A "genius" progressive Jew thinks it's appropriate to use a production of Fiddler on the Roof, the musical based on Sholem Aleichem stories about life in a tiny Jewish village that existed in a vast sea of Russian hostility/Jew-hate, to raise money for--wait for it--UNICEF and the UN Refugee Fund. (In our era, of course, Israel, the tiny Jewish nation, exists in a vast sea of UN hostility/Jew-hate.) Isn't that rather like donating proceeds from a production of Porgy and Bess to the KKK?
The woman who, prior to serving as Obama's ambassador the UN, spent much of her career decrying the civilized world's lackadaisical response to genocide (and wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning book on the subject), is being excoriated by former colleagues/ friends Leon Wieseltier and Michael Ignatieff because she's become an apologist for Obama's lackadaisical response to the unfolding genocide in Syria.
Well, I suppose it makes a change from that "Zionism is racism" trope. And you know that only someone who's really smart--like philosophy prof Omri Boehm--could come up with something this stupid:
The alliance that’s beginning to form between Zionist leadership and politicians with anti-Semitic tendencies has the power to transform Jewish-American consciousness for years to come. In the last few decades, many of America’s Jewish communities have grown accustomed to living in a political contradiction. On one hand, a large majority of these communities could rightly take pride in a powerful liberal tradition, stretching back to such models as Louis Brandeis — a defender of social justice and the first Jew to become a Supreme Court justice — or Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who marched in Selma alongside the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. On the other hand, the same communities have often identified themselves with Zionism, a political agenda rooted in the denial of liberal politics… by denying liberal principles, Zionism immediately becomes continuous with — rather than contradictory to — the anti-Semitic politics of the sort promoted by the alt-right. The idea that Israel is the Jews’ own ethnic state implies that Jews living outside of it — say, in America or in Europe — enjoy a merely diasporic existence. That is another way of saying that they inhabit a country that is not genuinely their own. Given this logic, it is natural for Zionist and anti-Semitic politicians to find common ideas and interests. Every American who has been on a Birthright Israel tour should know that left-leaning Israelis can agree with America’s alt-right that, ideally, “Jews should live in their own country.”
What do you call a man who generalizes about an entire group of people based on problematic anecdotes about a single member of that group?
You would call him a bigot.
You would certainly not call him liberal.
Boehm doesn't compare Israel's liberalism against that of Western Europe. He doesn't mention the undeniably liberal social policies in Israel. He doesn't mention that Israel, even while being the Jewish state, cannot discriminate against its non-Jewish citizens by law. He doesn't mention that in many ways, the "indecent" Zionist state is more liberal than the US.
Because Boehm is not a liberal. He is a bigot who is using the language of liberalism to attack and insult a specific group of people he finds distasteful, and he justifies his hate after the fact by cherry-picking examples that do not represent the group at all. And his agenda is to shame American Jews into hating the only liberal state in the Middle East and sympathize with Israel's very, very illiberal enemies.
OTTAWA – Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says he wouldn’t hesitate to protect the interests — and the values — of Canadians if they clash with the agenda of U.S. president-elect Donald Trump.
In a year-end roundtable interview with The Canadian Press, Trudeau chose his words carefully answering where he would draw his line in the sand when it comes to the many controversial promises and plans of the next American president.
Trudeau says his top responsibility is to watch out for the interests of Canadians.
He says that means jobs, trade and settling cross-border disputes with the United States.
But he says it also means having a “more open, more tolerant, more secure world.” ...
There once was a "scholar" named Hatem And one cannot help but beratem. And this is a fact, His magical act Re the Joooos: eliminatem. Update: Here's one more, a shout out to Germany's "baffled" leader:
There was method to Obama's madness, as Lee Smith explains here (my bolds):
The problem with the Iran deal was never that President Barack Obama was stupid or that his team were such terrible negotiators—even if someone else might have done better. Obama believed there was no way to get the Iranians to negotiate unless he de-escalated. He gave them $700 million a month just to sit through negotiations, and has continued to pay the Iranians to stick with the deal—like the $1.7 billion ransom paid in cash to release Americans that the Iranians were holding hostage. Obama keeps blocking nonnuclear sanctions for the same reason.
Obama was willing to pay Iran to sit at the table because the Iran deal was simply the hinge for a larger geopolitical maneuver: The JCPOA was the instrument by which the Obama administration effected a regional realignment intended to extricate America from the Middle East in part by turning the keys to the car over to Tehran. Obama’s White House re-prioritized its regional interests—traditional American allies, especially Israel and Saudi Arabia, were downgraded and Tehran was upgraded.
While the “realignment thesis” has few doubters on the ground in the Middle East, where its deadly effects are visible from Aleppo to Mosul to Yemen, Americans have been slow to catch up to the reality of what Obama intended and did, in large part because of the deceptive way in which the Iran Deal was sold to the American public. As a result, many deal opponents are still chasing the mechanical rabbits that the Obama administration created for them to chase—as if the point of the Iran deal was simply to limit Iran’s ability to spin X amount of plutonium instead of Y amount at facility Z.
The evil--yes, evil--Obama has wrought on Israel and the world is unforgivable. It will live on, and wreak havoc, long after his term as POTUS is done.
...in August 2015, Western Europe's most powerful leader, Angela Merkel, invited all Syrian refugees to come to Germany. The floodgates opened even wider. Syrian refugees poured in – but most of them proved to be neither Syrians nor refugees. Naive do-gooders who welcomed these monsters into their homes ended up being raped and robbed. And the terrorist attacks became even more frequent. On November 13, 2015, jihadists slaughtered 130 people in and around the Bataclan Theater in Paris. Then came the aforementioned New Year's Eve carnage. Brussels was hit in March, with 32 civilian deaths. On Bastille Day, a truck-driving terrorist mowed down 86 pedestrians on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice. And these were just a few of the jihadist offenses committed in Western Europe during this period. As I write this, a Turkish cop shouting “Allahu akbar!” has just gunned down Russia's ambassador to Turkey, and – shades of Nice – a truck driven by a Muslim has plowed into a busy Christmas market in the center of Berlin, killing at least 12 and injuring dozens. (P.S. Apparently Merkel heard of the attack shortly after attending a celebration of the “International Day of Migrants.” This is not a joke.)
The good news is that this year's spikes in out-of-control immigration and in jihadist terror appear to have been accompanied – at last – by an equivalent spike in outrage. Western Europeans' fury over the relentless rise of Islam in their midst – and at the complicity, and complacency, of their leaders – may finally have reached a tipping point...
Maybe. But, the multiculti orthodoxy being so deep-seated and widespread, I wouldn't count on it. It's far more likely that the latest "incomprehensible" act of jihad will be framed like this.
Just a few hours before twelve German families had a big bloody hole blown through them a week before Christmas, my old friend and sometime warm-up act Jonathan Kay, with his usual impeccable timing, decided to have another sneer at those simpletons who fret about where all this is heading:
Great @CBC180 discussion. Due to Mark Steyn-esque hysteria, Canadians think Canada is 17% Muslim. It's actually 3%.
Ha! What rubes, eh? As flattering as it is to be blamed for an entire nation's Islamophobia, I'd say the reason Canadians - like the French and Germans and Belgians and almost everybody else - think there are more Muslims than there are is fairly obvious: Islam punches above its weight. Even on days when they're not mowing down Christmas shoppers and assassinating Russian ambassadors - or stabbing French priests, or blowing up Belgian airports, or sexually assaulting German New Year revelers - the less incendiary news of Islam in the west nevertheless conveys an assertiveness and confidence that would still be impressive even if it were 17 per cent. By the time it actually is 17 per cent, you'll think it's 48.
None of whom, I wager, will be reading The Walrus, that staggeringly dull and preeningly self-important Kay-edited monthly. Update: It's been a year of slaughter and mayhem in Germany. And all because of a miniscule percentage.
The Danish parliament on Monday passed a bill that will bar students from taking a second university degree.
The bill restricts individuals who already have a higher education degree from pursuing a degree in another field at the same or a lower level.
The plan’s backers say the move will save 300 million kroner per year that can instead be used to fund the dagpenge unemployment system but critics say that limiting students’ abilities to change their course of studies can lock them in to poor choices and limit their future employment possibilities.
Nearly 80,000 Danes signed a petition protesting the bill, arguing that the so-called ‘double education cap’ will not only hurt students but will rob society of future skilled workers.
The petition argues that “thousands of students will be stuck in an education in which they can’t see a future”.
“The brightest and most ambitious young people will look abroad for the education they want. We run the risk that they will not return to Denmark with their knowledge,” the petition states, adding that the education cap is “short-sited”.
There are those who would "debunk" the miracle of Chanukkah--the one-day supply of oil that ended up fueling the Temple menorah for a full eight days--in a bid to tell the "truth" about the festival (that it's really about an internecine squabble between Hellenized Jews and traditionalist Jews and has nothing to do with the Jews' ongoing quest for religious freedom--as if that's a message that will draw young people to Judaism and help perpetuate non-Orthodox versions of the faith). All I have to say about a Festival of Lights that rejects and is devoid of the miraculous (and, by extension, the lights) is this: Bah, humbug! Update:2,000 year old coin from Maccabean revolt found in Jerusalem
Do you remember when Jewish organizations boycotted events sponsored by President Barack Obama because of his past association with the anti-Zionist, antisemitic Rev. Jeremiah Wright? Or perhaps you can recall when liberal Jewish organizations boycotted an event Obama sponsored because he broke bread at the end of Ramadan with Islamists who were not only anti-Israel, but anti-American?
You don’t remember? Strangely, neither do I. Maybe it was when the administration made more fuss over a Jew building a room addition in a historic Jerusalem Jewish neighborhood than Tehran building a bomb that liberal Jewish organizations boycotted events sponsored by the president. You don’t remember those either? Well, that’s because they never happened. Obama was the president, and disrespecting him would have been unthinkable, if only because of the office he held.
Fast forward eight years to the aftermath of the election of Donald Trump, and 12 groups belonging to the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations are boycotting their umbrella organization’s Hanukkah party because it is being held at a Trump-owned hotel...
They couldn't boycott Obama. For one thing, they adored him. For another, he didn't own any hotels. 😀
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says he’ll wait to comment on the consequences of the United States moving its Israeli embassy to Jerusalem until president-elect Donald Trump makes good on his pledge to do so.
“There are a lot of things that are said during an election campaign, during transition time,” Trudeau told a news conference in Montreal on Friday. “In Canada, our government needs to respond to concrete actions and proposals and I’m not going to fall into the theoretical or the hypothetical.”
Like some of his predecessors, Trump has vowed to move the embassy to Jerusalem, a politically charged act that would anger Palestinians who want east Jerusalem as part of their sovereign territory.
Trump’s recent nomination for ambassador to Israel, right-wing lawyer David Friedman, said he would work from “the U.S. embassy in Israel’s eternal capital, Jerusalem,” even though the embassy is in Tel Aviv.
The statement sparked anger from liberal Jewish groups and such a move would distance the United States from most of the international community, including its closest allies in Western Europe and the Arab world.
Trudeau said Canada’s position is there should be a “two-state solution” between the Israelis and Palestinians “that is directly negotiated and embarked upon” by the two peoples.
“I hope that the new administration in the U.S. understands that creating a successful two-state solution means respecting and encouraging positive actions that bring people together,” Trudeau said.
The inadequacy of this man's mind, in keeping with the banality of his expression, is truly staggering.
For starters, a colorful array of (mutually exclusive) plans to end the conflict favorably to Israel have appeared through the decades.3 Going from softest to toughest, these include:
Territorial retreat from the West Bank or territorial compromise within the West Bank.
Leasing the land under Israeli towns on the West Bank.
Finding creative ways to divide the Temple Mount.
Developing the Palestinian economy.
Encouraging Palestinian good governance.
Deploying international forces.
Raising international funds (on the Marshall Plan model).
Unilateralism (building a wall).
Insisting that Jordan is Palestine.
Excluding disloyal Palestinians from Israeli citizenship.
Expelling Palestinians from lands controlled by Israel.
Trouble is, none of these plans addresses the need to break the Palestinian will to fight. They all manage the conflict without resolving it. They all seek to finesse victory with a gimmick. Just as the Oslo negotiations failed, so too will every other scheme that sidesteps the hard work of winning.
This historical pattern suggests that Israel has just one option to win Palestinian acceptance: a return to its old policy of deterrence, punishing Palestinians when they aggress. Deterrence amounts to more than tough tactics, which every Israeli government pursues; it requires systemic policies that encourage Palestinians to accept Israel and discourage rejectionism. It requires a long-term strategy that promotes a change of heart.
Sadly, and also sensibly, I beg to differ. Given what Islam's core religious texts promulgate about "the Jews," there can be no long-term strategy of promoting a change of heart re the Jewish state that doesn't also include an acknowledgement and rejection of Islam's hateful, thoroughly rejectionist dogma. That dogma is the basis of Palestinian rejectionism. Period. End of story.
A town hall to discuss recent hate incidents and hate crimes in Canada was held in Richmond Hill on Tuesday evening.
“The purpose of the town hall is to discuss what has been happening locally since the US election, what we should be doing to keep ourselves safe and how we can work with the authorities and Government to be peaceful citizens but still have our voice heard and rights protected,” said Saud Juman, the organizer of the event.
Speakers at the town hall included Maryam Alikhani and Mark Topping of York Region Police’s Central Hate Crime Unit; Sabreena Ghaffar Siddiqui, a researcher on Islamophobia and Abbas Kassam of the National Council of Canadian Muslims (NCCM).
Sabreena Siddiqui told the audience that there is an underreporting of hate incidents by Muslims.
Here comes the disconnect--a sentence spoken by Siddiqui which has more to do with taking responsibility for internal problems than it does with ginning up fears about impending, Trump-engendered "hate crimes":
“Allow yourselves as immigrants, as people of colour, as Muslims, the permission to complain if an injustice is being done,” Siddiqui advised the audience. “But you should recognize and tackle the inequalities in your communities.
Wow. Such truth-telling, so rare in these days of victimhood politics, is as shocking as it is refreshing. Over in the Toronto Sun, another Muslim truth-teller, columnist Farzana Hassan, explains what's behind the rise of "populism" in Europe and the U.S.--and it isn't because of "racism" or "Islamophobia". It's because Western freedoms have been under assault:
But although considerable right-wing populism has been articulated by white supremacists and what has now come to be known as the alt-right, apprehension about outsiders has always been normal even among people with enough goodwill not to subscribe to racist ideologies.
Europe, and by extension the entire Western world, has gone through an arduous process of forging societies that recognize a common humanity in all. That is what gave rise to Western liberalism in the first place.
Events of recent years have assaulted Western freedoms of speech, of conscience and religion.
The West has built societies that are pluralistic, that are based on liberal principles of social justice and equality for all marginalized groups. But now Westerners are afraid.
Even Angela Merkel, who last year admitted over a million refugees into her country, acknowledges this fear. And for many expressing this sentiment, it has nothing whatsoever to do with racism.
It has more to do with preserving what the West holds dear and, in its most primal form, simply with protecting its citizens from harm.
I have a hunch that neither Sabeena nor Farzana will be invited to speak at any future town halls about "hate crimes." Update: Speaking of Western freedoms coming under assault...:
A 12-year-old boy attempted to commit attacks on a Christmas market and near a town hall in Ludwigshafen, western Germany, in the space of just over a week, officials say.
Hubert Stroeber, a spokesman for the local prosecutor’s office, told Reuters that the boy, who is German but of Iraqi heritage, tried and failed to detonate a nail bomb at the Christmas market on Nov. 26 and then planted another self-made explosive device in a backpack near the town hall on Dec. 5. A passer-by drew the police’s attention to the abandoned backpack, and specialists destroyed it in a controlled explosion.
The boy was possibly controlled by ISIS, according to the German magazine FOCUS. The “religiously radicalized” boy was “instigated [by an] unknown member” of the terrorist organization and had been planning to flee to Syria last summer, it reports.
Authorities also told television network ZDF that the boy had been radicalized via social media and the internet...
An editorial in the Globe & Mail agrees with a Senate report which notes that many thousands of Syrian refugees who were brought to Canada aren't learning one of Canada's two official languages quickly enough, and will therefore require further support from the feds:
It’s not the government’s fault, nor that of the refugees, that many have not fully absorbed a new language in a year, the length of the time that the government has indirectly budgeted for. English isn’t an easy language, and what’s more, it’s distant from Arabic. It’s not like the differences between Italian and French, or even German and English.
Women refugees, in particular, run the risk of falling behind. If they stay at home, they are apt to become isolated, and they may not learn much more than rudimentary English or French. They can’t learn a language well if they don’t have jobs and daycare.
The senators found that almost all the Syrian refugees were glad to be in Canada, and to have permanent status here. Still, this is part of the biggest displacement of people since the Second World War, and there’s bound to be some degree of post-traumatic stress syndrome that will further complicate matters, the senators said.
There is little likelihood that Syrian refugees to Canada will become an underclass, and there is no need for quasi-permanent subsidies. But more funding to help all refugees break the language barrier would be wise. It’s a sound investment. When new Canadians succeed economically, all Canadians benefit.
Two thoughts: many of these Syrian families have a lot of children, making it next to impossible for them to shoulder the financial burden of daycare. That, along with the fact that most refugees follow a strict form of Islam which requires women to stay at home and take care of the kids, means you can be sure that more than a few of these women refugees will be "falling behind." Also--why is there "little likelihood that Syrian refugees to Canada will become an underclass"? Doesn't the Muslim experience in places like France and Germany prove otherwise? It all sounds like the most dangerous sort of wishful thinking to me.
According to this article at the official Shuafat website, since the mid 1970s, Israeli authorities have tried to get camp residents to move to other, less crowded areas of Jerusalem, especially the Arab neighborhood of Wadi el-Joz. Yet “the residents of the camp have categorically refused the Israeli offer,” claiming that it would somehow impact their “right of return.”
In reality, it would mean that they’d have to pay rent instead of getting free housing from UNRWA. That’s the real reason they won’t move.
The same article says that more than half of the residents at the camp are not “refugees.” They are squatters taking advantage of the lawlessness of the area.
UNRWA should take responsibility for expelling these people — but of course UNRWA hasn’t done that for 60 years. Arabs have been moving into UNRWA camps since the 1950s to take advantage of free services, and UNRWA just lets it happen.
The bottom line is that Israel has tried to fix the problems of Shuafat for a long time, and UNRWA has let them fester, to follow the Palestinian master plan of keeping “refugee camps” forever as a propaganda weapon against Israel.
Partly out of leftist guilt and partly as a means of pandering to an ever-growing Muslim population, Canada's Socialist party recently spearheaded a move in parliament "condemning all forms of Islamophobia." Tarek Fatah explains--and lambastes--the folly of measure here:
Canada’s parliamentarians led by NDP leader Thomas Mulcair and Liberal MP Frank Baylis recently passed a motion “condemning all forms of Islamophobia”.
Initially, some Conservative MPs declined to give unanimous consent, but under threat of being labelled “racist” and “Islamophobic”, unanimity was eventually achieved.
Had the motion also denounced the Islamist doctrine of armed jihad and Islamic sharia as a source of public law, it would have met the test of good faith.
Unfortunately, it did not and thus the motion made a mockery of the facts on the ground.
Condemning or harassing anyone solely on the basis of their religion is wrong.
But public concerns and fears about so much death and destruction being caused around the world by terrorists who claim to be guided by Islam is not Islamophobia.
Nor is it racism or bigotry.
It is a rational response to a real threat to western civilization, even though the preponderance of so-called “white guilt” in our Parliament, eventually coerced all MPs to back the Islamophobic petition...
It is reality that “Islam” means “submit,” but this meaning conflicts with left-wing wishful thinking that all cultures are morally equal. Thus, virtually every left-wing professor and publication says that “Islam” means “peace.” (To the extent that it has any connection to the word for “peace” — salaam — it is the peace that ensues after all of humanity has submitted to Islam.) The amount of left-wing reality-denial concerning the Islamic world is about equal to the number of assertions leftists make about it. (Thus, the Obama administration labeled the Fort Hood massacre of 13 soldiers by a radical Muslim as “workplace violence.”)
Thus, Canada's MPs hew to the comforting fiction that the problem is "Islamophobia" and not the problematic (i.e. the supremacist) teachings of Islam.
An Islamic school sued a Montreal-based feminist for slander--and lost:
A feminist, secular author did not slander a Montreal private Muslim school when she likened it to military training camps, a Quebec Superior court has found.
Author and activist Djemila Benhabib told 98.5 radio host Benoît Dutrizac the Muslim Schools in Montreal "resembles the kind of indoctrination similar to what goes on in a military camp in Afghanistan or Pakistan."
In the same interview, she also said the school's religious teachings were a form of indoctrination that conveyed sexist values. She used the example of Quranic verses which made reference to the importance of young women remaining pure.
The school accused her of "greatly tarnishing" its reputation and sued her for $95,000. It was represented by human rights lawyer Julius Grey, who argued that comparing a local school to terrorism was a dangerous tactic.
Shortly before her trial began in September, Benhabib showed little remorse.
"I regret nothing," she said in a separate radio interview.
Anti-Semitism exists because people are naturally afraid of ghosts: The Jews in exile are a “ghostlike apparition of a living corpse,” and so the widespread “fear of the Jewish ghost” is a natural consequence of their statelessness, explained Leon Pinsker, who made this disturbing argument in his 1882 pamphlet Auto-Emancipation. The human fear of ghosts renders anti-Semitism—or Judeophobia, as he called it—a hereditary and incurable “psychic aberration” common to the whole of mankind. It is impossible to combat this superstitious prejudice, argues Pinsker, but independent statehood would enable the Jews to cease being despised aliens: only this could exorcise, or at least soothe, this historic psychosis.
In hindsight, on what would have been his 195th birthday today, one might argue that history has proved Pinsker wrong. The Jews resumed sovereignty nearly 70 years ago, and anti-Semitism persists—against diaspora Jews and, more worryingly for Pinsker’s case, against the resurrected Jewish state itself. Far from diffusing antipathy against Jews as homeless aliens, the Jewish state is a magnet for this rage. Its very right to exist is challenged incessantly.
Such a position, however, fails to do justice to Pinsker’s perspicacity. His flaw was not in his diagnosis of anti-Semitism, but in his prognosis: not in his premises, but his failure to take them to their logical conclusions. For if people are naturally afraid of ghosts, they must be even more afraid of ghosts that come to life. As much as they might fear ghosts, they are used, at least, to seeing ghosts as disembodied and ethereal. For ghosts to assume flesh and blood and wander the Earth is an act of necromancy.
Indeed, for two millennia, the West grew accustomed to seeing Jews as dependent minorities. As David Nirenberg outlines in his masterful Anti-Judaism, the way that societies defined themselves in relation to the Jews throughout the years was central to their own self-imagination. So central was the image of Jews in Western thought that if they did not exist, the West would have had to invent them—indeed, even in Judenrein medieval European societies, the trope of the Jew remained the ultimate Other.
As the years dragged on, the thought that this dispersed minority could ever be embodied as a nation-state grew more and more incongruous and absurd. With the Emancipation, the different European states sought to mold the Jews into a culturally assimilated community with a different religion, rather than a discrete people. Indeed, Zionism was such a revolutionary idea at its inception that the idea appeared far-fetched even to many Jews.
Now the Jews have a state, and there are many who wish to roll back that achievement. Yet, unlike the anti-Semites of old, today’s anti-Zionists do not necessarily want to annihilate the Jews. They just want the Jews to return to being stateless minorities, as they have always known them. In short, anti-Zionists want their Jewish ghosts back...
Karin Brothers is the sort of Israel-loathing shrew who has no problem voicing her animus towards iniquitous Zion during the Khomeinists' annual Rage Against Israel day. Here she is, useful idiocy personified, in highest dudgeon during last year's Zionhass-a-palooza in Toronto:
Holocaust week is the height of hypocrisy. It implicitly supports the State of Israel, which is currently committing a slow genocide (according to the Kuala Lumpur tribunal) against the two million Palestinians under its military occupation in Gaza. To object to it is not racist.
Publicly funded institutions should be commemorating genocides in general rather than the politically motivated and exclusivist Holocaust events, which imply that similar tragedies do not deserve the same international response.
A study of current genocides might lead to saving the lives of thousands of people.
Karin Brothers, Toronto
It's fitting that Brothers cited the Kuala Lumpur tribunal. It was every bit as biased against Israel as she is. It's also heartening to see that's there's been some pushback to Brothers' twisted views. For instance this letter, which appeared in yesterday's Star:
While I agree that studying current, and past, genocides might help save thousands of lives, Karin Brothers’ Dec. 8 letter wrongfully conflates the idea of Holocaust week with Zionism. Acknowledging and remembering victims of the Holocaust does not in any way carry an implicit support of the State of Israel.
Additionally, Brothers falsely claims that Israel has been carrying out “a slow genocide against the two million Palestinians under its military occupation of Gaza.” Israel returned the Gaza Strip to the Palestinians in the summer of 2005. Palestinians then chose Hamas as their leaders. Since then, Hamas has shown that it will use anything and everything it possibly can as weapons against Israel and, more disturbingly, against its own people. They knowingly hide behind their own people.
It is not Israel that is committing the genocide here. It is Hamas.
Next time some Israel-hater kvetches about the "apartheid wall," direct his/her attention to this:
A wall funded by Britain to try and stop migrants from the former Calais "jungle" camp reaching its shores has been completed -- seven weeks after the site was cleared, a French official said.
The four-metre-high (13-foot) wall runs along a kilometre-long stretch of the main road leading to Calais port, next to the area that used to house the sprawling camp.
The concrete barrier -- estimated to cost €2.7 million ($3 million) -- aims to prevent new arrivals stowing away on trucks bound for Britain.
Work on the wall, which is covered with plants on the traffic side, began in September. The squalid camp was razed after thousands of migrants were taken to shelters around France in October.
The structure is complete, a spokesman for the local prefecture told AFP late Monday.
The wall was built to boost a network of wire fences that had failed to prevent near nightly attempts by migrants to waylay trucks en route to Europe's second-busiest port.
This year alone, several migrants died after falling off trucks or being run over.
Calais has for years been a staging post for attempts by migrants to sneak into Britain by stowing away on trucks or trains crossing the Channel.
If that's not "apartheid"--and, clearly, it is not--then neither is that security system in Israel.
Mark Steyn notes that the mass murderer who blew up a Coptic church in Cairo the other day was a jihadi with a triple-barreled name:
"Mahmoud Shafik Mohamed Mostafa": "Mostafa" and "Mahmoud" are in essence variations of "Mohamed". So that's like being called Mohammed Shafik Mohammed Mohammed. How many Mohammeds does a guy need? Canadian Immigration briefly (and unofficially) had a Three-Mohammeds-You're-Out rule, for when the occasional Mohammed bin Mohammed al-Mohammed turned up among the asylum seekers. That would seem minimally prudent.
But, no matter how many Christians Mohamed Muhammad Mohamot slaughters, we look the other way and worry about "Islamophobia"...
Indeed. In fact, worrying about "Islamophobia" is a coping mechanism for multiculti-minded infidels (who would prefer to ignore the clear and present danger of jihad by focusing on something else, something within their power to "fix," or so they believe) and for Muslims (who use the faux phobia as a bait and switch tactic in the era of the suicide bomber). Speaking of the redundantly named, I am reminded of a time some years before 9/11 when we were flying from Amsterdam to London. Departure was delayed due to the fact that the police were looking for some chaps whose luggage had been loaded but who seemed to have decamped to parts unknown. One of the cops was holding a sheaf of papers and, sneaking closer to get a look, I managed to catch sight of the page on top. It showed the photo of a Middle Eastern-looking dude whose unforgettable name was--wait for it--Mohammed Mohammed. Given that, I was more than a little reluctant to board the flight. But once all the luggage was unloaded and the no-shows' property removed, my fears were allayed to the extent that I was willing to get on the plane.
Told through a series of anecdotal moments dotting the college days of the 44th President of the United States, Barry is more of a coming-of-age story than Southside With You, writer-director Richard Tanne's nostalgic journey through a day in the life of young Barack and Michelle Obama. Australian actor Devon Terell plays the titular Barry with a surprising amount of depth and persuasion, rolling with the punches as he searches for identity between the Columbia classroom and the Harlem projects. As he does, he juggles the privileges and responsibilities that come with dating a white woman. Because of this, the film makes for a skillful examination of a bi-racial America and cultural identity as a whole - the fact that the film is a non-fiction piece about a future president just makes it even more striking and relatable.
David Maraniss of The Washington Post was another reporter flying all over the world trying to separate the real Obama from the phony memoir of Dreams -- but in the friendliest possible way. Maraniss told Vanity Fair that Obama's memoir had value despite its pack of lies: "I say that his memoir is a remarkably insightful exploration of his internal struggle, but should not be read as rigorous factual history. It is not, and the president knew that when he wrote it and knows it now."
This was a bombshell. Maraniss had spent months exploring Obama's past and held a prestigious editor's post at the dominant paper in the nation's capital, and was overseeing campaign coverage as Obama faced a difficult re-election. But the bombshell never exploded.
In mid-June, his book Barack Obama: The Story came out. On June 5, deep inside the paper, New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani noticed several factual problems with Obama's memoir. She called the book a "forensic deconstruction" of Obama.
For example, Obama wrote about "a woman in New York that I loved." But while the physical description of this character closely resembles a white Obama girlfriend named Genevieve Cook, Maraniss wrote Obama "distorted her attitudes and some of their experiences, emphasizing his sense that they came from different worlds."
Maraniss relayed that during an interview at the White House on November 10, 2011, Obama acknowledged his description of his New York girlfriend was actually a "compression" of events "that occurred at separate times with several different girlfriends."
Obama didn't just dump his old girlfriends. He then added insult to injury by blurring them into a fictional composite. If a memoir can't be honest about something as trivial as " a women in New York that I loved," how can it be considered accurate with matters that are profound?...
Accurate, shmaccurate. As long as it's "striking and relatable," who cares if it's really just a pack of lies?
"The Hillel family will watch out for our Muslim brothers and sisters on campus,” the failed Democratic pol declared. And he added, “As we hope they will watch out for us."
I wouldn't count on it, Eric. They're likely to be far too busy with their BDS and other Zion-loathing activities.
Oddly enough, it's an aversion to that seasonal standard (written by Frank Loesser, of Guys & Dolls fame), "Baby It's Cold Outside." Mark Steyn discusses the song and its dissers here.
This is what passes for incisive political commentary in the "social justice" utopia of Sweden:
Sweden-based writer Annika Hernroth-Rothstein has a go at unpacking the bizarre imagery:
The drawing (below) showed a happy, red-faced Benjamin Netanyahu sitting next to Mr Trump in a gold, Roman-style litter. The vehicle is being carried by Orthodox Jews, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, a voluptuous woman and a few Israeli soldiers, marked with large Israeli flags on their chests. A speech bubble attributed to Mr Netanyahu says: “Finally!”
The image sends a clear message: that the Jewish state and, in a larger sense, the great, evil Jewish conspiracy, determined the outcome of the American presidential election in order to further its interests.
The idea that Jews run the world is an old antisemitic myth, and the absurd mix of people and powers represented in the cartoon — from call-girls to Charedim and the KKK — indicate the degree to which the cartoonist has fallen for this ancient lie.
Update: The only other Swedish cartoonist I'm familiar with is Lars Vilks. Something tells me that, unlike Vilks, the "Antligen" 'toonist has no fears of a potentially deadly backlash.
It hadn't occurred to me until reading the following that the American slogan "E pluribus Unum" could be triumphalist Islam's motto, too:
A Boston Islamic center that has been linked to convicted terrorists is hosting an interfaith event on Sunday to promote peace, but some critics say such “hateful houses of worship” are a dubious venue for a message of solidarity and hope.
The event, at Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center, is entitled “Out of Many, One,” and has Boston Mayor Marty Walsh and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., slated to speak. It is sponsored by the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization, and aimed at bringing religious communities together under common beliefs.
“My hope is that we can provide a place for members of the community, who are so fearful and concerned about our values being challenged, to speak up,” Interfaith Organization Board Member Nahma Nadich told FoxNews.com. “We need to affirm our values and be in solidarity with each other to protect all members of our community against hateful, divisive rhetoric.”
To be clear, she's speaking of Trump's hateful, divisive rhetoric, not Islam's.
