Unbreakable: Malala Yousafzai Is Changing the World.

Unbreakable: One Girl Changing the World. Video. Malala Yousafzai interviewed by Diane Sawyer. 20/20. ABC News, October 11, 2013. Excerpt 4: The Muslim Way.

“There Are Thousands of Malalas”: What Pakistan’s Teenage Activist Has Already Won. By Omar Waraich. Time, October 11, 2013.

Malala Is a Heroine, But Gandhi She Ain’t. By Qanta Ahmed. NJBR, October 12, 2013.

 

Men Dither While Women Lead. By Hanna Rosin.

Men dither while women lead in the world. By Hanna Rosin. CNN, October 11, 2013.

West Bank Reality: Arab, Not Jewish Hate. By Jonathan S. Tobin.

West Bank Reality: Arab, Not Jewish Hate. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, October 11, 2013.

Tobin:

Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas is planning on using the United Nations to publicize what he characterizes as violations of Arab rights in Jerusalem and settler violence in the West Bank. According to Abbas, the chutzpah of some Jews to demand the right to pray on part of their faith’s holiest site — the Temple Mount — is intolerable. But aside from his push to declare all of those parts of the city that were illegally occupied by Jordan from 1949 to 1967 as exclusive Palestinian property (a stand that would include the Western Wall as well as the Temple Mount in the Palestinian state he wants to create), Abbas is trying to focus the world on what he says is a campaign of outrages by Jews living in the West Bank against their neighbors. The latest example is an incident in which a mosque was defaced and cars vandalized in an Arab village by what appears to have been settlers.

 

Such instances are outrageous and should be punished. But those who commit such crimes are a tiny minority of even the Jewish population in the territories. The Israeli government, settler groups as well as the overwhelming majority of the Israeli people condemn these occurrences. But as shameful as they are, to pretend, as most mainstream media outlets do, that it is Jewish violence that is the everyday occurrences in the West Bank, let alone the most serious threat to the peace, is beyond absurd. Evidence for just how wrong this assumption is can be found throughout the year as the number of instances of violent attacks, lethal stone throwing and sundry other forms of terrorism that result not just in damaged windshields but wounded and dead Jewish bodies. Just last night, infiltrators near his home in the Jordan valley killed an Israeli. Last weekend, Arab terrorists shot a nine-year-old Israeli girl in a settlement. And yet you can bet that the U.N. and its sundry agencies dedicated to delegitimizing Israel will take up Abbas’ complaints rather than investigating the wave of anti-Jewish violence or ask what role the PA media plays in inciting these attacks.

 

The prevailing narrative of evil settlers attacking innocent Palestinians is popular precisely because it dovetails with the frame of reference through which Israel’s critics view the conflict. When they choose to notice the far more frequent instances of Arab violence against Jews, the victims are reported as being “settlers” — even when the targets are children — so as to make the point that they had it coming in some way. The settlers are seen as the possessors of stolen property, not people whose rights to live in the heart of the Jewish homeland are actually guaranteed by international law. If the media were to put settler violence in the context of the siege of attacks with which they have to live, the relatively small number of such incidents would be rightly seen as proof of the restraint and law-abiding nature of the vast majority of Jews living in the territories rather than as evidence of their incorrigible and hateful character.

 

More to the point, were the media to focus as they should on the drumbeat of incitement of hate against Israel and Jews that comes not from Palestinian outliers but the government that is the Jewish state’s supposed peace partner — Abbas’s PA — the notion that an accord merely requires an Israeli territorial retreat would be seen as a transparent fiction.

Medieval Times: “Vanity Fair” and the New Feudalism. By Matthew Continetti.

Medieval Times: “Vanity Fair” and the New Feudalism. By Matthew Continetti. Washington Free Beacon, October 11, 2013.

California’s New Feudalism Benefits a Few at the Expense of the Multitude. By Joel Kotkin. NJBR, October 7, 2013.


Continetti:

Looking for a distraction from the government shutdown and debt ceiling debate? I urge you to read Vanity Fair’s latest advertisement for “The New Establishment,” a list of “50 Titans Disrupting Media, Technology, and Culture,” the century-old magazine’s annual mash-note to the rich and powerful and self-satisfied. These disrupters innovate technologies, set the trends, define the limits of acceptable conversation in culture and politics and society, and pour money into the network of liberal foundations and Democratic campaigns around which our world is increasingly organized. They are the winners in the cognitive lottery that is the New Economy, the men and women creating and shaping, by accident and by design, the “New Feudalism” described so well by Joel Kotkin in The Daily Beast. It’s good to know their names.

 

The members of Vanity Fair’s new establishment include Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey, Sheryl Sandberg and Marissa Mayer, Cory Booker and Megan Ellison. These are the bold-faced celebrities you spot on other lists of power players, in the lush photos of parties and galas and tributes and premieres that appear in the front of the book of glossy magazines, and on the cover of our national newsweekly. They share a certain demographic profile. They are people of pallor, all but eight of them are men, they are clustered in Manhattan, Los Angeles, Silicon Valley, and Seattle, they work in technology, media, and politics, they are fantastically rich, and it is safe to assume that all but two of them share the attitudes and sensibilities, the mental luggage and politically correct language, the burnished resumes and can-do attitude of the caste.

 

One of the more remarkable things about this collection of do-gooders, overachievers, and symbolic analysts is their consistent inability to apply to themselves the skepticism and criticism they shower so heavily on Republicans and conservatives, on the rich who make their fortunes from resource extraction, manufacture, and investment. Not long ago a social critic such as C. Wright Mills could write pitilessly and accurately about The Power Elite, about the WASP establishment he saw lurking behind militarism and inequity. Few were exempt from his gaze. Our social critics today, however, prefer only to focus on a minority of a minority: the wealthy and influential whose policy and ideological objectives happen to be the very opposite of their own.

 

Put a banker or an industrialist or—dare I say it—a Republican in front of the men and women who edit Vanity Fair, and they will approach their subject with the utmost incredulity and commitment to ferreting out the worst possible facts. But the Hollywood tycoon or Internet billionaire or green-energy hawker or “engaged” actor whose politics exist in the temperate zone of bourgeois liberalism, whose public pronouncements are reliably “down the middle” and “moderate,” whose bold stands on the issues include such courageous positions as support for abortion-on-demand, affirmative action, amnesty, gun control, free trade, diversity, globalization, alternative energy, public transit, and government “investments” in education and infrastructure—his place in the establishment is not only noted but celebrated, applauded, held as an example to the people.

 

The news that a group associated with Charles and David Koch had contributed to another group that advocates for shutting down parts of the government to protest Obamacare has seized the political press and its allies in the Democratic Party as earth-shattering, revelatory. Meanwhile the imperious outgoing mayor of New York City can flood Colorado with outside money to support gun control, can cut a million dollar check to help his Democratic pal Cory Booker in New Jersey, can announce his intention to spend some $400 million in 2013 to make the world conform to his prejudices, and Time magazine slaps him on its cover, writes the headline “Bloomberg Unbound,” and writes in bold type: “He’s remade New York. Next up, the world.”

 

Does the world get a vote? Remaking the world into one giant New York City may sound swell to the editors of Time magazine, to the editors of Vanity Fair, and to the wide-eyed, Millennial bookers and producers toiling away in the Rockefeller and Time Warner centers, but it is not a cost-free proposition. New York is nice if you can afford it: If you are a wealthy liberal, or a recent college graduate rooming with three friends, if you are at the top of the world or setting out in the world, if you are Carrie Bradshaw or doing your best to impersonate her, the city cannot be beat. But it is hard to raise a family there. It is no place for the middle class.

 

The city has experienced a surge of inequality, of poverty, of dependence. Sublimated racial tension underwent a process of deposition over the summer, as activists and journalists challenged Bloomberg’s stop-and-frisk crime policy. All of these trends combined to give the world Bill de Blasio, the surprise Democratic nominee for mayor, and therefore in all likelihood the next occupant of Gracie Mansion. His tale of two cities captured the imagination of the Democratic electorate, his bourgeois liberal supporters not realizing how good they have it, how easily it all might disappear.

 

The feudalism Kotkin describes in his excellent essay has the same contradictory aspect: liberals lament the inequality and atomization of liberal societies, only to vote for, well, wealthy liberals. California, where many of the members of Vanity Fair’s new establishment reside, is a beautiful place. There are more billionaires in California than anywhere in the United States. But it is not a healthy polity. “The state suffers some of the highest levels of inequality in the country,” Kotkin writes. “The Golden State now suffers the highest level of poverty in the country.” The Golden State is “home to roughly one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients.” “For the first time in decades, the middle class is a minority.”

 

For years California has been a laboratory experiment in liberalism, for illegal immigration, progressive taxation, generous welfare benefits, union-run public schools, generous public service pensions, and the most cutting edge environmental policies. The result? Jerry Brown may have patched up the state’s fiscal situation for now, but the underlying problems remain: a hollowed-out economy and politics that satisfies the moral imperatives of rich liberals by buying off interest groups and the poor, and sends the middle class to Nevada and Arizona.

 

“The state’s digital oligarchy,” Kotkin says, “surely without intention, is increasingly driving the state’s lurch towards feudalism. Silicon Valley’s wealth reflects the fortunes of a handful of companies that dominate an information economy that itself is increasingly oligopolistic. … Through their embrace of and financial support for the state’s regulatory regime, the oligarchs have made job creation in non-tech businesses—manufacturing, energy, agriculture—increasingly difficult through ‘green energy’ initiatives that are also sure to boost already high utility costs.” I might dispute that part about the oligarchs acting “surely without intention”—at the moment things seem to be working precisely according to, say, Tom Steyer’s intention—but I cannot dispute Kotkin’s empirical findings or the thrust of his analysis. Neo-feudalism it is.

 

This week the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development released a study that concluded, in the words of the New York Times, that “the skill level of the American labor force is not merely slipping in comparison to that of its peers around the world, it has fallen dangerously behind.” Ask yourself which ideas rule in America in the fall of 2013: Who has won the intellectual fights over trade, over immigration, over the environment, over the family, over entitlements and welfare and affirmative action. The conservatives? I do not see it.

 

I see an America governed by liberal or libertarian principles, an America that has adopted economic and social policies that benefit the established and the ascendant, the smart and the wily, while ignoring or bribing the poor and low skilled. I see an America where a protest movement of the aging white middle class is mocked and vilified, where criticism of Obamacare or deficits and debt becomes the mark of a nihilist, a terrorist, a hostage taker, a suicide bomber. I see a world built to order for Reed Hastings of Netflix, for Ben Silbermann of Pinterest, for Dan Doctoroff of Bloomberg, for Tyler Perry and for Jennifer Lawrence, members of an establishment that finds its antitheses in the likes of de Blasio and Elizabeth Warren, Ted Cruz and Michele Bachmann. In this America our constitutional architecture is an obstacle to progressive ambition, and the nasty partisan fights we are experiencing are the birth pangs of a new power elite, a new digital oligarchy, a new caste of liberals here to assert their rule.

Malala Is a Heroine, But Gandhi She Ain’t. By Qanta Ahmed.

Malala is a heroine, but Gandhi she ain’t. By Qanta Ahmed. USA Today, October 11, 2013.

Why We Separate Church and State. By Seth Mandel.

Why We Separate Church and State. By Seth Mandel. Commentary, October 10, 2013.

Are Developing Countries Missing Out on the Blue Model? By Walter Russell Mead.

Are Developing Countries Missing Out on the Blue Model? By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, October 11, 2013.

The Perils of Premature Deindustrialization. By Dani Rodrik. Project Syndicate, October 11, 2013.

The Devil and Antonin Scalia. By Jennifer Senior.

The Devil and Antonin Scalia. By Jennifer Senior. New York Magazine, October 6, 2013. From the October 14, 2013 issue.

Technology Shabbat. By Tiffany Shlain.

Technology Shabbat. Video. By Tiffany Shlain. The Future Starts Here. AOL.com, October 11, 2013.

Tiffany Shlain website.

Tiffany Shlain videos.

The Tribe. Video. By Tiffany Shlain. Vimeo.

Kemal Ataturk Is Alive and Well and Living In Madison, WI. By Peter Berger.

Kemal Ataturk Is Alive and Well and Living In Madison, WI. By Peter Berger. The American Interest, October 9, 2013.

Berger:

Kemal Ataturk founded the Republic of Turkey as a militantly secular state. The Kemalist elite, while it could not (and, let us charitably assume, did not intend) to eradicate religion, it certainly made it clear that believers were second-class citizens. Their animosity was of course mainly directed against Islam. It did not succeed in making much headway against the majority population of Muslims, especially in the vast Anatolian hinterland. As Turkey became more democratic, these allegedly backward people voted—and not surprisingly they voted their “values”. The result has been the (thus far moderate) Islamist government.

 

The Kemalist policy toward religion has been a kind of disease control: Religion is basically a danger in a civilized society. It must be tightly controlled, contained within its tolerated spaces, kept out of the officially legitimated public sphere. In recent time Kemalism has not fared well in Turkey. It is unlikely to do better in the United States, the most religious country in the Western world, unless a currently assertive secularism achieves results in the federal courts which it could never achieve through the democratic process. The Freedom from Religion Foundation and, more importantly, the American Civil Liberties Union are spearhead organizations in the secularist campaign. This is not the place to speculate about the reasons for their recent activism. But I think it is useful to understand that their attitude toward public expressions of religious faith is essentially Kemalist.


Comment by Gary Novak:

Richard Rodriguez once gave a talk in which he described his visit to a Los Angeles high school where the lunch tables were voluntarily segregated by ethnicity. Even the Chicanos and Mexican-Americans sat at separate tables. Like Berger, Rodriguez thinks an important part of education is broadening one's comfort zone. So he described the situation as one in which the United States had been infected with the Canadian virus of multiculturalism.

 

I obtained a video of the talk and showed it to my introductory sociology class. One of my students went to the department head and complained that she was uncomfortable hearing multiculturalism criticized. It was too late for her to drop my class and take his, so he proposed that we accommodate her by having her attend his classes and take his tests, and he would tell me what grade to assign her at the end of the semester. I refused on the grounds that it might do her some good to hear multiculturalism criticized by a gay Hispanic. If I had wronged the student, I should go, not her. And, of course, if the situation were reversed and an ethnocentric student wanted out because talk of multiculturalism made him sick, the policy of accommodating the needs of all our student consumers would come to a screeching halt. “But that’s why you go to college—to learn you’re a racist!”

 

I suspect the department head felt quite virtuous for accommodating ME. “You see—even though you’re teaching the wrong stuff, my respect for academic freedom knows no limits. Your student clearly needs to be rescued, but I’ll take no action against you!” (The text I used—like all sociology texts—was, of course, making the case for multiculturalism.) Double standards and political correctness account for much of the increasing awareness that colleges today offer, as Berger puts it, “an increasingly costly and dubiously useful product.”

Why Republicans Shut Down the Government. By Francis Wilkinson.

Why Republicans Shut Down the Government. By Francis Wilkinson. Bloomberg, October 4, 2013.

Anger Can Be Power. By Thomas B. Edsall. New York Times, October 8, 2013.

Wrong Side of History. By Timothy Egan. New York Times, October 3, 2013.

The Myth That Makes the GOP Suicidal. By Ira Chernus. History News Network, October 9, 2013.

Putting the Spotlight on the Republican Party. By Stan Greenberg. Greenberg Quinlan Rossner Research. Democracy Corps, July 23, 2013. Results of the first national survey of the Republican Party Project. Also here.

Inside the GOP: Report on Focus Groups with Evangelical, Tea Party, and Moderate Republicans. By Stan Greenberg, James Carville, and Erica Seifert. Republican Party Project. Greenberg Quinlan Rossner Research. Democracy Corps, October 3, 2013. PDF. Also here.


Wilkinson:

For them [focus group participants], Greenberg notes, Washington looks nothing like the capital many others see. Gridlock? There is no gridlock. Only a socialist steamroller before which the Republican Party is feeble and afraid. “Evangelicals who feel most threatened by trends embrace the Tea Party because they are the ones who are fighting back,” the report states. Republican base voters “think they face a victorious Democratic Party that is intent on expanding government to increase dependency and therefore electoral support.”

 

This is the context of the fight against Obamacare. The basic idea – similarly articulated by some Republican officeholders, including Texas Senator Ted Cruz – is that Obama has extended a new entitlement to create a class of lazy, poor voters whose well-being is dependent upon the Democratic Party. Shorthand: more 47 percenters.

 

“Their party is losing to a Democratic Party of big government whose goal is to expand programs that mainly benefit minorities,” the report states.

 

The Republican moderates were staunch fiscal conservatives, but most readily embraced new gender relations and minority empowerment, including gay rights. The Tea Partiers and evangelicals spoke as if they were in the midst of War of the Worlds. As the report characterizes the Tea-Party worldview: “Obama’s America is an unmitigated evil based on big government, regulations and dependency.”

 

It’s a tough situation to rectify. A lot of Americans were not ready for a mixed-race president. They weren’t ready for gay marriage. They weren’t ready for the wave of legal and illegal immigration that redefined American demographics over the past two or three decades, bringing in lots of nonwhites. They weren’t ready – who was? – for the brutal effects of globalization on working- and middle-class Americans or the devastating fallout from the financial crisis.

 

Their representatives didn’t stop Obamacare. And their side didn't “take back America” in 2012 as Fox News and conservative radio personalities led them to believe they would. They feel the culture is running away from them (and they’re mostly right). They lack the power to control their own government. But they still have just enough to shut it down.

A Republican Party No One Could Control. By Fareed Zakaria.

A Republican Party no one could control. By Fareed Zakaria. Washington Post, October 10, 2013. Also here.

Tea Party Tactics Lead Straight Back to Secession. By Stephen Mihm. Bloomberg, October 8, 2013.

Obama Just Made a Terrible Mistake on Egypt. By Eric Trager.

Obama Just Made a Terrible Mistake on Egypt. By Eric Trager. The New Republic, October 9, 2013.

Netanyahu and the End of Days. By Victor Davis Hanson.

Netanyahu and the End of Days. By Victor Davis Hanson. National Review Online, October 10, 2013. Also at Real Clear Politics.

Hanson:

So far, Iranian president Hassan Rouhani’s peace ruse is still bearing some fruit. President Obama was eager to talk with him at the United Nations — only to be reportedly rebuffed, until Obama managed to phone him for the first conversation between heads of state of the two countries since the Iranian storming of the U.S. embassy in 1979.

 

Rouhani has certainly wowed Western elites with his mellifluous voice, quiet demeanor, and denials of wanting a bomb. The media, who ignore the circumstances of Rouhani’s three-decade trajectory to power, gush that he is suddenly a “moderate” and “Western-educated.”

 

The implication is that Rouhani is not quite one of those hard-line Shiite apocalyptic theocrats like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who in the past ranted about the eventual end to the Zionist entity.

 

Americans are sick and tired of losing blood and treasure in the Middle East. We understandably are desperate for almost any sign of Iranian outreach. Our pundits assure us that either Iran does not need and thus does not want a bomb, or that Iran at least could be contained if it got one.

 

No such giddy reception was given to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In comparison with Rouhani, he seemed grating to his U.N. audience in New York. A crabby Netanyahu is now seen as the party pooper who barks in his raspy voice that Rouhani is only buying time from the West until Iran can test a nuclear bomb — that the Iranian leader is a duplicitous “wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

 

Why does the unpleasant Netanyahu sound to us so unyielding, so dismissive of Rouhani’s efforts at dialogue, so ready to start an unnecessary war? How can the democracy that wants Iran not to have the bomb sound more trigger-happy than the theocracy intent on getting it?

 

In theory, it could be possible that Rouhani is a genuine pragmatist, eager to open up Iran’s nuclear facilities for inspection to avoid a preemptory attack and continuing crippling sanctions. But if the world’s only superpower can afford to take that slim chance, Netanyahu really cannot. Nearly half the world’s remaining Jews live in tiny Israel — a fact emphasized by the Iranian theocrats, who have in the past purportedly characterized it as a “black stain” upon the world.

 

After World War II, the survivors of the Holocaust envisioned Israel as the last-chance refuge for endangered Jews. Iranian extremists have turned that idea upside down — when, for example, former president Hashemi Rafsanjani purportedly said that “the use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything.”

 

Netanyahu accepts that history’s lessons are not nice. The world, both ancient and modern, is quite capable of snoozing as thousands perish, whether in Rwanda by edged weapons; in Iraq when Saddam Hussein gassed the Kurds; or, most recently, more than 100,000 in Syria.

 

Centuries before nuclear weapons, entire peoples have sometimes perished in war without much of a trace — or much afterthought. After the Third Punic War, Carthage — its physical place , people, and language — was obliterated by Rome. The vast Aztec Empire ceased to exist within two years of encountering Hernán Cortés. Byzantine, Vandal, and Prussian are now mere descriptors; most have no idea that they refer to defeated peoples and states that vanished.

 

The pessimistic Netanyahu also remembers that there was mostly spineless outrage at Hitler’s systematic harassment of Jews before the outbreak of World War II — and impotence in the face of their extermination during the war. Within a decade of the end of the Holocaust, anti-Semitism and hatred of Israel throughout the Middle East had become almost a religion.

 

In the modern age of thermonuclear weapons, the idea of eliminating an entire people has never been more achievable. But collective morality does not often follow the fast track of technological change. Any modern claim of a superior global ethos, anchored in the United Nations, that might prevent such annihilation is no more valid now than it was in 1941. Again, ask the Tutsis of Rwanda.

 

The disastrous idea of a preemptory war to disarm Iran seems to us apocalyptic. But then, we are a nation of 313 million, not 8 million; the winner of World War II, not a people nearly wiped out by it; surrounded by two wide oceans, not 300 million hostile neighbors; and out of Iranian missile range, not well within it. Reverse those comparisons and Obama might sound as neurotic as Netanyahu would utopian.

 

We can be wrong about Hassan Rouhani without lethal consequences. Netanyahu reviews history and concludes that he has no such margin of error. That fact alone allows us to sound high-minded and idealistic — and Israel suspicious and cranky.

Rush Limbaugh: Conservatism Is a Way of Life.

Conservatism Is a Way of Life. By Rush Limbaugh. Rush Limbaugh.com, October 10, 2013.

Rush:

Conservatism is not tax cuts. Conservatism is a way of life that is rooted in values and traditions that have contributed to the greatness of this country. Conservatism is the way you live, and that just has to be pointed out to people. To people growing up today, conservatism . . . God, I shudder to think what it is. What is conservatism to somebody that's 18 today? Conservatism is a deranged, lunatic, stupid cowboy, George Bush who wanted to go into Iraq for no reason.

 

What do you think it is? The way the media and the Democrat Party have defined conservatism today is a bastardization of what it is. One of the frustrating things is, the Republican Party has always been the modern day repository for conservatism, but you can’t find anybody there who’s willing to stand up and articulate it ’cause they’re afraid to or they don’t know what it is, or they don’t believe in it, whatever.

 

But Cruz and Mike Lee – and there are a bunch of others, and they are largely from the Tea Party – are willing to do it. Allen West was one. Ben Carson is another. There are all kinds of people standing up out there willing to articulate what it is, and when you listen to ’em, you find out it’s a lifestyle. It’s a value-based lifestyle that's rooted in personal responsibility, achievement, freedom, liberty.

 

Conservatism is not a bunch of policy wonks sitting around writing position papers. Conservatism is simply how happy, content-ful, responsible people live their lives. People who respect others. That’s conservatism, but it’s been so bastardized in the media – it has been so mischaracterized, demonized, you name it – that young skulls full of mush maybe as old as 30 or 35, get asked, “What do you think they think conservatism is?” and there hasn’t been a conservative articulate spokesman in politics for I don't know how long.

 

So the Democrats and the media have been able to define what a conservative is. It’s a racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe, extremist. That’s the furthest thing from the truth. So Cruz and Lee came along, and, in the process of trying to get what they wanted, were articulating conservatism for people. I signed on immediately because, to me, it’s about ideas. But the delay people, I love ’em. I love ’em, too. Same objective. The point was to stop Obamacare. There were arguments about how best to do it.

Thinking Like a Conservative: A Leftist View. By Rick Perlstein.

Thinking Like a Conservative (Part One): Mass Shootings and Gun Control. By Rick Perlstein. The Nation, September 25, 2013.

Thinking Like a Conservative (Part Two): Biding Time on Voting Rights. By Rick Perlstein. The Nation, September 26, 2013.

Thinking Like a Conservative (Part Three): On Shutting Down Government. By Rick Perlstein. The Nation, September 30, 2013.

Thinking Like a Conservative (Part Four): Goalpost-Moving. By Rick Perlstein. The Nation, October 10, 2013.

Can We Just Admit That the Libyan Adventure Was a Really Bad Idea? By Walter Russell Mead.

Can We Admit That the Libyan Adventure Was a Really Bad Idea? By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, October 10, 2013.

When Liberals Became Scolds. By George F. Will.

When liberals became scolds. By George F Will. Washington Post, October 9, 2019. Also here.

George Will on the JFK Assassination and the Advent of Punitive Liberalism. By Rush Limbaugh. RushLimbaugh.com, October 10, 2013.

Will:

“Ex-Marine Asks Soviet Citizenship”

 

— Washington Post headline, Nov. 1, 1959

 

(concerning Lee Harvey Oswald)

“He didn’t even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights. It’s — it had to be some silly little Communist.”

 

— Jacqueline Kennedy, Nov.22, 1963 

 

She thought it robbed his death of any meaning. But a meaning would be quickly manufactured to serve a new politics. First, however, an inconvenient fact — Oswald — had to be expunged from the story. So, just 24 months after the assassination, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the Kennedys’ kept historian, published a thousand-page history of the thousand-day presidency without mentioning the assassin.

 

The transformation of a murder by a marginal man into a killing by a sick culture began instantly — before Kennedy was buried. The afternoon of the assassination, Chief Justice Earl Warren ascribed Kennedy’s “martyrdom” to “the hatred and bitterness that has been injected into the life of our nation by bigots.” The next day, James Reston, the New York Times luminary, wrote in a front-page story that Kennedy was a victim of a “streak of violence in the American character,” noting especially “the violence of the extremists on the right.”

 

Never mind that adjacent to Reston’s article was a Times report on Oswald’s Communist convictions and associations. A Soviet spokesman, too, assigned “moral responsibility” for Kennedy’s death to “Barry Goldwater and other extremists on the right.”

 

Three days after the assassination, a Times editorial, “Spiral of Hate,” identified Kennedy’s killer as a “spirit”: The Times deplored “the shame all America must bear for the spirit of madness and hate that struck down” Kennedy. The editorialists were, presumably, immune to this spirit. The new liberalism-as-paternalism would be about correcting other people’s defects.

 

Hitherto a doctrine of American celebration and optimism, liberalism would now become a scowling indictment: Kennedy was killed by America’s social climate, whose sickness required “punitive liberalism.” That phrase is from James Piereson of the Manhattan Institute, whose 2007 book Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism is a profound meditation on the reverberations of the rifle shots in Dealey Plaza.

 

The bullets of Nov. 22, 1963, altered the nation’s trajectory less by killing a president than by giving birth to a destructive narrative about America. Fittingly, the narrative was most injurious to the narrators. Their recasting of the tragedy in order to validate their curdled conception of the nation marked a ruinous turn for liberalism, beginning its decline from political dominance.

 

Punitive liberalism preached the necessity of national repentance for a history of crimes and misdeeds that had produced a present so poisonous that it murdered a president. To be a liberal would mean being a scold. Liberalism would become the doctrine of grievance groups owed redress for cumulative inherited injuries inflicted by the nation’s tawdry history, toxic present and ominous future.

 

Kennedy’s posthumous reputation — Americans often place him, absurdly, atop the presidential rankings — reflects regrets about might-have-beens. To reread Robert Frost’s banal poem written for Kennedy’s inauguration (“A golden age of poetry and power of which this noonday’s the beginning hour”) is to wince at its clunky attempt to conjure an Augustan age from the melding of politics and celebrity that the Kennedys used to pioneer the presidency-as-entertainment.

 

Under Kennedy, liberalism began to become more stylistic than programmatic. After him — especially after his successor, Lyndon Johnson, a child of the New Deal, drove to enactment the Civil Rights Act , Medicare and Medicaid — liberalism became less concerned with material well-being than with lifestyle and cultural issues such as feminism, abortion and sexual freedom.

 

The bullets fired on Nov. 22, 1963, could shatter the social consensus that characterized the 1950s only because powerful new forces of an adversarial culture were about to erupt through society’s crust. Foremost among these forces was the college-bound population bulge — baby boomers with their sense of entitlement and moral superiority, vanities encouraged by an intelligentsia bored by peace and prosperity and hungry for heroic politics.

 

Liberalism’s disarray during the late 1960s, combined with Americans’ recoil from liberal hectoring, catalyzed the revival of conservatism in the 1970s. As Piereson writes, the retreat of liberalism from a doctrine of American affirmation left a void that would be filled by Ronald Reagan 17 years after the assassination.

 

The moral of liberalism’s explanation of Kennedy’s murder is that there is a human instinct to reject the fact that large events can have small, squalid causes; there is an intellectual itch to discern large hidden meanings in events. And political opportunism is perennial.

Ending the West’s Proxy War Against Israel. By Gunnar Heinsohn.

Ending the West’s Proxy War Against Israel. By Gunnar Heinsohn. Wall Street Journal, January 12, 2009. Also here.

Stop funding a Palestinian youth bulge, and the fighting will stop too.

Exploding Population. By Gunnar Heinsohn. New York Times, January 7, 2008.

Youth and war, a deadly duo. By Christopher Caldwell. FT.com, January 6, 2007.

“Youth bulge” violence. By Jonas Attenhofer. Jerusalem Post, April 10, 2007.

A Demographic Theory of War. By Clark Whelton. The Weekly Standard, October 5, 2007. Also here.

Hamas and Hezbollah Face Reform or Collapse. By Orit Perlov.

The End of the Muqawama? Hamas and Hizbollah Face Reform or Collapse. By Orit Perlov. INSS, Insight No. 473, October 8, 2013.

British Girls Have a Serious Drinking Problem. By Ann Dowsett Johnston.

Women, we’ve got to talk about our drinking. By Ann Dowsett Johnston. The Guardian, October 2, 2013.

Is alcohol a steroid for women? Video. Blonde on Blonde with Lis Wiehl and Deirdre Imus. Imus in the Morning. Fox Business, October 9, 2013.

A Dispatch from a Syrian Refugee Camp. By Lionel Beehner.

A Dispatch from a Syrian Refugee Camp. By Lionel Beehner. Political Violence at a Glance, October 8, 2013.

Za’atari Refugee Camp, JORDAN: Um Shahnaz and her three daughters in a trailer in Za’atari; her other two daughters and husband were killed in an airstrike against her home in Daraa.

The Left Hates Anything Old. By Dennis Prager.

The Left Hates Anything Old. By Dennis Prager. National Review Online, October 8, 2013.

Miley Cyrus’s Kind of Cool. By Mona Charen.

Miley Cyrus’s Kind of Cool. By Mona Charen. National Review Online, October 8, 2013.

Remembering Ovadia Yosef, the Israeli Ayatollah. By Jeffrey Goldberg.

Remembering Ovadia Yosef, the Israeli Ayatollah. By Jeffrey Goldberg. Bloomberg, October 8, 2013.

Goldberg:

More than 700,000 people gathered in Jerusalem yesterday to mourn the death of a great sage, Ovadia Yosef, a former chief rabbi of Israel and the supreme guide of the Shas political party.

 

The country had never before seen a funeral of this size. The mass of mourners was a testament to Yosef’s magnetism and scholarship, as well as to the work he did to lift up his community, the once-aggrieved (and still occasionally put-upon) Mizrachim, or Jews from Arab countries. (Yosef was himself born in Baghdad and served as a rabbi in Cairo.)

 

The party Yosef created made him a kingmaker in Israeli politics (read Noah Feldman’s incisive look at Yosef's revolutionary role in transforming Israeli political culture), and he was perhaps best known, beyond the walls of ultra-Orthodoxy, for his ruling that it would be permissible under Jewish law to cede biblical land to Palestinians if lives would be saved by doing so.

 

Much of the coverage of Yosef’s death has focused on the transformative role he played in the lives of Mizrachim. But much of it has neglected to mention the unfortunate fact that Yosef was a mean-spirited fundamentalist who created a corrupt party that coarsened Israeli politics, held a medieval belief in a vindictive God, and made abominable pronouncements on the moral and personal qualities of those of different races, religions and political views.

 

I spend a lot of time in this space highlighting the corrosive anti-Semitism of such figures as Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Iranian leader, and Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the extremist Al Jazeera televangelist. It’s unpleasant but necessary to note that Israel, too, has its share of religious fanatics. Yosef was his country’s most eminent. It’s true that he endorsed (as a theoretical matter) the idea of Israeli withdrawal from territories captured in the 1967 Six-Day War. But when former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon argued for a withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, Yosef said, “God will strike him with one blow and he will die. He will sleep and not awake.” (Some of Yosef’s followers were ecstatic – I saw their ecstasy with my own eyes – when Sharon later suffered a stroke.)

 

In the manner of the crudest fundamentalists everywhere, Yosef blamed misfortune and death on apostasy, irreligiosity and homosexuality (gay people, in his eyes, were “completely evil”). About Israeli soldiers who fell in battle, Yosef once said, “Is it any wonder if, heaven forbid, soldiers are killed in a war? They don’t observe the Sabbath, they don’t observe the Torah, they don’t pray, they don’t put on phylacteries every day. Is it any wonder that they’re killed? It’s no wonder.” Even more famously, he blamed the deaths of Jews during the Holocaust on the spiritual deficiencies of their ancestors.

 

In 2005, he argued that Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment for the Gaza withdrawal and for the alleged godlessness of the black residents of New Orleans. “There was a tsunami and there are terrible natural disasters, because there isn't enough Torah study,” he said. “Tens of thousands have been killed. All of this because they have no God.” He went on to argue – if that’s the word for it – that the deaths were also punishment directed at President George W. Bush for pressuring Sharon to remove Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip. “It was God’s retribution,” he said. “God does not short-change anyone.”

 

Yosef’s excoriations of Israeli politicians were legendary. In the last election, Yosef said this about the leadership of the right-wing Jewish Home party: “Those are religious people? They come to uproot the Torah. Those who elect them deny the Torah, this is the Jewish Home? This is the Jewish Home of the gentiles.”

 

The most devastating insult Yosef could muster against a Jew was to label him a gentile. He held gentiles in general contempt. “Goyim were born only to serve us,” he said in a 2010 sermon. “Without that, they have no place in the world – only to serve the people of Israel.” 

Of Muslims, he said, “They’re stupid. Their religion is as ugly as they are.” His hatred of Palestinians was obvious. Speaking of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and his aides, Yosef said, “All these evil people should perish from this world. God should strike them with a plague, them and these Palestinians.”

 

Yosef’s defenders will note that Abbas was one of the many dignitaries who expressed his condolences on learning of Yosef’s death. Abbas did so for the same reason Israeli President Shimon Peres and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did: because Yosef represented a vast and powerful political constituency.

 

Defenders of Yosef will also argue that his outbursts and prejudices came late in life (though not all of them did) or that they were the product of his upbringing, as a Jew who was both discriminated against by Muslims and who led an ethnic group that suffered at their hands. Yosef’s apologists also argue that the good work he did – on behalf of war widows, for instance – mitigates the damage of his egregious words.

 

Sorry, no: Prejudice is prejudice, whether it comes from an imam in Qatar or from the man whose Jewish critics labeled him, correctly, the “Israeli ayatollah.”