‘Anti-fascist’ demonstrators have a troubling blind spot

A flyer calling for the expulsion of an ethnic group from parts of London was widely shared online yesterday. There were also reports of menacing chants being made outside a place of worship. Were the far-right thugs of riotous Britain up to no good again? Actually, this time the bigotry was coming from the other side, from the self-styled anti-fascists of the radical left.

I thought these protests were about riotous bigotry here at home, not conflicts in the Middle East?

Yes, it seems yesterday’s anti-racist gatherings may not have been entirely anti-racist. A group called Finchley Against Fascism shared a virtual leaflet inviting people to gather in Finchley in north London to show their opposition to the bigotry and chaos of recent days. We need to mobilise, it said, in order to ‘Get fascists, racists, Nazis, Zionists and Islamophobes out of Finchley!’

Wait – Zionists? Jews who believe their people have a right to a national homeland? To lump Zionists in with fascists and Nazis is bad enough. To then say Zionists must be driven ‘out of Finchley’ is horrendous. Finchley is one of the most heavily populated Jewish areas of the UK. Many of its Jewish residents are likely to identify as Zionists. Let’s be clear about this: expelling Zionists from Finchley means expelling Jews from Finchley.

Not surprisingly, the online flyer caused distress to Jews. Local MP, Sarah Sackman of Labour, herself a Jew, was contacted by ‘concerned residents’. The flyer is ‘clearly anti-Semitic’, many of them said. It is. Saying ‘Zionists out’ in Finchley is as bad as those awful cries of ‘P*kis out’ that we heard during the recent riots. In both cases, bigots were essentially calling for the ethnic cleansing of parts of the country.

Some people also reported hearing chants of ‘Free Palestine’ outside the synagogue by Woodside tube station in Finchley. I thought we’d all agreed that political agitation near places of worship is a bad thing? There were Palestine flags on many of the anti-racist gatherings yesterday, too, and spontaneous eruptions of the chant, ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!’.

Was this really necessary? I thought these protests were about riotous bigotry here at home, not conflicts in the Middle East? People on the left are well aware that the ‘river to the sea’ chant makes many Jews feel uncomfortable, because they believe it implies the erasure of the Jewish State from the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Could that chant not have been parked for one measly evening in the name of that ‘unity’ everyone was talking about?

It should concern the organisers of yesterday’s gatherings that some Jews reported feeling uncomfortable at them. Raymond Simonson, the CEO of JW3, a Jewish cultural centre in Finchley, said he attended the ‘huge anti-facist demo’ in Finchley to ‘show solidarity with refugees [and the] local Muslim community’. But he felt ‘uncomfortable’. There was a ‘real edge’, he said, knowing ‘there were people around who don’t like me’.

Could that chant not have been parked for one measly evening?

Sure, it was a small minority at yesterday’s protests who said – or at least thought – ‘Zionists out’. Yet the fact that anyone said it, the fact there was an ‘edge’ to these demos that niggled at some Jews, speaks to a blind spot on the self-styled anti-racist left. They are fast to spot prejudice and intolerance when its targets are Muslims or black people, but the blinkers seem to come down when it’s Jews being menaced.

Indeed, Britain’s Jews are well within their rights to ask why there weren’t anti-racist gatherings in protest at their persecution following 7 October. Over the past ten months, synagogues in the UK have been daubed in graffiti. They’ve had their windows smashed. One in St John’s Wood in northwest London was targeted by a ‘pro-Palestine’ mob. Just two months ago, a teenage Nazi was jailed for eight years for plotting to blow up a synagogue. This week, yet another ‘surge’ in anti-Semitic hate crime has been reported. Where’s the demo?

Every decent person agrees that the targeting of mosques by rioting mobs in recent days was disgraceful, pure bigotry in action. It is just a shame that the low-level, almost year-long targeting of synagogues by so-called ‘anti-Zionists’ has not provoked anywhere near the same level of anger among leftists. Unity is good, sure. But moral consistency is better.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/08/anti-fascist-demonstrators-have-a-troubling-blind-spot/

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The case for colorblindness is as compelling — and vital — as ever

by Jeff Jacoby

ON THE first page of The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America, Coleman Hughes describes himself as a black person who always found race "boring." Growing up in New Jersey, he gave little thought to his racial identity or to those of his friends. "I didn't think of them as 'black,' 'white,' 'Hispanic,' and 'mixed race,'" he writes. "I thought of them as Rodney, Stephen, Javier, and Jordan."

Then he went to college.

"In four years at Columbia, hardly a week passed without a race-themed controversy," Hughes recalls. During orientation, students were directed to sort themselves by race and discuss how they "participated in, or suffered from, systemic oppression." The school newspaper promoted the idea that white supremacy was prevalent on campus. One professor was adamant that all people of color were victims of racial injustice, Hughes relates, "even as my daily experience as a black person directly contradicted that claim."

Though he still considered race itself boring, he was fascinated by the racial obsessions of American cultural elites, especially those who call themselves "antiracists." The more he explored those obsessions, the more convinced he became that the principle of colorblindness is the only ethical and workable basis for governing and living in a multiethnic democracy. That principle Hughes defines simply: "We should treat people without regard to race, both in our public policy and in our private lives."

Hughes's book makes the case for that approach, and for rejecting the racial doctrines popularized by advocates like Ibram X. Kendi, the founder of the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University. Kendi, like many on the left, contends that racism permeates American life and the only way to overcome it is with explicitly race-conscious policies. As he put it in "How to Be an Antiracist," his 2019 bestseller: "The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination."

It is illogical to call such views "antiracist," since they are grounded in racial awareness and score-settling. Hughes's theme is that the only true antiracism is colorblindness — treating skin color as irrelevant, stigmatizing all expressions of racial hostility or superiority, and recognizing that when it comes to the requirements for human flourishing, all people are fundamentally more alike than unalike.

In progressive circles today, an insistence on colorblindness is anathema. When the University of California compiled a list of "microagressions" that instructors were to avoid, among the verboten phrases were articulations of colorblindness, such as "There is only one race, the human race." During an appearance on ABC's "The View" by the soft-spoken Hughes, cohost Sunny Hostin said disparagingly that he is considered "a charlatan" — for enunciating ideas that Martin Luther King Jr. endorsed.

But the notion that public policy should be steadfastly race-blind was for decades a central principle of the civil rights movement. The NAACP argued again and again that it was illegitimate for government or law to take race into account. "Classifications and distinctions based on race or color," Thurgood Marshall, the group's chief counsel, wrote in a 1948 brief, "have no moral or legal validity in our society."

In his compelling debut book, Coleman Hughes argues that the way to achieve justice is to refuse to focus on race.

In a chapter titled "The Real History of Colorblindness," Hughes demonstrates that this conviction was at the heart of the anti-slavery and civil rights movements. He quotes numerous abolitionists and civil rights champions who emphasized the colorblind principle, from Wendell Phillips and Frederick Douglass in the 19th century to Marshall, Bayard Rustin, and A. Philip Randolph in the 20th. As for King, his legendary 1963 exhortation to judge people by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin was no anomaly. Hughes fills a page and a half with quotations from King's speeches and writings that are wholly at odds with the idea that race is all-important. "Let us be dissatisfied," King said in 1967, "until that day when nobody will shout 'White Power!' — when nobody will shout 'Black Power!' — but everybody will talk about God's power and human power."

The belief that America is permeated with racial bigotry, conscious and unconscious, has become ubiquitous on college campuses, in media newsrooms, and in other left-of-center strongholds. Terms like "whiteness" and "systemic racism" appear far more frequently in published sources than they used to. How did such ideas spread so rapidly? And what happened to undermine what was until recently Americans' upbeat view of the nation's racial progress? Hughes reproduces Gallup Poll findings to show that for years after the turn of the century, more than two-thirds of both black and white Americans considered race relations good or even very good.

That era of good racial feelings took a nosedive after 2013. By 2021, the percentage of those who felt relations between racial groups were good had fallen to 43 percent among white respondents and 33 percent among black respondents.

"It's not an exaggeration to say that whatever happened after 2013 represents the biggest setback in American race relations in at least a generation," Hughes laments.

What could have caused such an abrupt collapse in racial optimism? Hughes rules out a major political development like the election of Barack Obama or Donald Trump. As he points out, the plunge didn't begin until five years into the Obama presidency and was underway three years before Trump took office. Nor was there any measurable increase in actual racism, such as a rise in white supremacist activity or police shootings of unarmed black people. According to all available data, both of those had been steadily declining.

Hughes suggests that what caused the change was — technology. It was around 2013 that the use of smartphones and social media reached a "critical mass," increasing by several orders of magnitude the speed at which information could be spread. And the kind of content most susceptible to being posted online — retweeted, blogged, and shared on TikTok, Facebook, Instagram — is "anything that appeals to our tribal identities, us-versus-them narratives, or historical grievances."

Thus, when Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014, the claim that a racist policeman had gunned down an unarmed an innocent black kid whose arms were raised — though largely untrue — circulated with turbocharged speed. The less incendiary facts of the case — Brown had punched the cop and tried to steal his gun, and his hands were not in the air — moved much more slowly. It isn't a new insight that the digital revolution has given dangerous misinformation a powerful boost. But Hughes is the first writer I know of to link that insight to the recent upsurge in racial pessimism.

There is much more to Hughes's calm and cogent book. Without ever raising his voice, he demolishes, one by one, the "antiracist" myths that have grown so voluble and defends the oldest and most honorable of all American values: the "self-evident" truth that all persons are created equal. We have yet to achieve the full flowering of that value. But this gifted young writer makes an elegant and persuasive case that the long-overdue embrace of colorblindness is the surest way to get there.

https://jeffjacoby.com/27975/the-case-for-colorblindness-is-as-compelling

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Leftist racism in Australia gets more subtle

Neil Brown

This is the story of the column I almost wrote, but which was overtaken by events. It all started a few weeks ago with a well-placed leak that the Albanese government was moving on from the disastrous result of its failed referendum on the racist Voice. The Voice was, of course, only Plan A of its triple-headed monster of Voice, Makarrata and Treaty. The entire plan was to elevate one race above all others, denigrate European settlement, vastly expand government spending on bureaucracy, consultants and conferences and give us a dose of enforced wallowing in grief and guilt about being born or having migrated here.

The leak, then, was that the government was going to move on to Plan B: the Makarrata, otherwise known as truth-telling. That should have given us due warning by itself. When governments and their lackies – in the Aboriginal industry and anywhere else – start talking about truth-telling, we know that what they actually mean is lying. As with the eponymous Department of Truth immortalised in George Orwell’s 1984, the plan was to set up another bureaucracy whose only role was to rewrite history, paint a story of false oppression and deny the immense value of settlement that has been given to Australia’s Aboriginals since its foundation.

My response to this proposed twaddle, in the column I was going to write, was to issue a challenge to oppose the Makarrata: to get ready to fight against this unwarranted expansion of the powers of the federal government; get ready to argue against the coming waste of vast sums of money and, above all; to reignite the argument that had been so successful in the anti-Voice campaign, that we simply do not want our public policy based on race, we do not want more power being given to unelected officials and we do not want any more denigration of non-Aboriginal Australians.

But, lo and behold, the leak has miraculously faded away and it is now clear that Albanese has got cold feet about setting up a Makarrata as the next step on from the Voice. How ironic it is that his foray into truth-telling should begin with a lie! His cringe-making speech to the Garma festival tells us that after all the hype, after all the promises to implement the whole Uluru Statement word for word, as he promised on the very night of his election, we are not going to have one Makarrata, or at least not yet, and that what we will have instead is a series of little ones, mini-Makarratas, where there will be lots of coming together, broad concepts and lots of dialogue. Or, as one of his more trenchant Aboriginal critics put it, a ‘vague vibe (and) casual conversations’. The vibe, apparently, is Albanese’s next big thing.

This new proposal is a threat that has to be opposed and defeated. In fact, it is a far more substantial threat than the Voice, as it will be set up simply by government fiat and will not be subject to approval by the people at a referendum, which saved us from the Voice. Moreover, at least with the Makarrata, there was going to be a body that you could identify and where the wild allegations and re-writing of history that would inevitably be made would be open to cross-examination and competing evidence. But the mini-Makarattas will not be subject to any such restraints. They will essentially be private meetings where federal officials will agree to newly funded programs, new powers for so-called representatives of the Aboriginal people and more symbols and ceremonies, if there could possibly be any more than we already have, and where we will continually be reminded that we live under a justly deserved cloud of guilt and shame.

And when you get down to the details that Albanese has condescended to give us, it is even more ludicrous. And closer to being a giant fraud. He says, first, that corporate Australia will have to step up and link arms with the Aboriginal movement. We all know what that means: compulsory and tokenistic appointments of Aboriginal directors and shareholders who will force companies into making decisions that favour only one race.

Next, Aboriginal enhancement will magically be advanced, he claims, by the government’s policies on climate change and the environment, policies that are in reality designed to stop industrial progress and development. First up, you can kiss good-bye to any hope of ever getting Woodside’s Browse gas field up and running.

Thirdly, we are told, the new mini-Makarratas will have to work in with the government’s new Nirvana of ‘Made in Australia’; surely every Australian would want to buy Australian, but what on earth will be the Aboriginal contribution to quantum computers, solar panels and AI and why, like everything that Albanese touches, does it have to be defined by race?

What, then, would be a better policy on Aboriginal affairs than Albanese’s racism? Here are a few policies that are not only based on sound principle, but (Liberal party, take notice!) would be very popular with the electorate:

– a National Declaration that we are one nation, not a collection of rival camps and tribes;

– the sole objective of Aboriginal policy will be better outcomes and results;

– an end to race-based policies and funding;

– no treaties between the nation and its own citizens;

– no more empty gestures like comedic public welcome to country and smoking ceremonies;

– we will celebrate Australia Day on 26 January;

– one Australian national flag, the one we already have;

– the ABC will use the real and official names of cities and regions, not Dreamtime fantasies, as the source of news;

– and the one guiding principle that will influence all government decisions from now on will be to encourage the strength of individual Australians of whatever race or colour, and provide them with real incentives to improve their standard of living. And their happiness.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/08/brown-study-294/

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Viral reaction as US moves to ban gym ‘scam’

This is long overdue -- JR

One of the most hated things about gym membership could soon be history — in the US at least.

With the November US election approaching the Democrats have come up with a new policy, allowing people to cancel memberships with a single click.

The new consumer law, proposed by the White House, would require businesses to give people the option to easily end contracts.

For years, companies such as gyms have been accused of delaying the process to cancel a service, or making it extremely onerous.

A White House spokesman said: “Americans know these practices well: it’s being forced to wait on hold just to get the refund we’re owed; the hoops and hurdles to cancel a gym membership or subscription; the unnecessary complications of dealing with health insurance companies; the requirements to do in-person or by mail what could easily be done with a couple of clicks online; and confusing, lengthy, or manipulative forms that take unnecessary time and effort.”

The new Time is Money initiative will essentially make it easier for people to get refunds, cancel subscriptions and submit forms.

It will also require businesses to make customer service representatives available, rather than chatbots.

Additionally, the law will crack down on “doom loops” — where customers are shuffled around through a “a maze of menu options and automated recordings”.

Other changes include: ending airline runarounds by requiring automatic cash refunds and allowing health claims to be submitted online.

The announcement was received well online and quickly went viral with one post racking up 200,000 likes in just two hours.

“Could be the first good law passed in years,” one person wrote.

“Gym membership “contracts” have ALWAYS been a scam,” another added.

Carrie goes public with secret 20-year battle
“Actually thank goodness THANK YOU!!!!! If I have to yell at a robot to talk to a human 6 times till they transfer me again!!!!! LMAO,” a frustrated person chimed in.

https://www.news.com.au/finance/business/viral-reaction-as-us-moves-to-ban-gym-scam/news-story/b151e3f2be8aeae1757c70f512e746e2

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