NPR Goes for Broke on “Palestine”
National Public Radio Goes for Broke on “Palestine”
October 3rd, 2011
by Josh First
American tax dollars continue to fund National Public Radio’s left-wing agenda, one aspect of which is NPR’s aggressively anti-Israel, pro-Arab imperialism messaging.
April 22nd, 2011, saw NPR’s reporters across the board go for broke on the upcoming application for the creation of a second “Palestinian” state, this one planned for Judea, Samaria, and Gaza. The original and primary state that is 78% of the original Palestine Mandate is the current Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, ruled by the carpetbagging family of King Abdullah. In the 1920s, his family was chased out of the Arabian Peninsula by the al-Saud clan, now known as the Saudis. Approximately 80% of the Arabs living in Jordan identify as “Palestinians.”
NPR is no stranger to controversy over the issue of Arab imperialism and colonialism in the Holy Land. Last year Harrisburg’s local NPR affiliate, WITF, interviewed NPR’s ombudsman, who disclaimed any anti-Israel agenda.
“Critics call NPR ‘National Palestine Radio’, and we reject that, it’s ridiculous,” the ombudsman said in that 2010 interview.
Just months later, NPR’s president Mr. Ron Schiller was filmed making a pitch to supposed Arab donors, during which he bragged that NPR is known for its Leftist bias and known as “National Palestine Radio.” His fundraising ploy was that Arabs should naturally donate to NPR because it is a mouthpiece for their views. He was believable because his assertions about NPR’s Leftist activism have been widely observed and documented for decades.
Schiller promptly resigned from NPR after that film went public, and NPR promptly dropped heavy Israel reporting. Israel had been enormously disproportionately featured in NPR’s reporting for decades, and none of it was positive. After Schiller’s resignation, and the subsequent firing of the NPR vice president (Vivian Schiller, said to be no relation to Ron Schiller) who had been behind much of NPR’s political strong-arming of its reporters, NPR laid low and hid from scrutiny, knowing that it had finally been outed, all on the heels of NPR’s Ellen Weiss being dismissed for firing reporter Juan Williams in 2009. NPR is no stranger to political correctness, well, actually NPR is in the vanguard of it, but with so many firings and scandalous resignations associated with PC, the opinion service quieted down for a while.
Now, months later, NPR sees a unique opportunity to create pressure for the advancement of Islamic imperialism and Arab colonialism through the creation of another “Palestinian” state outside of Jordan, both of which NPR has long, long supported in the Holy Land.
In a September 22nd interview with Susan Rice, the Obama Administration’s United Nations representative, NPR’s interviewer asked question after question that revealed her support for Islamic imperialism and her anti-Israel bias. Even NPR’s late report on finance and the economy that same day featured a story on the supposed “Palestinian” economy.
That fawning report highlighted Arab business people supposedly working in quiet but successful obscurity, and failed to mention any of the enormous challenges facing Arabs in Judea and Samaria who wish to create a new Arab state there. In other words, it was just one more NPR propaganda piece, the kind that NPR executives used for fundraising among anti-Israel donors.
On October 3rd, 2011, incoming NPR CEO Gary Knell called for NPR to be fully funded by U.S. taxpayers and for elected officials to “depoliticize” NPR.
So, according to Knell, NPR is supposed to continue with business as usual, where every single molecule of the daily news is heavily politicized to the Left by NPR staff, but the American taxpayers who subsidize it are supposed to now ignore that and let NPR off the hook. Politicization-as-usual by NPR, but Heaven forefend that Americans raise that lack of balance to a political level where their tax money can be accounted for.
Like his predecessors, Knell either does not understand the problem, or, more likely, he wants to pretend the issues facing NPR are some sort of hoax. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, folks, is the message.
If there was ever a time to apply the Fairness Doctrine, this would be it. It’s a deeply flawed policy that undermines free speech, but when it comes to public money used to spread messages and promote policies that are directly opposed to American interests and policies, NPR is the poster child for its implementation.
Or better yet, disband NPR and return the savings to the taxpayers. There’s no compelling need or reason for NPR to exist any longer. Its inability to maintain journalistic balance is the constant proof of that.
What’s In a Pocket Knife?
That first pocket knife weighed a ton in my hand, the weight being strictly emotional as the responsibility for something sharp and deadly sank in to my five-year-old brain. I still have that knife today, and would you believe it’s about the cutest little folding knife ever made? If it’s even two inches long, I’d be surprised.
After that, over the next few years my dad bought me ever-bigger pocket knives, each one a successively bigger symbol of my increasing responsibility and age. Dad was tough, too, because had I ever screwed up, he would have taken away whatever he had given me. Basically, they remained pocket knives, truly, stashed away in my front pants pocket, and rarely opened. Fear of screwing up and losing what I had gained was behind my being responsible.
Leap forward 35 years, and I was beginning to hand out pocket knives to my own kids. First the two daughters, and now my son.
Each got one when they were ready. The eldest was about nine, and she showed interest in it for a year, and then promptly became a teenager. Fold-out lipstick became her obsession. Even shooting became passe.
The next girl got her knife around seven, and her first gun at twelve. She’s still into them. Her middle name is “Miss Responsibility.”
The boy, ahhh, the boy…if you are an adult, then you know how boys are. They are not girls. Where girls are carefully examining things, boys are quickly demolishing them or exploding them. Would he be ready by five or six, like I had been when I got my first knife?
As a dad, I like to replicate as many of the first-time symbols with my kids that I enjoyed myself. First BB gun at six, first deer rifle at 10, first .22 at 11, first shotgun at 12. My son, I am hoping, will want to be like me. Most dads’ dream is to have their son be the mini-me, and lots of boys enjoy it. Great basis for a relationship. It worked in the Pleistocene, when hunting and woodcraft skills were passed down this way, and it works today. Watching your boy become a little man is what being a dad to a boy is all about. Great stuff.
Well, this summer in Sag Harbor I bought what was to be the boy’s first pocket knife. When I returned from the hardware store to my family, all sitting around an outdoor cafe table, each nursing a foamy ice cream drink, the rebuttals came swift and hard. Especially from Daughter Number One.
The boy is not ready, was the general refrain.
“He’s a baby,” said one daughter.
“He’s too spoiled to handle it right,” said the other.
My city-born wife had long ago yielded to the forest of rods and rifles scattered about our home, leaning in corners or stashed across door frames. Each one or pair representative of a different season or combination of hunting and fishing seasons at a given time of year. Her eyes said she was uncertain about this, even though she knows how important it is to me to reach this milestone.
With the ice cream soda in his hand and the straw in his mouth, his eyes goofily crossed and focused on the receding liquid, the boy had no idea what was happening, so we were spared the agony of offering something and then taking it away. The brief discussion flew right by him, and I kept the little box in my pocket.
Tonight on his Cub Scouts hike at the PA Game Commission headquarters trail, three months past the Long Island moment, he took with him the pocket knife he got two weeks ago. It would be surprising if any of the other cub scouts carried a pocket knife with them, and he quietly knew it. Step one in developing a sense of responsibility is discretion. Good boy!
Two weeks ago we were in the midst of a historic flood, and our home was inundated by the mighty Susquehanna. Times of crisis are times of learning, and as my wife and kids were leaving me for higher ground, I handed the little man his first-ever pocket knife, in its box, wrapped with a ribbon.
“You are the little man while I am away, and you are responsible for your family tonight while I cannot be with you, OK?,” I said to him. Even as the water was washing at the bottom of my wife’s vehicle and pouring into the house, the family gathered round to congratulate him and welcome him into the society of the Big and Responsible.
Now I have regrets. The knife is a Schrade, long the standard by which other pocket knives were judged. But this knife is now made in China, and its details show it.
All other pocket knives that I give out are made in America by Case, and at weddings, birthdays, bar mitzvas, business deal closings, etc., I hand them out. It’s my way of passing along a piece of America, both symbolic and functional, as a token of our moment together. Clients and friends have pulled them out, years later, to proudly show me that they still have it, so I know it’s a meaningful tradition.
But in Sag Harbor, they were out of Case and just had this little Schrade. And wanting to capture and enhance our family vacation moment just right, I bought it. This Schrade knife, model 897 UH with Spey, sheepsfoot, and Turkish clipped blades, just doesn’t feel like the real deal. That Made-In-China feel is all over it, as its fit, finish, and materials all seem cheap and weak.
Which means that the little man will have to get a second knife sooner rather than later, and it’ll be a Case, something that’s really a quality product. And this second gift will introduce him to the other aspect of owning outdoors gear: You just can’t ever have too much, and once you get started collecting it, you really end up using it. Outdoors life is the best living there is, so the first and the second knives are both seeds toward something much greater. A life of adventure and accomplishment, health and clean fun…All that and more is wrapped up in this little knife in my hand.
Obama’s gaffes are fun. Jewish janitors? Intercontinental railroad? More, more!
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2011/09/obama-congressional-black-caucus-video-gaffe.html
Flood of 2011 Experiences In a Nutshell
Ladies and gentlemen, like many families along the Susquehanna Valley, our clan experienced a lot of displacement, loss, and discomfort as a result of the five feet of water in our basement.
But challenges like the flood are just a test, a test of our abilities, our faith, our ability to be a good neighbor, and our friendships.
It also tests whether or not businesses are willing to be good neighbors, or if they try to take advantage of people who are vulnerable and needy.
Here are some kudos that came out of our experience, turning the lemons into lemonade:
***Big thank you-s to Ed, Dominic, and Devon, friends who over-rode my last-minute living-in-denial mentality and simply showed up, despite my protests, and helped our family carry hundreds of pounds of things out of the basement and up to the first floor, and then from the first floor to the second, as the flood warnings changed hourly. Just in time. Without their muscle and hard work, our personal and financial losses would have been much higher.
***Big thank you to long-time friend Mark Brodsky, who selflessly dropped off a huge generator on my front porch on Friday morning, which kept the sump pumps going long after the electricity had been turned off in our city.
***Big thank you to Mark Woodland, an amazing friend and neighbor, who helped me set up sump pump after sump pump in our basement, despite the late hours, the gross water, and the hard work. Mark is a gifted technician of anything involving mechanics. Without Mark, I likely would have ended up with the pump hoses circling back into the house.
***Thanks to Rabbi Ron Muroff who descended like an angel to help out himself and then with other volunteers (thanks, Judge Solomon et. al.) when we needed help most. We are not members of his house of worship, but we will be making a donation to it.
***Thanks to neighbors Steve and Dick for helping with the sump pumps and generator when I was running helter-skelter.
***Thanks to the Harrisburg City Police for putting in long hours chasing down would-be looters in our neighborhood, putting up with ridiculous answers from these guys, and for bringing comfort to me when our neighborhood was dark, abandoned, and completely vulnerable to break-ins and looting. Officer Bobby Yost, call any time for a BBQ in our back yard. You earned it, buddy.
***Thanks to the two very likeable Allstate adjustors, Tim and Paul, for treating us fairly and kindly. These two suuthin good ol’ boys from Louisiana are hunters, fishermen, even-keeled, and really all-American in all respects. We enjoyed their company as well as their hard work to ensure that we were treated fairly. Hey, fellow Central Pennsylvanians, these guys from the bayous are our kind of people. If you desire a vacation in a very different part of the nation but still want to feel at home, I think we can safely recommend coastal Louisiana.
***Thanks to FEMA for helping so many of our communities. We pay our taxes for this kind of service, and it’s nice to see our government provide service with alacrity and a smile. James Ferguson, our guest FEMA employee (well, a contractor) all the way from Tacoma, had an easy, caring way, and a hard work ethic.
***Thanks big time to our US Mail carrier, John, who stopped briefly to talk with me on Friday, September 9th, to strategize about the best paths for him to take to various neighborhood homes under feet of muddy water. Yeah, we know that the US Mail folks are under the gun in so many ways, but John delivered our mail despite encountering conditions that he could have easily walked away from.
***Thanks to Todd at Rainbow Cleaning. Although he made money, Todd also helped us above and beyond the call of duty. Without his dozen airplane-prop – sized fans and two industrial dehumidifiers for almost two weeks, our basement would have never really dried out. Todd provided good advice, too.
***Thanks to my parents and to the Family Boss, Viv, for keeping us all on the straight and narrow despite the strong urges I often felt to run screaming in circles.
Josh
My Flight 93 Crash Site Experience, In a Nutshell
Why We Must Protect Flight 93’s Landscape
September 6, 2011
By Josh First
From October 2001 through October 2003, I led the effort to conserve the Flight 93 crash site for an eventual national memorial. At that crucial time in its development, I was working for a national non-profit land protection group, and the National Park Service asked me to help out, just weeks after September 11, 2001.
During that formative two years, I took a lot of criticism for targeting a relatively large area that needed to be protected. It’s nice now to see the Flight 93 memorial taking shape around those boundaries, not just because I feel personally vindicated, but because it’s unquestionable that the American public expects our national monuments and memorials to be fully representative of greatness, including that of Flight 93.
People have asked me why the memorial needed to be such a large area, roughly 2,200 acres, and my response used to be “Go to Gettysburg battlefield and see what kind of an experience you would have there, standing on just six acres.”
In other words, can the importance and mechanics of something that occurred on a large scale be boiled down to its essence in a physically small area? My answer is No, it cannot, and I think that anyone who is interested in what happened at Gettysburg or at any other famous American battlefield will agree. At each location, the local story unfolded across a landscape, and in each landscape certain facts occurred. These places become important to the public because the interplay between the facts and the landscape are important. They tell a story that represents heroism, determination, American grit, qualities that we all want to recognize and immortalize. These qualities and symbols make us quintessentially American, and we are proud of them.
At Gettysburg, Antietam, Yorktown, Pearl Harbor, and Flight 93, heroes defended America. What took hours, days, or weeks at some took only seconds at Flight 93’s final resting place. Having interviewed all of the landowners at Flight 93, each one offered me a different recollection of the plane’s final seconds. We all know now that those final seconds were a frenzied battle for control of the cockpit, led by Americans who knew that their nation was under attack and who were determined not to let their plane become a missile to hit the Capitol or the White House. Phone records and the recollections of family members who spoke with their loved ones point to a truly heroic effort that the passengers knew was likely to be suicidal. Nevertheless, they broke into the cockpit and duked it out, American style.
Flight 93 landed upside down after yawing and veering wildly across the landscape. It nearly clipped a large oxygen tank that fueled hand-held torches used to dismantle junk metal, and the workers below involuntarily fell to their knees as the enormous plane roared by, just feet above their heads. We all know that the last living views of our heroic passengers was Pennsylvania’s green countryside, the bowl-shaped landscape that surrounds the crash site. That area is now mostly protected, and it gives current and future visitors the opportunity to visualize and memorialize for themselves what happened on Flight 93. No homes, motels, or theme parks will ever press against this hallowed ground.
Again, if you’ve ever been to Gettysburg battlefield, and you’ve looked from Little Round Top across to Devil’s Den, and visualized the brave soldiers who fought there, then you know why the immediate landscape around Flight 93’s resting place must be conserved. Future generations of Americans deserve the same inspiration that we now take for granted. Just as past generations protected Gettysburg’s landscape for us, long before it became a pressured commercial area, so we must also do in Shanksville for generations of Americans to come.
Something Is Rotten in Scotland
Scotland: Western Civilization’s Poster Child for Politically Correct Rot
© Josh First
August 30, 2011
Western Civilization is crumbling from within, rotting from decades of increasingly demanding sentimentalism that pushes out laws based on equal justice before the law, and replaces them with laws based on redistribution of wealth and the rewarding of purported victims, whose sole claim to victim status is that some people feel badly for them. Of all possible places, the remote, scenic, and otherwise pretty much unimportant Scotland is the ugly poster child for this rot.
Political correctness has long been antagonistic towards America’s essential institutions, core beliefs, and justice system. It has made increasing headway here, but its roots run deep in Europe, where it has removed former greatness and replaced it with enforced apathy. Recall that England was nearly destroyed by Nazi Germany because English pacifism ran so deep. Pacifism is a core element of political correctness. Pained by World War I, “The War to End All Wars,” the English were blinded by a messianic belief that all wars were wrong, and that evil must be appeased, instead of confronted. By the 1930s, England had emasculated its Imperial self beyond recognition right when Hitler’s un-emasculated and newly imperialistic Germans nearly stormed its gates.
Decades later, pacifist England rejected the lesson of World War II, and Her Majesty’s subjects in its furthest occupied territories, including Scotland, casually absorbed Britain’s forced gentility. As one of those people opposed to the forced notion of a “United Kingdom,” as the English blithely claim to be, it’s always been difficult for me to admit that England truly influenced its once-great and long independent neighbors, including Wales, Ireland, and Scotland. Based on their best qualities, they should be above it.
All three nations have long histories of unique cultures and languages, inspired and fierce warriors, and proud identities. All three nations represent the high-water mark and stone wall rejection of Roman conquest, with London ironically the site of Rome’s regional capital, a kind of Quisling-English monument. England’s long, cruel tyranny over the three nations, still alive with the English occupation of Northern Ireland, eroded to bare nubbins those great characteristics of yore. One must now admit that enforced imperial unity has caused these three nations to learn the very worst that England has to offer. One nation stands above the rest in its willingness to prove it: Scotland. Sadly, “Make the world England” worked in Scotland.
True it is that peat-flavored whisky, bright Tartan cloth, Nessie, wool sweaters, and ubiquitous sheep upon scenic vales distinguish Scotland. And Scotland still provides mirth in Irish pubs enthralled by players of the Uilleann pipes, who gave the bagpipes to the Scots, who never got the joke. But fast forward six hundred and seventy five years after the Battle of Bannockburn, and Scotland became the location of the 1988 Lockerbie bombing, where Pan Am flight 103 was remotely blown up in flight by Libyan Mohamed al-Megrahi, who was subsequently convicted and imprisoned in Scotland. Lockerbie is the place in Scotland where most of the bombed plane’s parts and 270 people fell to earth. It should be hallowed ground, an inspiring symbol.
Although 270 innocents were killed, in 2009 Scotland released Megrahi from a Scottish prison cell on “humanitarian grounds.” All levels of the Scots government participated in the decision to release Megrahi, who was subsequently received and feted as a hero in Libya. Megrahi remains quite alive today, and Scottish politicians remain defiant about their decision.
Despite evidence that Megrahi’s release was a decision based on falsified medical advice and appears calculated to gain favor with Libya and access for British Petroleum to Libya’s oil and gas fields, Scottish officials refuse to admit that it was un-just to release a mass-murderer from prison because he did not feel well. They were, after all, appealing to the highest of politically correct causes, “humanitarianism.”
Humanitarianism is the sentimental basis for much of the politically correct thinking now permeating western nations. It is responsible for the false notions of fairness that result in injustices like Megrahi’s release, the calls to dismantle America’s borders, the blocking and then banning of the death penalty, and the release of recidivist violent criminals from U.S. jails. Under humanitarianism, the rule of law is being up-ended.
On August 20th, 2011, Susan Cohen, mother of 20-year-old Lockerbie victim Theo, was quoted in The Scotsman News as saying “The Scottish legal system is an absolute joke. In the US, we would not be able to have one man come out with the foolish line of ‘compassionate release’ and then let him go. I want there to be more trials over this – I hope there will be – but I wouldn’t trust them to be held in Scotland after what has happened. This is going to go down in history as a terrible black mark against Scotland. You are given your new-found freedom, and these are the kinds of decisions that are made.”
CNN reported that Frank Duggan, president of the Victims of Pan Am 103 support group, wrote an email to CNN on August 29th, 2011, that “blasted the report that al Megrahi was near death, saying he didn’t believe it or that the convicted felon merited any reprieve.” ‘His family is trying to make a sympathetic character out of an unrepentant, murderous monster,’ Duggan wrote.
Said English politician Iain Gray, “The sight of Megrahi last month acting as a cheerleader for a dictator indicted for war crimes [Moamar Gadafi] turned the stomach.” And yet, the Scots remain defiant. They believe that their decision making is unassailable, because they were making nice. Under it all simmers the other politically correct notion that all Muslims are automatically victims in western nations, and despite being a murderer, Megrahi is a member of that untouchable victim group. Free he must be.
Scotland’s official behavior is important because, as a former bastion of the Protestant ethic that gave us western civilization and the foundation of American democracy, what happens in Scotland indicates what might be happening elsewhere in the broader body politic of western civilization. If rotten politics are happening there, then rotten politics might be happening here. Official injustices carried out in Scotland can form the foundation for un-just decisions in America. Former U.S. senator Arlen Specter quoted Scottish law when he acquitted impeached president Bill Clinton during his trial in the Senate, so it’s not that far away.
Megrahi’s release is a painful example of how western civilization is under assault, from deep within. Greatness once infused Scotland, a greatness that created the two-handed Claymore sword, once swung by tough men defending their liberty and culture. That greatness has been frittered away, lost in its misty isles and replaced by misty thinking. If Scotland’s decision to release Megrahi is not repudiated, then the politically correct assault advances on western culture and institutions, and justice retreats.
Allen West – Our Hero
Congressman Allen West gives an excellent interview on America, Barack Hussein Obama, and foreign policy
http://www.jpost.com/DiplomacyAndPolitics/Article.aspx?id=235491
Political Correctness …Not Your Grandfather’s Values
How Political Correctness Is Breaking Western Civilization
© Josh First
August 11, 2011
Recent orgies of violence in America and England demonstrate the sickness of the politics of victimization and entitlement, and how it corrodes our basic institutions of civilization. Amplifying it have been law enforcement failures in both nations that reveal how decades of moral relativism and coddling of criminals has destroyed the rule of law, which is at the core of western civilization.
It has been eight months of infuriatingly shocking photos, videos, 911 calls, but limited reporting in the mainstream press, about anti-white beatings, flash mobs, and race riots across England and America. From Michael Chambers in western Pennsylvania, to Chrissy Polis in Maryland, to families attending the Wisconsin State Fair, to shoppers and business people caught on the streets of Philadelphia and Chicago, to people lounging in public parks in Milwaukee, to stores in Las Vegas, St. Paul, Kansas City, and New York, to bystanders, homeowners and shop owners in London, Tottenham, Manchester, and other British cities, groups of “wilding” young blacks have openly targeted whites, Hispanics, and Asians for savage beatings and robbery. Mostly, these are sadistic beatings of defenseless individuals, with laughing and taunts by the kids as they run down another hapless victim. Robbery seems to be a byproduct of the supine victim’s inability to hold on to their scattered personal belongings. In a scene that you could not create in a horror movie, except maybe the purposefully demented A Clockwork Orange, at one picnic pilfered food was wolfed down while the beatings continued, providing the kids with sustenance for their hard work.
“I heard laughing as they were beating everybody up. They were eating chips like it was a picnic,” said 22-year-old Shaina Perry, one of several picnicking Caucasians badly hurt in the assault at Wisconsin’s Kilbourn Reservoir Park, according to the July 6th Journal Sentinel.
Three years ago, Harrisburg had its own bout with teen pack violence, with victims being badly beaten on the street for the sheer fun of it all. I had my own run-in with one of the roving youth groups, in my Uptown neighborhood. That Saturday afternoon my dad and I were walking on the Front Street River Walk, and after being cornered by the group and then escaping, I was hit in the leg with a rock as the kids followed us and then milled about in front of our home. We witnessed our neighbors go through the same thing the year before. It’s scary. What is also scary is that I was carrying a pistol, and I would have been within my rights to use it.
What has caused this insanity is the insanity of decades of failed social policies that lock generation after generation of poor blacks into mental ghettos. Victim identity and victimization ideology is rampant, with supposed leaders like the reverends Al Sharpton, Jeremiah Wright, Louis Farrakhan, and Jesse Jackson all reinforcing grievances, separatism, radicalism, and militant action to recoup long-standing demands for reparations and social paybacks. The message that has been instilled by these reverends, and even by more mainstream academics like Cornel West, and now evidently refined to a perfected mindset and action, is that blacks are universally victims and universally owed something by anybody who isn’t black.
The success of the drug culture and the failure of the family haven’t helped, either.
But that isn’t the whole of it. Law enforcement, which is supposed to keep civilization civilized, has fallen down on the job. Here are some examples of how poor leadership has resulted in a muted law enforcement culture in the wake of these terrible events.
On August 10, 2011, after days of unimpeded thuggery and wholesale destruction across the streets of Britain, and howls of protest by taxpayers and burned-out homeowners over limp police action, Theresa May, Britain’s Home Secretary, told the British media “The way we police is by consent.” Video of the British police’s pathetic, timid attempts at consent-based crowd control are available on-line.
I have asked several people to tell me what Ms. May means by her statement, and no one can come up with an explanation that makes sense. Does she mean “Consent by the lawbreaker,” because that’s how it appears. She sure doesn’t mean that British police will enforce the law any time this week. Her police stood by and watched from mere feet away as hoodlums looted, burned, and beat people, not to mention the unrequited attacks on the police, themselves. Repeated empty threats of using water cannons and rubber bullets seemed to actually encourage the rioters.
Here in America, we were treated to a local police analysis of the Wisconsin State Fair mobs, as of August 10th, that went something like “We aren’t sure, we don’t know, we can’t say.” Despite overwhelming evidence of the racism inherent in the mob attacks, the police have been afraid to call it what it is. But if it were white kids running around beating the heck out of blacks, we all know that the police would call it racism and start filing hate crimes charges left and right.
Whether it is fear of the uncomfortable or a politically correct double standard, if trained law enforcement personnel and their political leaders will not explicitly identify a problem and try to fix it, then the problem will grow worse. None of us want to contemplate what that “worse” means in this context.
That is why Philadelphia’s Mayor, Michael Nutter, is now so important. In a widely played speech from last Sunday, he has opened a door into a subject that has been taboo among decision makers for too long. Joining Bill Cosby, Larry Elder, and other black leaders who have previously demanded accountability and responsibility among black youth, Nutter authoritatively scolded the wilding young people and their parents from his church’s pulpit. While criticizing their violence and sloppy physical appearances, his one line hit the nail on the head: “Parents, get your act together….You need to get hold of your kids before we [the criminal justice system] have to.”
Amen, brother, because if you don’t turn things around at the family level, with help from plain speaking black leaders, then it appears that western civilization is headed towards its demise. No one else here has the strength of character to turn the ship around.
Copyright Josh First, originally published at and licensed to www.rockthecapital.com
It’s Official: Britannica Gives Up and Dies
Islamic leaders establish “Shariah Zones” in London, where women, gays, Hindus, Jews, and Christians are stripped of their rights under British law, and morally relative multiculturalism reigns supreme.
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/146482
Abandoning the Helm, Here & Afar: How Hypocrisy Has Ended the Moral Claim
Abandoning the Helm, Here & Afar:
How Hypocrisy Has Ended the Moral Claim
© Josh First
July 31, 2011
Time was, for people in need only the local churches helped them. Every frontier town had a church, and its doors were always open to the needy. In a frontier society, the needy are ever-present. Over time, America grew, and seeking America’s promise, the needy increasingly arrived, and the model expanded. Are you hungry, do you need clothes? A local religious group was there to help you or your family. Bethesda Mission, Hebrew Free Loan Association, a myriad of Catholic charities, all served increasingly robust communities and then whole populations of American immigrants from across Europe. Immigrant aid societies flourished, most aimed at their own ethnic or linguistic group.
That model of bare-bones, volunteer-driven organizations advancing and increasingly advocating for the rights, needs, and interests of everyday shlmiel citizens is a uniquely American development. It is something to be proud of. That safety net for newcomers released their potential, increased the opportunity that awaited them, and enhanced their ability to become integrated, productive Americans.
Over decades, mirror image organizations evolved out of more refined social expectations, like human dignity and individual rights, wildlife habitat, environmental protection, and consumer protection. Out of this distinctly private and mostly religiously-based effort came public commissions, bureaucracies, laws, and then government mandates, with increasingly complex goals and symmetrically mixed results. Public health offices aimed at cholera, orphans, and clean water were useful; Prohibition spawned the Mob.
Beating Jim Crow in the South began in the late 1950s, and infused other movements. Responding to the Cold War, international causes became popular in the 1960s, spawning Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, among others.
Increasing public and private financial resources, and increased economic and individual opportunities across America created more defined political jockeying between these safety net groups. Many eventually morphed into highly tuned political machines with sophisticated interest groups, grassroots armies, funders, political backers, friendly media outlets, and crafted messages, many arriving at their final destination and recognizable form in the 1960s and 1970s. Those two decades are also recognizable as the turning point in American public political activism. Gun control, animal rights and welfare, gay rights, etc., all followed, and the laundry list is now long and well known. The political lines are now well drawn in the sand.
What impelled and set the original “founding” interest groups above, apart, and beyond their original surrounding circumstances was a powerful, convening clarion call that coalesced universal conscience: The moral claim.
The moral claim was based on a distinct and publicly recognizable difference between what was common practice at the time, on the one hand, and what was obviously needed to elevate and fairly improve the human condition, on the other hand. The moral claim was a non-partisan standard that appealed to nearly everyone, rallying and focusing fair-minded citizens from across religious, economic, racial and regional boundaries.
One of the most famous examples of the moral claim is King’s I Have a Dream speech. Dead people in coffins have been widely documented to sit up and cry when it’s replayed in their presence, because it is undeniably powerful medicine for a nation designed for freedoms it hadn’t yet delivered.
Similarly, when the Cuyahoga River actually caught on fire, advocates for environmental quality had one hell of a moral claim, and legitimately aimed at ending a long tradition of egregious pollution that privatized profits and socialized the costs. Three decades later, River Keeper was shutting down the last industrial pipes bleeding privately conjured PCBs and other chartreuse-colored ooze into the Hudson River’s very public waters.
But times change, and thankfully, the vast majority of the moral claims have been settled (more on this later, obviously). The problem is that the well-oiled machines that got those moral claims over the goal line are still running on high octane, and they have to keep going, or die. So they stay in the groove that worked for them, well worn over decades, and the growing differences between their goals, methods, and reality is now making hypocrites out of many of these the now-former bearers of the now-former moral claim. Hypocrites do not make good standard bearers.
For example, here in Pennsylvania this past January, purported environmental activists (self-appointed keepers of the green moral claim) banged drums and shouted into bull horns, doing everything possible to disrupt Governor Tom Corbett’s inaugural speech, occurring three hundred feet away. What was the issue that impelled them into their most moral rage? Why, it was the very most moral issue of natural gas drilling. And not just any gas drilling, but hydrofracturing deep gas wells. You’d think from their behavior that gas drilling is a moral issue found directly in the Constitution and the Bible, or that terrible crimes are occurring.
But it’s not a moral issue. Gas drilling is an every-day issue like plastics or peanut butter, arising from modern social needs, demands, and industrial processes that environmental activists themselves help perpetuate in their individual daily lives. It is subject to scientific analysis, assessments of risk-benefit tradeoffs, and regulations, both sufficient and insufficient. It is not a matter of principle.
But once Tom Corbett became governor, within his first two minutes and thirty-eight seconds, as a matter of fact, the activists turned gas drilling into an artificially manufactured issue of principle. Invoking the moral claim, protestors complained that the new Corbett administration, in office for exactly two minutes and thirty eight seconds, was environmentally immoral.
Uhhh, where were these folks during the eight-year tenure of the immediate past governor, Ed Rendell? You know, the same governor who handed out gas drilling and hydrofracking permits like they were potato chips, for years before Corbett was even a candidate? Rendell got a free pass from these purported keepers of the flame, apparently because he was of a political party that the activists otherwise generally concur with. Holding Corbett accountable for something he hasn’t yet done, while giving a free pass to Rendell who done a lot, makes them partisan, makes the gas drilling issue partisan, employs a double standard, makes the activists hypocrites, which terminates their moral claim.
Looking farther abroad, international human rights groups were once the only lifeline of political prisoners in Soviet, Socialist, and authoritarian gulags around the world. Today, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch disproportionately criticize democratic countries where press freedoms, free movement, and economic comforts make it easy to get access to friendly advocates and information, like Israel and America. And they ignore egregious violations among the harder targets, like Saudi Arabia’s all-encompassing barbarism and summary executions, China’s crushing occupation of Tibet, Iran and Syria’s mass executions of peaceful protestors, and Turkey’s ongoing genocide against the Kurds.
Saudi Arabia, that epitome of cruelty, barbarism, discrimination, lacking basic human freedoms and rights, in fact, has recently become the actual benefactor of Human Rights Watch, and thereby bought off the group. Getting access to authoritarian countries is hard, and if the masters of all things human rights play hardball with authoritarian regimes, they get tossed out. So they withhold full criticism, and instead criticize the enemies of the worst brutes, just to keep the machine running. And they take the brutes’ money, too.
Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the United Nations and other supposed watchdog groups, are now such giant hypocrites that their misdeeds have spawned watchdog groups to hold them, the self-appointed human rights organizations, accountable to their own purported standards. Groups like NGO Monitor (www.ngo-monitor.org) and UN Watch (www.unwatch.org), which is “tasked with measuring the UN by the yardstick of its own charter,” are playing backup to maintaining the moral claim, and not allowing it to be watered down in the name of convenient politics.
Internationally, certain pet issues predominate, monopolizing press exposure and the supposed moral claim. Despite a nearly two-to-one ratio of Jewish refugees from Jerusalem, Hebron, and Arab and Muslim countries, versus the number of Arab refugees from Israel in the same time period, today we hear only, hypocritically, about the Arabs. Compensating Jewish refugees, whose farms, homes, religious sites, and businesses remain under Arab colonialist occupation, is not a vogue subject. It’s still not vogue in Poland, either, by the way, another mass event held at the same time.
Similarly, Turkey’s still-smoldering genocide against the Armenians, its ethnic cleansing of the Kurds, its brutal occupation of Cyprus complete with an Islamic Apartheid wall, and its officialization of Islamic imperialism all get no media juice. Being a NATO member has its benefits, I suppose, but where oh where is the moral claim? Hypocrites all, the Human Rights Watches of the world. They are focused on tiny, democratic Israel.
In conclusion, if someone abdicates their self-appointed role and abandons the helm, which had been based on a universal standard, and instead becomes a hypocrite, then their moral claim has been badly cheapened or lost. Since the beginning of modern social activism, based on the early faith-based model, public deference was automatically given to those who made the moral claim, who rallied us around a universal conscience. No longer. We are in the beginning of a historic shift of moral authority away from the partisan establishment grievance groups and back into the hands of wired up, dialed-in citizens, whose blogs aggregate and focus public wrath on the official failure du jure. Tunisia one day, British Petroleum the next. Shifting and diffusing power back into the public venue is an inevitable and necessary cog in the evolution of social activism. Who knows what beautiful things will come out of it? Thankfully, hypocrisy won’t be one of those things, because it doesn’t pass the public’s sniff test.
Originally published by and licensed to www.rockthecapital.com