The NYT Can't Help But Rain on Israel's Party

This article exemplifies the "progressive" paper's snippy, nasty and generally negative coverage--Israel Celebrates Its 70th Israeli style: With Rancor and Bickering.

70 Book Experts, 70 Years

The Jewish Review of Books asked "70 leading Israeli and American scholars, novelists, critics, policymakers, and public intellectuals for their favorite books about Israel." Here they are.

This Is Joy. This Is Israel at 70

I defy you to listen to 12,000 Israelis singing "Al Kol Eleh," a song embracing "the bitter and the sweet," and not be moved.

Kendrick Lamar Just Won a Pulitzer Prize for This?!?

This is but of taste of the stuff that wowed the judges:

[Verse 1: Kendrick Lamar & RAT BOY]

Wake up in the mornin', thinkin' 'bout money, kick your feet up
Watch you a comedy, take a shit, then roll some weed up
Go hit you a lick, go fuck on a bitch
Don't go to work today, cop you a fit
Or maybe some kicks and make you—
Door and his Nike Air Rattles
Rush the fire exit, no time for battles
Well I, I never expected
Wake up in the mornin', thinkin' 'bout money, kick your feet up
Watch you a comedy—hol' up!
Wake up in the mornin', thinkin' 'bout money, kick your feet up
Watch you a comedy, take a shit, then roll some weed up
Go hit you a lick, go fuck on a bitch, don't go to work today
Cop you a fit or maybe some kicks and make it work today
Hang with the homies, stunt on your baby mama
Sip some lean, go get a pistol, shoot out the window
Bet your favorite team, play you some Madden
Go to the club or your mama house
Whatever you doin', just make it count (I need some water)Wake up in the mornin', thinkin' 'bout money, kick your feet up
Hop in the shower, put on your makeup, lace your weave up
Touch on yourself, call up your nigga, tell him he ain't shit
Credit card scam, get you a Visa, make it pay your rentHop on the 'Gram, flex on the bitches that be hatin' on you
Pop you a pill, call up your bitches, have 'em waitin' on you
Go to the club, have you some fun, make that ass bounce
It's whatever, just make it count

Either I'm missing something or Pulitzer standards aren't what they used to be.

Israel-Loathing CBC Opiner Neil Macdonald's Plea Is an Unequivocal Demonstration of His Bias

The plea: "Call me radical, but journalists should be able to pledge support for Palestinian journalists."

No problem, Neil. You're a radical Zion-loather, and have been for decades.

Julie Birchill's Love Letter to Israel

It's succinct--and it's awesome:

I’ve been a philo-Semite since I was a teenager (you can read about in it my memoir, Unchosen) but I didn’t go to Israel until I was in my 40s. To say it lived up to my expectations is an understatement — the people, culture and climate have basically ruined me for every other country. Especially the people — no country ever boasted such a rainbow of beauty. Not for nothing did my gay mate Chas refer to his first trip there — just short of a week — as The Six-Day Phwoar.

But of course Israel’s achievement goes far beyond the physical and the fiscal — in proportion to its population, it has the largest number of startup companies in the world. It is a beacon of enlightened light in a frankly wretched region which has a real problem with such outrageous concepts as equal rights for women and homosexuals. I believe that Islamofascism is the biggest threat to progress and pleasure since the Nazis stalked the earth and Israel fights it on the frontline for all of us. And regrettably, as antisemitism — “fresh’n’funky antisemitism” as I once called the new Left-wing, right-on brand — rises in Europe, Israel will be needed more than ever by the diaspora. 

In fact, there’s only one thing wrong with Israel — it’s not big enough. Never mind — next year in Samaria.

The 11 Faces of Judy

Hard leftist/Rabble rouser Judy Rebick reveals in a new book that she suffered from a mental illness that splintered her into 11 distinct personalities (each and every one of which, no doubt, despised Israel).

Remember When Michael Coren Used To Be On the Right?

Now Coren is questioning whether Jordan Peterson should be allowed to speak his mind, an indication of how totally Michael has succumbed to the Left's totalitarian impulse.

Oh, well. I guess it's hard for a conservative type to put bread on the table in a land where Ceeb-style leftism is considered the norm. (Hat tip: NDA)

"Schandlich!": Germany's Top Pop Music Prize Goes to a Pair of Jew-Hating Rappers

Found this one on The Local's "Germany" site:

The awarding of the most prestigious prize in German pop music to two rappers who made fun of Holocaust victims has been described by an influential Jewish organization as "a scandal."

At the annual Echo Awards on Thursday evening the rappers Kollegah and Farid Bang were awarded the best album award for their recent release “Jung, brutal und gutaussehend 3”.

For weeks, the fact that the two rappers had been nominated for the award had caused controversy in the German press due to their alleged anti-Semitism.

On the album, Farid Bang raps about his training regime, boasting that “my body is more defined than an Auschwitz prisoner’s.”

Kollegah has previously been accused of anti-Semitism due to a 2016 music video which appears to show a Jewish man at the head of a secretive global banking conspiracy...

"Gutaussehend," in case you were wondering, means "good-looking"--even though their "look" is as ugly as it gets.

Guess they meant it in an ironic sense.

Universalist Poseurs Misappropriate "Anne Frank"--Again

Caroline Glick discusses--and bemoans--the theft here.

At Least He Doesn't Mention "Islamophobia"

All in all, Justin Trudeau's statement re this year's Yom Hashoah is pretty sound. Much better, in fact, than a previous utterance on the the Holocaust.

The Left's Deft, Bereft Anti-Zionism

Ben Cohen unpacks it here:

In the West, while many centrist social democrats have been among the greatest friends of Israel and the Jewish people, the remainder of the left largely incorporated ideological hostilities reminiscent of the Soviet regime. When the “New Left” emerged in the 1960s, its libertarian suspicions of the repressive Soviet society didn’t prevent the adoption of a demonized view of Zionism straight out of the Soviet playbook; some of the movement’s graduates (in Germany, ironically) were even recruited by Palestinian terrorist groups to organize attacks on Jewish and Israeli targets. Meanwhile, in this century, the moderate centrist left, with some honorable exceptions, has been at best passive in the face of a virulent, Soviet-style campaign against “Zionism” that has involved boycotts, harassment and occasional violence not against the Israeli military or government, but directed at ordinary Jews in Western Europe, South Africa and North America.

This recent past matters because the present figureheads of the left are either in denial about it or, in some cases, actually complicit in it. In the United States, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders has spoken out against the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, but he has never questioned whether a political movement whose core goal is to return Jews to the situation they faced in 1945 should be considered “progressive” in the first place. In France, the leader of the populist left, Jean-Luc Melenchon, is an enthusiastic advocate of boycotting Israel, declaring last week that the French Jewish leadership is composed of unpatriotic “communalists.” In Britain, Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn on one day offers an assurance that anti-Semitism has no place in a party that has recorded more than 300 internal anti-Semitic incidents since 2015; the next, he attends a Passover Seder organized by a radical Jewish group that proudly excludes any Jews with basic sympathies for Israel (i.e., most of them) from its events.

At that same Seder, a modified “Haggadah” invited guests to pause and “consider how s**t the State of Israel is.” Such puerile obscenities are, sadly, the price of being accepted as a Jew on the far left. But as relevant history demonstrates, that’s not an aberration of our own time, but entirely consistent with the established patterns of the past.

Let us now consider how s**t much of the Left is. 

Their Own Private Abraham

Why Islam’s claim to Abraham creates—not solves—problems.

Kind of Nutty (Also Blind to the Holy War)

Canadian literary icon Margaret Atwood thinks Star Wars (you know, the George Lucas flick?) "caused 9/11."

Funny, I thought it was a product of Osama bin Laden's jihad ethos.

Rob Ford, the Hollywood Movie

Seriously, it's a go (with slim, red-headed Damian Lewis, of all people, slated to play the heavy-set Toronto mayor).

"Every Aspect of the Holocaust Had Been Anticipated By the Kishinev Pogrom"

A new book--Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History--debunks the myths and details the ramifications of the infamous 1903 attack. (One ramification that's not in the book: I sit here today because my great-grandparents--my mom's grandparents--left Kishinev in the wake of a second pogrom there in 1905. The town's police chief, a regular customer of my great-grandfather's small tobacconist shop, alerted him that the pogrom was about to happen, enabling the entire family, including a new-born baby, to hide until the trouble had passed and they could make their escape.)

 

The "Witty" Wordplay of Hamas On Campus (A.K.A. Students for Justice in Palestine)

"#Ashke-Nazi"--pretty damn "clever," no?

On a related note, it amuses me to no end that the first name of one of SJP's co-founders is "Hatem."

How perfect is that?

Civilizational Ennui and the Idealization of "The Other"

Not too surprisingly, they go together like a wink and a smile, and may well be catastrophic for Europe.

Come What May, the Brits Are Engendering Jihad and Jew-Hate

One often hears these days about the overt Jew-hatred of the UK's Labour Party and its leader Jeremy Corbyn. As execrable as that is, it conveys impression that, Theresa May's Conservatives, on the other hand, aren't as bad for the Jews.

But what if I were to tell you that, last year, May's government spent £20 million to help "educate" Palestinian moppets in the finer points of the ongoing jihad against the Jewish state? Isn't that as bad as--or even worse than--anything the Corbynites are doing?

Over on the Gatestone site, my favorite Brit, Douglas Murray, excoriates his country's government for pursing this hateful and shameful policy:

This past weekend it emerged that last year the British government funnelled £20 million to Palestinian schools. A review by the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se) found that these revenues go towards funding a curriculum which omits teaching peace, promotes the use of violence -- specifically jihad -- and encourages martyrdom. An analysis of the textbooks used in Palestinian schools funded by the UK government -- using UK taxpayers' money -- found that these textbooks, which come from the Palestinian Authority (PA), "exerts pressure over young Palestinians to acts of violence."

A science textbook intended for 12-year-olds, for example, teaches them Newton's second law of physics in the following way:

"During the first Palestinian uprising, Palestinian youths used slingshots to confront the soldiers of the Zionist Occupation and defend themselves from their treacherous bullets. What is the relationship between the elongation of the slingshot's rubber and the tensile strength affecting it?"

Another textbook, which is meant to be used for teaching arithmetic to 9-year-olds takes a highly local approach to the matter. Math lessons as provided by the PA -- courtesy of the UK government -- teach Palestinian children addition by asking them to calculate the number of "martyrs" in various Palestinian uprisings. 

Elsewhere, the study found that social studies books included images of children in their school rooms with an empty desk fitted with a sign reading "martyr". Repeatedly the textbooks refer to the "Occupation", to "Zionist Occupation", "Zionists" and much more, all of which perpetuates the notion that Israelis are "invaders" and "oppressors". In other words, these textbooks are clearly and consistently intended to indoctrinate a new generation of Palestinian children to hatred of their neighbours. Any government genuinely interested in promoting peace would withdraw funding from any entity -- wherever in the world it was -- which taught violence as such a core part of its curriculum. 

The British government, however, has long been strangely shameless when it comes to funding the Palestinian Authority. The British government, for instance, hides behind the claim that the PA's authorised textbooks for use in Palestinian schools have got better in recent years. In fact, this IMPACT-se report find precisely the opposite. Last year, the PA launched a much-vaunted new school curriculum for children in grades 5-11. Just last week the Minister of State for International Development, Alistair Burt, stated that "all of their [the PA's] schools in the West Bank are using the revised 2017 PA curriculum." 

The IMPACT-se investigation revealed, however, that "radicalization is pervasive across this new curriculum." And not just pervasive, but pervasive "to a greater extent than before." The study found that in textbooks which pretend to be teaching "equal rights'", girls are encouraged to sacrifice their lives. A textbook aimed at 5^th grade children (that is, children aged 10) teaches that "drinking the cup of bitterness with glory is much sweeter than a pleasant long life accompanied by humiliation." Another textbook urges that "Giving one's life, sacrifice, fight, jihad and struggle are the most important meanings of life."...

It takes a special kind of blindness and a boneheadednes not to see that the jihad being fomented against Israel is identical to the one being waged against the UK and the rest of the West. 

Will the Brits will wake up anytime soon?

I doubt it. Not when it feels so good to lavish all that love on the poor, oppressed Palestinians--and all that obloquy on mean old victimizing Israel.

Bernie Sanders, "Progressive" Twit, Falls for Hamastan Propoganda

Jonathan S. Tobin documents the fall:

Was the Palestinian “March of Return” a propaganda success for Hamas? If you think Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders is a reliable barometer of international opinion, then maybe the answer is “yes.”

On Sunday, Sanders — the former and possibly future Democratic presidential contender — illustrated the vast difference between the Trump administration and the left wing of the Democratic Party when he tweeted his support for the march, as well as his criticism of actions by the Israel Defense Forces at the border: “The killing of Palestinian demonstrators by Israeli forces in Gaza is tragic. It is the right of all people to protest for a better future without a violent response.”

As far as Israel’s critics are concerned, the Gaza march was a return to past Palestinian propaganda successes, in which the IDF could be accused of a “disproportionate” response to an attack. The more Palestinian corpses, the better for the Palestinian cause. And the worse for Israel as Western liberals, including many American Jews, shrink in horror from the tough tactics used by the Jewish state.

Sanders’s sentiments echoed those of others in the international community, such as France, which also issued a statement defending the Palestinians’ right to “peacefully demonstrate” and calling on Israel to show restraint. Had the Trump administration not vetoed a one-sided Security Council resolution calling on an investigation of Friday’s bloodshed at the Gaza border, the United Nations would also have handed a diplomatic victory to the Palestinians...

Dear Bernie, you Useful Idiot: the "better future" they're "protesting" for is one in which there's no Israel.