Saturday, July 11, 2020

Jews aren't indigenous to Israel? According to whom? - Jonathan S. Tobin


by Jonathan S. Tobin

A woke rabbi who launched a Twitter war over the meaning of a word demonstrated how leftist politics pollutes language and cancels Jewish rights.


There are a lot of things wrong with woke culture. While the impulse to demonstrate solidarity with the oppressed and opposition to bad things like racism is, in principle, praiseworthy, the virtue signaling is insufferable. As is the tone of self-righteous disapproval emanating from the woke towards all those that don't measure up to their standards.

As a friend's daughter eloquently summed up the problem, no matter how hard you try, "there's always a woker fish" who will wind up shaming you for insufficient ardor for supposedly righteous causes. That means the competition to out virtue signal and shame lesser beings can lead even seemingly nice people to do and say things that are not only obnoxious but actually have dangerous implications.

And that is the problem with Rabbi Andrue J. Kahn, assistant rabbi at New York's famed Temple Emanu-El, the landmark Reform cathedral on Fifth Avenue. "Rabbi Andy," as he styles himself on social media, seems like a well-meaning young man and posts lots of cute pictures on Instagram. And although he's just one out of a staff of five rabbis (plus two with emeritus status) at that historic institution, he's generally regarded as a comer in the world of liberal Judaism. So when he decided to rant on Twitter about something, it provoked a controversy that made news.

As his Twitter account demonstrates, Rabbi Andy is up to date as far as supporting things that woke rabbis should support, like abortion rights, Native American rights, why Black Lives Matter and smearing President Donald Trump's supporters as anti-Semites. He also knows what to oppose, including America's Founding Fathers, the Zionist Organization of America and, significantly, a letter signed by famous writers and artists against "cancel culture" and the repression of free speech that it encourages.

In other words, Rabbi Andy, like so many other well-meaning young liberal Jews, is just fine with cancel culture. Indeed, he's ready to cancel the entire Jewish people, and by implication, Zionism and Israel, to demonstrate his impatience with the non-woke.

As part of his sermonizing about the wrongs of white supremacy and its companion evil, "white Jewishness," the rabbi is particularly upset with the notion that the Jews are "indigenous" to Israel.

To the non-woke, that is an obvious and self-evident fact. But to Rabbi Andy, it's an offensive act of "appropriation" on the part of reactionary Jews. As he wrote:

"Let me say this as plainly as possible: Jews are not an indigenous people. It is appropriative to make use of this word when referring to our relationship to the land of Israel, and it undermines the difficult work being done to fix the ongoing oppression of indigenous peoples."

The rabbi goes on to quote from studies from the UN Human Rights Council and Amnesty International that claim that the word indigenous can only be used when referring to people struggling against colonial oppressors. Both of those organizations are guilty of vicious bias against Israel that often amounts to nothing less than anti-Semitic incitement. But the key point here is that Rabbi Kahn uses them to bolster a cardinal principle of intersectional ideology that sees the struggle of African-Americans for civil rights in the United States as linked to that of indigenous peoples in the Third World who fight against imperialist oppression.

In this woke version of reality, humanity is divided into two groups: white oppressors and indigenous people of color straining under the yoke of white atrocities. And in delineating this stark division between the bad and the good, Jews must accept that they are among the former and irredeemably white. The only thing for them to do is to admit guilt and to struggle against the systemic racist system into which they assimilated into in the United States.

As The Forward noted in an article about the controversy stirred up by Rabbi Kahn, Israel's Consul General to New York Dani Dayan, recently noted that both Jews and Palestinian Arabs are indigenous to Israel, and that peace will only happen when the latter finally recognize this fact rather than insisting that Jews have no sovereign rights in any part of the country. By lending support to the idea that Jews aren't indigenous, Kahn is actually undermining chances of peace in the Middle East rather than promoting it.

The fact that the Jewish people are indigenous to the land of Israel, to which their ties date back thousands of years and were reaffirmed with continuous settlement, as well as prayers throughout the ages, is irrelevant to the woke. So is the fact that the majority of Israeli Jews are not white or European, but descended from people who were forced to flee their homes in the Arab and Muslim worlds after Israel's creation in numbers that were greater than those Palestinian Arabs who fled Israel during the War of Independence. Yet as far as the rabbi is concerned, Jews who speak of being indigenous are stealing victim status that belongs only to Arabs and other people of color.

Perhaps Rabbi Kahn thinks the semantics here is important because the assertion of indigenous status distracts us from the sufferings of African-Americans or Palestinians. But his scolding of Jews for having the effrontery to claim ownership of this word has implications that go beyond his repellent pedantry and ideological inflexibility.

That's because telling Jews they are not indigenous to Israel is akin to branding them imperialist colonizers in their ancient homeland. And once you step down that path you aren't just virtue signaling your concern for the oppressed; you're also implicitly declaring that Zionism and the existence of the one Jewish state on the planet are illegitimate.

The redefinition of words with plain meanings in order to weaponize them for ideological purposes is key to the Orwellian process by which the woke suppress not only free speech, but the rights of those they consider white oppressors. In effect, what Rabbi Andy is doing when he lectures us about "white Jewishness" and who can be considered indigenous is canceling the entire Jewish people.

The only possible response to such despicable wordplay is to refuse to play by woke rules. There can be no compromise with intersectional canceling. It's time to make it clear to the self-righteous Rabbi Andys of American Jewish life that we won't accept their lectures or their politicized language lying down. The alternative is to consent to a denial of Jewish rights whose ultimate purpose is the sort of tragedy that ought to horrify a nice young rabbi a lot more than how to define a word.

 Reprinted  from JNS.org.


Jonathan S. Tobin

Source: https://www.israelhayom.com/opinions/jews-arent-indigenous-to-israel-according-to-whom/

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FOX NEWS EXCLUSIVE: Chinese virologist accuses Beijing of coronavirus cover-up, flees Hong Kong: 'I know how they treat whistleblowers' - Barnini Chakraborty


by Barnini Chakraborty

Li-Meng Yan told Fox News that she believes China knew about the coronavirus well before it claimed it did. She says her supervisors also ignored research she was doing that she believes could have saved lives.


Coronavirus Whistleblower: Exclusive Fox News Interview

Dr. Li-Meng Yan, a virologist from Hong Kong, tells Fox News in an exclusive interview about the early research she says she conducted into COVID-19, and why she believes that research was withheld from the world.

EXCLUSIVE: Hong Kong scientist Dr. Li-Meng Yan was stepping into uncharted territory.

Hours before she boarded an April 28 Cathay Pacific flight to the United States, the respected doctor who specialized in virology and immunology at the Hong Kong School of Public Health had plotted her escape, packing her bag and sneaking past the censors and video cameras on campus.

She had her passport and her purse and was about to leave all of her loved ones behind. If she was caught, she knew she could be thrown in jail -- or, worse, rendered one of the "disappeared."

Yan told Fox News in an exclusive interview that she believes the Chinese government knew about the novel coronavirus well before it claimed it did. She says her supervisors, renowned as some of the top experts in the field, also ignored research she was doing at the onset of the pandemic that she believes could have saved lives.

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She adds that they likely had an obligation to tell the world, given their status as a World Health Organization reference laboratory specializing in influenza viruses and pandemics, especially as the virus began spreading in the early days of 2020.

Yan, now in hiding, claims the government in the country where she was born is trying to shred her reputation and accuses government goons of choreographing a cyber-attack against her in hopes of keeping her quiet.

Yan believes her life is in danger. She fears she can never go back to her home and lives with the hard truth that she’ll likely never see her friends or family there again.

CHINESE AUTHORITIES DETAIN OUTSPOKEN CRITIC OF XI JINPING

Still, she says, the risk is worth it.

"The reason I came to the U.S. is because I deliver the message of the truth of COVID," she told Fox News from an undisclosed location.

She added that if she tried to tell her story in China, she "will be disappeared and killed."

Photo of Dr. Li-Meng Yan at her wedding. (Yan)
Photo of Dr. Li-Meng Yan at her wedding. (Yan)

Yan's story weaves an extraordinary claim about cover-ups at the highest levels of government and seemingly exposes the obsessive compulsion of President Xi Jinping and his Communist Party to control the coronavirus narrative: what China knew, when it knew it and what edited information it peddled to the rest of the world.

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Yan, who says she was one of the first scientists in the world to study the novel coronavirus, was allegedly asked by her supervisor at the University/WHO reference lab, Dr. Leo Poon, in 2019 to look into the odd cluster of SARS-like cases coming out of mainland China at the end of December 2019.

"The China government refused to let overseas experts, including ones in Hong Kong, do research in China," she said. "So I turned to my friends to get more information."

Yan had an extensive network of professional contacts in various medical facilities in mainland China, having grown up and completed much of her studies there. She says that is the precise reason she was asked to conduct this kind of research, especially at a time when she says her team knew they weren’t getting the whole truth from the government.

One friend, a scientist at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention in China, had first-hand knowledge of the cases and purportedly told Yan on Dec. 31 about human-to-human transmission well before China or the WHO admitted such spread was possible.

She reported some of these early findings back to her boss, Yan said.

"He just nodded," she recalled, and told her to keep working.

A few days later, on Jan. 9, 2020, the WHO put out a statement: "According to Chinese authorities, the virus in question can cause severe illness in some patients and does not transmit readily between people... There is limited information to determine the overall risk of this reported cluster.”

Dr. Li-Meng Yan in Hong Kong (Yan)
Dr. Li-Meng Yan in Hong Kong (Yan)
Yan said she and her colleagues across China discussed the peculiar virus but that she soon noted a sharp shift in tone.

Doctors and researchers who had been openly discussing the virus suddenly clammed up. Those from the city of Wuhan--which later would become the hub of the outbreak--went silent and others were warned not to ask them details.

The doctors said, ominously, "We can't talk about it, but we need to wear masks,'" Yan said.

‘EMERGING EVIDENCE’ OF CORONAVIRUS AIRBORNE TRANSMISSION INDICATED BY WHO

Then the numbers of human-to-human transmission began to grow exponentially, according to her sources, and Yan started digging for answers.

"There are many, many patients who don't get treatment on time and diagnosis on time," Yan said. "Hospital doctors are scared, but they cannot talk. CDC staff are scared."

She said she reported her findings to her supervisor again on Jan. 16 but that's when he allegedly told her "to keep silent, and be careful."

"As he warned me before, 'Don't touch the red line,'" Yan said referring to the government. "We will get in trouble and we'll be disappeared."

She also claims the co-director of a WHO-affiliated lab, Professor Malik Peiris, knew but didn't do anything about it.

Peiris also did not respond to requests for comment. The WHO website lists Peiris as an "adviser" on the WHO International Health Regulations Emergency Committee for Pneumonia due to the Novel Coronavirus 2019-nCoV.

Yan was frustrated, but not surprised.

"I already know that would happen because I know the corruption among this kind of international organization like the WHO to China government, and to China Communist Party," she said. "So basically... I accept it but I don't want this misleading information to spread to the world."




The WHO and China have vehemently denied claims of a coronavirus cover-up.

The WHO has also denied that Yan, Poon or Peiris ever worked directly for the organization.
"Professor Malik Peiris is an infectious disease expert who has been on WHO missions and expert groups - as are many people eminent in their fields," WHO spokeswoman Margaret Ann Harris said in an email. "That does not make him a WHO staff member, nor does he represent WHO."

HOUSE GOP ACCUSES CHINA, WHO OF 'FAILURE OF MONUMENTAL PROPORTIONS' IN SPREAD OF CORONAVIRUS

Yan says despite any pushback, she has been emboldened by a sense of right and wrong and says she had to speak up despite the personal and professional consequences.

"I know how they treat whistleblowers," she said.
"I know how they treat whistleblowers."
— Dr. Li-Meng Yan
Like so many before her, once Yan decided to speak out against China, she discovered her life was apparently in jeopardy, as well as that of those closest to her.

It was a fear directly relayed to her and seemingly confirmed by U.S.-based Hong Kong blogger Lu Deh, she says.

After she shared some of her theories and suspicions with him, he told her she would need to relocate, perhaps to the United States, where she wouldn't have to constantly look over her shoulder. Only then would she be safe and have a platform to speak, he said.

Yan made the decision to leave, but things got complicated when her husband of six years, who also worked at her lab, discovered the telephone call between his wife and the blogger.

Yan told Fox News she begged her husband to go with her, and says while her spouse, a reputable scientist himself, had initially been supportive of her research, he suddenly had a change of heart.
"He was totally pissed off," she said. "He blamed me, tried to ruin my confidence... He said they will kill all of us.'"
Shocked and hurt, Yan made the decision to leave without him.

She got her ticket to the U.S. on April 27. She was on a flight the next day.

When she landed at Los Angeles International Airport after her 13-hour journey, she was stopped by customs officials.

Fear gripped her and Yan didn't know if she would end up in jail or be sent back to China.

"I had to tell them the truth," she said. "I'm doing the right thing. So I tell them that 'don't let me go back to China. I'm the one who came to tell the truth here of COVID-19... And please protect me. If not, the China government will kill me."

The FBI was allegedly called in to investigate. Yan claims they interviewed her for hours, took her cell phone as evidence and allowed her to continue to her destination.

The FBI told Fox News it could neither confirm nor deny Yan's claims; however, Fox News was shown an evidence receipt that appeared to confirm an interaction.

As Yan was trying to find her footing in America, she says her friends and family back home were being put through the wringer.

Yan claims the government swarmed her hometown of Qingdao and that agents ripped apart her tiny apartment and questioned her parents. When she contacted her mother and father, they pleaded with her to come home, told her she didn't know what she was talking about and begged her to give up the fight.

The University of Hong Kong took down her page and apparently revoked access to her online portals and emails, despite the fact that she says she was on an approved annual leave. In a statement to Fox News, a school spokesperson said Yan is not currently an employee.

"Dr Li-Meng Yan is no longer a staff member of the University," the statement read. "Out of respect for our current and former employees, we don’t disclose personal information about her. Your understanding is appreciated."





The Chinese Embassy in the United States told Fox News they don't know who Yan is and maintain China has handled the pandemic heroically.

"We have never heard of this person," the emailed statement read. "The Chinese government has responded swiftly and effectively to COVID-19 since its outbreak. All its efforts have been clearly documented in the white paper "Fighting COVID-19: China in Action" with full transparency. Facts tell all."

The WHO has also continued to deny any wrongdoing during the earliest days of the virus. The medical arm of the United Nations has been taken to task recently by scientists challenging its official view of how the virus spreads. The WHO has also altered the coronavirus timeline on its website, now saying it got information about the virus from WHO scientists and not the Beijing authorities--as it has claimed for more than six months.

Fox News has also reached out to the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the scientists Yan accuses of suppressing her concerns for comment.

Yan says she'll continue to speak out--but knows there's a target on her back.


Barnini Chakraborty

Source: https://www.foxnews.com/world/chinese-virologist-coronavirus-cover-up-flee-hong-kong-whistleblower

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Reflections on Southern Slavery and Leftist Slavery - Daniel Greenfield


by Daniel Greenfield


The statue of the world’s greatest slave owner stands in Seattle.




Under 400,000 slaves were brought to America. Those enslaved African people represented only 3.6% of the transatlantic slave trade. By the Civil War, there were under 4 million black slaves in America.

Over 20 million people were imprisoned by Soviet leftists in the gulag system.

While the peak slave labor population in the leftist slave camps was less than the peak slave population in the South, the death rate ranged from 5 percent to 25 percent depending on the period.

Under 2 million people died as a result of the brutal leftist system of slave labor camps and that was a fraction of the full number of people killed through various means by the Socialist system.

Gulag labor was murderous with prisoners sent to work in uranium mines or to labor outdoors chopping trees and digging canals in subzero weather with little food and less protection. At one gulag, prisoners labored in uranium mines, breathing in radioactive dust, and dying within two years of cancer and leukemia. The sick were then used for medical experiments by Socialist medicine before they died.

These horrors were not some relic of the Stalin era, but were being carried out as recently as the 1970s.

The 1619 Project of the New York Times falsely claimed that America was built on slave labor, but before that revisionist history project, the paper had run a Red Century project defending Communism when Soviet Socialism was, from Moscow University to the White Sea-Baltic Canal, built on slave labor.

At its peak, as many as 1 in 5 Soviet construction workers were convict laborers and massive slave labor projects like the White Sea-Baltic Canal, hailed as triumphs of socialism, killed tens of thousands.

When Senator Bernie Sanders visited the USSR, he gushed over its socialist achievements, such as the Moscow Metro. The massive system had been built by Stalin to showcase the achievements of socialism and the Putin regime restored the old plaque reading, “Stalin raised us to be loyal to the nation, inspired us to labor and great deeds”.  But it wasn’t inspiration that built the Moscow Metro: it was slave labor.

"There's a reason Joseph Stalin had gulags," Kyle Jurek, a Bernie Sanders field organizer had argued, calling it a model for breaking Americans of their “privilege” by sending them to “go break rocks.”

Nobody would propose a return to the plantations, but forced labor is still popular with some socialists.

The Soviet Socialist system was built on forced labor, from the collective farms that peasants were not allowed to leave, to mandatory ‘volunteer’ brigades like those that helped build the Moscow Metro or harvested crops, to a massive slave trade in convict labor which built roads, tunnels, and canals, mined and did every form of dirty work, and was traded back and forth to Socialist civilian organizations.

The Soviet Socialist achievements that American leftists praised were the product of slavery.

While the Left demands that America make a reckoning for 19th century slavery, its leading figures, from Bernie Sanders to Noam Chomsky, were apologists for socialist slavery, and its leading institutions, from the New York Times to the Pulitzer Institute, both promoters of the 1619 Project, were complicit in covering up slavery and mass murder by their socialist allies in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

Today’s ‘woke’ corporations, like Nike and Coca-Cola, benefit from slave labor in Communist China’s systems of labor camps, state-run and civilian factories, which encompass over 1 million people.

The brands telling Americans that they need a reckoning with slavery have their own reckoning.

Slavery has been a fundamental feature of the socialist regimes admired by American leftists expressed in murderous abbreviations from the Soviet GULAG to Cuba’s UMAP camps for Christians, to China’s RTL. The Khmer Rogue in Cambodia turned forced labor into genocide and this was not all that unusual.

Southern slave owners, especially once shipping in new slaves was banned, wanted to profit from selling slaves and this resulted in a high population growth among enslaved African people, while the Soviet Socialist gulags, like their National Socialist counterparts, extracted maximum labor from their prisoners with no interest in their physical survival. They knew where they could easily get more slaves.

The Nazis and the Communists operated unsustainable slave economies that always needed more bodies. National Socialist and Communist slave labor served a dual purpose, obtaining free labor for state industries (and in Germany, politically connected industries), and disposing of unwanted people.

The National Socialists used slave labor to clear away unwanted conquered populations, Jews, and others who were not official members of the Herrenvolk, while building up the industries of conquest. The Soviet Socialists also used the gulag system, along with mass starvation and executions, to clear away unwanted ethnic and national minorities, including again Jews, but also to purge their system.

The Soviet Socialists used slave labor to eliminate potential dissent and terrorize the population on a much larger scale because while the National Socialists had used mass murder to achieve racial homogeneity, they used it to obtain political homogeneity as the basis for their system.

Both the National Socialists and Soviet Socialists envisioned an endless supply of slave labor that could be obtained through conquest. The South had internalized slavery, while the Socialists externalized it.

Socialist slavery was not an aberration: it was the essential idea of Marxism and of Socialism.

Article 12 of the 1936 Soviet constitution stated that, "in the USSR, work is a duty" and that the "principle applied in the U.S.S.R. is that of socialism: From each according to his ability, to each according to his work."

That was a quote from Karl Marx.

In that same paragraph, Marx had described the ideal Communist society as a place where, "labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want." The message echoed the one placed over the gates of National Socialist concentration camps, "Arbeit Macht Frei" or "Work makes you free."

The Soviet Union, like other socialist regimes, had defined itself as a worker state. But the nature of work, where and how one worked, was defined by the institutions of the state. Slavery was the founding principle of socialism which defined life around labor, not for the self, but for the collective good.

“Socialism is the final concept of duty, the ethical duty of work, not just for oneself but also for one’s fellow man’s sake, and above all the principle: Common good before own good, a struggle against all parasitism," Adolf Hitler had articulated in a Munich speech titled, Why We Are Anti-Semites.

Parasitism was the basis for forced labor in the Soviet Union and other Socialist regimes where the state defined who workers were and what legitimate work was. Citizenship in a workers’ state meant a willingness to labor on those terms. A failure to do so was parasitism which would be punished with redemption through labor. The “Arbeit Macht Frei” message of National Socialist concentration camps, derived from a 19th century novel about the moral redemption of forced labor, and the celebratory Soviet songs and poems of forced labor celebrated work as the true religion of a socialist state.

Southern slave owners justified the subjugation of human beings by asserting that forced labor gave meaning to inferior people, uplifting them from a degraded condition, and taking care of them.

Socialist slavery was based on the same premise and provided justification for Southern slavery.

"The dissociation of labor and disintegration of society, which liberty and free competition occasion, is especially injurious to the poorer class; for besides the labor necessary to support the family, the poor man is burdened with the care of finding a home, and procuring employment," George Fitzhugh, one of the most vocal advocates for the Southern plantation, had argued. "Slavery relieves our slaves of these cares altogether, and slavery is a form, and the very best form of socialism."

Fitzhugh believed that not only black people, but that most people should be slaves to protect them from the fierce competition of a capitalist society.

"With negro slaves, their wages invariably increase with their wants. The master increases the provision for the family as the family increases in number and helplessness. It is a beautiful example of communism, where each one receives not according to his labor, but according to his wants," he wrote.

The doctrines of Socialism helped inspire Southern slave owners to defend the plantation.

"Every plantation is an organized community," Rep. William Grayson had mused. "A phalanstery, as Fourier, would call it, where all work, where each member gets sustenance and a home."

Fitzhugh had also argued that, "a well-conducted farm in the South is a model of associated labor that Fourier might envy."

Charles Fourier, the utopian socialist who coined the term 'feminism', had wanted to wipe out the Jews by sending them to labor in his phalansteries, massive utopian communes, as his original vision of utopian socialist communes had given way to labor camps that would break the enemies of socialism.

Socialism is less efficient and produces less value, therefore it demands more cheap labor. Or slaves.

Socialist slavery begins with idealistic visions, but all the schemes based on willing cooperation fall through. The peasants cling to their land and have to be forced into communes. The workers don’t want to work and have to be compelled. The volunteers don’t show up and volunteering becomes mandatory.

The idealism turns into ossified academic jargon disguising the brutal reality of mass slavery.

America has spent centuries making a difficult and bloody reckoning with slavery. Its leftist enemies have rarely bothered to even make the effort, blaming crimes on individual leaders, on poor conditions, and on interference by America in hellholes like Cambodia that would otherwise have been utopias.

And, no matter how much we learn about the Socialist mass killings, rehabilitation is always waiting.

The Left has failed to make a reckoning with slavery. That’s why the media nods sympathetically at old Communists, and clucks over McCarthyism even as it cancels random people over minor missteps. Its preeminent revisionist historian, Howard Zinn, was a Stalinist, its preeminent thinker, Noam Chomsky, defended the Khmer Rouge, and Bernie Sanders, its presidential candidate, praised the products of Soviet slave labor. These are the crimes of apologists for a contemporary Confederacy: a slave empire that spread around the world, killing millions, and enslaving countless millions more in systems of labor camps that dwarf anything that any Southern plantation owner could have imagined.

Statues of Columbus and Jefferson are under attack, but a statue of the greatest socialist slave owner of modern times still stands in Seattle.

Vladimir Lenin had set up the system of gulags that eventually enslaved and killed millions. Lenin's plans had begun with "obligatory work duty" for class enemies, then evolved to the "most unpleasant forced labor" for members of the "propertied classes", and then to camps full of slaves laboring to build socialism who had been sent there for even the most minor of offenses.

As Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the architect of the Red Terror and the secret police put it, "Even now the labor of prisoners is far from being utilized on public works, and I propose to retain these concentration camps to use the labor of prisoners, gentlemen who live without occupation, those who cannot work without a certain compulsion, or, if we talk of Soviet institutions, then here one should apply this measure of punishment for unscrupulous attitude to work, for negligence, for lateness.”

The purpose of the concentration camp was no longer to punish class enemies, but to find slaves.

That Lenin’s statue still stands in Seattle is a testament to the reality that the Left has made no reckoning with its history of slavery. It has not repented of its crimes against millions of people.

The greatest slave empires of the modern era were not Southern, they were Socialist.

Conservatives have spent enough time defending the Founding Fathers. It is time to stop being on the defensive and attack the leftist proponents of modern slavery who propose to tear down their statues.


Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/leftist-slavery-was-worse-southern-slavery-daniel-greenfield/

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Report: Israel succeeded in infiltrating Hamas leadership - Arutz Sheva Staff


by Arutz Sheva Staff

Hamas leader escapes Gaza on IDF ship, as Arab reports claim cooperation with Israel.


A senior Hamas military leader, who commanded a naval commando unit, escaped from Gaza on an IDF ship, Arab media reported Saturday.

According to the report, the official escaped Gaza shores on an IDF ship, while in possession of cash, recording devices, and a laptop computer containing "classified information" regarding the terror group's commando unit.

This is the second top Hamas commander who has been suspected recently of cooperating with Israel.

According to a report last week in Lebanon's Al Akhbar newspaper, Hamas exposed "a dangerous operation by the Israeli intelligence services" to carry out terror attacks against Hamas targets in Gaza.

The report also claimed that Hamas arrested several ISIS operatives, who had planned a series of suicide attacks in Gaza, which would be carried out using explosive belts and booby-trapped motorcycles.


Arutz Sheva Staff

Source: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/283375

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Gas explosion in Tehran injures one person - Arutz Sheva Staff


by Arutz Sheva Staff

One person injured as explosion shakes Tehran for second time in two days.

A gas explosion shook a residential building in Tehran, Iran, on Saturday, injuring one person, Iran's semi-official ISNA reported.

Quoting the Tehran fire department, ISNA said several gas cylinders stored in a basement blew up, damaging the building and injuring a resident.

On Friday, IRIB reported that an explosion was heard in Western Tehran, and electricity had been cut in the area around where the explosion occurred.

Local reports said that the blast occurred at a missile warehouse.

According to Iran News, the Qods city governor, Leila Vaseqi, denied that an explosion had occurred, claiming that there was only a power outage which lasted for five minutes.


Arutz Sheva Staff

Source: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/283373

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Convicted Terrorist Susan Rosenberg Raising Funds for “Marxist” Black Lives Matter - Lloyd Billingsley


by Lloyd Billingsley

A reminder of leftist affection for murder and mayhem.





“There’s no way you can do any homework on Black Lives Matter and not see that it’s a Marxist political organization,” and the move to substitute a “black” nation anthem was “a communist political move.”  That was sports journalist Jason Whitlock in an interview with Tucker Carlson of Fox News this week, when more obscure information about BLM emerged.

Convicted terrorist Susan Rosenberg (pictured above) is vice chair of Thousand Currents, a California-based charity that handles fundraising for Black Lives Matter. Rosenberg is a veteran of the May 19 Communist Organization that carried out bombings in the early 1980s to counter President Reagan’s “Morning in America” campaign. Rosenberg landed on the FBI most wanted list and was arrested with stolen explosives in 1984.

The terrorist drew 58 years but served only 16 because in 2001 President Bill Clinton commuted Rosenberg’s sentence. Since 2016, Rosenberg has been involved with Black Lives Matter, now openly recognized as a Marxist organization making communist political moves. One of those moves, supported by prominent Democrats is to defund the police, but BLM Philadelphia boss YahNé Ndgo is taking that to a new level. “One of the things that we are demanding over five years is the complete abolition,” she told Fox News Tuesday. “We don’t want to see any police in our community.”

Black Lives Matter has made a hero of Joanne Chesimard (aka Assata Shakur) who murdered a New Jersey state trooper, escaped prison and fled to Cuba. As Atlanta and Chicago confirm, murder is becoming more common in communities where Black Lives Matter operates, and the abolition of police would make it more so. As it happens, in Communist doctrine and practice, murder is necessary for social progress.

The independent Ukrainian farmers known as kulaks resisted Stalin’s collectivization plan. Stalin murdered them by the millions in a planned famine that Walter Duranty of the New York Times claimed did not exist. American Communist Anna Louise Strong championed the elimination of the kulaks as a class. Stalin knew that one death is a tragedy and a million deaths a statistic, and Mao Zedong followed suit. His cultural revolution and man-made calamities claimed a big part of the 94 million deaths under Communism in the past century.

In China during the cultural revolution, “mutant social growths were identified and unceremoniously uprooted.” That is from China: People-Questions, published by the National Council of Churches in 1975 and edited by Michael Chinoy, once a correspondent for CNN. The NCC book contends that there will be more cultural revolutions as China moves “in a socialist direction.”

From 1975 until 1979 the Khmer Rouge claimed the lives of up to two million people out of a population of roughly seven million. For the full story see Murder of a Gentle Land: The Untold Story of  Communist Genocide in Cambodia, by John Barron and Anthony Paul. The Killing Fields movie, from 1984, showed none of the actual killing. Out of sight is out of mind, and ignorance of Communist atrocities remains a problem.

Should some kind of Communist regime take power in the United States, the killing fields would be vast indeed. For the left, at home and abroad, the United States has always been the main enemy. The motive is there and given the means and opportunity, those mutant social growths, conservatives, and Judeo-Christian types, with their traditional values, would have to go. In a way, the cultural revolution is already in progress.

America is attacked 24/7 as an inherently unjust and racist society, never a great country and beyond all prospect of reform. Like the Khmer Rouge, the left longs for the “year zero” of their utopian socialist dreams. Violent thugs extract cringing confessions of “white privilege” and “inherent bias.” In cities and states controlled by Democrats, police and politicians tend to look the other way. Embattled Americans, isolated by the pandemic, push back as best they can.

As he confirmed in his Mount Rushmore speech, President Trump wants to prevent the left from destroying America. That is welcome news, but problems may arise in the correlation of forces.

Back in the 1990s, the FBI deployed snipers, armored vehicles, helicopters and tanks at Ruby Ridge and Waco. In 2020, with Antifa taking over parts of cities, widespread arson and looting, and the murder of police officers, the FBI remains absent from the front lines. Murder is on the increase and Susan Rosenberg is heading up the fundraising for Black Lives Matter.

Former New York Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik told Tucker Carlson the DOJ needs to start looking into BLM. No such action is evident, and despite the efforts of the allegedly intrepid John Durham, none of the DOJ and FBI bosses in the coup attempt on President Trump has been brought to justice.

As the election approaches, leftist violence is certain to surge. Will the FBI and DOJ continue to take a knee? Will BLM and Antifa be declared terrorist organizations? As President Trump says, we’ll have to wait and see what happens.

* * *
Photo credit: YouTube


Lloyd Billingsley

Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/convicted-terrorist-susan-rosenberg-raising-funds-lloyd-billingsley/

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Justice for Roger Stone - Grant Baker


by Grant Baker

President Trump has corrected a miscarriage of justice. His commutation of the sentence, rather than a pardon, allows Stone to seek redress via the courts.


On Friday, July 10th, President Trump commuted Roger Stone’s prison sentence. The clemency order, not to be confused with a pardon, allows Stone to fight in the appeals court to clear his name against what many consider a legal railroading. Friends of Stone claim that Trump had offered a pardon only to be rebuffed by Stone who asked for clemency to remain out of jail as he fights through the appeals court. 
The decision to grant clemency came after a series of revelations which proved that Mueller’s team of prosecutors had tampered with evidence, manufactured statements, and buried exonerating evidence in their case against General Flynn, prompting the Justice Department to drop the case out of embarrassment. Mueller’s prosecutorial misconduct in the Flynn case strongly mirrors the prosecution of Roger Stone. Despite no underlying crime or Russian collusion found, the prosecution chose to push forward with process crimes.
Stone was accused of threatening a witness after sending text messages to comedian Randy Credico, telling him “my lawyers are dying to rip you to shreds...prepare to die”. Stone felt Credico had spun a false narrative to Mueller’s investigators to throw him under the bus. Even Credico claims the texts were taken out of context and were not threats of violence or intimidation. 
Stone was also charged with lying to Congress. When Stone was asked by Congress if he was speaking with Wikileaks, Stone replied that he did not have a contact in the organization, but was speaking with Credico, who had interviewed Julian Assange. This turned out to be a factual statement, but prosecutors alleged that Stone claimed his contact was Credico in order to protect Jerome Corsi. In hindsight, the claim that Stone was lying to protect Corsi from prosecution rings hollow, as Corsi was never found to have committed any crimes and was never charged.
Stone’s case was assigned to Judge Amy Jackson, the same judge who had sent Paul Manafort to months of solitary confinement, 23 hours a day, while awaiting trial. Jackson immediately issued a sweeping gag order against Stone which prohibited him from defending himself in the public eye, later reinterpreting her order to retroactively prohibit forwarding, liking, or sharing any social media post. No such gag orders were issued against the prosecution, which routinely leaked case details, including the infamous pre-dawn raid of Stone’s Florida retirement home conducted by “dozens of FBI agents with automatic weapons and tactical equipment, armored vehicles, and an amphibious unit” as a CNN camera crew looked on. Mueller issued a statement denying the tip off, but video from Stone’s surveillance cameras show the FBI directing the CNN crew where to set up, conferring with them multiple times before the arrest.
Stone’s trial raised eyebrows when Judge Jackson asked the jury forewoman if a verdict had been reached, prompting an irritated response from the forewoman that they had not. It would later turn out that the forewoman had gloated at Stone’s arrest and had made a celebratory social media post the morning of the jury’s conviction. Tomeka Hart, an active Democratic operative with multiple runs for public office, had gained the lead position on the jury which would decide Stone’s guilt. Citing the tainted jury, Stone went on to ask Judge Jackson for a new trial, only to be rebuked by the judge for looking into the jury’s private lives. 
Despite Justice Department sentencing guidelines stipulating 15 to 21 months in jail for obstruction of justice cases with no prior crimes, Mueller’s prosecutors went on to recommend 7 to 9 years. Senior officials at the DOJ balked, reversing the recommendation and setting off a media firestorm which accused Roger Stone of having privilege due to his friendship with President Trump. The jury forewoman once again entered the spotlight with a comically timed statement supporting Mueller’s sentencing recommendation and further cementing proof of her anti-Stone bias.
Judge Jackson sentenced Roger Stone to 40 months to be served at FCI Jesup, a COVID-19 hotspot with 30 confirmed active cases as of July 2020. Stone’s known history of asthma and other respiratory problems failed to convince the judge to delay his prison sentence despite prisons releasing thieves, rapists, and murderers due to the virus breakout. After months of fence sitting, President Trump granted Stone clemency on July 10th.
Roger Stone has reportedly spent $3 million over 3 years in legal fees battling Mueller, forced to sell his house to finance his defense. The case has prevented him from earning income and ruined his reputation in international media. Despite this, Stone’s decision to forgo a presidential pardon in favor of a path that allows him to clear his name and embarrass Mueller’s prosecution team speaks volumes of his character. The story will make one hell of a book someday. For now, the White House Press Secretary’s statement will do:
As it became clear that these witch hunts would never bear fruit, the Special Counsel’s Office resorted to process-based charges leveled at high-profile people in an attempt to manufacture the false impression of criminality lurking below the surface. These charges were the product of recklessness borne of frustration and malice. This is why the out-of-control Mueller prosecutors, desperate for splashy headlines to compensate for a failed investigation, set their sights on Mr. Stone.


Grant Baker

Source: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/07/justice_for_roger_stone_.html

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Europe: Rape Victims Accused of Racism - Raymond Ibrahim


by Raymond Ibrahim

Even when it comes to rape, then, if the victim is white and the rapist is not, she is no victim at all; worse, she is a "racist"

  • "[W]e are neglecting to properly address the religious and racist aspects of grooming gang crimes.... It's telling them that it's OK to hate white people." — Sarah Champion, British Labour MP, YorkshireLive, April 29, 2020.
  • Advice against alcohol, drugs, and reckless behavior would be more compelling if it were not made under duress.
  • Even when it comes to rape, then, if the victim is white and the rapist is not, she is no victim at all; worse, she is a "racist" and "hater" who, if anything, apparently deserves what she got and more. "Blame the victim" is back with a vengeance and gaining ground throughout the West.

According to Sarah Champion, a UK Labor politician and MP for Rotherham (the epicenter of sex grooming gangs), "We need to understand racially and religiously aggravated crime if we are going to prevent it and protect people from it and if we are going to prosecute correctly for it." (Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)

An increasingly popular idea is that whenever races clash, only minorities can be victims. The notion is hardly limited to the recent riots in America. Elements of such thinking often appear in other contexts.

British women, for instance, including rape victims who drew attention to "Asian" (Pakistani and South Asian) sex grooming gangs, are also being attacked by the "woke" establishment.
Earlier this month in the UK, Sarah Champion, a Labor politician and MP for Rotherham (the epicenter of sex grooming), was accused of "fanning the flames of racial hatred" and "acting like a neo-fascist murderer." Her crime? She had dared to assert that "Britain has a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls."

The same elements accusing Champion of being a "murderer" also characterized the UK's anti-extremism program, Prevent, as being "built upon a foundation of Islamophobia and racism."

A few weeks earlier, an article titled, "I was raped by Rotherham grooming gang—now I still face racist abuse online," appeared. In it, a British woman (alias, "Ella") revealed that her Muslim rapists called her "a white whore, a white b***h," during the more than 100 times she was raped in her youth by the Pakistani grooming gang.

"We need to understand racially and religiously aggravated crime if we are going to prevent it and protect people from it and if we are going to prosecute correctly for it," Champion said in a recent interview.
"Prevention, protection and prosecution—all of them are being hindered because we are neglecting to properly address the religious and racist aspects of grooming gang crimes.... It's telling them that it's OK to hate white people."
Ella's attempts to highlight the "religious and racist aspects" of her and many other girls' similar abuse led only to "a lot of abuse from far-left extremists, and radical feminist academics," she said. Such groups "go online and they try to resist anyone they consider to be a Nazi, racist, fascist or white supremacist".
"They don't care about anti-white racism, because they appear to believe that it doesn't exist. They have tried to floor me and criticise me continually and this has been going on for a couple of months. They tried to shut me down, shut me up ... I've never experienced such hate online in my life. They accuse me of 'advocating for white paedophiles' and being a 'sinister demonic entity.'"
Placing the blame -- or at least responsibility -- on the victim is not limited to the UK. According to an August 9, 2019 report, "in the Swedish city of Uppsala ... four women were raped in as many days." Although police failed to issue descriptions of the rapists -- usually a sure sign of their origins -- they did issue warnings for women to "think how they behave," to "think ahead," and not "go out alone."


Advice against alcohol, drugs, and reckless behavior would be more compelling if it were not made under duress.

After mobs of Muslim migrants sexually assaulted as many as a thousand women on New Year's Eve 2016 in Cologne, Germany, the city's mayor, Henriette Reker, called on women to "be better prepared, especially with the Cologne carnival coming up. For this, we will publish online guidelines that these young women can read through to prepare themselves."

In Austria, after a 20-year-old woman waiting at a bus stop in Vienna was attacked, beaten and robbed by four Muslim men -- including one who "started [by] putting his hands through my hair and made it clear that in his cultural background there were hardly any blonde women" -- police responded by telling the victim to dye her hair.
"At first I was scared, but now I'm more angry than anything. After the attack they told me that women shouldn't be alone on the streets after 8pm. And they also gave me other advice, telling me I should dye my hair dark and also not dress in such a provocative way. Indirectly that means I was partly to blame for what happened to me. That is a massive insult."
In Norway, Unni Wikan, a female professor of social anthropology at the University of Oslo, insists that "Norwegian women must take their share of responsibility for these rapes," because Muslim men found their manner of dress provocative. So much for the feminist claim that women are free to dress as seductively as they want -- and woe to the man who misinterprets this, unless he is from a racial or religious minority group.

Professor Wikan's conclusion was not that Muslim men living in the West need to adjust to Western norms, but the exact opposite: "Norwegian women must realize that we live in a Multicultural society and adapt themselves to it."

Even when it comes to rape, then, if the victim is white and the rapist is not, she is no victim at all; worse, she is a "racist" and "hater" who, if anything, apparently deserves what she got and more. "Blame the victim" is back with a vengeance and gaining ground throughout the West.


Raymond Ibrahim, author of the recent book, Sword and Scimitar, Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West, is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Gatestone Institute, a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, and a Judith Rosen Friedman Fellow at the Middle East Forum.

Source: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16179/rape-victims-racism

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How to Teach Americans to Hate Their Own Country -- And How Not To - Danusha V. Goska


by Danusha V. Goska

What has inspired young Americans to rage against monuments to people who fought and died for justice and equality?





In recent days, America has produced an astounding spectacle. Americans desecrated and demanded removal of their own statues to their own heroes, including African Americans who fought for the Union; Hans Christian Heg, a Norwegian immigrant and dedicated abolitionist who modeled courage and gave his life in the Civil War; Taduesz Kosciuszko, the Polish-born designer of West Point who left money in his will to purchase freedom for American slaves; the World War II Memorial to the men and women who actually did fight fascism; and the Emancipation Memorial, a monument paid for by freed slaves, dedicated in a speech by Frederick Douglass, and the first American monument to feature an African American. In Iran, mullahs gloated that Americans themselves were now chanting "Death to America."

Black Lives Matter proponents claimed, "It's just property, easily replaced." No one said "It's just property, easily replaced" when arsonists burned black churches, and no one would say that had vandals spray painted a pig and the f-word, not on a statue to Kosciuszko, but on the MLK monument. Clearly, the vandals knew that they were, piece by piece, no less than Chinese communists bulldozing Tibetan monasteries or Nazis dynamiting synagogues, engaging in acts of anti-American cultural genocide.

What inspired young Americans to go on this feverish rampage against the people who lived for, fought for, and died for the justice and equality that rioters claimed to support? Many blamed American education. I could relate.

Years ago, I was a new PhD looking for a job. I received rejection letters mentioning hundreds of qualified applicants. I was desperate. A very kind department chair offered me a part-time assignment.

I received the class textbook: Race, Class, and Gender in the United States by Paula S. Rothenberg. The book is "required reading at over 1,000 colleges." Rothenberg's "publisher estimates that her books have reached well over half a million students." I couldn't wait to plunge into its almost 700 influential pages, and to map out how I'd communicate its hefty contents to my students.

I began to experience a nameless discomfort immediately upon reading the preface to the anthology. Rothenberg talks about events, persons, and trends that any intelligent person might recognize as unconnected. These include environmentalism, Nelson Mandela serving time in prison, smoking on airplanes, and surgeries intended to "reassign" gender. I wondered what scholarly discipline qualified Rothenberg to expatiate on these diverse topics.

Rothenberg anoints herself with the authority to bring these diverse puzzle pieces together. Her unifying thread is the destructive privilege enjoyed by white, heterosexual, Christian, American men. Her authority is derived from her virtuous desire to overturn these men's hegemony, and to free the oppressed from their chains.

A blue-collar child of immigrants, I had learned in academia, from Alan Dundes, my mentor, that scholarship requires disciplined focus, a proven set of topic-specific research tools, and certified membership in a community. Any average Joe might have an opinion about, say, virus replication, but unless you've spent your life studying virus replication, unless you are using the tried-and-true tools for analysis of virus replication, and unless you've been admitted to the community of others engaged in the same study, your opinion about virus replication really doesn't amount to a hill of beans.

Dundes demanded that his scholars master at least two languages. If you are going to make sweeping generalizations about the human condition, you require intimate knowledge of at least one other, non-American culture. A true scholar never falls into the error, Dundes pointed out, of saying something like, "The folktale Cinderella proves that Americans … " Cinderella is an international folktale, told from ninth-century China to Medieval Italy to Walt Disney. If you want to use Cinderella to make a point about America or Americans, you must find what feature is unique in American tellings of the tale.

Paula Rothenberg never received a PhD, as she recounts in her memoir, Invisible Privilege: A Memoir about Race, Class, and Gender. She worked for a while on a dissertation addressing Charles Sanders Peirce's theory of truth. Rothenberg was studying philosophy, not sociology, anthropology, history, or statistics. I could find no theory, and no academic bona fides, that qualified Rothenberg to make the sweeping generalizations she makes about America or Americans.

Though on different topics, many of the otherwise disjointed works in the Rothenberg anthology feature a protagonist obsessed with personal unhappiness, and locating the source of that unhappiness in malicious, heterosexual, white, American men. Maz Jobrani could not find work in Hollywood. Clearly, this was because white men would not allow a Muslim to thrive as an actor. Noy Thrupkaew insists that white men conspire to oppress poor Asian-Americans by praising the academic successes of well-off Asian Americans. Male-to-female transgender person Susan Stryker rages against "hegemonic" words like "man" and "woman." Stryker chafes to "pull down the patriarchy." Stryker's life is full of pain: "To the extent that I am perceived as a woman … I experience the same misogyny as other women, and to the extent that I am perceived as a man … I experience the homophobia directed toward gay men." Sharlene Hesse-Biber attributed a student's bulimia to the fact that "Guys don't like fat girls." Fat girls, poor Asian-Americans, transgender persons, Muslim actors, all are in pain because of oppressive white men.

Patriarchy or patriarchal are mentioned 36 times in the book, white supremacy or supremacist, 29 times, white privilege, 55 times, racism or racist 506 times, variations of oppression 233 times. The phrase white men appears 31 times. White men "have control;" they constitute "the ruling group." White men never "do dirty work." White men never feel "haunting fears" or "deep shame." Rather, white men enjoy "the manhood of racism, sexism, and homophobia."

Rothenberg's anthology, she tells us, "views the problems facing our country and our communities as structural, and seeks to contribute to the conversation about fairness and justice." What is that structure that, as she puts it, is "destroying lives and families"? Rothenberg's answer: "patriarchy and white privilege." Her job is to "explore the interlocking nature of these systems of oppression as they work in combination and impact virtually every aspect of life in U.S. society today." 

"Intersectionality," she says, is a term that "captures the complexity of multiple and simultaneous forms of oppression." All the previously mentioned bad things, from Mandela's prison term to smoking on airplanes, have been "hierarchically constructed" to advantage white, heterosexual men.

When addressing the success of Asians in America, Rothenberg makes clear that that success, like everything else in America, has been manipulated by the unseen hand of white, heterosexual, American men. Asians have not succeeded; rather, the all-powerful white man has "racially positioned" Asians differently than how he has "racially positioned" African Americans. Similarly, the white man manipulates media to "stereotype" Muslims as terrorists. There is no real Muslim terrorist; there are no victims to jihad terror. There is only the white man manipulating media to harm Muslims.

Every student at the university must take this class, because white men's privilege has blinded us all, and without the class, we would go through life metaphorically walking into walls. Rothenberg reassures the reader, "It is impossible to make sense out of either the past or the present without using race, class, gender, and sexuality … Much of what passes for a neutral perspective across the disciplines and in cultural life smuggles in elements of class, race, and gender bias and distortion. Because the so-called neutral point of view is so pervasive, it is often difficult to identify … Learning to identify and employ race, class, and gender as fundamental categories of description and analysis is essential if we wish to understand our own lives and the lives of others."

We can't go through life seeing people as just people. We must see them as representatives of their skin color and other identities. Rothenberg will instruct us. "We should never lose sight of the fact that any particular individual has an ethnic background, a class location, an age, a sexual orientation, a religious orientation, a gender, and that all these characteristics are inseparable from the person."

We must never fool ourselves into thinking that we are aware of reality. In fact, Rothenberg will tell us what reality is. What we had thought of as "reality," she puts in scare quotes. Her opinions expressed in her book actually are reality, without quotation marks. "Racism, sexism, heterosexism and classism operate on a basic level to structure what we come to think of as 'reality' … Differences may appear to be 'natural' or given in nature, they are in fact socially constructed" to form "systems of oppression." We must jettison the idea that the "United States extends liberty and justice and equal opportunity for all." What will disabuse us of this foolish notion? "The reality presented in these pages." Note the lack of quotation marks around that use of the word reality.

Losing faith in America might depress some students, Rothenberg acknowledges. Never fear! Rothenberg is also Glinda, the Good Witch. She presents the reader with "examples of people working together to bring about social change. The task is enormous, time is short, and our collective future is at stake."

Rothenberg's story, from the bad old days when white, heterosexual, Christian, American men screwed over everyone else on the planet, to the bright future where people work together to bring about social change, is told in the language of progress. She uses terms like "still." People still oppose gay marriage! People still smoke on airplanes! But humanity is marching towards an inevitable progress. Every day, in every way, humanity is getting better and better. We've had a black president! We almost had a woman president! Progress is to be measured by how far away we get from white men, and how close we come to their opposite number: people of color, women, and handicapped and transgendered people.

The degree to which such ideas now dominate education cannot be underestimated. Douglas Murray wrote in 2019 that identity politics have penetrated even into the hard sciences as taught in elementary school. He cites Seattle Public Schools K-12 Math Studies Framework which includes the following, "Power and oppression … are the ways in which individuals and groups define mathematical knowledge so as to see 'Western' mathematics as the only legitimate expression of mathematical identity and intelligence. This definition of legitimacy is then used to disenfranchise people and communities of color. This erases the historical contributions of people and communities of color." Yes, this is woke math instruction for kindergartners through twelfth graders.

How do students react to this kind of education? On social media, I came across a group of recent college graduates discussing their experience of the class I had been hired to teach. With their permission, I repost their conversation here.

"The class was the single biggest load of crap ever. I found it extremely offensive to all ethnic groups. The class did however teach me the most important skill in life, just say what people want to hear at all times, contain all actual feelings, and you will be fine. 'Know your audience.'"

The message of the class, he said, was, "If you aren't white, you suck at life and should basically kill yourself because there is nothing you can do in life to improve tomorrow. If you are white, go kill yourself you dirty capitalist pig Nazi and try not to rape any women before you do it."

A second person posted: "That class was the biggest waste of time, energy and paper … Trees did not deserve to die for this class to exist."

A third poster: "I was kicked out of that class once, and for no reason either."

The first poster asked, "Did you try to express your opinion?"

"Yeah," he replied. "I shared an experience I had."

Another asked, "Was it a story of you experiencing racism? If so, that's probably why. White people never experience any type of racism of any kind. As a Jewish kid, when I saw a swastika drawn on my locker, you know what I did? Nothing, because I had a feeling there was no point."

Though Rothenberg's books enjoy many positive reviews on Amazon, her negative Amazon reviews echo the impression shared by the young men quoted above. One Amazon reviewer writes, "White people are demonized. Males are emasculated and belittled. The word 'normal' is used, quotations included, as an actual insult. To be an upstanding member of society who happens to be White, male or Christian is, according to Rothenberg, a very real crime, worthy of very real punishment … this book should be treated not only as a piece of blatant propaganda that would make the Führer blush, but as a warning: Americans, if you're 'normal,' if you're self-respecting and decent in any way, but you just so happen to be male, Christian or especially White, they ARE coming for you."

Another reviewer writes, "Purely a Marxist totalitarian charade with extremely one-sided analogies. To Paula Rothenberg; if you hate the U.S.A. and freedom, then leave it for a communist country!"

And another, universities "force this bias down the throats of the unknowing students who are only reading the book to pass the class. The articles within this book are ONLY focused on the leftist views of race, class, and gender … If I have to read this book (which I did), I'd like to see some rebuttals, or some OTHER viewpoints."

Her fellow scholars have also taken issue with Rothenberg's book. Professor Julius G. Getman is a noted labor historian and attorney. In his 2011 University of Texas Press book, In the Company of Scholars, Getman points out that the materials Rothenberg chose for her anthology "present a single point of view: women and people of color as innocent victims, white males as oppressors." Rothenberg's definition of racism, that makes it impossible for anyone who is not white to be a racist, is "elitist," "patronizing," "racist," and "factually in error." Getman says, though, that "A good course can be taught using a slanted text so long as the slanting is recognized and compensated for by the instructor."

It wasn't just the book's slant that discomfited me. I deeply value separation of church and state and the sanctity of the individual conscience. I didn't want anyone telling me what to believe, and for me it would be a sin to use my paltry power as a professor to impose my ethics on my students. I cherished my ideal of the Ivory Tower: The Ivory Tower was for discovering objective truths. The Church guided me on the moral way to handle those truths, but it was not for me to force anyone into my church.

Rothenberg's book contains the word "should" 180 times. "Asian Americans should participate in racial justice struggles." "We should never lose sight of the ethnic background" of people we meet. We "should" describe ourselves as experiencing "internalized sexism." The word "black" "should be capitalized."

This book was not empowering students with neutral knowledge obtained and arranged in a scholarly manner that they could choose to use to build the lives they wanted. This book, rather, was the scripture of a religion, that was indoctrinating students in how they should live their lives. If they did not mouth, however insincerely, Rothenberg's shahada, they would not pass, and they would not acquire the degrees for which they were paying.

That professors teach this book in a manipulative and coercive way is demonstrated on the web. One syllabus requires that students give the teacher a detailed autobiography. In subsequent assignments, students are to self-identify as "how you fit into both oppressor and oppressed group." Many such online assignments sound like "struggle sessions," where students are required to share intimate details of their private lives, only for those details to be used later to categorize them as oppressors or the oppressed, whether they wanted to be so categorized or not. Struggle sessions are tools of psychological manipulation, not scholarship.

Not just the book's slant, nor its moral coercion, concerned me. I was also gravely troubled by the vacuum into which its contents were to be injected. My students had not been prepared by grammar school, high school, or other college classes to assess the book's assertions. They lacked training in scholarly skills, and they lacked raw knowledge of basic facts. My students thought that the Atlantic Slave Trade was the only slave trade that had ever existed. They thought they knew everything about the Crusades, to wit: Christian Europeans during the Middle Ages decided to invade Muslim lands and force Muslims to become Christian. They believed that contemporary terror attacks, like 9-11, were somehow justified revenge for the Crusades.

Students had no knowledge, at all, that the Crusades were preceded by hundreds of years of warfare by Muslims against Christian populations in the Middle East and Europe. They became astounded if I shared with them the information in Dr Bill Warner's dynamic battle map showing the hundreds of battles and slave raids jihadis prosecuted against formerly Christian lands like Syria, Egypt, and Turkey, as well as Spain, Italy, and France. They were shocked when I told them that Muslims lived under Christian rulers in the Middle East and often were not pressured to convert to Christianity.

They had no idea that anyone, anywhere, had ever died in the introduction of communism. Once I told them that, yes, people died, I invited them to guess numbers. When I told them that one good estimate was 100 million, they were floored. They would often say, "Why hasn't anyone ever told us this?"

I would ask my students, "What group of people did the Nazis, as part of an organized program, mass murder first and last?"

Students would always guess "Jews."

When I told them that the first and last group that Nazis murdered as part of an organized program were handicapped people, they were uncomprehending. They thought that Nazis mass murdering Jews was an expression of Christian anti-Semitism. They had no real understanding of Nazism.

I faced a quandary. I needed the job. I genuinely loved my boss and wanted to please her. I also did not want to undermine the university's intentions with the course. I was being paid to teach X. So I decided to teach X. I assigned works from Rothenberg's anthology. I made a few adjustments, though.

I told my students that they were permitted, indeed, expected, to express any opinion they wanted in class, as long as they did so in an academically respectable way. Name-calling and other incivility would not be allowed. I assured my students that their grades would have nothing to do with their opinions. I told them that truth is the north star, and that real scholarship provides tools for them to get as close to truth as possible.

The student reaction to this policy both touched and saddened me. Students told me that my class was special and unique because they were allowed to say what they thought. They told me of being ejected from, harassed in, or failing, other classes because they expressed their opinion.

I told them that a major component of the class would be a research paper, and that we would work together using time-tested methods of academic research. I created a guide, "How to Write a Research Paper." They would pick the topic, and they could reach any conclusion that the evidence they unearthed suggested to them.

Many students had no idea how to conduct academic research. No idea how to formulate a question, how to access peer-reviewed sources, or even what peer-reviewed sources were, or how to differentiate between fact and opinion. Their initial attempts were often impassioned screeds emphatically stating their opinion, and advocating what other people should do. I told them that it wasn't their job, as scholars, to write rabble-rousing purple prose, or to preach a sermon telling other people what they should do. I said it was their job to discover, synthesize, and report, in clear prose, objective facts. They said they'd always gotten good grades on such papers in the past.

Not a few students told me that this class feature was one of their favorite assignments in their college career. They had the opportunity to discover more about something that mattered to them.

One student, an African American woman named "Angie," told me she wanted to write a paper proving that the use of Ebonics in academic settings helps black students. Over the weeks of the project, as she performed her research, I could see her mind challenged by what she was discovering. For her original research, she wrote two job application letters, one in Ebonics, and one in standard English. She showed the letters to potential employers. The employers told her that they would prefer to hire the author of the letters written in Standard English. Angie's confrontation with objective facts changed her mind about the topic. She sent me an email years after having been my student, thanking me for the impact my teaching had on her life.

In addition to the above class policies, I did the following.

I told my students about Polish Haitians. Napoleon brought Poles to Haiti to suppress the world's first successful slave uprising that resulted in a new country controlled by former slaves. Most of the Poles died of yellow fever. Of those that survived, many, true to the Polish tradition of "For Your Freedom and Ours," fought beside the slaves for their freedom. Their descendants, many of them blue-eyed, survive in Haiti to this day.

I told them about William Wilberforce, John Brown, William Lloyd Garrison, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, all influential opponents of slavery. I told them about Ben Franklin's co-founding of an anti-slavery society before America was even a country. I told them about Levi and Catherine Coffin, two of the hundreds of Americans who created and maintained the Underground Railroad. I quoted from the letters of average Union soldiers who fought and died to end slavery. For example, "citizen soldier" Alvin Coe Voris wrote, "God's terrible wrath must be visited upon the authors of the abominable crime of American slavery." I told them about the unbroken chain of inspiration stretching from Henry David Thoreau to Leo Tolstoy to Mahatma Gandhi to Martin Luther King.

I told them about Julius Rosenwald, a child of Jewish immigrants who worked in the rag trade from the time he was 16. He made a fortune and dedicated that fortune to the uplift of African Americans. He funded Booker T. Washington, enabling his career. He underwrote more than five thousand schools, shops, and teacher homes for African Americans.

A diehard Jersey girl, I told them, of course, about Frank Sinatra, and his public and private activism to end Jim Crow. Nelson Rockefeller funded Martin Luther King, once handing his aide, Clarence Jones, a suitcase jammed with $100,000 in cash. White Americans didn't just give money to the Civil Rights Movement. Viola Liuzzo, a dirt-poor coal-miner's daughter and married mother of five, gave her life; she was shot to death for her activism. The Rev. James Reeb was clubbed to death. Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were two more white Civil Rights martyrs. My students had never heard of them, nor had they ever heard of any of the people or movements mentioned above. What they had read about, in their anthology, was whites as oppressive racists.

We talked about the Muslim Slave Trade. According to Prof. John Azumah,

"While the mortality rate of the slaves being transported across the Atlantic was as high as 10%, the percentage of the slaves dying in transit in the Tran-Saharan and East African slave market was a staggering 80 to 90%. While almost all the slaves shipped across the Atlantic were for agricultural work, most of the slaves destined for the Muslim Middle East were for sexual exploitation as concubines in harems and for military service. While many children were born to the slaves in the Americas, the millions of their descendants are citizens in Brazil and the United States today. Very few descendants of the slaves who ended up in the Middle East survived. While most slaves who went to the Americas could marry and have families, most of the male slaves destined for the Middle East were castrated, and most of the children born to the women were killed at birth." While about 388,000 enslaved Africans were brought to the US, "a minimum of 28 million Africans were enslaved in the Muslim Middle East. Since at least 80% of those captured by the Muslim slave traders were calculated to have died before reaching the slave markets, it is believed that the death toll from 1,400 years of Arab and Muslim slave raids into Africa could have been as high as 112 million."

We talked about some other difficult topics. The Armenian Genocide, the Cambodian Genocide, and the Rwandan Genocide. We talked about Darfur, Biafra, and China's occupation of Tibet. They had thought that "genocide" was something that white people do. Turkey, they learned, has yet to acknowledge that the Armenian Genocide ever happened, and it charged its Nobel-Prize-winning novelist, Orhan Pamuk, with a crime for so much as mentioning it. We talked, briefly and not in detail, about Imperial Japan's unspeakable war crimes. Scholar Brian Victoria showed that Imperial Japan used Zen Buddhism to justify its crimes. They had thought that only white Christians capture, torture, and perform obscene medical experiments on helpless victims.

We talked about Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, the ironically named "Minister for Family Welfare and the Advancement of Women." She was the first woman to be charged with "genocidal rape." She ordered her Rwandan troops, "before you kill the women, you need to rape them." Spiked plants were used.

I introduced my students, albeit briefly, to this dark material for a scholarly reason. The Rothenberg approach castigates America for having had slavery. Rothenberg breaks Alan Dundes' simple rule of scholarship. You can't use Cinderella to make a sweeping generalization about America, because Cinderella is told around the world. If you want to use that tale, or any cultural product, to make a statement about a culture, you must determine what differentiates the American expression of Cinderella, or any other cultural product from other, international versions.

Rothenberg refuses to take the simple scholarly step of asking, What makes America's slavery history unique? White Americans are the only people who could have owned slaves who fought a bloody, devastating war to end slavery and to free their enslaved brothers and sisters, and they did so with Christian and American ideals as their inspiration. In contrast, Slavery is still practiced around the world. It was outlawed in Saudi Arabia only in 1962, and in Muslim Mauritania only in 2007. In June, 2020, an anti-slavery activist told the BBC that slavery is still widespread in Mauritania.

In Rothenberg's text, only whites hate, and whites only ever hate, and never help, and non-whites are only, ever, powerless victims. By introducing students to the above facts, I hoped that they would realize that the story is not "Whitie must be erased for the good of mankind," but rather an older story, the problem of evil that exists in every heart, behind every skin tone, in every era. In wrestling with the problem of evil myself, I found my solution in Christ. I hoped that they would find their own solution.

Black Lives Matter rioters tearing down statues and their media allies are acting out the selective outrage that Rothenberg inscribed and modeled in her text. In Rothenberg's book, and in modern liberal media, only whites hate, whites only hate, and never help, and non-whites are only, ever, powerless victims. Truth is that which serves the party. Neither Rothenberg nor National Public Radio penetrate Islam's many and canonical supports for still-extant slavery. Scholar David Wood has thoroughly exposed the anti-black racism and its support for slavery, including sex slavery, inscribed in Islam from its earliest and most sacred texts. See here, here, here, here, here, here, here … and too many others to mention. NPR produced, on July 1, 2020, a broadcast linking white supremacy to Christianity. In leftist media and academia, it is always, only, white, Christian Americans who do bad things. There is no universal problem of evil that we must all confront and deal with, regardless of our skin color or gender. Thus, no universal solution must be sought. Humiliating, disempowering, or getting rid of whitie is enough. "White lives don't matter … Abolish whiteness," said Cambridge professor Priyamvada Gopal. After which, she was immediately promoted.

"Say his name! George Floyd!" BLM orders us. BLM also orders us to flush down the memory hole names like Justine Ruszczyk, Genesis Rincon, Jazmine Barnes, Brandon Hendricks, or Amaria Jones. Victims of black shooters must be erased, along with statues to Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant.

This isn't just about fairness or patriotism. It's about scholarship. To focus on slavery in America and to leave students, who have spent an entire semester and a lot of cash to take a class completely unaware of the much larger Muslim slave trade, is to trash any concept of scholarship.

Like Rothenberg, I did not want to leave my students depressed. I told them that I had the solutions to all the dark material we were plowing through. I said I had it right on my desk, and if they'd close their eyes for a moment, I would lift it up and show it to them. They closed their eyes, and I lifted the solution for them to see. I was, of course, holding up a mirror.

I told them that no matter what world problem perturbed them, there were others out there working on it. I listed a few such organizations on the blackboard, including those fighting slavery, female infanticide, illiteracy, and environmental degradation. I told them that when I feel sad about the state of the world, I donate some money.

I offered a quote, "The love of a single heart can make a world of difference." The author of this quote is Immaculée Ilibagiza. During the Rwandan genocide, she had to hide in a three foot by four foot bathroom for three months with seven other women. Ilibagiza is a devout Catholic. I did not mention her Catholicism to my students. I did not want to proselytize them, only to let them know something. I wanted my students to know that some who have been through the darkest night have managed to survive, thrive, and share their light with others. I wanted my students to know that that kind of personal power is rooted not in self-pity, not in resentment, not in rage or vengeance or the rush to destroy, or self-definition as a perpetual victim. I wanted my students to know that that power is rooted in forgiveness, hope, love, and the drive to nurture and create. And I wanted them to know that that was a choice open to them.


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Photo credit: DM Air Force Base


Danusha Goska is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery

Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/how-teach-americans-hate-their-own-country-and-how-danusha-v-goska/

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