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LEFTIST CONTEMPT FOR WESTERN CIVILIZATION CONSTITUTES ITS GREATEST THREAT FOR SURVIVAL

The Atlantic Publishes All You Need To Know About the Left: Dennis Prager, Daily Wire, July 11, 2017— Last week, The Atlantic rendered a great service to those of us who contend that America is in the midst of a civil war between the right and the left.

The Science of Racism is Back: Philip Carl Salzman, C2C Journal , June 30, 2017— The founder of anthropology in North America was Franz Boas, a German Jew who began his work in the early 20th century, when racial explanations of human behaviour were popular.

Are Biased Textbooks Turning Young Americans Against Israel?: Rafael Medoff, JNS, July 11, 2017— According to some experts, anti-Israel bias in the textbooks used by many American high schools may be to blame for the decrease in sympathy for Israel among young adults.

France Marks 70 Years Since Historic 'Exodus' Voyage to Israel: Arutz Sheva, July 9, 2017— Seventy years ago this week, some 4,500 Jewish Holocaust survivors gathered aboard a rickety old steamer in the French Mediterranean port of Sete, destined for a journey that would help spur the creation of an independent Jewish state.

 

On Topic Links

 

Israel Built A 9/11 Memorial Out Of Ground Zero Wreckage – You Have To See it: Benny Johnson, IJR, 2015

Leading Researcher on Campus Jewish Life Rejects Report of ‘Devastating Loss’ of Support for Israel Among Young Jews: Rachel Frommer, Algemeiner, June 23, 2017

Jewish Voice for Peace Is Spreading Hate on Campus. It’s Time for Jewish Academics to Speak Up.: Jarrod Tanny, Tablet, July 5, 2017

The Appalling Protests at Evergreen State College: Charlotte Allen, Weekly Standard, June 9, 2017

                                              

 

 

THE ATLANTIC PUBLISHES ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE LEFT                                                                    Dennis Prager

Daily Wire, July 11, 2017

 

Last week, The Atlantic rendered a great service to those of us who contend that America is in the midst of a civil war between the right and the left. It provided a smoking gun — actually, the gunshot itself — to those of us who contend that the left (never to be confused with liberals) is intent on dismantling Western civilization. It published articles by two left-wing writers, one by Peter Beinart titled "The Racial and Religious Paranoia of Trump's Warsaw Speech," and one by its national correspondent, James Fallows, written on the same theme as Beinart's.

 

The subject of both articles was President Donald Trump's speech in Warsaw, Poland, last week, a speech described by The Wall Street Journal as "a determined and affirmative defense of the Western tradition." Yet, to the Atlantic writers, defending Western civilization is nothing more than a defense of white racism. Beinart begins his piece saying: "In his speech in Poland on Thursday, Donald Trump referred 10 times to 'the West' and five times to 'our civilization.' His white nationalist supporters will understand exactly what he means. It's important that other Americans do, too." And Fallows begins saying, "what he called 'civilization' … boils down to ties of ethnicity and blood."

 

Is there one liberal or conservative American who thinks that the words "the West" and "Western civilization" mean a celebration of white-blood purity? I doubt it. What we have here are two vital lessons. One is that leftism is the primary racist ideology of our time, seeing everything in terms of race, whereas mainstream liberalism and conservatism advocate a race-blind society as manifest in Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous "content of his character" line. The left disdains this view. To cite one of innumerable examples, the University of California has published a list of biased "microaggression" statements students and faculty are to avoid. One of them is "There is only one race, the human race." In other words, the left, which controls our universities, teaches American students that it is wrong to believe in one human race. That was precisely what the Nazis taught German students. And now, we have another expression of this doctrine enunciated in the pages of The Atlantic: that those who wish to protect or save Western civilization are talking about saving the white race.

 

I am certainly not equating leftism with Nazism. The left doesn't seek to annihilate all Jews (it merely supports the Palestinians, who seek to annihilate the Jewish state). I am merely stating an unassailable truth: No significant political movement since the Nazis has "honored" race or equated Western civilization with race, as Beinart and Fallows do. The second service provided by The Atlantic writers is proof that the left loathes Western civilization and therefore has become the internal enemy of Western civilization both in America and Europe.

 

In the left's eyes, the mere suggestion that Western civilization needs to be saved is, by definition, a call for the preservation of the white race. Therefore, the left opposes calls to save Western civilization. As Beinart wrote: "The most shocking sentence in Trump's speech — perhaps the most shocking sentence in any presidential speech delivered on foreign soil in my lifetime — was his claim that 'The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive.' … Trump's sentence only makes sense as a statement of racial and religious paranoia."

 

Those of us who have long equated the left with opposition to Western civilization are vindicated. We didn't need Beinart and Fallows — we already had innumerable examples, such as the University of Pennsylvania English department removing its longstanding poster of William Shakespeare because he was a white male — but in their explicit articulation of the left's view, they are immensely helpful. Shakespeare is read in every language that has an alphabet not because he was white or European but because he is regarded as the greatest playwright who ever lived. But the leftists who run that English department place race (and gender) above excellence — a thorough rejection of Western values. Ironically, outside of liberals and conservatives, those most likely to celebrate Western values are likely to not be Western. The Japanese would scoff at the idea that Bach and Beethoven did not write the greatest music ever composed. That is why some of the greatest Bach recordings of our time come from Japanese musicians living in Japan. Nor would the Japanese deny that their modern country's democratic values come from the West…

[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]

                                                                       

 

Contents

THE SCIENCE OF RACISM IS BACK

Philip Carl Salzman

C2C Journal , June 30, 2017

 

The founder of anthropology in North America was Franz Boas, a German Jew who began his work in the early 20th century, when racial explanations of human behaviour were popular. Decades before European racism would come to fruition in the Holocaust, Boas was arguing against race as a way of understanding people. It would not have eluded Boas that the Canadian peoples he studied, the Inuit and First Nations of the Northwest Coast, were viewed by many with racist disparagement and discriminated against. In opposition to such views, he maintained that “nurture,” the learning of ideas, values, and actions from parents, peers, and community, rather than “nature,” biology and genetics, determined the course of human lives.

 

By mid-century racism was not just out of fashion, but actively reviled. Biological anthropologists assembled evidence showing how promiscuous gene flow led to gradual variations, or clines, within and among populations, such that no clear or immutable race-based characteristics existed. Thus there was no scientific basis for identifying races, or for believing that they had a reality in nature.

 

How times have changed! Racism is now back as an accepted and, indeed, celebrated way to explain human differences. And nowhere is it trendier than on university campuses in Canada, the United States, and beyond. Not just among radical students demanding race-based entitlements, but also within institutional processes such as faculty hiring. Aboriginals are preferred to teach Aboriginal Studies. Middle Easterners are preferred to teach Middle East Studies. African Studies ditto. East Asian Studies ditto. The logic is partly borrowed from the tenets of modern feminism and sex and gender minority rights, which hold that only members of such groups can fully understand them. Attempts by outsiders to speak for or even about others is decried as “cultural appropriation”.

 

You might imagine that this would not sit well with cultural anthropologists, who often go to distant lands to study people who are different from them. But even anthropologists are now keen for racial hiring. At my university, McGill, where a big thrust is underway to expand First Nations Studies, anthropology professors are insisting on hiring a First Nations anthropologist. There is no way to square this with deracinated anthropology; it is simply, fundamentally, racist. Ironically, these new racist hiring policies are prescribed to fight racism. In March, a pair of McGill Anthropology students published an article in the McGill Daily titled “Classroom Colonialisms: Calling out racism and working towards decolonial anthropology at McGill.” Leaving aside that the Daily is a student newspaper renowned for its anti-Semitic racism, the students’ solutions for racism in anthropology are hiring non-white staff and purging the classics of anthropology from the program because most were written by white males.

 

It is sad that people claiming to be students of anthropology do not grasp the simple and irrefutable logical point that making decisions on the basis of race is racism, no matter which races you favour. Perhaps they believe, as some of my colleagues in the McGill Anthropology Department do, that there is good racism and bad racism, and that they are advocating good racism. Yes, you read that right; “good racism.” We have heard such arguments many times in human history, and seen their consequences. Reducing people to demographic categories, rather than treating them as the unique individuals they are, is a betrayal of liberal values and the Enlightenment and of the idea of the university as an institution of civilization founded on universalistic criteria such as merit.

 

The hottest new idea among “social justice warriors” is “intersectionality,” which means that the interests of victim groups intersect, and that they should seek liberation through unity. Thus women, gays, people of color, and Muslims should unite to throw off their oppressors: men, heterosexuals, whites, and Jews. This idea ought to be dismissed as incoherent given that most women are heterosexual, that homosexuality is forbidden and women are obliged to be subservient in Islam, and that Jews are historically victims of Christians and Muslims.

 

But, inspired by intersectionality, the Black Lives Matter movement has expanded its fight against white police violence against blacks to ally with Palestinians against Jews, despite the long history of Arab involvement in the African slave trade and the institutional racism against blacks that persists today in many Arab countries. Black Lives Matter is equally blind to the realities of black homicide in America, where the 13 percent of the population which is black suffers 45 percent of the murders, of which 90 percent are committed by other blacks. The new racism, predicated on the belief that there are good races, but also bad races, generally holds that white people are bad, because they are “privileged” and, in most developed countries, the majority.  They have not suffered as victims of racism like other races. But even that rule is selective and willfully ignorant of facts and history, not least the serial persecution of Jews and centuries of enslavement of white Europeans by Arabs.

 

It is no accident that the revival of racism coincides with the re-demonization of Jews. The Boycott, Divest, and Sanction movement on North American campuses is nominally aimed at Israel. But Jewish students are sometimes targets of invective, and even violence. In my Anthropology Department at McGill, professors have aligned themselves with BDS, as has the Anthropology Graduate Students Association, even though BDS fits the U.S. State Department criteria for anti-Semitism, as it selectively singles out and disparages Israel and advocates for termination of the country. Supporters of BDS stand with Palestinian Hamas, Fatah, Islamic Jihad, and others that promise variously to place Jews under the disabilities of subordinate-class dhimma status, expel them entirely from their historical home, or murder Israeli Jews and all Jews around the world (see the Hamas Charter). So my colleagues and students have thrown their support to people who advocate racial genocide…

[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]

 

Prof. Philip Carl Salzman is a CIJR Academic Fellow

 

                                                           

Contents  

             

ARE BIASED TEXTBOOKS TURNING YOUNG AMERICANS AGAINST ISRAEL?

Rafael Medoff

JNS, July 11, 2017

 

According to some experts, anti-Israel bias in the textbooks used by many American high schools may be to blame for the decrease in sympathy for Israel among young adults. According to the Brand Israel Group, only 54 percent of US college students lean more toward Israelis than the Palestinians, down from 73 percent in 2010. The decrease was even sharper among Jewish college students, dropping from 84 percent to 57 percent. “The problem starts in high school,” Dr. Sandra Alfonsi, the founder of Hadassah’s “Curriculum Watch” division, told JNS.org. “There’s no doubt [that] the lack of sympathy for Israel on college campuses today is at least partly the result of several generations of teenagers being educated with textbooks that are slanted against Israel.”

 

One of the most controversial texts used in high schools around the country is the Arab World Studies Notebook, a 540-page volume authored by Audrey Parks Shabbas. Shabbas heads Arab World and Islamic Resources and School Services, a curriculum publisher that seeks to promote a positive image of Arabs and Muslims in US schools. After parents in Anchorage, Alaska, complained to their local board of education in 2004 about the book’s slant against Israel, the American Jewish Committee (AJC) prepared a 30-page analysis of the textbook. The AJC found it to be riddled with “overt bias and unabashed propagandizing,” such as depicting Israel as the aggressor in every Arab-Israeli war, and praising Muslim conquerors throughout the ages for their “gentle treatment of civilian populations.”

 

As a result, the Anchorage Board of Education removed the Notebook from the local high school curriculum. School authorities in Tulsa, Oklahoma, have also withdrawn the text. Shabbas has claimed that the Notebook has been distributed to more than 10,000 teachers, and “if each notebook teaches 250 students a year over 10 years, then you’ve reached 25 million students.” “The most important statistic is the number of workshops that Shabbas has given to instruct teachers in how to use the book,” Curriculum Watch’s Alfonsi said. “She has conducted hundreds of such three-day teacher-training sessions.” Shabbas’s website names 211 schools where she ran teacher workshops from 2000-2006. Other years are not listed. Shabbas did not respond to requests for comment from JNS.org.

 

The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) recently published a 108-page monograph, “Indoctrinating Our Youth,” which describes how high schools in the Boston suburb of Newton have been using biased texts such as the Arab World Studies Notebook, and also are inviting anti-Israel speakers to address their students. One controversy began in 2011, when a Newton South High School parent complained about a passage from the Notebook that accused Israel of torturing and murdering hundreds of Palestinian women. Other parents soon joined the protests. Matt Hills, vice chair of the Newton School Committee, dismissed the critics as “McCarthyesque.”

 

In early 2012, Newton Superintendent of Schools David Fleishman said that the Notebook had been removed from the curriculum because it was “outdated.” But an investigation by Americans for Peace and Tolerance (APT), a Boston-based activist group, found that the Notebook was still being used in Newton as late as the 2013-2014 school year. The dispute has been complicated by the refusal of Newton school authorities to identify which Israel-related materials were being used by teachers. Many school districts around the country list their curriculum materials on their websites. APT President Charles Jacobs told JNS.org that his group “will continue to build support for a policy of transparency, so that parents and citizens can know what is being taught to Newton’s students.”

 

In response to a request for copies of these materials, Fleishman said that the requester would need to pay $3,643 to cover photocopying expenses. Eventually, a Freedom of Information request filed by community activists forced the release of some of the materials. Newton Mayor Setti Warren, a member of the nine-person School Committee, attended committee meetings on the textbooks issue, but did not actively participate in the discussions, according to community members. The mayor, who is now a candidate for the Democratic nomination for Massachusetts governor, did not respond to requests for comment from JNS.org.

 

Several mainstream Jewish organizations in Boston, including the local chapter of the Anti-Defamation League, initially denied that biased materials were being used in local schools. They also criticized the APT for organizing protests against the Newton school authorities. Later, the New England ADL changed its position, agreeing that the Arab World Studies Notebook and another anti-Israel text, A Muslim Primer, should not have been used in schools…

[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]    

 

Contents

 

FRANCE MARKS 70 YEARS SINCE HISTORIC 'EXODUS' VOYAGE TO ISRAEL

Arutz Sheva, July 9, 2017

 

Seventy years ago this week, some 4,500 Jewish Holocaust survivors gathered aboard a rickety old steamer in the French Mediterranean port of Sete, destined for a journey that would help spur the creation of an independent Jewish state. On Sunday the city marked the audacious attempt to reach what was then the British-controlled Mandate of Palestine in the presence of a few of the remaining survivors of the voyage, along with France's Grand Rabbi Haim Korsia.

 

"It's the last time that we have survivors: in 10 years they'll be gone," said Freddy Dran, co-president of the "Exodus Committee" and a representative of the Jewish community in Sete, near Montpellier. "We've found that in Sete and the region, half the population has no knowledge of this event, which had a profound impact on 20th-century history," he said, calling the commemoration "an educational project for younger generations". The plight of those onboard was memorably dramatized in the 1960 Otto Preminger film of the same name, starring Paul Newman.

 

"Boarding this ship was like climbing Mount Sinai," according to Isthak Roman, whose father was onboard, speaking at Sunday's ceremony. On the night of July 10-11, 1947, a strange-looking boat overflowing with people, most of them survivors of Nazi concentration camps, began slowly making its way out of the harbor, officially destined for Colombia. The operation was mounted by the Haganah, a Jewish pre-state organization in the Land of Israel, which had acquired the flat-bottomed boat originally intended for only river navigation from an iron yard, before discreetly bringing it to the Mediterranean.

 

At the same time, the group began bringing thousands of would-be immigrants to Sete aboard more than 170 trucks. "If we hadn't decided quickly to load these 4,554 people we would have had serious problems," a leader of the truck convoy, one of five Sete residents at the time who attended the anniversary ceremony. "Haganah was behind this entirely clandestine operation, very few people in Sete were aware of what was going on," said Gustave Brugidou, president of a Sete historical society. Most residents were focused on the Tour de France racers as the cycling race passed through the city on July 10, and "were astounded to see all these people arriving on Mole Saint Louis dressed in winter clothes in the middle of summer," he said, referring to the port's jetty.

 

The passengers, representing a multitude of nationalities and including about 1,700 women and 950 children, squeezed themselves onto the boat still known as the "President Warfield". Their goal was to break through the infamous British blockade on Jewish immigration to Palestine, where the Zionist movement hoped to create a Jewish state, and the ship was renamed the "Exodus 47" on July 16, a reference to Moses's biblical exodus, and a flag bearing the star of David was hoisted. Had European Jews been allowed into British Mandate-controlled Palestine, many could have been saved. As it was, the British caved to Arab pressure, preventing Jews from escaping the Holocaust and did not change their policy to accept survivors.

 

Two days later, a British navy vessel that had been trailing the Exodus seized it just a few dozen miles from the Palestine coast, in a confrontation that resulted in at least two deaths. "The ship's commander asked them to stop the fight, he said, 'My mission is to bring Jews to Israel alive, not dead'," Yossi Bayor, who was 15 when he boarded the Exodus, told the ceremony in Hebrew. The passengers were rounded up by the British and put on prison ships bound for the French coast, where they refused to disembark, and after several weeks were brought to Hamburg, Germany, in the British-controlled zone where the Holocaust survivors were put back in camps. "The conditions were terrible, we had no sleeping berths, everyone was on the floor," Bayor recalled.

 

The ordeal sparked a global outcry, and most of the passengers were later interned on Cyprus, then a British colony, and did not reach Israel until it declared statehood in 1948. "Thanks to — or because of — the odyssey undertaken by this ship from Sete, the State of Israel was created a few months later," said Brugidou, underscoring its influence on the decisive United Nations vote to divide Palestine in November 1947. The name Palestine for the area was coined by the Roman conquerors who destroyed the Second Temple in 70 C.E. in revenge for the fight put up by the Jewish forces. It referred to the ancient and now long gone Philistine tribes who came from the Greek Isles and were an implacable enemy of the Jews in biblical times and has no connection with the Arabs who call themselves Palestinian today..

 

CIJR Wishes All Our Friends & Supporters: Shabbat Shalom!

 

 

 

Contents

 

On Topic Links

 

Israel Built A 9/11 Memorial Out Of Ground Zero Wreckage – You Have To See it: Benny Johnson, IJR, 2015—It is called the 9/11 Living Memorial Plaza, and was initiated and designed by Eliezer Weishoff. Completed in 2009 for $2 million, it sits on 5 acres of hillside, 20 miles from the center of Jerusalem according to Wikipedia.

Leading Researcher on Campus Jewish Life Rejects Report of ‘Devastating Loss’ of Support for Israel Among Young Jews: Rachel Frommer, Algemeiner, June 23, 2017—A leading social scientist and researcher of campus Jewish life told The Algemeiner on Thursday that a new report claiming there has been a “devastating loss” of support for Israel among US Jewish students did not match his findings from nearly 20 years of systematic study of the topic.

Jewish Voice for Peace Is Spreading Hate on Campus. It’s Time for Jewish Academics to Speak Up.: Jarrod Tanny, Tablet, July 5, 2017—I am a professor of Jewish history in North Carolina, and I find it very discouraging that so few young academics, particularly tenured ones, in Jewish studies are willing to speak out against Jewish Voice for Peace’s ideology and its increasingly vitriolic tactics. I am calling on my colleagues who believe that dialogue and justice are not incompatible with Zionism to recognize Jewish Voice for Peace’s demagoguery.

The Appalling Protests at Evergreen State College: Charlotte Allen, Weekly Standard, June 9, 2017 —At Evergreen State College, the revolution will be televised. And it already has been, thanks to the smartphone.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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