Tuesday, January 14, 2020



The Hatred Whose Name We Dare Not Speak

Why the self-censorship when anti-Semitic violence is perpetrated by blacks?

Week after week come new headlines of attacks upon Jews walking the streets of ordinary, traditionally Jewish New York neighborhoods.

Since the beginning of December, there have been eight attacks upon Jews, starting with the shooting assault on a Jersey City Jewish supermarket which left three innocents dead.

Quite simply, even a mere year or two ago, this was not a problem one would have expected to see in the post-Second World War United States. A new menace to Jewish life, a reawakened anti-Semitism, reminiscent of the 1930s, with its Nazi and fascist infection, when Jews were last victimized in American streets, is now with us and a high proportion of this anti-Semitic violence is being perpetrated by African-Americans.

The problem is also large when viewed in the total context of hate crimes in the US: in the third quarter of 2019, anti-Jewish incidents comprised roughly half of all hate crimes recorded by New York City police.

After the Jersey City attacks, some local blacks despicably blamed Jews for living in the neighborhood and thus supposedly causing the attack.

Astonishingly, a local black official, Jersey City School Board member Joan Terrell-Paige, asked “Where was all this faith and hope when Black homeowners were threatened, intimidated, and harassed by I WANT TO BUY YOUR HOUSE brutes of the jewish [sic] community?” whom she accused of having “waved bags of money”  in front of black homeowners.

In one of the five assaults in New York City during Chanukah, a Jewish man, walking in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, was confronted by a gang of black youths screaming anti-Semitic obscenities at him, one of whom threw his drink at him.

In another assault, also in Crown Heights, a Jewish man was accosted by a group of eight black teenagers and knocked to the ground.

More serious still, this past weekend, a machete-wielding African-American man, Grafton Thomas, attempted to murder several Jews after entering a rabbi’s home in the orthodox Jewish neighborhood of Monsey in upstate New York. Thomas stabbed five people, one of whom was seriously injured.

More than a century ago, Lord Alfred Douglas, the lover of Irish playwright and wit, Oscar Wilde, devised a euphemism for the-then illegal activity of homosexual sex, ‘The love that dare not speak its name.’ Today, as though it were illegal or grossly offensive to identify anti-Semitic acts committed by anyone other than whites, officialdom substitutes the vocabulary of the mealy-mouthed. It would appear that attacks on Jews are viewed as serious and deserving of scrutiny and action only when committed by credentialed haters like white supremacists.

Thus, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio claimed in the midst of December’s anti-Jewish attacks that “‘most’ of the ‘violent and anti-Semitic attacks around this country’ are ‘fermented systematically and in an organized fashion by right-wing forces’” and that President Trump was also largely responsible for this.

Similarly, Representative Rashida Tlaib (D–MI) asserted that the Jersey City attack was a case of “white supremacy.” Still others opt for silence.

Where are the African-American community leaders, local and national, decrying this anti-Jewish violence perpetrated by members of their community? Where are the New York City Democratic representatives? Senator Charles Schumer has condemned the attacks as “pure evil” and called for a federal investigation into the attack, but why have we heard nothing, for example, from Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?

Only last October, Representative Ocasio-Cortez could be found absurdly accusing President Donald Trump of anti-Semitism. Now, when confronted by actual anti-Semitic assaults in the streets of her own city, not a word was to be heard from her.

Mayor de Blasio, it is true, was not silent, observing that “It’s not enough to condemn anti-Semitism — we have to confront it … The NYPD … will bring the perpetrators to justice.”

However, as the Orthodox Jewish newspaper, Vos Iz Neias, notes, “Mayor De Blasio’s policy has proved to be consistent: send out a tweet (only sometimes). Arrest the perpetrators. Release them a few hours later back onto the streets … The mayor cannot claim to be serious about eliminating anti-Semitic attacks in the city, while at the same time refusing to keep the perpetrators of these very crimes off the streets.”

New York Governor, Andrew Cuomo, has been forthright and active, describing the Monsey attack as a case of “domestic terrorism” and issuing instructions to state police to increase patrols in Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods across the state, but the silence from many other Democrats and African-African-American leaders remains alarming and symptomatic of the problerm.

The systematic ignoring and misidentification of black anti-Semitic assaults is an unsustainable and unserious approach to a profoundly serious problem. Regrettably, at this moment, we have no reason to expect progress because the reluctance to confront black anti-Semitism is not mysterious: it stems from a general reluctance to condemn anti-Semitism committed by anyone other than white racists because doing so would call attention to the widespread nature of the problem and beg the question of its durability and resurgence.

Any searching examination would soon reveal that anti-Semitism is not simply another bigotry, but rather an intellectual and spiritual disease which invests Jews with virtually supernatural capacity to harm humankind as the essential first step in mobilizing the masses to persecute and even murder them.

Those who wish to rid the world of the Judeo-Christian moral and intellectual legacy can do no better than targeting its Jewish progenitors. This is why anti-Semitism has been rife across time and place, operates without the normal stimulants of ethnic animosity or competition for territory or resources, and even appears in societies devoid of Jews.

The African-American community must confront the problem of anti-Semitic sentiment and violence within and this can only start with the African-American leadership recognizing the problem, taking the lead, forthrightly condemning the assaults, and visibly engaging in acts of solidarity with Jews.

Progress also cannot occur when leaders like Mayor De Blasio and Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders embrace radical Muslim activists like Linda Sarsour.

In short, positive words without positive action, or worse, coupled with negative action, has not and will not suffice.

This is a moment of truth for Democrats and for African-Americans, to be counted in substantive opposition to the haters within their ranks with a view to marginalizing them, or to quietly acquiesce in this alarming state of affairs, to the detriment of American Jews and society in general in the years to come. Their decision will shape the country the United States will become.

SOURCE 





Why today’s young men are terrified of sex

Mason, a former college football player from suburban Milwaukee, was almost 20 years old when he lost his virginity.

It’s a story you don’t hear too often. Boys, we’re told, are having sex younger and more irresponsibly than ever. But as author Peggy Orenstein learned while doing research on her new book, “Boys & Sex: Young Men on Hookups, Love, Porn, Consent, and Navigating the New Masculinity” (Harper), out now, the reality can be very different.

For Mason, the simple act of kissing was something he largely avoided in high school, afraid that without enough experience he would do it wrong. “He thought he was just supposed to know,” writes Orenstein. Even holding hands felt like it came with the risk of humiliation.

When he went to college he met a girl, Jeannie, who invited him back to her dorm room to fool around. He wasn’t able to perform, and blamed it on the weed he’d been smoking all night. She texted him the next day, inviting him over to try again.

“But the more he thought about it,” Orenstein writes, “the more anxious he became.” Once again, his attempts at intimacy fizzled.

For Orenstein, who’s spent two decades writing about the sexuality of girls — with bestsellers like “Girls & Sex” and “Don’t Call Me Princess” — Mason’s predicament was difficult to take seriously at first.

Like many of us, she bought into the cultural stereotypes “that all guys are sexually insatiable,” she writes. “Ever ready, incapable of refusal, regret, or injury” — an idea that just reinforced “the most retrograde idea of masculinity.”

Over the span of two years, Orenstein spoke to hundreds of boys across the United States, ranging in age from their early teens to mid-20s and spanning all races, socioeconomic backgrounds, religious beliefs and even sexual orientations. She learned that a surprising number of them don’t live up to gender cliches — meaning they aren’t hormone-driven Frankenstein’s monsters, obsessed with sex and unconcerned with the consequences. In fact, they’re pushing back against cultural expectations, and many are going so far as to avoid sex altogether.

According to the latest data by the General Social Survey, men between the ages of 18 and 29 are having less sex than ever; the number of abstinent men has nearly tripled in the last decade, from 10 percent in 2008 to 28 percent last year.

But as Orenstein discovered, it’s a movement that exists largely in secret. Rather than declare their abstinence, they come up with excuses for their lack of sexual interest — like the college sophomore Orenstein interviewed who frequently faked “whiskey d–k” to avoid hookups, or Mitchell in Los Angeles, who avoided sex with his high-school girlfriend for years because he was terrified that his sexual ability “would just be … sufficient.”

While girls struggle to find the magic middle ground between “prude” and “slut,” boys are “pushed to be as sexually active as possible,” Orenstein writes, “to knock out their firsts regardless of the circumstances or how they felt about their partners.”

Nate, a high-school junior from the San Francisco area, is terrified of sex because he’s certain the girls in his peer group already have more experience than him. “She’s going to know how to do things and you won’t,” he told Orenstein. “That’s a problem if she tells people you’ve got floppy lips or don’t know how to get her bra off.”

He wants to have a girlfriend someday, but for now, Nate says, “I’m afraid of intimacy.”

While the boys who spoke to Orenstein admit that porn “is about as authentic as pro-wrestling,” a 2016 study from London-based Middlesex University found that 53 percent of teen boys believe that the sex acts featured in porn are mostly realistic.

“Everyone watches porn and then gets super nervous about their [penis] size,” a college sophomore from Chicago told Orenstein. “I mean, it’s brutal. Like if you’re in the locker room, you’re going to turn around and try to hide yourself, or you’re not going to change in front of other guys.”

But it’s not always porn doing the most damage. Porn may offer the most ridiculous representations of sex, but mainstream media can spread just as much misinformation, and it’s more difficult for younger audiences to separate fact from fiction.

Mason had recently been watching the David Duchovny TV comedy “Californication,” about a womanizing novelist in Los Angeles. The sexual exploits are “just slightly unrealistic,” Mason says. “Like, the main character has sex with everyone wherever he goes. They made it seem so convincing. Whereas if you were to watch a porn video where a dude comes in with his [sexual organ] in a pizza box, it’s like, ‘All right, obviously that isn’t going to happen in real life.’ ”

Dylan, 17, is a high-school junior in Northern California. He’s handsome, athletic, a straight-A student, and captain of the soccer team. He was also, until recently, a virgin.

He had drank too much at a friend’s party and passed out on a couch. That’s where his friend Julia, who was sober, found him. She dragged Dylan, stumbling, to the bathroom and had sex with him on the floor.

The next morning, Dylan was horrified and asked Julia why she forced herself on him. “I didn’t want to do that,” he told her, insisting that he wanted his first time to be special.

“Oh, please,” she shot back. “Don’t give me that. All guys want it.”

It was a bias that even Orenstein admits to having. She was shocked by how often the boys shared stories of being on the receiving end of unwanted sex, “in which girls didn’t hear or didn’t respect ‘no,’ ” Orenstein writes.

Was it rape? The boys she interviewed weren’t sure. She recalls a college sophomore who told her of losing his virginity at 14 to a 17-year-old girl at his first high-school party. He didn’t want to do it, he says, but was too drunk and too worried about rumors she might spread to leave. “Like, if it’s the guy who didn’t consent,” he asked Orenstein, “what do you call that?”

According to a 2017 study at Columbia University, 80 percent of victims of sexual assault were women, but men were also being increasingly targeted, with one in eight male students reporting being coerced into non-consensual sex.

And in a 2017 study at New York University, sociologist Jessie Ford interviewed 40 straight male and female college students about their sexual experiences. Most men admitted that they would have sex even if they didn’t want to, because guys should always be “down to f–k.” Rejecting an invitation to sex was considered unmanly or “gay.”

When young men have sex forced upon them, it sends mixed signals — and makes it harder for them to understand the concept of consent altogether. “If they can’t say no,” Orenstein writes, “how are they supposed to hear it?”

The solution for all this isn’t what most parents want to hear: They need to have a straightforward talk with their sons about sex. “I know it’s awkward, I know it’s excruciating. I know it’s unclear where to begin,” Orenstein writes. “But this is your chance to do better.”

Mason agrees, and he can remember the exact moment where some parental intervention would’ve made a difference. He was a teenager, sitting on the basement couch of his family’s home and browsing porn on his school-supplied iPad. His father walked in and saw what he was doing. “You shouldn’t be watching that,” his dad scolded him. “It’s bad for you.”

Mason was well aware that his father had a trove of bookmarked porn on his own computer, so he snapped back, “Don’t be a hypocrite. I’ve seen all the stuff you watch.”

His father didn’t say another word. He just turned on the TV, watched it silently with his son, and then went to bed.

“I feel he sort of failed me,” Mason told Orenstein. If he had used the opportunity to start a conversation, to tell his son, “This will skew the way you view women . . . it’s only going to keep you from interacting with girls in a healthy manner,” Mason thinks it could’ve made all the difference for him. “But my parents were too fearful to actually deal with any of it,” he says.

Real conversations about what’s actually involved in a healthy sexual relationship can make all the difference. For Mason, it finally happened with his girlfriend Jeannie, who repeatedly tried (and failed) to seduce him.

After their third date together, in which Mason declined to have sex with her yet again, she asked him pointed questions about his anxiety, and why sex felt so scary to him.

“It felt like a storybook moment,” Mason recalled. Her openness to his insecurity and lack of sexual confidence allowed him to let his guard down. “Whatever nerves had affected me the previous times disappeared. And I realized: If I can’t be fully vulnerable, mentally and emotionally, it stops me from being able to be vulnerable physically.

“Because the naked body,” he adds, like an epiphany that’s taken his entire childhood to realize, “that’s a very vulnerable thing, you know?”

SOURCE 






Former Obama Campaign Manager Warns Democrat Voters About Bernie Sanders

Not that anyone who helped Barack Obama get elected to the presidency has any business warning anyone about picking someone too radical for the country, but it is nevertheless worth noting that Barack Obama 2012 campaign manager Jim Messina is sounding the alarm about Bernie Sanders, whose recent surge in Iowa has party insiders on edge.

In an interview with Politico, Messina argued that Trump would easily take advantage of Bernie's unrepentant socialism in key battleground states.

“If I were a campaign manager for Donald Trump and I look at the field, I would very much want to run against Bernie Sanders,” Messina told Politico. “I think the contrast is the best. He can say, ‘I’m a business guy, the economy’s good and this guy’s a socialist.’ I think that contrast for Trump is likely one that he’d be excited about in a way that he wouldn’t be as excited about Biden or potentially Mayor Pete or some of the more Midwestern moderate candidates.”

Messina has not officially endorsed any 2020 Democrat yet, but he's recently attended a Biden fundraiser, and his wife supports Biden.

“From a general election perspective, socialism is not going to be what Democrats are going to want to defend,” Messina argued. “If you’re the Democratic nominee for the Montana Senate race, you don’t want to spend the election talking about socialism.”

Of course, what Messina fails to acknowledge is that other 2020 Democrats have also embraced radical socialist policies in order to appeal to the increasingly radical Democratic Party base. The main difference between Bernie Sanders and his rivals is that Bernie wears his socialism on his sleeve, while the others deny being socialists at heart.

Messina is not the only Obama campaign alum sounding the alarm on Sanders. “My concern about Sanders would be just how low his ceiling may be,” said a senior campaign adviser who wished to remain anonymous.  “The argument Sanders would make is he can turn out tough-to-turn-out voters. While many are very progressive like the Sanders base, most aren’t, most aren’t connected to politics, they tend to be more moderate.”

Well, I'm not so sure about that, but we'll see if the party heeds the warning or not soon.

Sanders has a razor-thin edge in polling in Iowa.

SOURCE  





Australia: Bureaucracy short-circuited

THE [Qld.] State Government has backed off sacking firefighters without Blue Cards this summer after entire brigades threatened to quit in protest. Barely a third of Queensland's rural firies met the January 1 deadline to get a working-with-children check, forcing Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk to grant a three-month amnesty.

But volunteers will be turfed out of rural fire brigades and fined up to $6500 unless they apply for a Blue Card by March 31. And Queensland Fire and Emergency Services will refuse to give new uniforms to volunteers until they have applied.

"QFES personnel who refuse to apply for, or are unable to hold a current Blue Card, will not be eligible under law to continue their work, volunteer or undertake a practical placement within regulated roles at QFES," a spokesman said.

Queensland is the only state forcing firies to have Blue Cards
based on legal advice that they provide a "health service". The QFES spokesman yesterday said 21,378 volunteers require a Blue Card, yet only 8039 had met the original January 1 deadline to apply.

Twenty-six volunteers had applications rejected due to criminal records for "serious offences", which can include murder, rape, kidnapping, burglary and supplying drugs. Army reservists and interstate volunteers will be granted week-long waivers to fight fires in Queensland, a spokesman for Fire and Emergency Services Minister Craig Crawford said.

Rural Fire Brigades Association Queensland boss Justin Choveaux warned communities could be left undefended as entire brigades quit in protest against the requirement. "Whole brigades will close down," he said. "No one thought this through.

The plan is to grow volunteers — sacking half of them is not part of that plan. "The more volunteers there are, the safer communities will be. Reducing the number of volunteers to fight fires and carry out hazard-reduction burning is going to leave the community more exposed."

In Mareeba, in far-north Queensland, four senior members of the Paddy's Green rural fire brigade have quit in protest "These members have nothing to hide; evidenced by having to pass a criminal check at the first instance to become a member of a RFB," brigade secretary Kay Eccleshare wrote to the Cairns area director.

Dr Eccleshare said Blue Cards were required for people providing services to children, but the role of firefighters was to pro-tect communities from fire.

The Western Australian Bushfire Volunteers' Association blasted Queensland's Blue Card rule yesterday. "To suggest that the aver-age fire volunteer needs a Blue Card is the equivalent of arguing that the same requirement should apply to every retail assistant in every local convenience store because they both occasionally interact with children," executive officer Darren Brown said.

From the Brisbane "Courier Mail of 9 January, 2020

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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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