In New York City, the savages protest in support of savagery

When my good friend William Teach wrote, at 8:25 PM EST on Christmas Day, “What’s the over/under that the @nytimes doesn’t bother to cover this, despite being a NY paper? Maybe a tiny blurb on A25. If these were rioting Jews it would already be on the web front page,” I thought that surely, surely!, even The New York Times couldn’t ignore riots. But, Mr Teach was right: at least as of 8:40 AM EST, there were no stories at all on the front page of the Times website concerning the riots, though there was a story, in the “In Case You Missed It” section about halfway down on the right hand side, “New York City, for Some Jews, Feels Newly Tense : With antisemitism and protests spilling onto the streets of New York, the city’s Jewish population is trying to navigate the new contours of its hometown,” a story dated on December 20th, six days ago.

There was an old joke in the city, from the days when people actually read the dead-trees editions of newspapers, that people on the subways used the Times as a cover to hide from people that they were actually reading the New York Post:

Pro-Palestinian protesters chant ‘Christmas is canceled’ while carrying blood-red mock Nativity scene through NYC — scuffles break out, arrests made

By Larry Celona, Reuven Fenton, Jorge Fitz-Gibbon, and Patrick Reilly | Christmas Day, December 25, 2023 | 8:25 PM EST

They’re out to “cancel” Christmas.

Hundreds of pro-Palestinian protesters converged on Midtown Monday, lugging a blood-red mock Nativity scene and chanting, “Christmas is canceled here.” Continue reading

As dumb as a box of rocks

Sadly, while ignorance can be cured through education, there’s really no cure for stupid!

I got this image via a tweet from Guy Benson, and it’s just shaking my head stupid. Just what do they believe that the ‘Palestinian’ Arabs think about “feminist values of protecting women and queer people of color”? According to Amnesty International:

Women’s and girls’ rights
According to the Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counselling, 29 women were killed in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip by their family members in apparent cases of domestic violence. In September, the Gaza authorities prevented sisters Wissam and Fatimah al-Assi, aged 24 and 20 respectively, from pursuing complaints for domestic violence through courts by impeding them from accessing a prosecutor to testify.

LGBTI people’s rights
Authorities failed to prevent and investigate homophobic and transphobic threats and attacks.

On 9 July, security forces stood by and watched as a mob beat youths and children participating in a parade organized by Ashtar Theatre in Ramallah that included rainbow flags. The attack came amid a wave of incitement to violence and hate speech against LGBTI people and feminists that the authorities failed to investigate.

The last I heard, Amnesty International was not some evil reich-wing organization!

Male homosexual activity is a criminal offence, punishable by up to ten years imprisonment, and worse. From The Jerusalem Post, written well before the current unpleasantness:

According to Palestinian law, being gay is punishable by up to 10 years in prison and in Gaza, it’s punishable by death. In 2016, Hamas executed a senior commander by firing squad in Gaza for homosexual activity. LGBTQ+ Palestinians have no legal protections against discrimination, are forbidden from adopting and gay marriage is not recognized in any capacity.

In this Pride month alone, the LGBTQ+ community has been threatened and silenced in Ramallah, forcing a concert of east Jerusalem’s Bashar Murad to be canceled when anti-gay activists marched into a concert venue and demanded the organizers cancel the event for the LGBTQ+ community.

According to Wikipedia, Northwestern University has an acceptance rate of just 7%, so one would think that the student body would be fairly intelligent, but if you did think that, apparently you’d be wrong. The University has a guesstimated annual cost of attendance of a whopping $91,290, including room-and-board.

But it doesn’t matter: at least their College Feminists are as dumb as a box of rocks.

Palestinian liberation is an intersectional issue, and goes hand in hand with feminist values of protecting women and queer people of color. As intersectional feminists, we are against all forms of oppression, including settler colonialism.

Really? As students in Evanston, Illinois, they are living on the land of the Illini and Ho-Chunk Indian tribes; have they shown their opposition to “settler colonialism” by giving up their homes and property to those tribes? Or is it the usual: they oppose other people’s settler colonialism, but have Reasons to keep what they have personally?

Ignorance, as stated earlier, can be cured by education, by teaching the person who doesn’t know something what he doesn’t know! But one would think that the Northwestern University College Feminists would have learned by now that Islam forbids homosexual activity, and most of the nations in the Muslim Middle East have legal prohibitions on such, prohibitions which are of varying severity, up to and including death, especially in Iran, which supports Hamas to the tune of an estimated $100 million per year. One would have thought that the College Feminists would have heard of the dissent in Iran which started over the religious police’s killing in custody of an Iranian woman for not properly wearing a head scarf.

Perhaps the College Feminists simply don’t understand the meaning of the word they like to throw around, intersectionality:

Intersectionality is an analytical framework for understanding how individuals’ various social and political identities result in unique combinations of discrimination and privilege. Intersectionality identifies multiple factors of advantage and disadvantage.[1] Examples of these factors include gendercastesexraceethnicityclasssexualityreligiondisabilityweightspecies[2] and physical appearance.[3] These intersecting and overlapping social identities may be both empowering and oppressing.[4][5] However, little good-quality quantitative research has been done to support or undermine the theory of intersectionality.[6]

Intersectionality broadens the scope of the first and second waves of feminism, which largely focused on the experiences of women who were whitemiddle-class and cisgender,[7] to include the different experiences of women of colorpoor womenimmigrant women, and other groups. Intersectional feminism aims to separate itself from white feminism by acknowledging women’s differing experiences and identities.

Does that sound like gobbledygook to you? It should, but it seems that the College Feminists have assumed the position that all people who are supposedly oppressed have something in common, when they really do not. Were Hamas to actually take over, and the Northwestern University College Feminists living there, they’d be among the first ones lined up against the wall.

Feminism and progressive politics are things which can exist in Western civilizations, another term they’d probably hate, but it’s only under the enlightenment and Christian European and English-speaking North American societies where these things are even allowed to exist. The things people have the freedom to do and say in Iceland and Ireland and Israel are not allowed in Iran or Iraq or Indonesia, and trying them can get you beaten, imprisoned or even killed.

For $91,290 a year, you’d think that they could have learned that.

I completely support this measure in Minneapolis Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. -- Galatians 6:7

Representative Ilhan Omar Mynett (D-MN) and state Attorney General Keith bin Ellison (D-MN) have endorsed a November ballot initiative that would abolish the Minneapolis Police Department and replace it with a new Department of Public Safety.

The initiative would remove language in the city charter that requires Minneapolis to keep a police department with a minimum number of officers based on population.

The city would then create a new agency responsible for ‘integrating’ public safety functions ‘into a comprehensive public health approach to safety.’ The new agency could have police ‘if necessary to fulfill the responsibilities of the department.’

Mrs Mynett argued, in an OpEd in the Star Tribune:

Charter change on Minneapolis public safety is needed

The amendment on November’s ballot lets citizens choose a more humane system.

By Ilhan Omar | August 31, 2021 | 11:41 AM CDT

Minnesota and the entire world watched in horror last May as George Floyd, a resident of my congressional district, had his life taken from him by the very officers who had sworn an oath to protect him. One of those officers is now in prison. But as Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison said at the time, that verdict represented accountability, not justice, because justice implies restoration. “Now,” he told us, “the cause of justice is in our hands.”

What many don’t know is that the murder of George Floyd was not a one-off event. I remember witnessing my first police shooting as a teenager, where the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) put nearly 38 bullets into the body of a mentally ill man who was just released from an institution, didn’t speak a word of English, couldn’t respond to commands and was not of any imminent threat. Many of us, particularly people of color, have witnessed those kinds of killings in front of civilians far too often.

The truth is the current system hasn’t been serving our city for a long time. Right now, we expect the MPD to respond to all types of emergencies, from mental health crises, to domestic abuse, sexual abuse, and simple noise complaints and traffic stops. But the department simply is not equipped to deal with all these issues, which can lead to escalating tensions and even violence at the hands of police.

One of the biggest impediments to change is the Minneapolis Police Federation. Led by far-right Donald Trump supporter Bob Kroll until recently, the union routinely shields bad cops from any discipline. A recent Reuters investigation found that 9 out of 10 accusations of misconduct resulted in no punishment or intervention aimed at changing the officers’ behavior. The union also openly championed violent “warrior-style policing,” which treats any interactions with civilians like a war zone. These were the very tactics used against protesters in the wake of Floyd’s murder.

It looks to me like Minneapolis has become a war zone: with 61 homicides through the end of August, there have been two more murders in the city than at the same time last year, and last year saw a real spike due to the death of George Floyd. Robberies are up, 1,245 to 1,156, as are aggravated assaults, 1,975 to 2,030.

So, what would Mrs Mynett and Mr bin Ellison do about these killings, these crimes? Why, they’d send a social worker, or a crisis intervenor, or have some other #woke reaction. Of course, the number of reported crimes would actually decrease, because the people of the city would throw up their hands and say, “What’s the use?”

But murders would increase, because murder is a crime of evidence, not a crime of reporting: unless a killer has planned very well, it’s very difficult to dispose of a body, 100 to 300 lb of blood and tissue and bone, something which will start to stink in relatively short order. Bodies almost always get discovered.

Still, if that’s what the idiots good people in Minneapolis want, I say, let them have it, let them show us what an absolutely brilliant idea it is. After all, I don’t live there, so why would I care when they reap what they sow?

Is it possible to support the Palestinians and not be anti-Semitic? Perhaps, but I've yet to see it done

I have said it before: it is philosophically possible to be opposed to Israeli foreign policy and not be anti-Semitic, but it is a trick I have never seen accomplished. But, let’s be honest: most of the pro-Palestinian agitators don’t even try anymore. Mia Khalifa, a Lebanese-born former porn actress tweeted:

You can see the actual tweet if you follow the link; what is presented here is a screen capture of it, because it’s very possible that the lovely Miss Khalifa will delete it.

Why? As the New York Post noted:

one of the bottles with Khalifa bore the date 1943 and contained champagne produced in Nazi-occupied France.

“Owning the Jewish state by proudly drinking wine from Vichy France,” one user wrote. “About right, yes.”

The Post noted that drinking that wine in Gaza is illegal.

Why do the left support the Palestinians, and the Arabs in general? The Advocate is a very leftist homosexual rights publication, but even they can’t stomach the idea of “Queers for Palestine”:

Queers for Palestine?

By James Kirchick | January 28, 2009 | 12:00 AM EST

Of all the slogans chanted and displayed at anti-Israel rallies over the past month, surely “Queers for Palestine” ranks as the most oxymoronic. It is the motto of the San Francisco–based Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism (QUIT), a group advocating financial divestment from the Jewish State. QUIT contends that Zionism is racism, regularly demonstrates at gay pride marches, organizes with far-right Muslim organizations, and successfully lobbied the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission to boycott the 2006 World Pride Conference due to its location that year in Jerusalem.

Mr Kirchick, the author, used the wrong word: it isn’t “oxymoronic” but just plain moronic. Any liberal who supports the Palestinians is just plain stupid.

What makes QUIT oxymoronic is that their affinity for Palestine isn’t reciprocated. There may be queers for Palestine, but Palestine certainly isn’t for queers, either in the livable or empathetic sense. Like all Islamic polities, the Palestinian Authority systematically harasses gay people. Under the cloak of rooting out Israeli “collaborators,” P.A. officials extort, imprison, and torture gays. But Palestinian oppression of homosexuality isn’t merely a matter of state policy, it’s one firmly rooted in Palestinian society, where hatred of gays surpasses even that of Jews. Last October, a gay Palestinian man with an Israeli lover petitioned Israel’s high court of justice for asylum, claiming that his family threatened to kill him if he did not “reform.” He’s one of the few lucky Palestinians to be able to challenge his plight.

And that’s only in the relatively benign West Bank. The Gaza Strip, which has stagnated under the heel of Hamas’s Islamofascist rule since 2007, is an even more dangerous place for gays, “a minority of perverts and the mentally and morally sick,” in the words of a senior Hamas leader. As in Iran, Hamas’s patron and the chief sponsor of international terrorism, even the mere suspicion of homosexuality will get one killed in Gaza, being hurled from the roof of a tall building the method of choice.

Virtually none of the current political left’s opinions fare very well in the Muslim Middle East. Women’s rights? While the laws differ in the specifics, in no country in the Muslim Middle East do women have equal rights with men. Racial equality? Among the Arabs, blacks are considered inferior, and have far fewer rights. Freedom of religion? To varying degrees Islam is the official religion in these areas, and not only are adherents of other faiths, or of atheism, subject to discrimination, apostasy laws exist throughout the Muslim Middle East, and Muslims renouncing Islam, or anyone criticizing Islam, can be subject to criminal penalties, up to and including capital punishment.

Miss Khalifa? She’s an idiot. In a video, she complains about the difficulty of getting into a non-pornography workforce, but she’s wearing a suit jacket without a blouse, to show off deep cleavage. Now, she’s drinking wine from Vichy France, which was controlled by the Nazis, and proudly saying that her wine is older than the state of Israel. But if she is a particularly clueless advocate, she isn’t qualitatively different from the American and European left in their support of the Palestinians.