Category — Liberalism

Look, I don’t usually get involved with the Israel thing — but how many times do American Jews tout that Israel is “the Middle East’s only democracy”?

For the record, in a democracy, you need a healthy measure of freedom of expression. That means allowing people to say things we don’t like. Not things that compromise specific military security, and not saying things that clearly endanger people’s lives, but never the less, the right to say really offensive things. Not handing them a platform. Not validating every stupid opinion as important. But they should not be legally punished simply for being offensive.

If you are a democracy, you should have the right to say that the earth is flat. Or that the earth revolves around the sun.

You should also be able to say that the Holocaust never happened, and you should be able to say that Israel has no right to exist.

Israel is apparently on track to ban the latter. Horrifically, Israel is seeking a one year prison term for offenders.

The JTA reports,

A bill that would require a one-year prison sentence for anyone speaking against Israel’s existence as a Jewish state passed a first reading.

The bill, proposed by Jewish Home Party lawmaker Zevulun Orlev, advanced Wednesday by a vote of 47-34, with one abstention. Knesset members had a heated discussion on the bill before and after the vote.

A Knesset committee will determine when and in what form it should come back to the entire body for a second and third reading.

The measure comes just days after a bill was proposed making it illegal to observe Israel Independence Day as a day of mourning.

Why? Why is this happening? Am I missing something? If this law is passed, is it really going to help Israel’s viability?

Update: Readers have correctly noted democracy only references the right to vote. So let me say this. Let us work together against groups like the ADL who want to limit our free speech through hate crimes legislation.

This isn’t Israel.

Some of the Dutch Left have had enough of Islamic fundamentalism, and are hitting back. Bully for them. These people need strong borders, not post-modern multi-culti sympathy.

The IHT reports,

Two weeks ago, the country’s biggest left-wing political grouping, the Labor Party, which has responsibility for integration as a member of the coalition government led by the Christian Democrats, issued a position paper calling for the end of the failed model of Dutch “tolerance.”
[...]
Indeed, Ploumen says, “Integration calls on the greatest effort from the new Dutch. Let go of where you come from; choose the Netherlands unconditionally.” Immigrants must “take responsibility for this country” and cherish and protect its Dutch essence.

Not clear enough? Ploumen insists, “The success of the integration process is hindered by the disproportionate number of non-natives involved in criminality and trouble-making, by men who refuse to shake hands with women, by burqas and separate courses for women on citizenship.

We should all find the strength to stand up to fundamentalists who forbid shaking hands with women.

Shockingly, some Somali immigrants to the U.S. are not embracing liberalism and democracy as readily as we would expect from a country that is one of the most brutal shitholes in the world.

Frontpagemag reports,

The funeral for Shirwa Ahmed last week in Burnsville, Minnesota, punctuated a growing national security threat metastasizing inside the U.S. — one Homeland Security and law enforcement authorities have quickly taken note of. Ahmed, who killed himself in a suicide bombing attack in Somalia in October, is just one of up to 40 men from the Twin Cities area who have disappeared and are feared to have returned to their homeland for training with the al-Shabaab terrorist group to wage jihad.

The FBI is investigating similar disappearances in other major Somali communities in Columbus, OH, Atlanta, Boston, San Diego, and Seattle. There are even reports coming from Europe, recently from Denmark, of Somali men returning home to fight with al-Shabaab and other terrorist organizations.

ABC News also reports that a Somali from Boston, Tarek Mehenna, a U.S. citizen, was arrested last month on his way to Somalia to wage jihad after being in contact with Daniel Maldonado, a Muslim convert currently in federal prison after pleading guilty to training at a Somali terror training camp after being captured in Kenya with a Somali terrorist cell.

Predictably, Somali leaders in many of these cities are claiming surprise and shock that anyone from their communities and mosques would be leaving the U.S. for jihad. But as Daveed Gartenstein-Ross explained in a Fox News report, there exists an active recruiting and transportation network in the U.S., including Minneapolis, for Somali-run terrorist training camps, many of which have recently reopened. In many instances, these same Somali leaders purporting ignorance and innocence for the local media are not only aware of these recruiting operations, but have actively participated in them.

Somalis are one of the worst immigrant pools to draw from in the world. Only the dissidents should be allowed to immigrate to the U.S. Somalia is a cesspool of misery bent on spreading more. It doesn’t matter that there are some who will assimilate. Mass immigration from Somalia is a very bad bet.

Lock the doors. Do not heed the socially liberal Jews who will always find a reason to keep immigration doors open to anyone and everyone despite all warning signs. The liberal Jew is consistently an airhead on such issues. The socially liberal Jew would rather face destruction to this and other western countries generally and our community specifically rather than appear racist or insensitive. When socially liberal Jew starts babbling about why you can’t generalize, ask socially liberal Jew if he has read “Infidel.” Usually, he has not. He cannot bother to do due diligence. He would rather read more Naomi Klein. He would rather quote the 1/2 Jewish putz Tim Wise. Socially liberal Jewesses particularly think Wise is a wonderful person. You have to look them straight in the eye, and say, “Tim Wise is a seriously major putz,” and explain why in a slow, patient, and authoritative voice.

The socially liberal Jew must be called out as the fool that he is.

Heed the warnings of the Somalian prophetess. She is a great convert to the West. She risks her life for us every day, and only asks that we protect ourselves, our countries, our culture. Do not let socially liberal Jews shout out the mobilizing warnings of the prophetess. The prophetess speaks truth, she speaks from knowledge, she speaks from battle.

The East Village Mamele is not happy with the voters of California, Arizona and Florida who have “voted to deny families this kind of joy.” What kind of joy is this? The kind of joy we all should recognize is both universal, urgent, and a basic human right. The joy of singing the Itsy Bitsy Spider at a gay wedding ceremony.

“It was more emotional than we expected,” reported my bro-in-law, as Shirley jabbered in the background. “It felt like a renewal of our earlier vows. And having Shirley running around us added to the emotion level.” They sang “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” during the ceremony, to keep Shirley interested. The justice of the peace sang along. Shirley danced with excitement.

However, this isn’t just about the opportunity for a kick-ass family party. Rather, the E.V. Mamele has another darned good reason for Americans to rethink their position on gay marriage.

There are so few moral slam-dunks in this world. I understand ambivalence about abortion. I get anxiety about affirmative action. But I simply do not understand how allowing other people legal and societal parity and the right to true love and family is any threat to straight people’s lives or marriages. In an election year in which “Yes, we can” carried the day, here was an initiative whose sole purpose was to say “No, you can’t.” And I don’t want to get into the biblical justification for intolerance. Rabbis and ethicists way smarter than I am have explained how to contextualize the who-can-lie-with-whom abomination thing. You could look it up.

I could look it up…and you could look up some rabbis who actually have a very different interpretation…but frankly, this issue should not be decided by rabbis. Even rabbis online.

Mamele also notes that,

In Newsweek last week, Anna Quindlen pointed out that the same confident “God doesn’t want this” and “this is unnatural” and “this will cause the breakdown of society” language was used about interracial marriage in the 1960s.

Now, I could give you some biologists to look up online in order to show you why this isn’t really the same, but that isn’t the point. Rather, bringing in racial segregation is a dubious stick with which to hit us holdouts on this issue. Overall, blacks clearly do not see these issues as analogous. And Jews have historically been all too prone to usurping the black Civil Rights movement for their own issues and and their own agenda.

This has incurred a lot of legitimate resentment. We need to stop doing that. It’s really obnoxious.

Eli Valley is racking up the hate for his new comic in the Forward. But some of the enraged denunciations are just plain bizarre.

Ed Lasky writes in his essay, “A Challenge to the Liberal Jewish Community,” in the American Thinker that,

Rabbis and other leaders in the Jewish community were in the forefront of criticizing “smears” against Barack Obama during the recent campaign. These comments concerned not only his heritage but also those people he chose to associate with and support-among them, Pastor Jeremiah Wright, Jr. and Rashid Khalidi. These leaders have also been engaged in outreach efforts towards Muslims – some have even broken bread with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who denies the Holocaust and whose regimes sponsors anti-Semitism around the world.

Oh, really? The Jews For Obama and the NJDC…these people broke bread with Ahmedinijad?

Which Reform temple do you think they attend? I personally suspect Temple Rodeph Shalom is affiliated with these guys. Don’t they have that “Classical Reform” look about them?

More Jewish teens were attacked by Muslim Arabs from Africa. Let this be a warning about what we will face here one day if we do not close the gates to problematic immigration groups. Do not listen to social-leftists who promise on one hand that American exceptionalism will preempt such problems here, even as they never stop bitching and moaning about “institutional racism” and “white male hegemony” on the other. The Jewish social-left percieves immigration realities with all the integrity of how the right-wing haredim view the history of the universe. Completely in fantasy La-La land.

Haaretz reports,

Thiery Nebet, Dan’s father, told Haaretz over the phone that according to what his son had said, as they were walking down the street, “Four or five Arabs of African origin started to throw walnuts at Kevin. When he went up to them to ask them why they did it, they surrounded him and knocked him down. Kevin and David moved in and very quickly more Arabs joined in and started to beat the three with their fists and with chains.”

The Jewish teens were hospitalized, one with a broken nose and jaw and all three with bruises, and filed a police report after their release. Police opened an investigation and are looking for the Muslim teenagers allegedly responsible for the attacks.

Close the gates, ladies and gentlemen. We do not need this population coming here en masse. Now, I know some of you feel this makes me a bad person, and that’s okay. You can blame your policy shift on “the unfortunate hysteria of reactionary elements within our community,” whatever. Just change your position.

Please?

Jspot has a new site, and it is gorgeous. There are a lot of of new features. Let me tell you the most important one. You are able to cross-post on Jspot as well as your own site. Now…obviously the content has to be appropriate. Jspot is not the place for me to rant and rave about ending mass immigration from Pakistan. That’s what their comments section is for! But it just may be the place for me to scream about our addiction to oil and the need for a cross harbor tunnel.

I have friends who ask me what they can do to promote their blogs and have their ideas reviewed by a larger audience. If you are a leftist, the answer may very well be Jspot.

Guest post from Pissed Off Liberal Jew!

While DK is a fan of all things homogeneous, I personally feel that educational institutions benefit from teaching high level materials to diversified groups of people. This week Professor Andrew Furman writes about his time on an inter-racial basketball team in the San Fernando Valley during the early 1980s in the Forward. Furman paints a picture of, well, taking a picture with his team of blacks, whites, Jews and an Asia. All stereotypical jokes aside (for there are plenty) OF COURSE this happened:

I remember the photographer looking down into the viewfinder of his fancy camera, then looking back up again, gazing toward us for a moment without saying anything, as if he had noticed something troubling through the lens but wasn’t quite sure how to address the problem. Recognizing the photographer’s discomfort, our graying coach, Bob Johnson, a man as mild as his name, broke his pose and peered over toward his players, taking us in.

“Okay, I think we better mix it up a little over here. This doesn’t look so good,” he uttered, giving audible expression to what was certainly on the poor photographer’s mind.

A quick look about and his meaning was clear. The five black players on our squad all stood on one side, while the rest of us had congregated together on the other. It took a mere moment to arrange a satisfactorily integrated tableau. Appeased, the photographer snapped the photo and we were done.

But holding hands and making friends, in my opinion, isn’t the point. The point is the exposure. Yes it would be wonderful, and in the end it worked out this way for Furman and his team, if people made friends with people from the other side of the tracks. The benefits of busing are summarized in one of his final points: I didn’t realize it at the time, but my world, as well as the world of my black teammates, had grown larger because of the vigorous efforts during the 1970s and 1980s to integrate the city’s public schools. Furman and his teammates were forced, by the state and school, to learn something that would have never been teachable with a book.

Regardless of the downsides (for there are plenty) busing and forced integration made/makes people think bigger. I went to a public school in the San Fernando Valley as well. However, it was not in the LAUSD. I was in a “public” school district with far fewer people in a much more expensive suburban ‘hood. The over all feeling of the school was Jewish. While playing of the football team that forced the Catholic coaches to let us miss two-a-days for Yom Kippur was empowering, over-all my high school wasn’t exactly “Stand and Deliver.”

In college I got to know many folks of different colors and creeds. But for the most part my close friends were Jewish. When I started into college politics, I was forced to work with different people. By working with them for long hours, like Furman did on his basketball team, I got to know these people better. I learned about Pilipino customs (and of that particular spelling because there is no “F” sound in the Pilipino language), Latino music and food, Black American holidays and even some Christian stuff. Because I was forced into a situation that I didn’t know before, I learned more.

I also made some great friends, but that isn’t the point nor should it be the argument for integration of schools. The educational system in the United States is in really bad shape. Anything to make it better and more complete is needed. Economic and social integration of public schools is the right thing to do for education not for socialization. Make the better argument.
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I am a Liberal Jew and I am Pissed

pissedoffliberaljew.blogspot.com

In “My Niece Has Two Daddies,�? the Forward proves that even the venerable voice of the moderate Jewish Left can’t escape having a writer on staff who thinks like Deborah Nussbaum Cohen.

Anyway, I’m not sure which southeast Asian country the child originates from, but she’s here now, and the welcoming party is on. And since the adopting couple is gay, and the child isn’t Jewish and really we all know that is being converted, clearly we need to invoke every possible flakey liberal multi-culti-Jewey straw in our arsenal.

Obviously, they had a Simchat Bat, had the ceremonial feet washing, declaring, “May you always pour old wine into new flasks — to take the tradition and make it speak to your life by renewing and reinventing the rituals of Judaism that carry so much meaning.�? Then there was the mandatory comparison to wild geese, and with Purim right around the corner, clearly it was only appropriate to light the Chanukah menorah. Still, one also must light a separate candle for tikkun olam, specifically in honor of Martin Luther King Jr.

You know, at the end of the day, there are damned good reasons not to leave the Orthodox world entirely. I mean, forget about belief. This stuff is just sloppy and silly. This is embarrassing. I hate being an American Jew when I read this. I want to be anything else. Am I a self-hating Jew? Well, I am now! No wonder liberal Jews are leaving the fold. Who can tolerate this cheesiness? This is the pits. These people are secular missionaries for the dominant culture and religion. Because many types of Christianity beat the shit out of this. If this is Judaism – and for many American Jews, it is – our numbers are going to decline dramatically.

There is no need to insist on passing this sort of thing on to anyone.