Tuesday, February 05, 2019




Was the attack on a homosexual black fake news?

Something appears to have happened but what was it?  Maybe he just had a falling-out with his boyfriend.  Spousal violence is very common among homosexuals

Americans were stunned earlier this week when initial reports circulated that an actor was attacked, insulted with homophobic slurs, doused with an unknown substance, and forced to wear a noose around his neck. The horrific details were covered by multiple news sites.

According to CBS, Actor Jussie Smollett from the show “Empire” alleged he was “attacked” by men who were Trump supporters….in the middle of the night…in the frigid temperatures of Chicago….

I’m sorry, but something about this just didn’t seem right from the very start. Do people REALLY believe that a group of Trump supporters were walking around in the Sub-zero midwest temperatures just waiting for a “gay guy” to attack?

However, as expected, the media united in their support for the actor even though there was NO evidence of many of his claims:

An example from NBC: “He is a victim, and we treat him like a victim. He’s been very cooperative,” Johnson said. “We are making gains in the investigation and hopefully we’ll bring it to a successful resolution soon.”

However, some doubts started to surface after video footage of the actual event was proving difficult to find.

From the Associated Press: Detectives have recovered more surveillance footage of “Empire” actor Jussie Smollett walking in downtown Chicago before and after he says he was attacked by two masked men, including video of him arriving home with a rope around his neck, but they’re still searching for footage of the attack, a police spokesman said Thursday.

The video from a surveillance camera at Smollett’s apartment building showing him arrive home with a rope around his neck is part of a larger effort to obtain as much footage as possible of his walk from a Subway restaurant to his apartment at around 2 a.m. Tuesday.

Police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said detectives, who are investigating the case as a possible hate crime, have pieced together more footage from the hundreds of public and private surveillance cameras in that area of downtown Chicago, which is home to many high-end hotels and restaurants. But they still haven’t found video of the attack or the men who match Smollett’s description of the suspects, he said.

Still more doubts surfaced after it was reported that the victim’s story seemed to change to include that the attackers told him that the area where he was attacked was “MAGA country.” Also suspicious was that the actor apparently had a phone conversation with his manager near the time of the event but they are refusing to turn over their phone records.

This from the Daily Caller: The Chicago Police Department (CPD) said “Empire” actor Jussie Smollett and his music manager are not handing over phone records of a conversation that occurred Tuesday morning during an alleged attack.

“Update on the ‘Empire’ Smollett case: The victim and his manager reported that they were talking on their cell phones to each other but CPD has been unable to independently verify this because they refused to turn over their cell phones,” CPD spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said in a Thursday statement obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation.

SOURCE

UPDATE: Jussie Smollett Managed To Keep Hold Of His Subway Sandwich Throughout ‘MAGA’ Attack. So this guy managed to hold on to his PHONE and a SUBWAY SANDWICH as two hateful white supremacists tied a noose around his neck, broke his rib, and poured bleach all over him?






Time to tell the truth about the Palestinian issue

by Alan Dershowitz

The front page of the New York Times Sunday Review featured one of the most biased, poorly informed, and historically inaccurate columns about the conflict between Israel and Palestine ever published by a mainstream newspaper. Written by Michelle Alexander, it is entitled, “Time to break the silence on Palestine,” as if the Palestinian issue has not been the most overhyped cause on campuses, at the United Nations, and in the media.

There is no silence to break. What must be broken is the double standard of those who elevate the Palestinian claims over those of the Kurds, the Syrians, the Iranians, the Chechens, the Tibetans, the Ukrainians, and many other more deserving groups who truly suffer from the silence of the academia, the media, and the international community. The United Nations devotes more of its time, money, and votes to the Palestinian issue than to the claims of all of these other oppressed groups combined.

The suffering of Palestinians, which does not compare to the suffering of many other groups, has been largely inflicted by themselves. They could have had a state, with no occupation, if they had accepted the Peel Commission Report of 1938, the United Nations Partition of 1947, the Camp David Summit deal of 2000, or the Ehud Olmert offer of 2008. They rejected all these offers, responding with violence and terrorism, because doing so would have required them to accept Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people, something they are unwilling to do even today.

I know because I asked Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas that question directly and he said no. The Palestinian leadership indeed has always wanted there not to be a Jewish state more than it has wanted there to be a Palestinian state. The Palestinian issue is not “one of the great moral challenges of our time,” as Alexander insists in her column. It is a complex, nuanced, pragmatic problem, with fault on all sides. The issue could be solved if Palestinian leaders were prepared to accept the “painful compromises” that Israeli leaders have already agreed to accept.

Had the early Palestinian leadership, with the surrounding Arab states, not attacked Israel the moment it declared statehood, it would have a viable state with no refugees. Had Hamas used the resources it received when Israel ended its occupation of the Gaza Strip in 2005 to build schools and hospitals instead of using these resources to construct rocket launchers and terror tunnels, it could have become a “Singapore on the Sea” instead of the poverty stricken enclave the Palestinian leadership turned it into.

The leaders of Hamas as well as the Palestinian Authority bear at least as much responsibility for the plight of the Palestinians as do the Israelis. Israel is certainly not without some fault, but the “blame it all on Israel” approach taken by Alexander is counterproductive because it encourages Palestinian recalcitrance. As Israeli diplomat Abba Eban once observed, “The Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.”

One striking illustration of the bias is the absurd claim by Alexander that “many students are fearful of expressing support for Palestinian rights” because of “McCarthyite tactics” employed by pro-Israel groups. I have taught on many campuses, and I can attest that no international cause is given more attention, far more than it deserves in comparison with other more compelling causes, than the Palestinians. It is pro-Israel students who are silenced out of fear of being denied recommendations, graded down, or shunned by peers. Some have even been threatened with violence. Efforts have been made to prevent from speaking on several campuses, despite my advocacy of a two state solution to the conflict.

Alexander claims that there is legal discrimination against Israeli Arabs. The reality is that Israeli Arabs have more rights than Arabs anywhere in the Muslim world. They vote freely, have their own political parties, speak openly against the Israeli government, and are beneficiaries of affirmative action in Israeli universities. The only legal right they lack is to turn Israel into another Muslim state governed by Sharia law, instead of the nation state of Jewish people governed by freedom and secular democratic law. That is what the new Jewish nation state law, which I personally oppose, does when it denies Arabs the “right of self determination in Israel.”

Alexander condemns “Palestinian homes being bulldozed,” without mentioning that these are the homes of terrorists who murder Jewish children, women, and men. She bemoans casualties in Gaza, which she calls “occupied” even though every Israeli soldier and settler left in 2005, without mentioning that many of these casualties were human shields from behind whom Hamas terrorists fire rockets at Israeli civilians. She says there are “streets for Jews only,” which is a categorical falsehood. There are roads in the disputed territories that are limited to cars with Israeli licenses for security. But these roads are in fact open to all Israelis, including Druze, Muslims, Christians, Zoroastrians, and people of no faith.

The most outrageous aspect of the column is the claim by Alexander that Martin Luther King Jr. inspired her to write it. But he was a staunch Zionist, who said, “When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You are talking anti-Semitism.” It is certainly possible that he would have been critical of certain Israeli policies today, but I am confident that he would have been appalled at her unfair attack on the nation state of the Jewish people and especially on her misuse of his good name to support anti-Israel bigotry.

SOURCE  







Abortion Maximalists Stand on Shaky Moral Ground
    
A bill proposed by Virginia state Delegate Kathy Tran — ultimately voted down — would have made certain forms of baby killing legal. The proposed law would have reduced the number of doctors required to sign a baby’s death warrant and expanded the number of excuses for why a mother could choose at the last minute to ask for one. A video of Tran explaining how, under her bill, a fully developed baby could be terminated even during labor, ignited a burning controversy.

The flames shed light on movements in other states, particularly New York and Rhode Island, to make abortion legal past the point of viability, meaning past the point where the baby could live independent of its mother.

Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam threw gasoline on the fire when he defended the legislation clumsily (to put it charitably), making it sound like he believed a viable baby could be fully delivered before the doctor and mother decided whether it should be permitted to live.

Many in the mainstream media — who often treat conservative reactions to an outrage as the “real” story rather than the outrageous thing itself — have been falling over each other to demonstrate how much more complicated and nuanced this issue is.

And they have a point — or points. Tran now says she misspoke and acknowledged that the way she had described the law would have run afoul of anti-infanticide laws.

It’s also true that the number of women who will bring a baby fully to term only to terminate it during the 40th week is indeed extremely small.

But it is only small in comparison to the total number of abortions in this country. According to the respected (and pro-abortion rights) Guttmacher Institute, there were some 926,000 induced abortions in 2014 (the most recent year for which data is available), and 1.3 percent — or roughly 12,000 — of those were after the 20th week.

Meanwhile, it’s not necessarily true, as Northam has tried to argue, that most women who seek late-term abortions do so solely for compelling health reasons or in response to a severe fetal deformity. According to a 2013 Guttmacher study, “most women seeking later terminations are not doing so for reasons of fetal anomaly or life endangerment.”

If you don’t think late-term, post-viability abortions are morally troubling, you might want to ask yourself why we are only one of seven countries in the world that allow elective abortions after 20 weeks. It’s unclear how many countries allow abortion at 40 weeks, mid-delivery, but it’s possible that the U.S. and North Korea would be the only members of that club.

I’m all in favor of debating such details, but what bothers me about these abortion controversies is the way utilitarian arguments are given the presumption of moral superiority. In almost every other sphere of debate where progressives claim the moral high ground, they are categorical. “If it saves just one life, it’s worth it,” they say about gun control, health-care reform, police abuse, etc.

Imagine if I were to argue that since lynchings are so rare, we don’t really need strict laws against lynching. Infanticide, like racism, murder and rape, is a moral category. It’s not less evil if it’s rare. It is rare — thank God — because we’ve agreed to treat it as evil.

Many people have trouble being 100 percent certain that a fertilized egg or a blastocyst is a human being, but vanishingly few of us dispute that a delivered baby outside the womb is a human being. And it is not a large leap in logic or morality to believe that a partially delivered viable baby is a human being. If you want to argue that the status of the baby gets murkier as you wind the clock backward, fine. But that’s a different argument. It’s not murky at 40 weeks.

In debates over the death penalty, there is one thing virtually everyone agrees upon: It’s profoundly wrong to execute the innocent. Our criminal justice system is rightly crammed with all manner of checks to minimize the risk of a terrible mistake. Well, a viable baby is surely innocent, too. And yet, among abortion rights maximalists, it is considered the morally sophisticated position to remove as many checks as possible from preventing infanticide. If you think it’s worth tolerating a certain number of baby killings to protect abortion rights, you should say so. But please don’t pretend the moral ground you’re standing on is very high.

SOURCE





Why Is There A War On Cheerleaders?

If I were to tell you that a growing group of killjoys wants to ban NFL cheerleading, would you guess that this group is on the political left or right?

Must be the right, right? They're the religious ones with all the sexual hang-ups.

Wrong. They're on the left. And what's their problem with cheerleading? I'll let them speak for themselves.

In The Boston Globe, Margery Eagan, Globe columnist and co-host of NPR's "Boston Public Radio," wrote a column titled "It's time to say goodbye to the NFL cheerleaders." She described NFL cheerleading as "creepy and demeaning."

USA Today sports columnist Nancy Armour came to the same conclusion: "The underlying premise of NFL cheerleaders is degrading. ... NFL cheerleaders need to go."

Chicago Tribune sports reporter Shannon Ryan wrote, "The league has shown only that it regards cheerleaders as pieces of sideline eye candy." To make her point, she asked, "why aren't there scantily dressed male cheerleaders and dance teams?"

Only the well-educated could ask such a stupid question — because only the highly educated deny that, with few exceptions, the only people who would like to see scantily dressed male cheerleaders are gay men.

In USA Today, Yale Divinity School Director of Communications Tom Krattenmaker added a theological voice to the anti-cheerleader chorus. "It's time," he intoned, "to call this out for what it is: demeaning to women and an anachronism that ought to be beneath the male fans to whom this titillating eye candy is served." This sentence, and his whole piece, is what goes for deep thought on the left today. He doesn't explain how being an NFL cheerleader is "demeaning." He simply declares it so. Did he bother to interview any cheerleaders? I did, and the consensus among cheerleaders is that it is one of their greatest life experiences.

Jacie Scott, a black woman who retired from being a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader in 2016, wrote in response to Nancy Armour: "I spent four years as a cheerleader in the NFL, and the experiences that each year brought helped shape me into the woman I am today. ... I saw countries I never imagined seeing. I made a positive impact in lives, young and old, and I did it all with 30-something incredible women. I wouldn't trade my time as a cheerleader for anything."

What is demeaning to cheerleaders is not cheerleading but people like Tom Krattenmaker, Shannon Ryan, Margery Eagan and Nancy Armour who have the conceit — and meanness — to label these women demeaned.

I interviewed a former Atlanta Falcons cheerleader, Nina Ahlin (now Noa Hami), on my radio show. When she entered my studio, I was struck by how attractive she was 20 years after retiring from cheerleading, and by her modest dress. Regarding her dress, she explained that soon after retiring as a cheerleader, she met an Orthodox Jewish man, fell in love, converted to Orthodox Judaism and married.

Apparently, her religious husband, a successful businessman, didn't find this woman's cheerleading background "demeaning." On the contrary, like the vast majority of men — religious or secular — he was delighted to be dating and ultimately marrying an NFL cheerleader. Good thing he didn't go to Yale Divinity School.

It was clear that even now, as an Orthodox Jew who dresses in the long skirts and long sleeves, she doesn't find cheerleading demeaning: She sent me a photo of herself from her cheerleader days.

As she wrote to me: "I can't imagine my life without having the experience I did as an NFL cheerleader. It was literally life changing for me. The friendships I made, the places we were able to go and the people we were able to meet can't be duplicated. ... The thought of that being taken away from young girls who dream of one day becoming a pro cheerleader scares me!"

Why do leftists have contempt for cheerleading and cheerleaders (who, after all, choose to be cheerleaders — and for virtually no pay)?

A Vanity Fair piece on cheerleaders gave the game away: "The league profits from selling a retrograde notion of masculinity — big, strong men, unafraid to take a hit, surrounded by enthusiastic, scantily clad women."

Or as a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation article titled "Pro cheerleading 'should be abolished'" reported, former professional basketball player Mariah Burton Nelson said, "Cheerleading implies that women's proper role is to support men, smile at men and fulfill the sexual fantasies of males."

The left has contempt for masculinity and the male sexual nature that is part of it. The new emasculated man will not look at sexy women. And the new defeminized woman will not want to "support men," let alone appear sexy for them.

The left claims to be pro-choice. But it demands the abolition of NFL (and NBA) cheerleading without giving women a choice to be cheerleaders — just as it never gave Miss America participants a choice when it abolished the Miss America swimsuit competition. Leftists believe they are morally superior people and, therefore, have the right to deprive anyone — man or woman — from choosing what the left disdains. The only woman's choice the left cares about is the choice to extinguish nascent human life.

Even if you have no interest in football or cheerleading, this should be your issue. We have to tell the left here, as in virtually every other area of life, and in the most forceful terms possible: Just leave us alone. Let us live our lives with our small joys. And grow up — men like looking at women, and women like being looked at.

A world with NFL cheerleaders is far preferable to the world the left wants to create: a dystopia in which men and women are interchangeable.

SOURCE
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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here

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1 comment:

C. S. P. Schofield said...

Two Comments;

1) "Time to tell the truth about the Palestinian issue"? How about this; when you lose a war bad things happen to you. When you keep fighting a lost war, things get worse. At some point Israel is going to decide they have Had. Enough. And then hell is going to go for a walk with the sleeves rolled up. Somebody REALLY needs to take the leaders of Hamas and other such organizations aside and explain to them just how stupid it is to pick fights with the descendants fo people tough enough to survive the Third Reich's viciousness.

2)The Progressive Left hates cheerleaders because it hates the sight of people enjoying themselves in any manner the Left doesn't get. It is beyond time we told them to go screw themselves.