the direction of the wind not only thwarted the kites, but also blew copious amounts of Israeli tear gas toward the protesters."
Pharaoh and his legions had the same bad experience with the wind. G-d must be an Islamophobe.
Hamas organized the invasion. It urged its human shields to head to the fence telling them that the Israelis had run away. That was the same way Egypt’s Nasser had tricked Jordan’s King Hussein during the Six Day War. Instead of defeating the Israelis and salvaging Gaza, Nasser’s scheme led to the liberation of Jerusalem, along with Judea and Samaria by the indigenous Jewish people. And it also had disastrous consequences for this latest attempted invasion by Egyptian-Jordanian settlers into Israel.
While the Hamas supporters were destroying their own crossing point infrastructure, as they had previously trashed their own gas lines, the United States was inaugurating the opening of an embassy in Jerusalem. Despite media misinformation, the riots predated the embassy and will postdate it.
The media used contrasting photos of the embassy opening and the Pallywood fake photos of protesters crying for the cameras and pretending to limp on crutches to smear Israel and America. And as usual they missed the real story. While Israelis and Americans were building something, Muslim terrorists were destroying everything they could get their hands on. While Rabbis and Pastors blessed, Imams cursed.
Hamas Sheikh Iyad Abu Funun had sworn on the Koran that, "We will not leave a single Jew on our Islamic land." It did not matter, “whether left-Wing, right-wing, secular, religious, or extremist.”
That is what this is about.
The dedication of the embassy is a leap of faith. Faith in building rather than destruction. Faith in life instead of death. Faith in the G-d who watches over Jerusalem, not the Allah for whom Gaza burns.
UPDATE: New Israeli information states that it's a $100 subsidy per family for rioters.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.
Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.
Thank you for reading.
Tuesday, May 15, 2018
How Not To Get Shot by a Soldier
The following is intended to serve as a useful guide to various activists, protesters and other completely non-violent folk who happen to be packing knives, guns, rocks and grenades. You will encounter various law enforcement and military personnel-- this is how not to get shot by them.
First of all it's important to remember that if you attack an armed man in a uniform, he will very probably shoot you.
Even given the most restrictive Rules of Engagement in the world which forbid him from opening fire unless he is outnumbered 600 to 1, and only when he has been given specific authorization by the UN to use deadly force-- there will still come a time when he will open fire on you. This will occur when he feels that he or his comrades are in danger. At this point there will be bullets headed your way, and no matter what you learned at your Madrassa or in Protest Studies at Evergreen State High University, you are not bulletproof. Really, you're not.
The good news is that there is a very easy way not to get shot.
Step 1. Don't attack soldiers.
Step 2. When in doubt, see Step 1.
That means not trying to disembowel them with your peaceful knife and not throwing rocks at their head. Because while you might think that legal activism includes attempted murder, the men in uniform think that attempted murder should result in sudden death. And when that happens you will realize that fanatical passion for your poorly thought out cause and a medieval weapon are no match for trained soldiers who have guns and know how to use them.
The thing to remember is that while just about every revolution you read about does involve a crowd of people rushing at armed men, those people usually end up dead or in a lot of pain. You should expect to have the same thing happen to you. Putting on a Kefiyah or a pair of Birkenstocks does not exempt you from the laws of physics, or the code of common sense. Putting your wacky beliefs about a pedophile who rode a flying horse in a dream aside, if you attack someone, you should expect them to respond. And if they have a gun, they will respond with bullets.
At that point you will either become a martyr or the world's ugliest man.
Since the dawn of time, men have guarded the borders of their nations. The border indicates that the lands within are the possession of their tribe and their chieftain. That border may only be crossed with the permission of the laws of the people who rule over it. To cross that border without their permission is to invite war, or at least a shower of arrows, spears or more lately, bullets. To cross that border for hostile purposes is to take your life in your hands. And unless you have an army with you, those hands are slick, greasy and operated by a mind completely devoid of common sense.
Similarly since the dawn of time men have responded blow for blow, rock for rock and fist for fist. If you claim to be non-violent, that may remove from you the risk of suffering preemptive violence, but it does not give you license to engage in violence yourself under the dubious shield of words. Because words are only good for fighting other words. Once you have a weapon out, then you have put words such as "non-violence" or "pacifist" or "youth" aside. You have given up the moral protection of presumed innocence, for a life and death struggle. And if you do not have the stomach for the consequences of that struggle, then you should not raise that knife or that stone. Because there will be no use complaining afterward about disproportionate violence.
It is also written in the codes of common sense, that only the attacker can be guilty of disproportionate violence, not the defender.
It is the business of the defender only to repel you with as little damage to himself as possible. If you have a rock, you should not expect him to put down his gun, and throw rocks at you. And if you have a knife, you should not expect him to set aside his gun for a sharp blade. This is not a duel of honor, but an exchange of force intended to result in injury or death. His business is not to mete out an equivalent level and method of force to yours, but to dispatch you as quickly as possible. Prior to your attack on him, his concern was for your safety. After your attack on him, his concern is only for his own.
What you need to understand is that for you violence is political. To soldiers and law enforcement officers, violence is only a tool. In your mind, your attempt to kill is noble, while his attempt to kill you is vile and cruel. In his mind however there is an equation, violence set against violence.
He does not particularly care what you believe, just that you not attack him while you are believing it. To you he is only a rage puppet in a political or religious narrative. To him, once you attack you are nothing more than a moving target. Understanding this will help you to not get shot. Failing to understand this is how martyrs are made. But the thing about martyrdom is that the health plan is terrible and there's no long term prospects to it at all.
The difference between terrorists and and soldiers, is that terrorists want to kill people, but lack the necessary skills to do it well. While soldiers have the skills to kill people, but would rather not do it. When angry people with rocks, knives, crowbars and a few guns attack trained personnel with guns, the victory goes to the people who are trained to kill, not to those who want to kill. And when the blooded radicals complain about disproportionate force, what they're really doing is whining about how surprisingly hard it is to kill people.
The average radical, lefty or Islamic, is as stupid as he is vicious. His cleverness exhausts itself in invective and rhetoric, which he discovers has surprisingly little application in a firefight. What is left is a would be murderer who rather late in the game discovers that he is trying to kill people, who are better at killing than he is. And that he came woefully unprepared for the encounter. Part of his misguided thinking is the belief that a knife or a rock are more moral weapons than a gun. They are not. A gun is the most moral weapon invented because it is efficient, quick and deadly. Killing a man with a knife is positively horrifying compared to shooting him in the head. Soldiers and law enforcement officers understand this. Subconsciously so do radicals, which is why they long for the knife, the rock and the nail studded bombs. If they kill, they prefer to be brutal and cruel about it.
The terrorist is utterly terrible at the art of war, but excels at the art of making his innocent victims suffer. The soldier dispatches his targets quickly and cleanly. For the terrorist however, inflicting agony is the sadistic purpose of the entire exercise. The suicide bomber gives himself a quick death, while mutilating those in his vicinity. He spreads horror and shock. And of course terror.
But the media finds something awful about the soldier who executes his target with one round to the head, and something faintly heroic about the suicide bomber "making a statement" by taking away the arms of a 13 year old girl. Because the media radicals admire murderous passion, but find something horrible about the detachment of the soldier just doing his job. To kill horribly because of passion is somehow better in their eyes, than to kill cleanly and dispassionately to keep the people around you safe.
But terrorists only exist when they are tolerated. And they are tolerated by people who do not think like soldiers, but think like the media. Who want to find ways of making terrorists less angry, rather than finding ways to make more terrorists dead. Such people write narrowly restrictive rules of engagement, prosecute soldiers for defending themselves, and are outraged when a bullet prevents a massacre, rather than being outraged by the planned massacre instead.
But let us be clear about it. When you pick up a knife or a rock or a gun, you are not facing the politicians or the generals who answer to them. You are facing men who bear you no particular ill will, but do want to get home to their families that night or that month or that week. And if you do anything that risks interfering with that, they will shoot you.
They are just guarding the front lines. They are not politicians. They just have guns and know how to use them. And if you attack them, you will die. And in that moment you will realize that neither your moving poems or your Koran, will do you the least bit of good. Because while you have the passion, they have the training. And the best to not be shot by men trained in the art of violence, is to put down the knife, the rock or the gun and walk the other way.
(A Spanish translation of this article kindly undertaken by Rafael can be found at his blog here)
Even given the most restrictive Rules of Engagement in the world which forbid him from opening fire unless he is outnumbered 600 to 1, and only when he has been given specific authorization by the UN to use deadly force-- there will still come a time when he will open fire on you. This will occur when he feels that he or his comrades are in danger. At this point there will be bullets headed your way, and no matter what you learned at your Madrassa or in Protest Studies at Evergreen State High University, you are not bulletproof. Really, you're not.
The good news is that there is a very easy way not to get shot.
Step 1. Don't attack soldiers.
Step 2. When in doubt, see Step 1.
That means not trying to disembowel them with your peaceful knife and not throwing rocks at their head. Because while you might think that legal activism includes attempted murder, the men in uniform think that attempted murder should result in sudden death. And when that happens you will realize that fanatical passion for your poorly thought out cause and a medieval weapon are no match for trained soldiers who have guns and know how to use them.
The thing to remember is that while just about every revolution you read about does involve a crowd of people rushing at armed men, those people usually end up dead or in a lot of pain. You should expect to have the same thing happen to you. Putting on a Kefiyah or a pair of Birkenstocks does not exempt you from the laws of physics, or the code of common sense. Putting your wacky beliefs about a pedophile who rode a flying horse in a dream aside, if you attack someone, you should expect them to respond. And if they have a gun, they will respond with bullets.
At that point you will either become a martyr or the world's ugliest man.
Since the dawn of time, men have guarded the borders of their nations. The border indicates that the lands within are the possession of their tribe and their chieftain. That border may only be crossed with the permission of the laws of the people who rule over it. To cross that border without their permission is to invite war, or at least a shower of arrows, spears or more lately, bullets. To cross that border for hostile purposes is to take your life in your hands. And unless you have an army with you, those hands are slick, greasy and operated by a mind completely devoid of common sense.
Similarly since the dawn of time men have responded blow for blow, rock for rock and fist for fist. If you claim to be non-violent, that may remove from you the risk of suffering preemptive violence, but it does not give you license to engage in violence yourself under the dubious shield of words. Because words are only good for fighting other words. Once you have a weapon out, then you have put words such as "non-violence" or "pacifist" or "youth" aside. You have given up the moral protection of presumed innocence, for a life and death struggle. And if you do not have the stomach for the consequences of that struggle, then you should not raise that knife or that stone. Because there will be no use complaining afterward about disproportionate violence.
It is the business of the defender only to repel you with as little damage to himself as possible. If you have a rock, you should not expect him to put down his gun, and throw rocks at you. And if you have a knife, you should not expect him to set aside his gun for a sharp blade. This is not a duel of honor, but an exchange of force intended to result in injury or death. His business is not to mete out an equivalent level and method of force to yours, but to dispatch you as quickly as possible. Prior to your attack on him, his concern was for your safety. After your attack on him, his concern is only for his own.
What you need to understand is that for you violence is political. To soldiers and law enforcement officers, violence is only a tool. In your mind, your attempt to kill is noble, while his attempt to kill you is vile and cruel. In his mind however there is an equation, violence set against violence.
He does not particularly care what you believe, just that you not attack him while you are believing it. To you he is only a rage puppet in a political or religious narrative. To him, once you attack you are nothing more than a moving target. Understanding this will help you to not get shot. Failing to understand this is how martyrs are made. But the thing about martyrdom is that the health plan is terrible and there's no long term prospects to it at all.
The difference between terrorists and and soldiers, is that terrorists want to kill people, but lack the necessary skills to do it well. While soldiers have the skills to kill people, but would rather not do it. When angry people with rocks, knives, crowbars and a few guns attack trained personnel with guns, the victory goes to the people who are trained to kill, not to those who want to kill. And when the blooded radicals complain about disproportionate force, what they're really doing is whining about how surprisingly hard it is to kill people.
The average radical, lefty or Islamic, is as stupid as he is vicious. His cleverness exhausts itself in invective and rhetoric, which he discovers has surprisingly little application in a firefight. What is left is a would be murderer who rather late in the game discovers that he is trying to kill people, who are better at killing than he is. And that he came woefully unprepared for the encounter. Part of his misguided thinking is the belief that a knife or a rock are more moral weapons than a gun. They are not. A gun is the most moral weapon invented because it is efficient, quick and deadly. Killing a man with a knife is positively horrifying compared to shooting him in the head. Soldiers and law enforcement officers understand this. Subconsciously so do radicals, which is why they long for the knife, the rock and the nail studded bombs. If they kill, they prefer to be brutal and cruel about it.
The terrorist is utterly terrible at the art of war, but excels at the art of making his innocent victims suffer. The soldier dispatches his targets quickly and cleanly. For the terrorist however, inflicting agony is the sadistic purpose of the entire exercise. The suicide bomber gives himself a quick death, while mutilating those in his vicinity. He spreads horror and shock. And of course terror.
But the media finds something awful about the soldier who executes his target with one round to the head, and something faintly heroic about the suicide bomber "making a statement" by taking away the arms of a 13 year old girl. Because the media radicals admire murderous passion, but find something horrible about the detachment of the soldier just doing his job. To kill horribly because of passion is somehow better in their eyes, than to kill cleanly and dispassionately to keep the people around you safe.
But let us be clear about it. When you pick up a knife or a rock or a gun, you are not facing the politicians or the generals who answer to them. You are facing men who bear you no particular ill will, but do want to get home to their families that night or that month or that week. And if you do anything that risks interfering with that, they will shoot you.
They are just guarding the front lines. They are not politicians. They just have guns and know how to use them. And if you attack them, you will die. And in that moment you will realize that neither your moving poems or your Koran, will do you the least bit of good. Because while you have the passion, they have the training. And the best to not be shot by men trained in the art of violence, is to put down the knife, the rock or the gun and walk the other way.
(A Spanish translation of this article kindly undertaken by Rafael can be found at his blog here)
Monday, May 14, 2018
The Incredible Narcissism of Hillary and Comey
Hillary Clinton is 5’4. Former FBI boss James Comey is 6’8. But they have one important thing in common.
Both Clinton and Comey put themselves first.
Hillary launched her spiteful book tour without any regard for what it would do to her party. No amount of frustration from her fellow Democrats would dissuade her from cashing in and lashing out at her enemies. And no amount of frustration from fellow FBI agents, including Comey’s own Bureau confidants, could dissuade him from cashing in and lashing out at Trump across a thousand talk shows.
Hillary Clinton’s book tour damaged Dem prospects. Comey’s book tour harms the investigation. Its entire existence violates FBI rules. Much as Clinton’s book hurt her likely Dem successors.
But both bitter book tours are the work of selfish, spiteful and egotistical people who don’t care how much damage they do to the allies who trusted them as long as they make money and settle scores.
It’s only fitting that Comey is using the same excuse that Hillary did for his leaks of classified information. “It wasn’t classified when I sent it.” It’s also inevitable that Comey, like Clinton, takes refuge in the same sort of legalistic technicalities to justify his wrongdoing. Did he leak the documents? No, he gave them to someone else to pass on to the media. Is that leaking? No, because he was already a “private citizen.”
Meanwhile Comey goes on claiming ignorance of the origins of the Fusion GPS dossier.
"When did you learn that the DNC and Hillary Clinton campaign had funded Christopher Steele’s work?" FOX News's Bret Baier asked Comey.
Like Obama, Comey claimed to have only found out about the dossier's true origins from the media. After being pressed by Baier, he finally declared, "I wanted to know what I knew."
The technical term for that is, “Plausible deniability”.
Or the most honorable and principled plausible deniability that $10 million can buy.
Comey, like Clinton, always sounds like he’s answering questions at a deposition, even when he’s at a media interview, and his replies are littered with lawyerese like, “Not to my recollection” and “my understanding”.
Spot which ‘understanding’ answers in a television interview came from Comey and Clinton.
"Well, my understanding of what happened is that the State Department had e-mails that they gave to the committee that was formed."
"Okay, my understanding was the activity was begun, that, that Steele was hired to look into was first funded by Republicans."
Yes, they both speak the same way.
“My understanding” means that I’m going to put forward something that is misleading while limiting my liability for doing so because I can claim that I ‘misunderstood’ its actual meaning. “Not to my recollection” means that I’m going to lie, but if you catch me, I’ll claim that I forgot about it. Oops.
Or as Comey put it, when asked if he’d told Obama about the origins of the Clinton-Steele dossier.
“No, not to my recollection.”
Comey’s recollections have been known to change over time. As have Hillary Clinton’s.
Mr. Comey, like Mrs. Clinton, doesn’t know anything, whether he’s testifying in the Senate or to CNN. But when a public official answers, “Not to my recollection” and “my understanding” in TV interviews, he or she is reflexively answering questions in a way that avoids legal liability even when there isn’t any.
Comey and Clinton both suffer from the same brand of legalistic paranoia of career cover-uppers. It’s why Comey circulated the Clinton draft among people like Strzok and got him to do the dirty work. It’s why Comey passed on a memo to his pal, who was also a lawyer, to be leaked to the media. (Expect that fake attorney-client relationship’s confidentiality to be honored, unlike that of Trump and his actual lawyer. But much like that of Hillary Clinton and her non-protected relationship with Cheryl Mills.)
Every decision that Comey made was done to protect his own career. He allowed Obama and Hillary allies to run their version of Watergate against Trump as long as his own fingerprints weren’t on it. Comey wanted to benefit from an election rigging without ever being accountable for it. Letting McCabe get his hands dirty would allow him to claim that he didn’t know anything about what was going on.
When McCabe’s antics threatened that state of affairs, Comey authored the Weiner letter. He didn’t believe the letter would stop Hillary from winning, but it would protect him in case she lost.
And it did. For a little while.
But Comey couldn’t keep balancing the impossible demands of Democrats to bring down Trump, with Trump’s demands to be informed of what was going on. And so Comey tried to weasel out of it by leaking materials to the media and making it clear that there would be a price to pay for firing him.
Comey wasn’t loyal to a higher duty. His higher duty was always to his career. Just like Hillary.
“A Higher Loyalty” is a shameless effort by Comey to spin his self-serving actions as honorable. But a principled and honorable man would have wanted to know where the Steele dossier came from.
"I wanted to know what I knew,” is the answer of a cynically dishonorable man. The sort of man who would kick off his comeback by posing with the Statue of Liberty after violating all that she stands for.
Honor and loyalty to Comey are just more forms of plausible deniability. Duty and principle are another version of, “My understanding” and “Not to my recollection”. To paraphrase, Walter Sobchak, "Say what you want about the Democrats, but at least it's an ethos." McCabe, Strzok and the rest of the gang believed in something. James Comey only ever believed in covering the bureau of his behind.
That’s why he collided with Hillary Clinton. He couldn’t commit all the way to helping her, because they were two of a kind. Hillary would sell out anyone. And so would Comey. Just ask McCabe.
What happens when an unstoppable careerist hits an immovable bureaucrat?
Comey wouldn’t put Hillary ahead of his career. And Hillary won’t put the Democrats ahead of her grievances. That’s why her people are taking potshots at Comey even though he’s helping the Dems.
Neither Comey nor Clinton have any higher loyalties. Their books are written in praise of themselves.
Egomaniacs and narcissists have no sense of proportion. Their own happiness is the greater good that the world revolves around. It takes an egomaniac to produce “A Higher Loyalty” or “What Happened”.
Both books are fueled by a grandiose conviction in the moral heroism of their authors. But that delusion is constantly being undermined by their self-serving lawyerly defenses of their actions.
And by the final fact that neither Comey nor Clinton can conceive of a good greater than themselves.
Stripped of their pretensions, “What Happened” and “A Higher Loyalty” lay out a quest by two Washington D.C. insiders for their careers and everyone they blame for losing their jobs. Comey and Clinton want us to believe that their Russian conspiracy theories somehow ennoble and justify them.
They don’t.
The Russian conspiracy theory has always been a self-serving effort by the Clintons and their government allies to justify a ruthless campaign against their political opponents. Its tautological politics dress up the self-serving abuses of the conspiracy theory’s inventors and promoters as patriotism. They justify any assault and abuse to defend against a threat invented by Clinton and promoted by Comey.
When Comey replies that he didn’t want to know that the Steele dossier originated with the Clinton campaign, it’s not the answer of an honorable man, but of a coward who didn’t want to know whose dirty work he was doing. An honorable man isn’t someone who can tweet someone else’s quotes about integrity, it’s a man who is accountable for his own deeds.
Honor isn’t found in how harshly you treat your political opponents, but how sternly your view yourself.
Clinton and Comey take responsibility for nothing and assign responsibility for everything. Even when they talk about accepting responsibility, they mean they’re about to blame it on someone else.
“A Higher Loyalty” and “What Happened” share a common thesis. It’s someone else’s fault.
Hillary blamed Comey. Now it’s Comey’s turn to shift the blame.
Both of them deserve each other. America doesn’t deserve them. Or deserve what they’ve done to it.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the following link at the Center's Front Page Magazine.
Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.
Thank you for reading.
Both Clinton and Comey put themselves first.
Hillary launched her spiteful book tour without any regard for what it would do to her party. No amount of frustration from her fellow Democrats would dissuade her from cashing in and lashing out at her enemies. And no amount of frustration from fellow FBI agents, including Comey’s own Bureau confidants, could dissuade him from cashing in and lashing out at Trump across a thousand talk shows.
Hillary Clinton’s book tour damaged Dem prospects. Comey’s book tour harms the investigation. Its entire existence violates FBI rules. Much as Clinton’s book hurt her likely Dem successors.
But both bitter book tours are the work of selfish, spiteful and egotistical people who don’t care how much damage they do to the allies who trusted them as long as they make money and settle scores.
It’s only fitting that Comey is using the same excuse that Hillary did for his leaks of classified information. “It wasn’t classified when I sent it.” It’s also inevitable that Comey, like Clinton, takes refuge in the same sort of legalistic technicalities to justify his wrongdoing. Did he leak the documents? No, he gave them to someone else to pass on to the media. Is that leaking? No, because he was already a “private citizen.”
Meanwhile Comey goes on claiming ignorance of the origins of the Fusion GPS dossier.
"When did you learn that the DNC and Hillary Clinton campaign had funded Christopher Steele’s work?" FOX News's Bret Baier asked Comey.
Like Obama, Comey claimed to have only found out about the dossier's true origins from the media. After being pressed by Baier, he finally declared, "I wanted to know what I knew."
The technical term for that is, “Plausible deniability”.
Or the most honorable and principled plausible deniability that $10 million can buy.
Comey, like Clinton, always sounds like he’s answering questions at a deposition, even when he’s at a media interview, and his replies are littered with lawyerese like, “Not to my recollection” and “my understanding”.
Spot which ‘understanding’ answers in a television interview came from Comey and Clinton.
"Well, my understanding of what happened is that the State Department had e-mails that they gave to the committee that was formed."
"Okay, my understanding was the activity was begun, that, that Steele was hired to look into was first funded by Republicans."
Yes, they both speak the same way.
“My understanding” means that I’m going to put forward something that is misleading while limiting my liability for doing so because I can claim that I ‘misunderstood’ its actual meaning. “Not to my recollection” means that I’m going to lie, but if you catch me, I’ll claim that I forgot about it. Oops.
Or as Comey put it, when asked if he’d told Obama about the origins of the Clinton-Steele dossier.
“No, not to my recollection.”
Comey’s recollections have been known to change over time. As have Hillary Clinton’s.
Mr. Comey, like Mrs. Clinton, doesn’t know anything, whether he’s testifying in the Senate or to CNN. But when a public official answers, “Not to my recollection” and “my understanding” in TV interviews, he or she is reflexively answering questions in a way that avoids legal liability even when there isn’t any.
Comey and Clinton both suffer from the same brand of legalistic paranoia of career cover-uppers. It’s why Comey circulated the Clinton draft among people like Strzok and got him to do the dirty work. It’s why Comey passed on a memo to his pal, who was also a lawyer, to be leaked to the media. (Expect that fake attorney-client relationship’s confidentiality to be honored, unlike that of Trump and his actual lawyer. But much like that of Hillary Clinton and her non-protected relationship with Cheryl Mills.)
Every decision that Comey made was done to protect his own career. He allowed Obama and Hillary allies to run their version of Watergate against Trump as long as his own fingerprints weren’t on it. Comey wanted to benefit from an election rigging without ever being accountable for it. Letting McCabe get his hands dirty would allow him to claim that he didn’t know anything about what was going on.
When McCabe’s antics threatened that state of affairs, Comey authored the Weiner letter. He didn’t believe the letter would stop Hillary from winning, but it would protect him in case she lost.
And it did. For a little while.
But Comey couldn’t keep balancing the impossible demands of Democrats to bring down Trump, with Trump’s demands to be informed of what was going on. And so Comey tried to weasel out of it by leaking materials to the media and making it clear that there would be a price to pay for firing him.
Comey wasn’t loyal to a higher duty. His higher duty was always to his career. Just like Hillary.
“A Higher Loyalty” is a shameless effort by Comey to spin his self-serving actions as honorable. But a principled and honorable man would have wanted to know where the Steele dossier came from.
"I wanted to know what I knew,” is the answer of a cynically dishonorable man. The sort of man who would kick off his comeback by posing with the Statue of Liberty after violating all that she stands for.
Honor and loyalty to Comey are just more forms of plausible deniability. Duty and principle are another version of, “My understanding” and “Not to my recollection”. To paraphrase, Walter Sobchak, "Say what you want about the Democrats, but at least it's an ethos." McCabe, Strzok and the rest of the gang believed in something. James Comey only ever believed in covering the bureau of his behind.
That’s why he collided with Hillary Clinton. He couldn’t commit all the way to helping her, because they were two of a kind. Hillary would sell out anyone. And so would Comey. Just ask McCabe.
What happens when an unstoppable careerist hits an immovable bureaucrat?
Comey wouldn’t put Hillary ahead of his career. And Hillary won’t put the Democrats ahead of her grievances. That’s why her people are taking potshots at Comey even though he’s helping the Dems.
Neither Comey nor Clinton have any higher loyalties. Their books are written in praise of themselves.
Egomaniacs and narcissists have no sense of proportion. Their own happiness is the greater good that the world revolves around. It takes an egomaniac to produce “A Higher Loyalty” or “What Happened”.
Both books are fueled by a grandiose conviction in the moral heroism of their authors. But that delusion is constantly being undermined by their self-serving lawyerly defenses of their actions.
And by the final fact that neither Comey nor Clinton can conceive of a good greater than themselves.
Stripped of their pretensions, “What Happened” and “A Higher Loyalty” lay out a quest by two Washington D.C. insiders for their careers and everyone they blame for losing their jobs. Comey and Clinton want us to believe that their Russian conspiracy theories somehow ennoble and justify them.
They don’t.
The Russian conspiracy theory has always been a self-serving effort by the Clintons and their government allies to justify a ruthless campaign against their political opponents. Its tautological politics dress up the self-serving abuses of the conspiracy theory’s inventors and promoters as patriotism. They justify any assault and abuse to defend against a threat invented by Clinton and promoted by Comey.
When Comey replies that he didn’t want to know that the Steele dossier originated with the Clinton campaign, it’s not the answer of an honorable man, but of a coward who didn’t want to know whose dirty work he was doing. An honorable man isn’t someone who can tweet someone else’s quotes about integrity, it’s a man who is accountable for his own deeds.
Honor isn’t found in how harshly you treat your political opponents, but how sternly your view yourself.
Clinton and Comey take responsibility for nothing and assign responsibility for everything. Even when they talk about accepting responsibility, they mean they’re about to blame it on someone else.
“A Higher Loyalty” and “What Happened” share a common thesis. It’s someone else’s fault.
Hillary blamed Comey. Now it’s Comey’s turn to shift the blame.
Both of them deserve each other. America doesn’t deserve them. Or deserve what they’ve done to it.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the following link at the Center's Front Page Magazine.
Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.
Thank you for reading.
Sunday, May 13, 2018
Liberating Our Jerusalem
When Jordan's Arab Legion seized half of Jerusalem, ethnically cleansed its Jewish population and annexed the city-- the only entity to recognize the annexation was the United Kingdom which had provided the officers and the training that made the conquest possible. Officers like Colonel Bill Newman, Major Geoffrey Lockett and Major Bob Slade, under Glubb Pasha, better known as General John Bagot Glubb, whose son later converted to Islam, invaded Jerusalem and used the Muslim forces under their command to make the partition and ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem possible.
The Jews living in the free half of Jerusalem continued to be killed by Jordanian Muslim snipers. The victims of those years of Muslim occupation included Yaffa Binyamin, a 14-year-old girl sitting on the balcony of her own house and a Christian carpenter working on the Notre Dame Convent.
Under Muslim occupation, while Muslim snipers were cold-bloodedly murdering their children, the Jewish residents living under fire couldn't so much as put in an outhouse without being reported to the UN for illegal construction. In one case a UN observer organization held four meetings to discuss an outhouse for local residents before condemning Israel for illegal construction.
It did not however condemn Jordan when one of its soldiers opened fire on a train wounding a Jewish teenage girl.
Not very much has changed.
The hysterical condemnations of “illegal construction” did not end when the Muslim occupation did. The great outhouse of the United Nations and the smaller outhouses of the foreign ministries of countries whose leaders tremble whenever Muslims grow agitated over a cartoon or a YouTube video fill the air with the vilest of substances whenever a Jewish family moves into a home in Jerusalem.
It would be inconceivable for the international community to denounce an ethnically cleansed group which survived attempted genocide for moving back into its own city. It is, however, standard policy at the State Department and the Foreign Office to denounce Jews living in those parts of Jerusalem that had been ethnically cleansed by Muslims, as "settlers" living in "settlements," and accuse them of being an "obstruction to peace."
Peace being the state of affairs that sets in when an ethnic cleansing goes unchallenged.
What we are talking about here is not peace, but ethnic cleansing. In 1948, the Jews were ethnically cleansed from Jerusalem to Islamize the city. Their synagogues were blown up by the Muslim occupiers. Their tombstones were used to line the roads traveled by the racist Muslim settlers. In 1948, the Jews were ethnically cleansed from Jerusalem to Islamize the city. Whether they were Zionists or anti-Zionists did not matter. They were not Muslims. That was all that counted.
“For the first time in 1,000 years not a single Jew remains in the Jewish Quarter,” Abdullah el-Talal, a commander of the Muslim invaders, had boasted. “Not a single building remains intact. This makes the Jews' return here impossible.” In his memoirs he wrote, “I knew that the Jewish Quarter was densely populated with Jews who caused their fighters a good deal of interference and difficulty…. Only four days after our entry into Jerusalem the Jewish Quarter had become their graveyard. Death and destruction reigned over it.”
Every politician who denounces Jews building houses in Jerusalem, but not Muslims doing the same thing is endorsing Abdullah’s genocidal vision and all the terrorism that goes with it.
In 1920, racist Muslim settler mobs in Jerusalem had chanted "Mohammed's religion was born with the sword", “Death to the Jews” and “the government is with us” as Muslim policemen under British colonial rule had joined with them in the rape and murder of the indigenous Jewish population.
Too many governments are still with those who wave the sword of Mohammed and cry death to the Jews. They encourage them, defend their agenda and issue weak rebukes when blood is spilled in the name of Islamization in Jerusalem, as it is in Kobani by ISIS and a thousand other places. Those who endorse the Islamization of Jerusalem cannot escape responsibilities for the crimes of the Islamizers.
Describing Jewish homes in Jerusalem, one of the world's oldest cities, a city that all three religions in the region associate with Jews and Jewish history, as "settlements" is a triumph of distorted language that Orwell would have to tip his hat to. How does one have "settlements" in a city older than London or Washington D.C.?
To understand that, you would have to ask London and Washington D.C. where the diplomats insist that one more round of Israeli compromises will bring peace.
They say that there are three religions in Jerusalem, but there are actually four. The fourth religion is the true Religion of Peace, the one that insists that there will be peace when the Jews have been expelled from Judea and Samaria, driven out of their homes in Jerusalem, and made into wanderers and beggars once again. Oddly enough, this religion's name isn't even Islam-- it's diplomacy.
Diplomacy says that the 1948 borders set by Arab countries invading Israel should be the final borders and that, when Israel reunified a sundered city in 1967, it was an act of aggression, while, when seven Arab armies invaded Israel in 1948, it was a legitimate way to set permanent boundaries. When Jordan ethnically cleansed East Jerusalem, it set a standard that Israelis are obligated to follow to this day by staying out of East Jerusalem. To violate that ethnic cleansing endangers peace.
When Muslims move into a Jewish town, there's no clamor. When Muslim countries fund Muslim housing in Israel, there are no angry statements. Muslim housing in Jerusalem or anywhere in Israel is not a problem. Only Jewish housing is.
The issue is not Israel. If it were, then Arabs with Israeli citizenship would also be condemned. It's only the Jews who are the problem.
The entire Peace Process is really a prolonged solution to the latest phase of the Jewish Problem. The problem, as stated by so many diplomats, is that there are Jews living in places that Muslims want. There were Jews living in Gaza before 1948, but they were driven out, they came back, and then they were driven out again by their own government in compliance with international demands. Now only Hamas lives in Gaza and it's as peaceful and pleasant without the Jews as Nazi Germany.
But there are still Jews in the West Bank and they have to be gotten rid of. Once enough Jews have been expelled, there will be peace. That's not a paragraph from Mein Kampf, it's not some lunatic sermon from Palestinian Authority television-- it is the consensus of the international community. This consensus states that the only reason there still isn't peace is because enough Jews haven't been expelled from their homes. The ethnic cleansing for peace hasn't gone far enough.
There will be peace when all the Jews are gone. That much is certainly undeniable. Just look at Gaza or Egypt or Iraq or Afghanistan, which has a grand total of two Jews, both of them in their seventies. Or Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Syria where peace reigns now that the Jews are gone. Some might say that violence seems to increase proportionally with the number of Muslims, but we all know that would be Islamophobic. On the other hand suggesting that violence increases with the number of Jews living on land that Muslims want, that's just diplomacy. A common sense fact that everyone who is anyone in foreign policy knows to be true.
How will we know when the Muslims have gotten all the land that they want? When the violence stops. Everyone knows that agreements mean nothing. No matter how many pieces of paper are signed, the bombs and rockets still keep bursting. The only way to reach an agreement is by groping blindly in the dark, handing over parcel after parcel of land, until the explosions stop or the Muslims fulfill their original goal of pushing the Jews into the sea.
That's the wonderful thing about diplomacy if you're a diplomat and the terrible thing about it if you are anyone else without a secure way out of the country when diplomacy fails. And diplomacy in the region always fails. Camp David and every single agreement Israel has signed with Muslim countries aren't worth the paper they're written on. The only peace treaty that counts is the one made by tanks and rifles. It's the one made by Israeli planes in Egyptian skies and Israeli soldiers walking the border. It's the one made by Jewish farmers and ranchers, tending their sheep and their fields, with rifles strung over their backs. The only peace that's worth anything is the peace of the soldiers and settlers.
In 1966, Jerusalem was a city sundered in two, divided by barbed wire and the bullets of Muslim snipers. Diplomacy did not reunite it. Israel pursued diplomacy nearly to its bitter end until it understood that it had no choice at all but to fight. Israel did not swoop into the fight, its leaders did their best to avoid the conflict, asking the international community to intervene and stop Egypt from going to war. Read back the headlines for the last five years on Israel and Iran, and you will get a sense of the courage and determination of the Israeli leaders of the day.
When Israel went to war, its leaders did not want to liberate Jerusalem, they wanted Jordan to stay out of the war. Even when Jordan entered the war, they did not want to liberate the city. Divine Providence and Muslim hostility forced them to liberate Jerusalem and forced them to keep it. Now some of them would like to give it back, another sacrifice to the bloody deity of diplomacy whose altar flows with blood and burnt sacrifices.
As we remember Yom Yerushalayim, Jerusalem Day, it is important to remember that the city is united and free because diplomacy failed. The greatest triumph of the modern state happened only because diplomacy proved hopeless and useless in deterring Muslim genocidal ambitions. Had Israel succumbed to international pressure and had Nasser been as subtle as Sadat, then the Six-Day War would have looked like the Yom Kippur War fought with 1948 borders-- and Israel very likely would not exist today.
Even as Jews remember the great triumph of Yom Yerushalayim, the ethnic cleansers and their accomplices are busy searching for ways to drive Jews out of Jerusalem, out of towns, villages and cities. This isn't about the Arab residents of Jerusalem, who have repeatedly asserted that they want to remain part of Israel. It's not about peace, which did not come from any previous round of concessions, and will not come from this one either. It's about solving the Jewish problem.
As long as Jews allow themselves to be defined as the problem, there will be plenty of those offering solutions. And the solutions invariably involve doing something about the Jews. It only stands to reason that if Jews are the problem, then moving them or getting rid of them is the solution. There is less friction in defining Jews as the problem, than in defining Muslims as the problem. The numbers alone mean that is so.
Yom Yerushalayim is a reminder of what the real problem is and what the real solution is. Muslim occupation of Israel is the problem. The Islamization of Jerusalem is the problem. Muslim violence in support of the Muslim occupation of Israel and of everywhere else is the problem. Israel is the solution. Only when we liberate ourselves from the lies, when we stop believing that we are the problem and recognize that we are the solution. Only then will the liberation that began in 1967 be complete.
Only then will we have liberated our Jerusalem. The Jerusalem of the soul. It is incumbent on all of us to liberate that little Jerusalem within. The holy city that lives in all of us. To clean the dross off its golden gates, wash the filth from its stones and expel the invaders gnawing away at our hearts until we look proudly upon a shining city. Then to help others liberate their own Jerusalems. Only then will we truly be free.
Under Muslim occupation, while Muslim snipers were cold-bloodedly murdering their children, the Jewish residents living under fire couldn't so much as put in an outhouse without being reported to the UN for illegal construction. In one case a UN observer organization held four meetings to discuss an outhouse for local residents before condemning Israel for illegal construction.
It did not however condemn Jordan when one of its soldiers opened fire on a train wounding a Jewish teenage girl.
Not very much has changed.
The hysterical condemnations of “illegal construction” did not end when the Muslim occupation did. The great outhouse of the United Nations and the smaller outhouses of the foreign ministries of countries whose leaders tremble whenever Muslims grow agitated over a cartoon or a YouTube video fill the air with the vilest of substances whenever a Jewish family moves into a home in Jerusalem.
It would be inconceivable for the international community to denounce an ethnically cleansed group which survived attempted genocide for moving back into its own city. It is, however, standard policy at the State Department and the Foreign Office to denounce Jews living in those parts of Jerusalem that had been ethnically cleansed by Muslims, as "settlers" living in "settlements," and accuse them of being an "obstruction to peace."
Peace being the state of affairs that sets in when an ethnic cleansing goes unchallenged.
What we are talking about here is not peace, but ethnic cleansing. In 1948, the Jews were ethnically cleansed from Jerusalem to Islamize the city. Their synagogues were blown up by the Muslim occupiers. Their tombstones were used to line the roads traveled by the racist Muslim settlers. In 1948, the Jews were ethnically cleansed from Jerusalem to Islamize the city. Whether they were Zionists or anti-Zionists did not matter. They were not Muslims. That was all that counted.
“For the first time in 1,000 years not a single Jew remains in the Jewish Quarter,” Abdullah el-Talal, a commander of the Muslim invaders, had boasted. “Not a single building remains intact. This makes the Jews' return here impossible.” In his memoirs he wrote, “I knew that the Jewish Quarter was densely populated with Jews who caused their fighters a good deal of interference and difficulty…. Only four days after our entry into Jerusalem the Jewish Quarter had become their graveyard. Death and destruction reigned over it.”
Every politician who denounces Jews building houses in Jerusalem, but not Muslims doing the same thing is endorsing Abdullah’s genocidal vision and all the terrorism that goes with it.
In 1920, racist Muslim settler mobs in Jerusalem had chanted "Mohammed's religion was born with the sword", “Death to the Jews” and “the government is with us” as Muslim policemen under British colonial rule had joined with them in the rape and murder of the indigenous Jewish population.
Too many governments are still with those who wave the sword of Mohammed and cry death to the Jews. They encourage them, defend their agenda and issue weak rebukes when blood is spilled in the name of Islamization in Jerusalem, as it is in Kobani by ISIS and a thousand other places. Those who endorse the Islamization of Jerusalem cannot escape responsibilities for the crimes of the Islamizers.
Describing Jewish homes in Jerusalem, one of the world's oldest cities, a city that all three religions in the region associate with Jews and Jewish history, as "settlements" is a triumph of distorted language that Orwell would have to tip his hat to. How does one have "settlements" in a city older than London or Washington D.C.?
To understand that, you would have to ask London and Washington D.C. where the diplomats insist that one more round of Israeli compromises will bring peace.
They say that there are three religions in Jerusalem, but there are actually four. The fourth religion is the true Religion of Peace, the one that insists that there will be peace when the Jews have been expelled from Judea and Samaria, driven out of their homes in Jerusalem, and made into wanderers and beggars once again. Oddly enough, this religion's name isn't even Islam-- it's diplomacy.
Diplomacy says that the 1948 borders set by Arab countries invading Israel should be the final borders and that, when Israel reunified a sundered city in 1967, it was an act of aggression, while, when seven Arab armies invaded Israel in 1948, it was a legitimate way to set permanent boundaries. When Jordan ethnically cleansed East Jerusalem, it set a standard that Israelis are obligated to follow to this day by staying out of East Jerusalem. To violate that ethnic cleansing endangers peace.
The issue is not Israel. If it were, then Arabs with Israeli citizenship would also be condemned. It's only the Jews who are the problem.
The entire Peace Process is really a prolonged solution to the latest phase of the Jewish Problem. The problem, as stated by so many diplomats, is that there are Jews living in places that Muslims want. There were Jews living in Gaza before 1948, but they were driven out, they came back, and then they were driven out again by their own government in compliance with international demands. Now only Hamas lives in Gaza and it's as peaceful and pleasant without the Jews as Nazi Germany.
But there are still Jews in the West Bank and they have to be gotten rid of. Once enough Jews have been expelled, there will be peace. That's not a paragraph from Mein Kampf, it's not some lunatic sermon from Palestinian Authority television-- it is the consensus of the international community. This consensus states that the only reason there still isn't peace is because enough Jews haven't been expelled from their homes. The ethnic cleansing for peace hasn't gone far enough.
There will be peace when all the Jews are gone. That much is certainly undeniable. Just look at Gaza or Egypt or Iraq or Afghanistan, which has a grand total of two Jews, both of them in their seventies. Or Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Syria where peace reigns now that the Jews are gone. Some might say that violence seems to increase proportionally with the number of Muslims, but we all know that would be Islamophobic. On the other hand suggesting that violence increases with the number of Jews living on land that Muslims want, that's just diplomacy. A common sense fact that everyone who is anyone in foreign policy knows to be true.
How will we know when the Muslims have gotten all the land that they want? When the violence stops. Everyone knows that agreements mean nothing. No matter how many pieces of paper are signed, the bombs and rockets still keep bursting. The only way to reach an agreement is by groping blindly in the dark, handing over parcel after parcel of land, until the explosions stop or the Muslims fulfill their original goal of pushing the Jews into the sea.
That's the wonderful thing about diplomacy if you're a diplomat and the terrible thing about it if you are anyone else without a secure way out of the country when diplomacy fails. And diplomacy in the region always fails. Camp David and every single agreement Israel has signed with Muslim countries aren't worth the paper they're written on. The only peace treaty that counts is the one made by tanks and rifles. It's the one made by Israeli planes in Egyptian skies and Israeli soldiers walking the border. It's the one made by Jewish farmers and ranchers, tending their sheep and their fields, with rifles strung over their backs. The only peace that's worth anything is the peace of the soldiers and settlers.
In 1966, Jerusalem was a city sundered in two, divided by barbed wire and the bullets of Muslim snipers. Diplomacy did not reunite it. Israel pursued diplomacy nearly to its bitter end until it understood that it had no choice at all but to fight. Israel did not swoop into the fight, its leaders did their best to avoid the conflict, asking the international community to intervene and stop Egypt from going to war. Read back the headlines for the last five years on Israel and Iran, and you will get a sense of the courage and determination of the Israeli leaders of the day.
When Israel went to war, its leaders did not want to liberate Jerusalem, they wanted Jordan to stay out of the war. Even when Jordan entered the war, they did not want to liberate the city. Divine Providence and Muslim hostility forced them to liberate Jerusalem and forced them to keep it. Now some of them would like to give it back, another sacrifice to the bloody deity of diplomacy whose altar flows with blood and burnt sacrifices.
As we remember Yom Yerushalayim, Jerusalem Day, it is important to remember that the city is united and free because diplomacy failed. The greatest triumph of the modern state happened only because diplomacy proved hopeless and useless in deterring Muslim genocidal ambitions. Had Israel succumbed to international pressure and had Nasser been as subtle as Sadat, then the Six-Day War would have looked like the Yom Kippur War fought with 1948 borders-- and Israel very likely would not exist today.
As long as Jews allow themselves to be defined as the problem, there will be plenty of those offering solutions. And the solutions invariably involve doing something about the Jews. It only stands to reason that if Jews are the problem, then moving them or getting rid of them is the solution. There is less friction in defining Jews as the problem, than in defining Muslims as the problem. The numbers alone mean that is so.
Yom Yerushalayim is a reminder of what the real problem is and what the real solution is. Muslim occupation of Israel is the problem. The Islamization of Jerusalem is the problem. Muslim violence in support of the Muslim occupation of Israel and of everywhere else is the problem. Israel is the solution. Only when we liberate ourselves from the lies, when we stop believing that we are the problem and recognize that we are the solution. Only then will the liberation that began in 1967 be complete.
Only then will we have liberated our Jerusalem. The Jerusalem of the soul. It is incumbent on all of us to liberate that little Jerusalem within. The holy city that lives in all of us. To clean the dross off its golden gates, wash the filth from its stones and expel the invaders gnawing away at our hearts until we look proudly upon a shining city. Then to help others liberate their own Jerusalems. Only then will we truly be free.