(c) M Westrop 2010

Notice the Hassidic sheep

And the weeping crocodile

“The human race,” quoth an anonymous wit, “is divided into adults and women.”

If we accept the division for the sake of argument, we would observe that many females belong in the adult column, but almost all feminists, along with all leftists, belong in the other. (Homosexuals are well distributed into both, the division having nothing to do with sexual preferences or who’s macho or who’s effeminate.)

Generally, but most significantly in the realm of public affairs, adults think, women feel.

One of the few exceptions among feminists is brave, intelligent, principled Phyllis Chesler.

Recently, on August 25, she gave an address at a Yale University conference on global anti-semitism.

Her speech, titled The History and Psychological Roots of Anti-Semitism Among Feminists, Their Gradual Palestinianization and Stalinization, is well worth reading in full. Here are a few passages from it:

I could not have predicted the rapid and extreme Stalinization and Palestinianization that would take place among academics and activists in general. I could never have imagined that the western intelligentsia, the “good” people, including feminists, would make so tragic an alliance with Islamic barbarism and misogyny.

I became a feminist leader in 1968-1969. I remain one. Most of the other feminists of my generation are no longer engaged in the historical moment. …

For the last decade, Jewish and non-Jewish feminists have marched in pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel rallies, signed newspaper ads and petitions to divest from and boycott Israel—yes, even gay and lesbian feminists who would be tortured to death in Muslim countries, did so. These professed “humanitarians”—who carry on about the recent Turkish assassination flotilla—do not take as strong a stand against stoning or forced face-veiling. Some feminists think [face-veiling is] “liberating” or even the ultimate feminist choice. Most feminists do not take a stand against forced marriage, child marriage, first cousin marriage, polygamy, and honor-related violence, included honor killing. They fear that doing so might be seen as “racist” or as culturally insensitive. …

In October of 2004, a small group of San Francisco-based feminist activists … traveled to Duke University … to support the Palestine Solidarity Movement Conference that was taking place there. …

They did not have a balanced or particularly feminist agenda. Although many activists were lesbians or pro-gay, they had not come to protest the Palestinian persecution and torture of suspected homosexuals in Gaza or on the West Bank nor did they seem to know that Israel has granted political asylum to Palestinian homosexuals, including those who have literally been tortured and nearly killed by other Palestinians. Instead, these American feminists wore keffiyas, political buttons and tee-shirts that read “We are all Palestinians.”

The American and European Left and feminist and gay movements have made a marriage in Hell with Islamist terrorists. The same Left that has still never expressed any guilt over their devotion to communist dictators who murdered one hundred million of their own people in the service of a Great Idea, have now fatefully joined the world Jihadic chorus in calling for the end to “racist” Zionism and to the Jewish Apartheid and “Nazi” state. …

She notices the immaturity of these leftists and feminists:

These westerners share an extraordinary psychological rage which requires a scapegoat and cleaning messianic promises, a refusal to look within, an overwhelming need for group approval, an inability or refusal to think as independent individuals, an adolescent in-your-face rebelliousness towards certain authorities—coupled with an adolescent, slavish adoration of other authorities, a desire for cathartic violence, for the ecstasy of mob action …

And their often stunning stupidity:

In 2007, a Jewish Israeli feminist researcher at Hebrew University, doctoral candidate Tal Nitzan, blamed Israeli soldiers because they refused to rape Arab and Palestinian women; she claimed this constituted “racism” against Palestinians.

Earlier this year, 2010, a team of researchers led by a female Harvard social scientist blamed Israel in the pages of The Lancet, a British medical journal, for an increase in Palestinian wife-battering in Gaza and on the West Bank. The researchers did not even consider the role that radical Islamification might play in the oppression of women or the fact that Gaza is ruled by terrorist gangsters and this might cause an escalation of violence towards women. Honor killings (and a relevant, recent study actually existed) were not included in their measures of violence against Palestinian women. Why? Because that cannot be blamed on Israel or on the West. …

In the summer of 2010, Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University and former spokesman for the PLO, …

– who, it is said, arranged for Obama’s fees at Harvard to be paid presumably by some rich Arab or Arabs –

… a man who also happens to be a friend and former dinner companion of President Obama, signed an appeal for money to send yet another aid ship to Gaza named “The Audacity of Hope,” the title of Obama’s second autobiographical book. He publicly challenged the President, saying that “if the name [of the boat] is a problem for the administration, it can simply insist that Israel lift the siege: end of problem, end of embarrassment.” …

We’re perfectly sure he won’t be embarrassed. Though he might pretend to be.

Such feminists, leftists, and gay liberationists have not thought through what their lives might be like under Islamic rule. In fact, they still deny that there’s a “problem” with Islam and insist that the main problem is with American and Israeli colonialism, imperialism, and militarism. …

They should try converting to Islam to test their theory.

We like her whole speech, except the end of it where she says:

I have not come here today to bash feminists [as such]. I am one. As I’ve said, I don’t understand what happened to the best minds of my Second Wave generation. However, our feminist work is certainly not worthless and was not done in vain.

We say it was almost entirely done in vain. Worse, it was done to the detriment of generations of children. We regret that Phyllis Chesler still wants to describe herself as a feminist. To us she is a thinking adult. She is an asset to the cause of individual freedom, the cause that feminism is hysterically against.

Obama’s chief economic adviser, Christina Romer, admits that the Keynesian economic policy she (among others) advised Obama and the Democrats to adopt and implement, which they did eagerly as it was the redistributionist policy they wanted, was wrong and has failed.

The Washington Post reports:

Christina Romer, chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, was giving what was billed as her “valedictory” before she returns to teach at Berkeley, and she used the swan song to establish four points, each more unnerving than the last:

She had no idea how bad the economic collapse would be.

She still doesn’t understand exactly why it was so bad.

The response to the collapse was inadequate.

And she doesn’t have much of an idea about how to fix things.

What she did have was a binder full of scary descriptions and warnings, offered with a perma-smile and singsong delivery: “Terrible recession. . . . Incredibly searing. . . . Dramatically below trend. . . . Suffering terribly. . . . Risk of making high unemployment permanent. . . . Economic nightmare.” …

At week’s end, Romer will leave the council chairmanship after what surely has been the most dismal tenure anybody in that post has had: a loss of nearly 4 million jobs in a year and a half. … She was the president’s top economist during a time when the administration consistently underestimated the depth of the economy’s troubles – miscalculations that have caused Americans to lose faith in the president and the Democrats.

Romer had predicted that Obama’s stimulus package would keep the unemployment rate at 8 percent or less; it is now 9.5 percent. … The economy lost 350,000 jobs in June and July. …

When she and her colleagues began work, she acknowledged, they did not realize “how quickly and strongly the financial crisis would affect the economy.” They “failed to anticipate just how violent the recession would be.”

Even now, Romer said, mystery persists. “To this day, economists don’t fully understand why firms cut production as much as they did or why they cut labor so much more than they normally would.” Her defense was that “almost all analysts were surprised by the violent reaction.”

That miscalculation, in turn, led to her miscalculation that the stimulus package would be enough to keep the unemployment rate from exceeding 8 percent. Without the policy, she had predicted, unemployment would soar to 9.5 percent. The plan passed, and unemployment went to 10 percent. …

The truth is that the Obama administration is pretty much out of options. … “What we would all love to find – the inexpensive magic bullet to our economic troubles – the truth is it almost surely doesn’t exist,” Romer admitted.

Okay, there is no magic bullet – but there is the invisible hand.

It’s also called the free market.

Free marketeers would lower taxes, remove the minimum wage and the multifarious bureaucratic burdens on employers, and above all forbid government interference in the market. That is to say, they would reverse the policy of high spending by the state which Romer advised, Obama and the Democrats wanted, and even President Bush was seduced into attempting.

Economically wise conservatives have been telling liberals for decades, Keynes was wrong, Hayek was right.

Will the Republicans remember that when they regain Congressional power in November?

We never thought of John Bolton as a candidate for the presidency because for years we’ve thought of him as the ideal Secretary of State; how he alone out of all the Secretaries of State of the last hundred years (at least) would not be corrupted by the left-tilting career diplomats; and how his clarity of thought and deep knowledge of the world would disperse the fog in the minds at Foggy Bottom.

But now that it has been proposed that he stand for the presidency, and he has hinted that he might be willing to do so, we see him as a potentially great president.

Are any of our readers willing to be interviewed on being both atheist and conservative for a documentary?

If so, please reply to Elyse’s comment under About Us, and tell her how she can contact you.

And if you do the interview, don’t forget to mention our website.

Today, Thursday September 2, 2010, Israel’s Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Abu Abbas for the Palestinian Authority start talking about “peace talks” under pressure from President Obama.

The president of the United States has reported through the State Department to the disgusting United Nations Human Rights Council (see our post America begs, August 26, 2010) that his country is much at fault in the way it treats (among others) illegal immigrants, citing in particular the Arizona law recently passed to deal with the problem.

Governor Jan Brewer of Arizona was justifiably outraged and wrote to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton:

The idea of our own American government submitting the duly enacted laws of a State of the United States to ‘review’ by the United Nations is internationalism run amok and unconstitutional … I again respectfully request that you amend the Report to remove Paragraph 95 relating to the State of Arizona and S.B. 1070. If you choose not to do so, the State of Arizona will monitor the proceedings and assert any rights it has in this process. Be assured that the State of Arizona will fight any attempt by the U.S. Department of State and the United Nations to interfere with the duly enacted laws of the State of Arizona in accordance with the U.S. Constitution.

Read the whole letter here.

Ben Johnson at Liberty News reports and comments:

A portion of her letter pins the blame for the increased deaths of illegal aliens where it belongs: squarely on the shoulders of Barack Obama and his Open Borders allies. …

Brewer noted Obama’s “failure to secure the entire border” and his decision “not to enforce major portions of our federal immigration laws” has encouraged alien traffickers to enter through the Arizona desert, leading to at least 170 dead illegals along that state’s border so far this year.

Thousands of migrants have died on the Arizona-Mexico border. A few days ago, August 25, seventy-two were reported killed by drug lords.

The letter challenged Hillary to compare human rights conditions in Arizona with those in member nations of the UN Human Rights Council “and publish that comparison.” …

The only thing missing in [Governor Brewer’s]  gutsy letter is mention of the human rights violations American citizens face because of Obama’s de facto amnesty program, such as paramilitary clashes, drug trafficking, murders, increased gang activity, rampant kidnappings, sexual assaults, crime, welfare use, home invasions, overcrowded schools, hospital closures caused by soaring medical costs, job losses, bulging prison detentions, bilingual status, property damage, environmental degradation, and overburdened infrastructure.

Brewer is standing up for her state and the whole country — and not merely on the immigration issue. Although few media outlets have covered it, I reported last week that the remainder of Obama’s report to the UN Human Rights Council establishes new categories of “rights” for the UN to enforce, including the “right” to gay “marriage” and military service, ObamaCare, card-check union registration, taxpayer-funded daycare, bilingual education, race-based voting schemes, and Affirmative Action. Three foreign nations will then draw up a plan for the United States to follow, in order to implement these “rights” — and check up on our progress four years from now, regardless of whether Barack Obama is president. The body reserves the right to “decide on the measures it would need to take in case of persistent non-cooperation.”

The three foreign nations are France, Japan, and Cameroon (a member of the Organization of Islamic Conference). On November 5 their diplomats will start to examine the United States on the issues raised by its own self-deprecating report along with complaints about America compiled by other foreign bodies. Part of their remit will be to see in due course whether  “voluntary pledges and commitments” made by the country under examination have been carried out. As the Obama administration has committed itself to fighting the Arizona law, the UNHRC will now expect it to do so successfully, and can “take measures” against the US if it fails.

The “measures” could do no harm unless the US government actually wanted them to.

Is it really possible that Obama wants America to accept the rule of the appalling UN?

Apparently, yes.

Great fun – the idea that our universe was made by people like us.

Dr John Gribbin, astronomer, thinks it possible. Writing in the Telegraph, he even suggests how we – that is to say, some among us – could make universes too.

Is our universe a designer universe? By this, I do not mean a God figure, an “intelligent designer” monitoring and shaping all aspects of life. Evolution by natural selection, and all the other processes that produced our planet and the life on it, are sufficient to explain how we got to be the way we are, given the laws of physics that operate in our universe.

However, there is still scope for an intelligent designer of universes as a whole. Modern physics suggests that our universe is one of many, part of a “multiverse” where different regions of space and time may have different properties (the strength of gravity may be stronger in some and weaker in others). If our universe was made by a technologically advanced civilisation in another part of the multiverse, the designer may have been responsible for the Big Bang, but nothing more.

As with much else in modern physics, the idea involves particle acceleration, the kind of thing that goes on in the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. …

To create a new universe would require a machine only slightly more powerful than the LHC – and there is every chance that our own universe may have been manufactured in this way. …

He goes on to explain how it’s possible using black holes, which “are relatively easy to make”. He quotes Alan Guth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who has “investigated the technicalities of ‘the creation of universes in the laboratory’, and concluded that the laws of physics do, in principle, make it possible”.

Dr Gribbin asks: ‘How likely is it to have happened already?”

While the intelligence required to do the job may be (slightly) superior to ours, it is of a kind that is recognisably similar to our own, rather than that of an infinite and incomprehensible God. And the most likely reason for such an intelligence to make universes is the same for doing things like climbing mountains, or studying the nature of subatomic particles – because we can. A civilisation that has the technology to make baby universes would surely find the temptation irresistible. And if the intelligences are anything like our own, there would be an overwhelming temptation at the higher levels of universe design to improve upon the results.

This idea provides the best resolution yet to the puzzle Albert Einstein used to raise, that “the most incomprehensible thing about the Universe is that it is comprehensible”. The universe is comprehensible to the human mind because it was designed, at least to some extent, by intelligent beings with minds similar to our own.

Read it all here. Enjoy.

Christine Brim at Big Peace reveals that the Obama administration is doing still more to assist Islamic organizations in America, including funding them with tax-payers’ money. To what end?

On August 31, this coming Tuesday, the Muslim Brotherhood-associated “Coordinating Council of Muslim Organizations” (CCMO) will bring 25-30 Muslim leaders of 20 national Muslim groups to attend a special workshop presented by the White House and U.S. Government agencies (Agriculture, Education, Homeland Security, Health and Human Services etc.) to provide the groups “funding, government assistance and resources.” The workshop will apparently provide special access for these Muslim Brotherhood organizations: the organizers pledge to provide “direct access” and “cut through red tape.” Government and Muslim groups will hold an Iftar dinner (breaking the fast of Ramadan) after the workshop.

The event was announced in an email newsletter sent August 27 by the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism finance trial, long associated with the Muslim Brotherhood, the global Islamist network. …

The Muslim Brotherhood founded in 1928, is a global Islamist political movement dedicated to imposing Shariah law on all nations and institutions. Their credo is “Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. Qur’an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.”

While it promotes stealth jihad throughout the Western world, it also uses violent force when and where it can. It is the parent movement of Hamas, the terrorist organization that controls Gaza and wages perpetual war on Israel.

The Hudson Institute quotes the Muslim Brotherhood’s own declaration of its world-wide ambitions:

We have a clear mission—to implement Allah’s law, on the basis of our belief that that it is the real, effective way out of all our problems—domestic or external, political, economic, social or cultural. That is to be achieved by forming the Muslim individual, the Muslim home, the Muslim government, and the state which will lead the Islamic states, reunite the scattered Muslims, restore their glory, retrieve for them their lost lands and stolen homelands, and carry the banner of the call to Allah in order to bless the world with Islam’s teachings.

Christine Brim thinks that the groups attending the “workshop” and dinner are likely to be associated with the Muslim Brotherhood, because –

The sponsoring organization – the Coordinating Council of Muslim Organizations (CCMO), co-sponsoring with the Department of Agriculture – has a long history of associations with the Muslim Brotherhood.

And because the CCMO officers are themselves Muslim Brotherhood leaders:

These are not just your garden-variety Muslim Brotherhood operatives. The CCMO officers include leading national and international figures in the Muslim Brotherhood, settled in the Washington DC suburbs to enjoy “direct access” to the Administration and Congress. CCMO is a major U.S. node in the loosely coordinated Muslim Brotherhood network. Just the fellows to give your tax dollars as stimulus money!

If Christine Brim is right and the organizations being aided by the government are pursuing the aims of the Muslim Brotherhood, this can only mean that the Obama administration is actively helping to promote those aims.

Is it doing so inadvertently, not realizing that these organizations have an anti-American agenda? Christine Brim doesn’t think so:

I suggest that the Administration knows these groups are linked to the Muslim Brotherhood. They think that’s a good thing.

This isn’t incompetence; it’s intentional.

What can be done about it? Any chance the mainstream media will investigate these dark procedures as a start?

Not much of a one, we guess.

From an article in City Journal on what Europe has become and how it differs from America, we select some passages as samples in the hope that they will tempt you to read it all. We think it’s true, and that it’s a splendid piece of writing for which both the author Pascal Bruckner, a French philosopher, and his translator Alexis Cornel, deserve praise.

It’s title is Europe’s Guilty Conscience, it’s introductory headline, Self-hatred is paralyzing the Continent.

Brooding over its past crimes (slavery, imperialism, fascism, communism), Europe sees its history as a series of murders and depredations that culminated in two global conflicts. … Those born after World War II are endowed with the certainty of belonging to the dregs of humanity, an execrable civilization that has dominated and pillaged most of the world for centuries in the name of the superiority of the white man.

In its “white man’s guilt” it includes America:

Since 9/11 … a majority of Europeans have felt, despite our sympathy for the victims, that the Americans got what they deserved. The same reasoning prevailed with respect to the terrorist attacks on Madrid in 2004 and on London in 2005, when many good souls, on both the right and the left, portrayed the attackers as unfortunate people protesting Europe’s insolent wealth, its aggression in Iraq or Afghanistan, or its way of life.

But take its greatness with its shame: –

Europe has surely engendered monsters. But it has, at the same time, engendered the ideas that made it possible to slay monsters. European history is a succession of paradoxes: arbitrary feudal power gave rise to democracy; ecclesiastical oppression, to freedom of conscience; national rivalries, to the dream of a supranational community …

– that (in our italics) we think is another crime in the making, a new nightmare rather than a dream  –

… overseas conquests, to anticolonialism; and revolutionary ideologies, to the antitotalitarian movement. …

Wallowing in its remorse, Europe is misjudging itself and the world:

A civilization responsible for the worst atrocities as well as the most sublime accomplishments cannot understand itself solely in terms of guilt. … We now live on self-denunciation, as if permanently indebted to the poor, the destitute, to immigrants— as if our only duty were expiation, endless expiation, restoring without limit what we had taken from humanity from the beginning. This wave of repentance spreads through our latitudes and our governments like an epidemic. An active conscience is a fine and healthy thing, of course. But contrition must not be limited to certain parties while innocence is accorded to anyone who claims to be persecuted.

The United States, despite its own faults, retains the capacity to combine self-criticism with self-affirmation, demonstrating a pride that we lack.

America itself, yes, if not its present  leadership.

But Europe’s worst enemy is Europe itself, with its penitential view of its past, its corrosive guilt, and a scrupulousness taken to the point of paralysis. How can we expect to be respected if we do not respect ourselves … ? The truth is that Europeans do not like themselves, or at least do not like themselves enough to overcome their distaste and to show the kind of quasi-religious fervor for their culture that is so striking in Americans.

We too often forget that modern Europe was born not during a time of enthusiastic historical rebeginning, as was the United States, but from a weariness of slaughter. It took the total disaster of the twentieth century, embodied in Verdun and Auschwitz, for the Old World to happen upon virtue, like an aging trollop who moves directly from debauchery to fervent religious belief. …  We became wise, perhaps, but with the force-fed wisdom of a people brutalized by carnage and resigned to modest projects. The only ambition we have left is to escape the furies of our age and to confine ourselves to the administration of economic and social matters.

While America is a project, Europe is a sorrow. Before long, it will amount to little except the residue of abandoned dreams. … [T]here is a striking contrast between the stories that we Europeans tell ourselves about rights, tolerance, and multilateralism and the tragedies that we witness in the surrounding world — in autocratic Russia, aggressive Iran, arrogant China, a divided Middle East. We see them, too, in the heart of our great cities, in the double offensive of Islamist terrorism and fundamentalist groups aiming to colonize minds and hearts and Islamize Europe. …

History goes on without us, and everywhere emergent nations are recovering their dignity, their power, and their aggressiveness, Europe leaves it to the Americans to be in charge, while reserving the right to criticize them violently when they go astray. …

[Europe] has a history, whereas America is still making history, animated by an eschatological tension toward the future. If the latter sometimes makes major mistakes, the former makes none because it attempts nothing. For Europe, prudence no longer consists in the art, defended by the ancients, of finding one’s way within an uncertain story. We hate America because she makes a difference. We prefer Europe because she is not a threat. Our repulsion represents a kind of homage, and our sympathy a kind of contempt. …

But if Europe thinks it has earned its rest and can opt out of the world’s “uncertain story”, it is wrong:

Europe has developed a veritable fanaticism for modesty, but if it cannot preside over the destinies of the whole world, it must at least play a part, retain its special voice in favor of justice and law, and assume the political and military means to make itself heard. Penitence is finally a political choice; it is to choose an abdication that in no way immunizes us against mistakes. Fear of repeating yesterday’s errors makes us too indulgent of contemporary outrages.

By preferring injustice to disorder, the Old World risks being swept away by chaos, the victim of a renunciation mistaken for wisdom. …