DeBlasio threatens Jews

Ryan Saavedra reports in the Daily Wire,

New York City Democrat Mayor Bill de Blasio faced an instant and widespread backlash late on Monday night over a tweet that singled out the “Jewish community” in threatening arrests for not following social distancing guidelines.

De Blasio tweeted: “My message to the Jewish community, and all communities, is this simple: the time for warnings has passed. I have instructed the NYPD to proceed immediately to summons or even arrest those who gather in large groups. This is about stopping this disease and saving lives. Period.”

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) responded: “Would DeBlasio have sent this identical tweet with the word ‘Jewish’ replaced by any other religious minority? If not, why not? Laws should be enforced neutrally w/o targeting religious faith. #ProtectFreeExercise.”

Read much more here.

Kindergarten blather from Bill de Blah-Blah

Mark Steyn on the attacks on Jews in New York:

Violent attacks on Jews are sufficiently routine in New York City (eight just last week) that a busy mayor can apparently afford to phone it in:

Hate doesn't have a home in our city.

Did whichever twelve-year-old staffer came up with that fatuous pap even have to run it by the big guy? Admittedly, Bill de Blasio's speechwriters seem to be laboring under the illusion that he's mayor not of New York but of Sesame Street. But it was so well-received that the intern on duty followed up with:

Anti-Semitism is an attack on the values of our city.

That's a real dodge, isn't it? First, "values" should be attacked - or at any rate challenged, contested, debated, eternally. Otherwise, they're just a state ideology - and, as in this case, a useful deflection for sleazy cowardly politicians. What's being attacked is not "values" but actual Jews with bones and arteries and lungs and other inviting body parts.

Thus, a few hours after the mayoral Tweet, the fellow at top right - Grafton Thomas - went to a private home in Monsey and stabbed five Jews at a Hanukkah gathering. Why do robbers rob banks? Because that's where the money is. Why go to Monsey? Because that's where the Jews are. At the time of the 2000 Census, for example, forty-two per cent of residents spoke Yiddish and seven per cent spoke Hebrew. So, if you've got a machete and you're looking for a Jew to stick it into, you've got a fifty-fifty chance of hitting paydirt. That's why Grafton Thomas was in Monsey. Nobody grabs his machete to go a-huntin' "values".

The kindergarten blather from Bill de Blah-Blah is not merely useless but deadly - in that it obstructs honest analysis of what's happening and how to stop it. If I were a New York Jew, I would utterly despise him. But fortunately for the Democrats Jews are way smarter than that. There are a million or so Ashkenazi Jews in New York City, and, according to The New York Times' Brett Stephens (in a column that seems to have gone down like a lead gefilte fish), the Ashkenazis have the highest IQ of any group on the planet. It's so high they're all planning on voting for Blah-Blah and his party until the end of time.

One result of our victimhood culture

In Commentary Magazine, Abe Greenwald writes,

...Historically, indulged victims have needed no encouragement in pointing their finger at Jews. Telling them that others are responsible for their woes has usually been enough to get them headed in that direction. But some on today’s left have given Jew-hatred an extra nudge. Their winks, dog-whistles, and outright calumnies have served as a noxious propaganda campaign and led to a surge of minority anti-Semitism. With the attempted murders in Monsey, this can no longer be kept a secret, and maybe those who have facilitated it will begin to know a little shame.

Read more here.

Different times, same anti-Semitism

via PowerLine

Media bias

Oregon Muse writes in the Ace of Spades blog,

The fact that the Democrats are circling the wagons around an open, undisguised anti-Semite who refuses to stop making anti-Semitic statements is mentioned only in passing; no, the idiot reporter thinks the real story here is that the Republicans are "pouncing" on it. News items like this are the best proof of media bias. Find me a story in the MSM wherein the Democrats are said to be "pouncing" or "seizing" on something and I'll eat a bug.

Read more here.

Where was our Vice President today?

Jim Hoft reports at The Gateway Pundit that Vice President Mike Pence traveled to Missouri to participate in the clean up of a Jewish Cemetery that was vandalized.

Vandals damaged dozens of headstones this week at the historic Jewish Cemetery north of St. Louis.

Read more here.

"But, outside of the UN, there is some good news!"

Thanks to Bookworm, who provides this link to the delightful Nikki Haley in her first UN press conference.

Do go to Bookworm's site where she brilliantly exposes a Leftist hiding behind Anne Frank's skirts.

Anti-Semitism

Can we think for a moment about anti-Semitism? Bookworm will be our guide.

In the early Middle Ages, England was as one with other European countries: Jews were allowed to live in the kingdom but they did so at the King’s sufferance. The monarchy (including attendant courtiers) looked to Jews for ready cash. (The quick answer to why were the Jews money lenders is as follows: Early Christianity barred charging interest on money, something that made loans financially impossible. Jewish law, however, did not prevent charging interest, although the rabbis had rules against usurious interest. Additionally, European laws banned Jews from most other livelihoods.)

As long as the cash was flowing in its direction, the British monarchy allowed the Jews to exist in the country and protected them. When members of the court, the King included, could no longer pay the Jews or when the King decided that he could do better by simply stealing all the gold rather than borrowing it, that protection went out the window.

Some of you may be asking “Protection against what or from whom?” Obviously, some of that protection was from the King himself. Early medieval British Jews always had to deal with the monarch’s philosophy, which was “Do right by me and I won’t kill you.” Doing right meant low-interest loans to begin with; no-interest repayment plans when the monarch demanded a plan change; and, eventually, forgiving the debt entirely when the monarch wouldn’t or couldn’t replay it.

Most of the protection, though, was against the ordinary English people who believed wholeheartedly in what have become the classic Christian antisemitic tropes: Jews used the blood of Christian children for their evil Passover rituals; Jews defiled innocent Christian maidens; Jews killed Christ and their descendents should be punished for eternity. Christ, who was himself a Jew, never taught these things.

If those classic tropes sound familiar, they should. Modern day Muslims, from the Palestinian strongholds, to Egypt, to Saudi Arabia, to Iran, to Dearborn, Michigan currently rely on 1,300 year old Muslim variations : Jews use the blood of Muslim children for their Passover evil rituals; Jews defile innocent Muslim maidens; Jews were disrespectful to Mohamed and their descendents should be punished for eternity. Same song; slightly different words. More on this later.

In 1190, the fevered antisemitism that powered the British people culminated in the York massacre. The Christian citizens’ bloodthirsty hunt for the Jews became so fervid that many Jews opted for a peaceful, immediate death at their own hands, rather than an inevitable, brutal death at the hands of an enraged mob.

To summarize — For the last 1,000 years, we’ve seen four different types of antisemitism:

Christian antisemitism. Medieval Christian antisemitism, which was grounded in religious faith and was intermittently genocidal.
“Othering” antisemitism. Post-Enlightenment 19th and 20th century British and American (and sort of French) antisemitism, which was based upon cultural “othering” and was not genocidal, although Jews were certainly victimized.
Socialist or Leftist antisemitism. 20th and (sadly) 21st century socialist antisemitism, which draws on all the old hatreds but reconfigured itself as an antipathy to control over capital. When mixed in with a European nationalist fervor (e.g., Germany), a nation’s traditional Christian Antisemitism (i.e., those nations that Nazis conquered that still willingly handed over their Jews), or a leader’s paranoia (e.g., Stalin, who feared the Jews would overthrow him), it can range from ugly insults to unconstrained genocide.
Muslim antisemitism. Like Christian antisemitism, this is tied to faith. Like socialist antisemitism, it’s also tied to control over capital. Like “othering” antisemitism, it’s tied to Jews generally, not just religious Jews. Unlike all the other types of antisemitism, Muslim antisemitism is not tied to a specific century or movement. Muslim Antisemitism has existed unchanged since Mohamed’s time. He is the prophet so his excoriations and incitements to murder are graven in stone and must be obeyed at all times and in all places.
The above list leads to this question: Today, in the 21st century, which is the antisemitism that Jews need to fear.

Neither Christian nor Othering antisemitism should worry Jews today. Serious Christian antisemitism is a thing of the past. Indeed, when it comes to genocide, the sad truth is that, throughout vast swaths of the world — swaths that not-so-coincidentally align perfectly with Muslim-majority or Muslim-controlled regions — Christians are on the receiving end of a massive genocide. In America, I know that there are Christians who don’t like Jews, whether in classical medieval terms or in “othering” terms, but they are not genocidal. One particular individual might be a crazed killer, but the the small cadre of Christian antisemites in America is not worth worrying about.

Othering Antisemitism was never something to fear. It barred Jews from career and social advance, and made them the object of opprobrium, but it did not end with them burned in buildings, dead in the street, or gassed and burned. In America, Jews overcame it by being so damn good at the things Americans needed that the Americans of necessity had to invite them into the bank or law firm or buy their products.

In the last 50 years, Muslims and Socialists have joined forces and are creating a situation that’s ripe for genocide. Israel is ground zero. Socialist antisemites try to frame their antipathy to Israel in terms of “two states,” and “imperialism,” and “anti-Arab racism,” but some, surely, must understand that Hamas and its fellow travelers have always been brutally honest about their plans: They intend to kill every Jew they find. Muslims make no effort to hide their goal.

Thanks to this socialist moral support, Muslims are getting increasingly aggressive against European Jews. This is especially so in France which, until Frau Merkel’s immigration folly, had a greater percentage of Muslims making up its population than any other European country. It’s not just headline attacks such as the Hyper Cache antisemitic attack (which Obama, when unscripted, carelessly glossed over as “a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris” getting killed).

French Jews, who must disguise their faith on the streets and surround their homes and institutions with armed guards, see the genocidal handwriting on the wall. They are frantic to leave France. They understand that, while Israel may be directly under Iran’s nuclear umbrella, at least Israel’s Jewish government is not largely composed of socialists sympathetic to Muslim antisemitism, anti-Zionism, and genocidal fury.

Conclusion? Jews need to fear Leftist and Muslim antisemitism, both of which are alive and well, and which history demonstrates too often end in genocide. Muslims are explicitly told to practice genocide. Socialism, once it gains critical mass, simply seems to end up in genocide.

...In early 21st-century America,the scary kind of American antisemitism, the genocidal kind that isn’t just about “I don’t like you and don’t marry my daughter,” is a Muslim and Leftist phenomenon. These two groups are the ones that, in the 21st century, engaged in genocide. For the Muslims, it was then, as it is now, a daily religious obligation. For the socialists, it was the inevitable end of their fealty to Karl Marx’s ideas. In the 21st-century, these two groups are drawing together (1) to marginalize Jews in the diaspora (harass them, insult them, kill them one at a time) and (2) to destroy the Jews entirely in their homeland of Israel.

Bookworm goes on to describe what Donald Trump is doing to fight anti-Semitism. Read the rest here.

A calamity

"Progressives are seldom deterred by missing facts."

Bookworm tells us what she does on Facebook under her real name

I daily link to news stories about rampant, naked antisemitism on America’s college and university campuses; the antisemitism powering the BDS movement; the antisemitism that’s become integral to the Black Lives Matter movement; the antisemitism that animates intersectionality; and the antisemitism in the Nation of Islam, which gave birth to Keith Ellison. Each of those incubators for antisemitism, of course, is a core Democrat constituency that neither the DNC nor any Democrat candidate (including Hillary) has ever disavowed.

For international stories, I point daily to the doings at the UN, to Iran’s routine assertions that it will annihilate Israel (a goal closer to reality thanks to Obama’s willingness to hand hundreds of millions of dollars to Iran), to the blatantly antisemitic attacks that terrorists have folded into the larger terrorist attacks that grabbed headlines; and to the endless Palestinian depredations against Israeli citizens. During the knife intifada, I was posting stories about murderous attacks every day — and sometimes several times a day.

...Throughout the years, my Facebook friends have responded to these posts in two ways: my few conservative friends invariably commented on these posts; the rest of my friends — all of whom are Progressives — ignored them entirely.

...So let me sum up here: For the last decade at least, the American mainstream media has downplayed or ignored rampant antisemitism at home and abroad, including antisemitism at the heart of the Democrat party. Likewise, for the last several years, my Progressive friends have been equally willing to turn a blind eye to this antisemitism. Indeed, they’ve been supportive of Obama’s increasingly overt efforts to isolate Israel from both the US and America, leaving it (and the Jews within it) prey to the thugs surrounding her, including a potentially nuclear Iran.

Let me distill that summation even more: Throughout the Bush and the Obama years, Progressives have been entirely okay with surging, violent antisemitism, both at home and abroad.

That is, they’ve been okay until suddenly they saw a benefit to attaching the “antisemitic” label to Trump. Instantly, my Facebook feed was crawling with posts claiming that, overnight, antisemitism has become a major threat in America.

The Progressives’ evidence? Well, it’s pretty slim. Wolf Howling has already attacked the paucity of any data supporting the claim that Steve Bannon is an antisemite or that Breitbart News, which is heavily staffed by conservative and Orthodox Jews, all of whom are pro-Israel, is a hotbed of right wing antisemitism. Progressives are seldom deterred by missing facts.

Read more here.

Our trajectory

At PJ Media David Solway lists nine phenomena that may portend an American collapse.

Education. American pre-university education, with its inbred pedagogical and curricular decrepitude, has been further compromised by the entrenching of the Common Core program, characterized by coercive federal intrusion and string-attached funding, monopoly publishing and testing, elimination of pivotal American figures and historical events, a leftist disposition, and a powerful pro-Muslim bias.

Higher education is in no better shape. Standards have been lowered to admit those who are unfit for the rigors of post-secondary education; the curriculum has been both diluted and politicized; the campus has become a hotbed of revolutionary sentiment and activism; debate, argument and the free exchange of ideas are no longer part of its intellectual currency as a left consensus has shut down the expression of contrary views; feminist orthodoxy has exerted a castrating effect on university teaching and policy; trigger warnings prioritize feelings over knowledge, infantilizing a student body that must be spared the slightest twitch of emotional discomfort; and draconian language laws meant to combat expressions of “micro-aggression,” no matter how vanilla, have prohibited statements like “America is the land of opportunity” or “I believe the most qualified person should get the job.” In short, the utopian ideal of “social justice” has snookered the pursuit of truth and the formation of inquiring minds.

...The university now graduates in ever increasing volume a class of sanctimonious and indoctrinated incompetents—a recipe for social calamity.

Gender Theory. ...Putting the stamp of legitimacy on the farce-in-progress, Obama has just signaled his approval of gender dysfunction in appointing the freakish transgender aspirant Raffi Freedman-Gurspan as director of outreach and recruitment for the White House personnel office.

Raffi Freedman-Gurspan in Washington, D.C.
National Center for Transgender Equality via AP

Such aberrations follow from and go hand in hand with a longstanding, aggressive and doctrinaire feminism that has infected every important social and professional institution, leading to the legal and societal deprivileging and even the feminization of men, who must not only endure institutional inequities but must continually apologize for their existence—another recipe for social and cultural catastrophe.

Immigration. Open-door immigration, a consequence of programmatic multiculturalism conceived as a social good and justified by the contentless mantra of “diversity,” is a surefire source of disorder, tension and sporadic episodes of violence. Indeed, the incursion of Islam into the West is nothing less than the latest installment of the millennial campaign to subvert and conquer the liberal democracies of the developed world. The Islamic doctrine of hijra or migration, emulating Mohammad’s journeys to Medina (originally Yathrib) and Abyssinia, is being re-enacted before our noses. The evidence is all around us and is so convincing that only the deluded, the cowed or the complicit can deny or cosmeticize or facilitate its progress.

Europe is disintegrating before our eyes, the Commonwealth nations are gradually being destabilized, and the United States now finds itself saddled not only with a growing and restive Islamic community but with dubious Muslim officials embedded in the highest levels of its administration and a president who has modified the oath of allegiance so that immigrants [read: Muslims] need not “bear arms on behalf of the United States.”

Add to this the unstanchable deluge of illegal migrants pouring across the southern border, abetted by the current government, swollen by anchor baby, “birth tourism,” and antiquated chain migration law, and encouraged by the existence of so-called sanctuary cities. As a result, we have a country losing its national character and exposing itself to mounting domestic turbulence.

Religion. ...As G.K. Chesterton is reputed to have said, “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”

...One becomes a social justice warrior or a warrior for Islam or some other substitute for what has been relinquished.

...Aside from the robust evangelical community, the U.S., like Europe, is turning away from its religious foundations, with the attendant loss of civil coherence.

Replacement Ratio. When a nation ceases to reproduce itself, the prognosis for long-term survival is patently negative. Every liberal democracy, with the exception of Israel, has fallen dramatically beneath the replacement ratio of 2.1, including the United States (reaching an historic low in 2013, according to Forbes ). This is a palpable sign of impending ruination that cannot be ignored.


...As Western cultures grow increasingly hedonistic , concentrating on pleasure and entertainment rather than living productive and reproductive lives—Iain Bamforth remarks in A Doctor’s Dictionary how “hedonism has turned into a kind of militancy”— as marriage becomes a failing social institution, and as pro-choice abortion is now virtually unlimited, it is only a matter of time before the regenerative mortgage forecloses.

Anti-Semitism. Although anti-Semitism and its cognate, anti-Zionism, are by no means a significant social depravity in the U.S., they flourish in three major constituencies: the elite leftist segment of the population, the Democratic Party, and, most tellingly, the administration of Barack Obama, whose foreign policy is demonstrably anti-Israel and pro-Muslim, in particular pro-Iranian. Throwing his support behind the Muslim Brotherhood while playing Doctor Faustus to a diabolical ayatollah, he has, in fact, surrendered the Middle East to prolonged Muslim insurgency, thus endangering the survival of Israel, America’s traditional and loyal ally. Former Israeli ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren’s recent book Ally, despite its measured tones, makes this act of treachery amply clear. Similarly, “if Obama has his way,” observes James Lewis in a short but compendious article for American Thinker, “Israel will be the first national victim.”

Race. Race relations in the U.S. have markedly deteriorated under the suzerainty of the present administration, in some places resembling guerilla warfare as black-on-white violence proliferates and race riots are becoming an almost regular occurrence. Victor Davis Hanson in an article for PJ Media aptly titled “The Tragic and Complete Collapse of Racial Relations” indicates that “a small cohort of urban African-American males under fifty—no more than 3-4% of the general population—is responsible for about 50% of many of the violent crimes committed.” The racial divide is widening rather than closing and the prospect for civil upheaval metastasizes alarmingly.

The Economy. The American economy under the statist and regulatory dispensation of the present administration is plainly on the verge of implosion. Massive unemployment, the piling on of astronomical debt, the collapse of the housing market, the insensate printing of fiat money, the downgrading of the nation’s credit rating, the high cost of the carbon conspiracy fostered by the false hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming, a crushing trade deficit, and the precarious status of the reserve currency all point to a looming and unprecedented fiscal cataclysm in the making.

Obama. Anyone who doubts that Barack Hussein Obama, to quote James Lewis once again, is a “false messiah” and “a cancer on the body politic,” a Marxist-trained and Alinsky-inspired radical, an Islamic sympathizer, a nuclearizing agent for Iran (thus fulfilling Carter’s legacy), a congenital liar and frivolous narcissist, a contemptible dispenser of apologies for a country that has been—or had been—a force for good in a maleficent world, and the worst and most dangerous president in American history by an order of magnitude—anyone who doubts this has not been listening or looking or is himself dedicated to America’s destruction.

A considerable sector of the American public is surely aware, dimly or acutely, of several, many or all of the nine signs of approaching national collapse assembled here, even though these portents are almost universally censored or deliberately misrepresented by the liberal elite, by government and academia, and by mainstream press and TV coverage. These entities operate under the aegis of what has come to be known as political correctness, the assault upon truth, honesty and candid expression that taints and devitalizes the culture. It serves a triple function, namely, to suppress anything that opposes orthodox opinion or is felt as unpleasant, no matter how crucial to our wellbeing, to flatter our exalted sense of ourselves, and to promote a political agenda by masking its underlying purpose. As George Orwell famously observed and history has abundantly demonstrated, the perversion of language is a tried and tested facet of totalitarian strategy, which seeks to destroy the ability of a subject population to think lucidly and to make reasoned judgments.

... Can the desired election of a responsible and patriotic conservative administration undo the damage and turn back the tide of devastation? Can America return to its foundations? The future, like science, is not settled. Chance—or miracle—may intervene to alter a trajectory.

Read more here.

Absence of romantic victims

Victor Davis Hanson is writing on a cruise ship in Cypris. He explains how Turky still controls over 40 percent of the best land there. He writes about hypocrisy.

We see such hypocrisy when the West stays silent while Muslims butcher each other by the thousands in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya and Syria. Only when a Westernized country like Israel inflicts far less injury to Muslims does the West become irate. The same paradox seems to hold true for victims. Apparently, Western Christian Greeks are not the romantic victims that Palestinian Muslims are.

In the 40 years since they lost their land, Greek Cypriots have turned the once impoverished south into a far more prosperous land than the once-affluent but now stagnant Turkish-occupied north — unlike the Palestinians, who have not used their know-how to turn Gaza or Ramallah into a city like Limassol.

The next time anti-Israeli demonstrators shout about divided cities, refugees, walls, settlers and occupied land, let us understand that those are not necessarily the issues in the Middle East. If they were, the Cyprus tragedy would also be center stage. Likewise, crowds would be condemning China for occupying Tibet, or still sympathizing with millions of Germans who fled a now-nonexistent Prussia, or deploring religious castes in India, or harboring anger over the tough Russian responses to Georgia, Crimea and Ukraine, or deploring beheadings in northern Iraq.

Instead, accept that the Middle East is not just about a dispute over land. Israel is inordinately condemned for what it supposedly does because its friends are few, its population is tiny, and its adversaries beyond Gaza numerous, dangerous and often powerful.

And, of course, because it is Jewish.

Read more here.