So who's the Fascist now?

Volodymyr Zelensky's government has suspended 11 Ukrainian political parties because of their alleged links with Russia.

The decision was taken by the Ukrainian national security and defence council, and although 10 of the 11 were small parties, one - the Opposition Platform for Life - holds 44 of the 450 seats in Ukraine's parliament, according to The Guardian.

At the same time, Zelensky signed a decree on Sunday to merge all national TV channels into a single government-run service - effectively ending the operation of private TV media.

The now outlawed Opposition Platform for Life party is led by Viktor Medvedchuk, who enjoys warms relations with the Kremlin - so much so that Vladimir Putin is the godfather of Medvedchuk's daughter.

Medvedchuk was charged with treason last year and put under house arrest, in a move which angered Moscow.

The pro-Kremlin oligarch escaped his house imprisonment three days after Russia invaded Ukraine, according to the Ukrainian government, and Medvedchuk's whereabouts are currently unknown.

President Zelensky accused the 11 blacklisted parties of 'colluding' with the Russian invaders, and said the suspension would last until martial law was lifted.

In a video address on Sunday, President Zelensky said: 'The activities of those politicians aimed at division or collusion will not succeed, but will receive a harsh response.

'Therefore, the national security and defence council decided, given the full-scale war unleashed by Russia, and the political ties that a number of political structures have with this state, to suspend any activity of a number of political parties for the period of martial law.'

Nashi (Ours) party, led by Yevhen Murayev, is the second biggest of the 11 political parties suspended in the crackdown on opposition parties.

Murayev was pinpointed as a potential candidate to lead a puppet government in Kyiv, installed by the Kremlin, according to a British intelligence report before the Russian invasion on February 24 - a claim that the Nashi party leader denied.

The heavy-handed move was criticised by the Kremlin, with ex-president and top security official Dmitry Medvedev writing sarcastically on his Telegram: 'The most democratic president of modern Ukraine has taken another step towards the western ideals of democracy.

'By decision of the Council for National Defence and Security, he completely banned any activity of opposition parties in Ukraine.

'They are not needed! Well done! Keep it up.'

The move comes on the tail of a decision by Zelensky to enact what he called a 'unified information policy' during the period of martial law, which will give his government a monopoly on the news.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10633237/President-Zelensky-suspends-11-political-parties-Ukraine-Kremlin-collusion-claims.html

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This Mom Says Transgender Movement Took Her Daughter’s Life

When Yaeli was 6, Martinez had moved her children to her native El Savador. They went to school there for five years, but visited California during the summer.

In 2011, they moved back to California, but Martinez said she didn’t reconcile with Yaeli’s father. He had been in Yaeli’s life earlier and “she was Daddy’s little girl,” Martinez said.

Yaeli had struggled with depression since her early teens.

When she entered high school, her mother said, Yaeli befriended another girl who identified as a boy and suggested to Yaeli that the reason for her depression might be that she was actually a boy.

Yaeli attended an LGBTQ club at school that affirmed her questioning of her own gender. Her counselor at school also affirmed her decision to begin socially transitioning from female to male.

“I don’t know if the schools, they supposed to let us know what’s going on or not, but they never send me any note about telling me, ‘We need to talk about your daughter,’” Martinez, who is originally from El Salvador, said.

Martinez said she found out what was happening to Yaeli through one of her other children, who attended the same high school.

Martinez recalls taking her daughter out to eat and asking her to share what was really going on in her life. Yaeli told her mom: “I don’t want to talk about it because you guys are not going to be supportive.”

Martinez recalled responding to her daughter by saying, “Well, we don’t know. So, if you tell us what’s going on I’ll be more than happy to help you. I’d do anything to help you, Yaeli. The only thing that I need, and I wanted it for you, is to see the happy girl that used to be before.”

“She said, ‘I’m not a girl. I’m a boy.’”

When Yaeli was 16, she moved out of her mother’s home.

Because Martinez expressed concerns over her daughter’s “transitioning” to a boy, Yaeli’s school psychologist recommended that she would be better off living away from home.

Martinez lost custody of her daughter to the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services.

Martinez says she was allowed to visit her daughter for one hour a week. After six months, she got two hours.

The logic of the Department of Children and Family Services was that “if we keep [Yaeli] out of your home, she [will] have more chance to survive,” Martinez recalled. “She’s not going to try to commit suicide.”

For about three years, Yaeli lived away from her family. She legally changed her name to Andrew and started taking cross-sex hormones.

Martinez watched as her daughter struggled to find happiness and relief from her depression.

“She was taking the [cross-sex] hormones; she was not happy. She changed her name, [but] was not happy,” Martinez said. “She adopted a dog because that was going to make her happy. None of it, everything that they’ve done, didn’t work.”

After identifying as a male for about three years, changing her name, and taking cross-sex hormones, Yaeli took her own life about six months before her 20th birthday.

And Martinez got that phone call from the coroner’s office.

She learned that her daughter had knelt on railroad tracks and raised her hands toward the sky as a train approached.

“I don’t want any parent to go through this,” Martinez told The Daily Signal. “Because this pain never goes away. … You breathe and you can feel the pain.”

She says she questioned Children and Family Services after her daughter’s death, saying, “Where is my daughter? You took her away from me, my family. Now she’s gone. You told me that she was going to be better off.”

Martinez said the agency had no adequate response.

The Daily Signal asked the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services for comment. The agency replied March 16, saying in part:

We extend our deepest condolences to the family and friends of Andrew M., as well as to the LGBTQIA community which advocates relentlessly to protect its youngest and most vulnerable members from such tragedies. State law protects the confidentiality of records for all children and families who may have come to the attention of child protective services, and prohibits confirming or commenting on whether a child or family has been involved with the department.

When Children and Family Services took her daughter from her, Martinez said, she was painted as “the bad guy.”

“Even though I talked to them about the depression, they didn’t care about [it], it didn’t matter,” Yaeli’s mother said.

“I wish one day, the system changes and [they] really help these kids” struggling with gender identity, Martinez said.

“I want them to explore what’s going on. Why [are children] acting the way that they are? Why [are they] feeling … the way that they feel? I want them to … be aware of the mental care.”

“They don’t talk about it,” Martinez said, referring to Children and Family Services and her daughter’s public school. “There is a lot of kids who are committing suicide. The system offers them that they will pay for anything, hormones, any surgery that they need.”

“I wish the system, instead of spending millions of dollars on these kids, having them in foster care, [would instead] support us as a parent and give us the tools that we need,” Yaeli’s mother said.

Instead, she said, what exists is a “broken system that is destroying our family.”

https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/03/21/this-mom-says-transgender-movement-took-her-daughters-life

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Make no mistake: Anti-Zionism is antisemitism

Jeff Jacoby

If Jewsplaining were an Olympic event, Paul O'Brien would be a contender for the gold.

O'Brien, the executive director of Amnesty International USA, was the guest speaker at a March 9 luncheon hosted by the Woman's National Democratic Club in Washington, D.C. His topic was Amnesty's recent report labeling — or rather, libeling — Israel as an "apartheid" state. In the course of defending the report, O'Brien told his audience that Israel "shouldn't exist as a Jewish state" and suggested that most American Jews share his view.

When a questioner cited a recent poll showing that lopsided majorities of American Jews identify as pro-Israel and feel an emotional attachment to the Jewish state, O'Brien replied: "I actually don't believe that to be true." What his "gut" told him, he said, was that "Jewish people in this country" don't think Israel needs to be a Jewish state — that it's enough for it to be "a safe Jewish space" that Jews can "call home."

It takes astonishing chutzpah — or remarkable tone-deafness — for a non-Jew born and raised in Ireland to declare that the Jews of America don't really want Israel to be what it has been for 74 years: the reborn nation-state of the Jewish people.

O'Brien's remarks were at times rambling and contradictory, and when they generated a backlash — condemnation came from sources as diverse as the New York Post editorial page and all 25 Jewish Democrats in the US House — he claimed that he had been quoted out of context. But there is no mistaking his bottom line: "We are opposed to the idea — and this, I think, is an existential part of the debate — that Israel should be preserved as a state for the Jewish people," he told his audience.

This is anti-Zionism: the belief that it is illegitimate for Israel to be an avowedly Jewish state and that Israel's explicitly Jewish identity must come to an end. And those who promote anti-Zionism are no less antisemitic than those who promote the claim that Jews were responsible for spreading COVID-19. Or the white supremacist vow that "Jews will not replace us." Or Louis Farrakhan's condemnation of Judaism as a "gutter religion." Or the chants of "Jews to the gas!" that have erupted at European soccer matches.

No doubt O'Brien would disagree. He would protest that one can be anti-Zionist — opposed to Israel's existence as a Jewish state — without being guilty of bigotry against Jews. In his remarks to the Woman's National Democratic Club, he described antisemitism as "a real, live threat" and insisted that he and his organization "firmly oppose antisemitism." Many anti-Zionists bristle at being charged with antisemitic bias, since their animus, they say, is not against Jewish people; it's against a Jewish country, one in which Jewish ethnic, religious, and national identity is linked to statehood.

But that argument doesn't withstand scrutiny.

If a group of activists asserted that the Republic of Ireland is an illegitimate country that should never have been created, would anyone believe their claim to not be anti-Irish? If they denied Ireland's right to exist and condemned it for fast-tracking citizenship for foreigners with an Irish ancestor, would anyone have trouble recognizing their stance as bigotry against Irish people?

The only difference between those who claim that the Irish are not entitled to a state of their own and the anti-Zionists who say there should be no Jewish state is that the former don't exist. No one denies that Ireland is the legitimate national state of the Irish people, just as no one denies that Poland is the national state of the Polish people and Japan is the national state of the Japanese people. It is only Jewish governance in a Jewish state that is singled out for obloquy. That is antisemitism.

Throughout history, hostility to Jews has, broadly speaking, taken three forms. One is religious antisemitism, which targets Jews for their faith. This is the antisemitism of the Crusades, in which Jews were forced to choose between baptism and death, and of the blood libel, in which Jews were accused of committing ritual murder as part of their religion.

Then there is the antisemitism that expresses itself physically, by seeking to exterminate as many Jews as possible. This was the antisemitism of Hitler and Nazi Germany — a genocidal campaign in which all Jews were targeted.

The third way in which antisemitism has manifested itself is as opposition not primarily to Jewish religion or Jewish life but to Jewish sovereignty — as hatred of a Jewish state in the Jewish homeland. In biblical times this was rampant, but during the long era of Jewish exile, when Jews had no state and no national political power, this type of anti-Jewish hostility became largely a dead letter.

To anti-Zionists, Jewish sovereignty is as intolerable today as it was in 1948, when five Arab armies invaded the newborn state of Israel, vowing "a war of extermination and a momentous massacre."

That changed with the birth of modern Zionism and the movement to reestablish a Jewish homeland. In the 20th century, campaigns of national liberation and self-determination changed the map of the world, bringing scores of new countries into existence in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Of all those countries, only Israel has had to face a decades-long campaign of demonization and delegitimization. At bottom, anti-Zionism has very little to do with criticism of Israel's policies or sympathy for Palestinian Arabs, both of which are perfectly in order. It has everything to do with denying to Jews a right that Slovaks, Chinese, Iranians, and Mexicans take for granted: a state of their own.

To anti-Zionists, Jewish sovereignty is as intolerable today as it was in 1948, when five Arab armies invaded the newborn state of Israel, vowing "a war of extermination and a momentous massacre." That war wasn't launched to achieve a two-state solution but to prevent one: The Arab world rejected the United Nations decision to partition Palestine into two countries, one Jewish and one Arab. What animates Israel's enemies is not the desire to establish a 22nd Arab state but to disestablish the world's lone Jewish state.

Anti-Zionism need not express itself in hateful or violent rhetoric to be antisemitic. It is antisemitic by definition. A relentless obsession with Israel's sins, real and imagined; the denial that Jews are entitled to Jewish sovereignty — these are not mere expressions of opinion, they are expressions of bigotry against the Jewish people. O'Brien's words are part of the rising tide of antisemitism in America and around the world. They deserved the condemnation they received, and then some.

https://jeffjacoby.com/26103/make-no-mistake-anti-zionism-is-antisemitism

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Davos Man on life support

Judith Sloan

I attended the World Economic Forum held in Davos, Switzerland just the once. It took me several years to recover.

Don’t get me wrong: it’s a picture-perfect location and the infrastructure that has sprung up to accommodate the many Davos men (and a few gals) and the sycophantic hangers-on is impressive. But if the stench of hypocrisy were at all toxic, I and the many other attendees would have died on those picturesque slopes.

There were just so many aspects of the conference that any rational, intelligent human being would baulk at. Like Russian oligarchs and US billionaires, having flown in on private jets, banging on about the dire problem of wealth and income inequality. Like evil African dictators and island dwellers screaming about climate change and the need for immediate compensation from the West.

Like the consistent propaganda about the benefits of unbound globalisation no matter how unsavoury some of the leaders of the countries involved in the group-hug.

From my point of view, probably the worst aspect of the whole event was the fawning and unquestioning approach taken by most of the assembled journalists and commentators. You have to understand, Davos is a gravy train and those who have been invited (and paid for by their employers) regard themselves as being privileged to be there.

No objections are raised about the colour-coded press passes that provide degrees of contact with the rich and famous – so much for fighting inequality. Some of them even involve themselves in the childish endeavour of spot the celebrity.

(I am the first to admit that popular culture is not my strong suit. I could have collided with Bono or Angelina Jolie and not realised. Who is Bono again?)

Most of the journalists and commentators, who are housed in a separate barn-like building away from the main conference centre, simply swallow the guff served up to them. They churn out puerile pieces about the wonderful ‘reform/reset’ initiatives being discussed by the hand-picked elites, headed by the indestructible Klaus Schwab who got the whole thing rolling.

I am pleased therefore to announce that Davos Man (and the whole edifice surrounding the World Economic Forum) is now on life support. Trapped by the despicable embrace of the worst dictators in the world and kowtowing to woeful world leaders/business types/celebrities/civil society apparatchiks, poor old Schwabby – who has become a very wealthy man on the basis of this long-running talkfest – and his pals need to realise their heyday is behind them.

Let us not forget here that Vladmir Putin gave a special address – by Zoom, it has to be admitted, because of Covid – to the Davos Agenda 2021. That’s right – 2021. Putin had been a fairly regular presence at the annual confab in that quaint village in the Swiss Alps over the years. There was only one year (post-Crimea) when there was a bit of a kerfuffle over whether or not he should be invited.

And who should be the opening keynote speaker at this year’s remote Davos conference? You guessed it, that other freedom-loving dictator, President Xi Jinping of China. The theme of his address is that we need to discard a Cold War mentality. This could be quite hilarious if it were not so serious.

Here are some of his other key points:

Amidst the raging torrents of a global crisis (Covid), countries are not riding separately in some 190 small boats, but are rather all in a giant ship on which our shared destiny hinges. Small boats may not survive a storm, but a giant ship is strong enough to brave a storm.

Economic globalisation is the trend of the times. Though the countercurrents are sure to exist in a river, none could stop from flowing to the sea. Despite the counter-currents and dangerous shoals, economic globalisation has never and will not veer off course.

We should never grow the economy at the cost of resource depletion and environmental degradation, which is like draining a pond to get fish; nor should we sacrifice growth to protect the environment, which is like climbing a tree to catch fish.

Are you thinking what I’m thinking? That the person responsible for drafting this florid bilge should be sent to the same re-education camps that the Uighurs are sent to (which don’t exist, obviously). My particular favourite is the last quote: black is white and white is black.

But let’s be serious for a moment. The reality is that globalisation is now in full retreat given the West’s sanctions on Russia. In all likelihood, these sanctions, which harm the Russian economy but also those imposing the sanctions, are likely to remain in place for some time.

Three oil majors – Shell, BP and Exxon-Mobil – have already lost a cool $US30 billion-odd on their assets located in Russia. Having spent literally decades grovelling to various vile Russian presidents and powerful bureaucrats and oligarchs, these companies did their dough in a matter of days. Russia has been effectively gifted these energy assets, without a rouble/dollar exchange taking place. To be sure, the loss of their technical expertise and bespoke equipment will eventually take its toll, but it’s not such a bad deal for Putin.

And when you hear ‘rules-based order’ next time, pause to think what does this really mean? These are the Davos rules, the rules established by the elites seeking even more billions. That China was admitted as a member of the World Trade Organisation when it was – way before it met the criteria for admission – was just part of the push for a ‘rules-based order’ type of globalisation.

Mind you, adherence to the rules is very much in the eye of the beholder as well as a day-to-day proposition. Take the case of China imposing sanctions on Australian coal, barley and wine, among other goods. Was this within the rules? Is being pissed off at the mere suggestion of an inquiry into the sources of Covid-19 sufficient for China to flout the rules? By the way, international law is basically an ‘intellectual rort’, to use Helen Dale’s fine description.

Hopefully, it’s farewell Davos Man and hello to those who regard economic and personal freedom, as well as national and energy security, as the highest priorities of sovereign countries. But while he may be in intensive care, let’s just watch. There is a still a lot of money at stake – for instance, in relation to the decarbonisation panic. So the advocates of unbridled globalisation won’t give in easily.

https://spectator.com.au/2022/03/davos-man-on-life-support/

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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