Political Cowards

Michael Lumish

{Also published at Jews Down Under.}

Courage the Cowardly Dog

Part of the problem that we have is the generally pussitudinous nature of most well-meaning, western-leftists when it comes to their politics.

That is, people will often hold strong opinions on political questions but are highly reluctant to discuss those opinions among people prepared in disagreement.

Or, if they are willing to engage in argument that argument often devolves into self-righteous ad hominem denunciations or disgust for those with the temerity to disagree with socially-prevailing orthodoxies.

The litany of accusations resembles religious chantings, with the snapping of fingers and the nodding of heads, as we see on the campuses.

Racism! Homophobia! Sexism! Transphobia!

"You are a cis-gendered, heteronormative, white male, patriarchal asshole, who needs to shut the hell up!"

{You are the Devil and the Power of Christ compels you! The Blood of the Martyrs compels you!}

But it must be understood that people who think in religious terms about politics have rarely thought through their positions and thereby rely upon intimidation, both social and physical, to shut people up, in much the same way that the Church used to and the Mosque still does.

It has less to do with the actual situation of lives as lived then it has to do with patrolling the permissible boundaries of acceptable theo-political discourse.

Among the things that I find disturbing about this historical moment in the West is the declining willingness of our friends on the progressive-left to actually discuss their positions with those who do not already hold those positions.

In some measure, at least, all of these "snowflakes" and Social Justice Warriors are embracing the Anti-Free Speech Movement.

Instead of reasoned argument they rely upon snubbing, silencing, de-platforming, dehumanization, mockery, social isolation, street violence, and an imperious refusal to engage the insidious individuals who they deem beneath their political contempt.

In today's political climate to so much as wear a red baseball cap makes one a "fascist" among idiots without the cognitive wherewithal to fairly articulate their own beliefs while listening to the beliefs of others.

The truth, as I have been endeavoring to get across to people, is that such a cowardly political stance represents the failure of liberalism.

If you consider yourself a liberal, but you oppose freedom of speech, then you are not a liberal.

You may be a socialist or a communist or a fascist or an anarchist or nothing whatsoever, but you are not liberal. If you do not believe in freedom of speech then you do not believe in the freedom of the individual, but rather power and control over the individual... all for the greater good, naturally.

Freedom of speech - whether Antifa or Black Lives Matter like it or not - stands at the very foundation of Enlightenment liberalism, which is the source of democracy... which is a little gift from those insidious dead "white" guys.

One cannot stand for democracy or liberalism or social justice or, even, general human fairness if one falters on freedom of speech.

Without freedom of speech, there are none of those things.

This should be Basic Civics.

This should be taught in the seventh grade.

Yet many of the highly educated, well-meaning, sophisticated idiots out there in the universe have yet to figure that out.

Furthermore, of course, the entire university-based movement in opposition to freedom of speech - as we have seen all over the country throughout 2017 - goes against everything that the university system, free inquiry, the empirical method, and liberalism stand for.

Fascists oppose freedom of speech which is why the German National Socialists did so.

Communists oppose freedom of speech which is why the Soviet Union threw those with alternative political viewpoints into "mental institutions."

Antifa and progressive-left college students oppose freedom of speech which is why they keep shutting down the campuses when they bring in conservative speakers like Milo Yiannapolous or Ben Shapiro or any number of alternative thinkers who were hounded off campus this year.

When I was growing up it was always the political right that endeavored to stifle free-expression of ideas, but times have changed.

Now, sadly, it is the political left that thinks it can intimidate people into ideological conformity.

I think that they are mistaken.

A way forward

Sar Shalom

First, some conditions that need to be addressed however Israel progresses.

One, there are between 2 and 3 million Arabs living in the disputed territory east of the Armistice Line.

Two, permanently denying them a say in the state that rules them is unacceptable.

Three, forcing those Arabs to leave or conditioning their gain of political rights on their leaving is unacceptable.

Four, including those Arabs in the Israeli polity would be highly undesirable.

Five, Jordan's conquest of 5.6 million dunams in the Independence War does not create a right for a future Palestine to encompass 5.6 million dunams.

As to number four, I am aware that the Palestinian Arab population is inflated and that they may not be enough to threaten the Jewish majority of Israel if they were granted citizenship. However, that is not the only threat from including them in Israel's polity.

Consider coalition politics in Israel today. The Knesset consists of 5 major blocs: the right, the left, the center, the chareidim, and the Arabs. Due to the nature of the Arab parties that exist, a coalition requires a majority of 61 MKs that excludes the Arab parties. In the current Knesset, the Joint List holds 13 out of 120 seats, meaning that a coalition requires 61 out of 107. Thus a simple majority of the Knesset of 50 percent plus 1 is effectively a requirement for a 57 percent supermajority of Jewish-party seats. Adding 2 million Arabs to Israel's electorate could very easily swell the Arab bloc to 30 seats or more, meaning that a coalition would require 61 out of 90 or fewer seats or a two-thirds supermajority of Jewish-party seats.

Given the ability of reaching consensus demonstrated so far, that would render Israel ungovernable.

Unfortunately, there is never going to be an agreement that ends the Palestinian national movement's (PNM) claims with Israel still standing. This means that any path forward would have to consist of unilateral Israeli action.

One factor working in Israel's favor is that the bulk of the Arab population in the northern portion of the disputed territory resides either west of a line running from Route 458 southeast of Ramallah to Route 578 to the northern section of the security barrier or in the vicinity of Jericho. As such, a unilateral action could be to draw from southeast of Ramallah to the security barrier in the north roughly following Routes 458 and 578.

Where that line passes Shilo, a corridor would extend west to the security barrier along Routes 60 and 5, expanding to Route 55 west of Ariel. An additional line would be drawn along some route from the intersection of Route 5 and the security barrier to Ramallah. Inside of defined perimeters west of Routes 457/578 and either south of Route 5 or north of Route 55, Israel would evacuate the settlements and make the vacated territory Area B. Outside of those perimeters, excluding the Jericho area, and north of Maale Adumim would be annexed to Israel.

Subsequently, the PNM could be told that if they ever display actions suggesting that they would not exploit any transformation of their jurisdiction into a state in order to enhance their war-making capabilities against Israel, Israel will start the process of transitioning their jurisdiction into a state and discuss borders for the southern disputed territories. Until then, Israel will sit pat and operate in the expanded Area B as she has operated in Area B for the past two decades.

I realize that abandoning Beit El, Yizhar, and many northern settlements would be a steep price for not even a pretense of peace. However, it would also mean annexing Ariel, Shilo, Maale Adumim, and the northern Jordan Valley, an act for which Israel could not hope to gain diplomatic cover without paying a price.

One requirement to go ahead would be diplomatic cover from the U.S. to acquiesce, if not recognize, Israel's partial annexation in the north. In order to defend against a future president like Obama reneging on this acquiescence, it would be necessary for it to take the form of a treaty that would be legally enforceable against future presidents.

At a more grassroots level, withdrawing from the perimeters I described would provide a counteroffer to the notion that Jordan's conquest of 5.6 million dunams entitles the Palestinians to 5.6 million dunams. Many will complain about Israel grabbing land in giving the PNM less than that. However, unlike during Obama's reign, they would not be able to claim that Israel must withdraw from any additional territory in order to avoid becoming a binational state. Further, it would define the Palestinians' territory in a small number of contiguous areas which would remove almost any objection besides their supposed entitlement to 5.6 million dunams.

This Week on Nothing Left

Michael Lumish

This week Michael Burd and Alan Freedman have a pretty excellent line-up it looks to me.

Milo? I haven't listened, yet, but I am very much looking forward to it.

Barry Shaw and Dore Gold are very big names.

Juliet Moses, I do not know. But I am willing to learn.

You guys should tune in.



2 min Editorial: Gideon Levy (Haaretz) and the AJDS

11 min Juliet Moses, New Zealand politics

29 min Milo Yiannopoulos

51 min Barry Shaw, alternatives to 2-state solution

1 hr 18 min Dore Gold, JCPA on UN Resolution 181

1 hr 31 min Isi Leibler in Jerusalem

The podcast can also be found on the J-Air website.

Or its Facebook page.

NOTHING LEFT can be heard live each Tuesday 9-11am on FM 87.8 in the Caulfield area, or via the J-Air website www.j-air.com.au

Contact Michael and Alan at Nothing Left:

michael@nothingleft.com.au

alan@nothingleft.com.au

Hijab Barbie

Michael Lumish

There is a lot of recent hoopla concerning the Hijab Barbie.

I honestly do not know what to make of it beyond the fact that Mattel wants Muslim customers for their Barbie collection.

Many would argue - and I definitely agree - that the hijab is a symbol of women's submission to men, particularly within an Arab-Muslim context, and is, therefore, an anti-feminist, anti-liberal, anti-progressive, symbol of injustice.

Others would argue it is simply about accepting ethnic diversity.

Still, others would suggest that it is a matter of creeping jihadism. The argument here would be that the purpose of jihad, including the non-violent kind, is the advancement of Sharia Law and that the hijab is a symbol of precisely that.

This is something that should be taken into consideration.

But, the truth is, Barbie is Jewish!

{She is still allowed Muslim friends, tho.}

Peter Coyote lays it out.

A description of anti-Zionism

Sar Shalom

The current issue of Conversations by the Institute of Jewish Ideas and Ideals contains an article, "Broadening Our Vision: An Introduction to Seven Interesting Middle Eastern Rabbis," by Zvi Zohar about a handful of Sephardic/Mizrahi. (The article is currently not online, but I could provide a link when it is available.) One of the rabbis profiled is Yaakov Moshe Toledano, born in Tiberias of Moroccan ancestry. During his days, Zionism, and the Yishuv which was its prime manifestation, was a controversial notion among religious Jews. Rabbi Toledano responded to the religious opposition to Zionism in a responsum where he wrote:

...in the belief that as long as we are in this hard Exile we are forbidden to lift up our head. Rather, we are commanded to bow ourselves down before every tyrant and ruler, and to give our backs to the smiters and our cheeks to them that pluck off hair (Isaiah L:6); as if the blood of Israel had been forfeited, and as if He—blessed be He—had decreed that Jacob be given for a spoil and Israel to the robbers (Isaiah XLII:24).

Rabbi Toledano wrote in reference to religious opposition to forsaking the lands of our exile. However, removing the reference to exile would make it refer to a more general audience. It would not apply perfectly, as the progressive-left does not view Jews as obligated to bow themselves down "before every tyrant and ruler," as Europeans/Americans and East Asians do not merit such deference. However, the Arabs, as an oppressed people, do merit such deference in their minds. Thus Rabbi Toledano's words as applied to the progressive left would become:

The Jews are commanded to bow themselves down before every Arab, and to give their backs to any Arab who would flog them and their cheeks to any Arab who would pluck their hair; as if Israel had been forfeited, and as if it was decreed that Jacob be given for a spoil and Israel to Arab robbers.

There is a word for that sentiment. That word is Anti-semitism.

"Palestine" is a Wraith

Michael Lumish

"Palestine" and "Palestinian" are European settler colonial terms for the land of the Jewish people. I think we should cease to use those terms or, at least, put them in quotes.

Or perhaps go with Palestinian-Arab.

In truth, the greater Arab nation gave the world "Palestinians" - a word which used to mainly refer to Jews living under the British mandate - as a challenge to Jewish sovereignty on historically Jewish land.

The Jews are the indigenous people of the Land of Israel.

The Arabs are settlers and colonists on Jewish land.

I certainly do not mind that Arabs live there. Nor do I mind that Chinese people or Venezuelans or the Easter Islandish live there.

But none of those folk can claim sovereignty because none of them are indigenous.

Only the Jewish people have a claim to indigeneity to that land and we must insist on this basic concept.

Everything flows from that recognition.

From a purely objective historical standpoint, only the Jewish people can claim indigeneity to Israel.

I mean, if a lonely band of Jebusites comes wandering from somewhere out of the desert, then maybe a case can be made otherwise.

But the Arabs are not from Israel.

They are not from Judea.

They are from Arabia.

We need to bang this into people's skulls.

Nine Reasons Why Progressives Do Not Understand Their Pro-Israel Friends

Michael Lumish

{Also published at Jews Down Under.}

The western-left is befuddled and disgusted by pro-Israel diaspora Jewry despite the fact that pro-Israel diaspora Jewry supports the western-left.

These are nine of their fundamental misunderstandings:


Number One:  Anti-Zionism is not equivalent to criticism of Israel. 

Well-meaning western-leftists tend to confuse anti-Zionism with mere criticism of the Jewish homeland.

As I know that you guys know, they are not the same thing.

An anti-Zionist is someone who believes that Israel should never have been reconstituted as the national homeland of the Jewish people.

Given Jewish history, such a wish is genocidal.


Number Two: there is a difference between criticism and defamation.

There is nothing wrong with criticizing any country, but when people, for example, call Israel an "apartheid state" that is an example of defamation. And, yes, it is anti-Semitic because the suggestion of such a claim is that Israel, much like apartheid South Africa, must be dismantled.

Thus see reason number one why progressives do not understand their pro-Israel friends.


Number Three: Progressives have little sense of proportion when it comes to Israel. 

They will call-out the lone, sole Jewish state for its alleged persecution of the Palestinian-Arabs yet never breath a word about the far worse treatment that virtually all non-elite Arabs receive from their governments in Arab-Muslim countries.

And no Arabs are treated worse than Palestinian-Arabs who are essentially used as pawns in the Long Arab War against the Jews of the Middle East.

This is clearly a racist double-standard.

The people who most abuse Palestinian-Arabs are not Jews, but Arabs, themselves.


Number Four: Jews are the only people on the planet with a claim to indigeneity in the Land of Israel. 

There has been an ongoing Jewish presence on that land for a period of time that fades into prehistory.

The Arabs are from Arabia. They are not from Judea.

The Jews are, however, from Judea and Samaria.

The Jewish people are the only extant people in the world today with claims to indigeneity to the Land of Israel.

Jewish indigeneity is an underexplored aspect of Jewish history that - surprisingly enough - it takes a brilliant Métis, pro-Israel, football-playing Zionist to understand this better than do the Jewish people.

Jewish people, wherever we may live, are the indigenous people of the Land of Israel.

Why does it take Ryan Bellerose, an indigenous American, to point that out? 


Number Five: Dhimmis -  including Copts, Yazidis, Kurds, and Jews - are among the historically oppressed minorities in the Middle East

The theocratically-infused Arab and Muslim occupying powers outnumber the rest of us by a factor of 50 or 60 to 1 in that part of the world.

This is how Oxford historian Martin Gilbert describes the centuries of dhimmi status in In Ishmael's House: A History of Jews in Muslim Lands (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2010) 32 - 33.

There could be no building of new synagogues or churches.  Dhimmis could not ride horses, but only donkeys; they could not use saddles, but only ride sidesaddle.  Further, they could not employ a Muslim. Jews and Christians alike had to wear special hats, cloaks and shoes to mark them out from Muslims.  They were even obliged to carry signs on their clothing or to wear types and colors of clothing that would indicate they were not Muslims, while at the same time avoid clothing that had any association with Mohammed and Islam. Most notably, green clothing was forbidden...

Other aspects of dhimmi existence were that Jews - and also Christians - were not to be given Muslim names, were not to prevent anyone from converting to Islam, and were not to be allowed tombs that were higher than those of Muslims.  Men could enter public bathhouses only when they wore a special sign around their neck distinguishing them from Muslims, while women could not bathe with Muslim women and had to use separate bathhouses instead.  Sexual relations with a Muslim woman were forbidden, as was cursing the Prophet in public - an offense punishable by death.

Under dhimmi rules as they evolved, neither Jews nor Christians could carry guns, build new places of worship or repair old ones without permission,or build any place of worship that was higher than a mosque.  A non-Muslim could not inherit anything from a Muslim.  A non-Muslim man could not marry a Muslim woman, although a Muslim man could marry a Christian or a Jewish woman.

Number Six: The Evil of "Whiteness"

Much of the Left sees Jews as "white" and "whiteness" as a form of oppressive consciousness that is embodied by people of European descent.

Oh, the shame of whiteness.

This is one of the essential racist aspects of the contemporary Left.

The truth is that genetic studies show that almost all Jews have a DNA root that goes to the Levant. Calling a Jew "white" because he or she may have some European blood would be like calling a black person "white" because a grandmother had relations with a white person.


Number Seven: Progressive-Left Racism

It must be understood that, outside of political Islam, the progressive-left is the most racist political movement in the West, today.

The Jewish people are being driven from Europe primarily due to the Islamist-Leftist alliance that we see playing out in European Union politics.

Hostility towards Jews is ratcheting-up throughout Europe and this hostility demonstrates the hypocrisy of western-left anti-racism.

It clearly demonstrates that the Left is highly particular about which types of racism that they approve of and which types they oppose. They do not oppose racism toward Jews as the Reem's case, among a variety of other cases - including that of Alameda, California high school student Natasha Waldorf -clearly shows.

Nor do western-progressives mind that Muslims are chasing Jews out of Europe and, further, they even tend to believe that Palestinian-Arabs have every right to kill Jews as a matter of "resistance" despite the fact that it has always been the Arabs who represent the hostile party... not the Jews.


Number Eight: the Jews have never prevented the Palestinian-Arabs from gaining a state of their own... even on our own land!

On the contrary, it was the Arabs who have turned down every single offer for statehood since the Peel Commission of 1937.

The progressive-left must stop blaming the Jewish people of the Middle East for Arab-Muslim intransigence in refusing to accept a state for themselves next to their Jewish neighbors.

This ongoing tendency from the EU and the UN and the US Department of State is indecent, unjust, and opposed to the facts of history.


Number Nine: The Day of the Dhimmi is Done.

The progressive-left loves dead Jews and despises Jews who stand up for the Movement for Jewish Liberation.

Well, ya know what?

Too bad.

Whatever anyone might think of the Jewish people we will stand up for ourselves whether anyone likes it or not.

Fundamental Principles

Michael Lumish

Milo Yiannapolous

Sometimes it is important to refer back to fundamental political assumptions.

I am promoting the Yiannapolous interview on Nothing Left radio because Yiannapolous is interesting. The reason that he is interesting is because he straddles a line on the progressive-left hierarchy of victimhood that drives people batty.

He is Gay and part-Jewish. This would make him a natural fit for the western-left.

However, he is also conservative and anti-feminist, which also makes him a natural fit for the western-right.

For many people, Yiannapolous is a confounding figure. He refuses to fit pre-existing categories. He is not a scholar, but he is an exceedingly intelligent and well-educated individual with guts who rides the political winds high.

I am happy to promote Milo because I am a classical liberal... although I believe in regulatory capitalism rather than laissez-faire.

I believe in individual autonomy, representative democracy, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, and so forth.

Basically, I believe in the Constitution of the United States of America and, thus, I believe in the tradition that follows from English Common Law and the political Enlightenment as it played out from Magna Carta to Martin Luther King, Jr.

I am increasingly opposed to the Left because I am liberal, anti-racist, pro-democracy, pro-freedom of speech, and, thus, pro-Israel.

{I respect the faith of our fathers, but I am not dogmatic about it.}

But what strikes at my heart is the hypocrisy of the western-left which self-righteously proclaims its anti-racism.

They are not lying so much to us as they are to themselves.

Thus I want Milo to have his day in the sun.

He is certainly a far more decent figure, from a moral perspective, than is the insidious regressive-left anti-Zionist and Jew Hater, Linda Sarsour.

On the CTRL-L and the Conjuration of Demonic Political Golems

Michael Lumish

{This is a retread from a piece that I wrote one year ago to the day. - ML}

Since the recent election of entertainer and businessman, Donald Trump, to the Presidency of the United States, the American CTRL-L has rampaged through the streets of America's largest cities.

The CTRL-L is a combination of various racist, non-democratic, violently-inclined leftist groups - including Black Lives Matter, the Occupy Movement, the ANSWER coalition, and BDS - that infect the True Believers within the Democratic Party.

The Democratic Party, of course, is a party in disarray where members are at one another's throats because of their recent defeat at the hands of a world-famous gazillionaire "outsider" who refuses to speak in the tired politically-correct jargon of the school-marmish, safe-space-seeking, yet semi-fascistic, Obama coalition.

What the various anger-driven misfits of the CTRL-L have in common is a shared contempt for the USA as a liberal democracy, for Israel as the national homeland of the Jewish people, and for the American people, in general, who still seem rather fond of the United States as a society grounded in liberal democracy and regulatory capitalism.

Since the CTRL-L has infected the Democrats it has - like everything it touches - turned that party into the realm of anti-American, anti-White, anti-Jewish "racists" who demand inclusivity with one another via the exclusivity of wrong-thinking Jews and right-thinking white people.

The CTRL-L is, needless to say, the ALT-R inside-out and backwards.

What they both have in common, however, is that neither is real as a distinct political movement... although one, it must be said, is considerably more materialized than the other.

As David Haggith put it in a piece entitled, Liberals Scared to Death by Their Own Caricature of Trumpettes:

Liberals are afraid of their own shadows right now. That’s because they’ve created anti-matter, Mr. Hyde caricatures of the Trumpettes — the average little guys who support Trump. These shadows that liberals have cast by their own self-deceit now surround them, and they believe the grotesquely exaggerated images they have created.

This false belief like any phobia is taking on its own life by creating mass hysteria in the streets of America. By that step, belief becomes reality. While the initial description that liberals painted of Trumpettes is false — they’re all misogynistic, homophobic racists — the hysteria is real, and that causes people to react with violence against whatever they fear. Those violent reactions become very real horrors that are not just painted in the imagination, and they divide the nation deeper, creating  fears that are now based on real horrible events that came about due to the original false beliefs. It’s like a panic attack that feeds on itself.

Just as there is no CTRL-L, so there is no ALT-R.

That racists, sexists, and homophobes live in the United States is unquestionably true.

That racists, sexists, and homophobes live in Paraguay, Papua New Guinea, and Pakistan is also true.

The so-called ALT-R appeared on the national stage directly before the election is obviously not a coincidence. It astonishes me, in fact, that the magickians who conjured up this monstrosity did not seem to think that we might notice. Prior to this most recent election virtually no one had ever even heard of any such creature as the ALT-R aside, perhaps, from a few pissed-off nincompoops banging their heads against their laptops.

Just as the CTRL-L is a recent conjuration of the imagination designed for political purposes, so is the ALT-R.

The progressive-left, the Democratic Party, and the Hillary Campaign, conjured up the virtually non-existent American fringe of White Supremacists, Klansmen, and other such cultural relics, in order to breathe life into them as a single menacing golem. They turned this fantastical zombie-like monstrosity onto the neck of Donald Trump but - as anyone familiar with the literature around golems will tell you - they have a tendency to turn on their creators.

For months, now, the ALT-R golem has stalked the countryside scaring the holy hell out of perfectly normal Americans. It is even responsible, in some measure, for the violence and broken glass in the streets of Chicago and Portland among those fighting the chimera-like demon.

In the end, however, the thing turned on its master and is now being chased through the streets by townsfolk with pitch-forks and torches and actual human beings are being seriously harmed, if not killed, as a result.

The irony, sadly, is that while both the ALT-R and the CTRL-L, as distinct political movements, are creatures of the imagination, the individual body parts have reality. However, the parts comprising the CTRL-L are considerably more real than the parts comprising the ALT-R.

For example, the ALT-R has the Klan and virtually everyone in the United States despises the Ku Klux Klan. We despise the Klan like we despise the Nazis. The Klan is so hated, in fact, that it doesn't even exist any more outside of the fringiest of the fringe-fringe.

The same cannot be said of the Black Lives Matter movement, with its Jewish problem and inspiration for highway overpass shootings of cops for political purposes.

Among extreme political groups, BLM is important enough to warrant the attention and appreciation of both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.

The Klan, however, has all the contemporary significance of a filthy white hood rotting beneath some porch in the Arkansas hills.

Milo Yiannopoulos on Nothing Left Live

Michael Lumish

{Also published by Jews Down Under.}

Michael Burd and Alan Freedman of Nothing Left on Australia's J-AIR radio conducted an interview with Milo Yiannopoulos to be aired on Tuesday, November 28, 9 to 11 AM, Melbourne time.

Yiannopoulos is one of the more notorious figures emerging out of the previous presidential election in the United States.

The guy is a British, Gay, conservative, secular Jew who will kick your rhetorical ass in a New York minute.

The reason that I like Milo is because he is brave.

The reason that many in the Jewish community despise Milo is because they think he is a degenerate.

So, good for Burd and Freedman for having the guts to bring him on.

The thing is, Nothing Left attracts top names from Dershowitz on down.

I am biased because I occasionally drop in to say hello, but the fact of the matter is that they also speak with Isi Liebler, Caroline Glick, Tuvia Tenenbom, Brigette Gabriel, Matthias Küntzel, Jonathan Tobin, Diane Bederman, Ted Belman, Gregg Roman, Dan Shapiro, Martin Sherman, and Avi Abelow.

And that is just since August of this year.

Anybody who knows anything about the Arab-Jewish conflict knows most of those names.

But Yiannopoulos is in a category unto himself.

Some refer to him as "alt-right," but, in truth, he is probably something closer to a "classical liberal"... perhaps bordering on economic libertarian.

He drives some people batty because they cannot stick him into pre-ordained slots within the identity politics Hierarchy of Victimhood.

He represents one example of how the term "alt-right" was (and is) used as a smear against people who having nothing whatsoever to do with "white nationalism" or "white supremacy" or the Klan or Nazis or anything even close to such nonsense.

The term "alt-right" is generally understood to mean "white nationalist."

It was coined by actual white-nationalist-nobody Richard Spencer who came to fame because the Clinton campaign needed a specimen who Hillary could smother in her "Basket of Deplorables."

Milo Yiannopoulos, however, is an openly Gay, half-Jewish Brit and a former editor for Breitbart - which is also an example of a venue that came into fame in the months leading to the astonishing triumph of Donald Trump to the Presidency of the United States. In truth, the best thing ever to happen to Breitbart and Bannon and the fellahs over there was the Hillary campaign.

Were it not for Hillary - or such is my claim - virtually no one would ever have heard of the "alt-right."

One thing that it is interesting to note is that Yiannopoulos and everyone's favorite antisemitic anti-Zionist, Linda Sarsour, came to widespread public notice during the same political moment.

They are both charismatic figures who carry their ends of the political zeitgeist.

The difference is that Linda is still enjoying her "fifteen minutes."

Milo got his cut short.

This is going to be a long-term recovery for the Bay Area

Social Media Notes # 3

Michael Lumish

On a Facebook post, Jordan Rapport wrote the following:

I don’t understand how so many progressives recognize the soft racism of the alt right, and Richard Spencer, but then turn around to display their own soft antisemitism through anti Zionism. It’s hypocritical and disgusting.

In the comments, the question of "intersectionality" came up.

Part of what I like about social media is that it gives me a greater sense of how people think.

Not just how intellectuals think, but how normal people think.

In this case, a person in the thread asked, what is "intersectional"?

I have to tell you, I take that as a terrific sign.

It makes me happy in much the same way that if I speak to a person and they have no idea who Linda Sarsour is... that makes me happy, too.

Good!

It means that antisemitic anti-Zionism, and its attendant "intersectionality," are not gaining quite as much traction as some of us might fear.

Nonetheless, I worry about some of our pro-Jewish / pro-Israel friends.

Sticking your neck out on this issue can be pretty fucking costly in a variety of interesting ways.

This Week on Nothing Left

Michael Lumish


This week Michael Burd and Alan Freedman hear from Stan Goodenough, a Christian advocate living and working in Israel who attended the Beersheba commemorative festivities last week, and then hear from acclaimed author, playwright and film producer Tuvia Tenenbom who is visiting Australia shortly.

The guys have a fascinating interview with British political commentator Jamie Palmer on why the Left hates Israel and catch up with Isi Leibler in Jerusalem as usual.

2 min Editorial: Balfour Declaration

8 min Stan Goodenough at Beersheba festivities

26 min Tuvia Tenenbom, author, film producer and commentator

51 min Jamie Palmer, political commentator on why the Left hates Israel

1 hr 30 Isi Leibler in Jerusalem

The podcast can also be found on the J-Air website.

Or its Facebook page.

NOTHING LEFT can be heard live each Tuesday 9-11am on FM 87.8 in the Caulfield area, or via the J-Air website www.j-air.com.au

Contact Michael and Alan at Nothing Left:

michael@nothingleft.com.au

alan@nothingleft.com.au

The West Has Gone Bats!

Michael Lumish

{This is a fleshing out of an earlier thing that I called The U.S. Has Gone Bats!}

It is also published at Elder of Ziyon, Jews Down Under and The Jewish Press.}

Yes, that is the way it is.

I suppose that it is not surprising that my cohort, born in the 1960s, stomped on the Western Liberal Tradition.

This is to say that the contemporary Left is shedding its own intellectual heritage - defined by Enlightenment liberalism - and in the process is emerging as authoritarian, increasingly opposed to freedom of speech and thought, and increasingly antisemitic.

{One of my new favorite rebels - University of Toronto professor of evolutionary psychology, Jordan Peterson - would likely agree.}

And when I argue that my friends on the Left are trending against the "Western liberal tradition," I mean just that.

The contemporary Left is turning against the philosophical tradition of Enlightenment liberalism that emphasized rationality and individuality as it emerged out of the European Renaissance and took political forms from Magna Carta to the Constitution of the United States to the Knesset in Israel.

Instead, what we get today from the activist Left is reactionary, irrational, close-minded, violently-inclined, smug, stupid, arrogant, authoritarian, and dismissive of freedom of speech.

The American Left is often misdescribed as "liberal," but that is the last thing that it is.

The western-left, today, is opposed to the liberal tradition.

Among the reasons for growing American Left disinterest in the tradition of Enlightenment liberalism is because those of us who came of age following the Baby Boomers were trained not to believe in "Western values" by our Vietnam War era older peers and siblings.

From Abbie Hoffman to Alan Ginsberg to Noam Chomsky, much of The Movement, as Terry Anderson called it, prodded and poked at the ongoing viability of more traditional and allegedly objective European suppositions on how to apprehend truth.

It is no coincidence, after all, that the post-structuralist turn in western academia paralleled the Counterculture and the rise of the New Left toward the middle-end of the twentieth-century.

Our older siblings and friends who came out of the Vietnam War period, for understandable reasons, passed their cynicism off to us.

The twentieth-century was a bloody nightmare and those of us raised on the Anti-War Movement, the Counterculture, and Civil Rights looked in directions - politically and personally - beyond anything that Eisenhower could have imagined when his boys stormed the beaches.

I do not know about you, but I grew up reading Jack Kerouac, Kurt Vonnegut, Hunter S. Thompson and Joseph Heller.

It was all about rebellion and, in the cases of the latter three, hilarious rebellion.

{Kerouac was never particularly funny.}

The interesting question for me, now, is how it is that my generation - which both voted for Ronald Reagan and read Vonnegut - is now ushering in the current era of corrosive, hard-ass, high-handed, progressive-left identity politics which is shedding liberalism and tends to despise Israel.

From a political-social standpoint, it is a damn good question.

It's not that we are responsible for the never-ending malice and bloodshed in the Arab-Muslim Middle East. Nor are those of us who entered college in the United States in the 1980s responsible for the perpetual poverty of the urban poor, or climate change, or general human stupidity.

We inherited these joys to the world.

We are, however, responsible for the current state of American politics, which is absolutely dismal and, on the progressive-left, increasingly ugly toward diaspora Jewry when we speak out on behalf of our brothers and sisters in Israel.

The United States has not been this culturally torn-up since 1968.

American politics at this moment has people at one another's throats. It is ripping up families and friendships. It is resulting in violence in the streets from Berkeley to Charlottesville.

And, it must be understood, that the current toxic nature of American politics is encouraging the rise of the new white nationalism. I tend to downplay the white nationalist trend because playing it up increases its attractiveness to idiots so inclined.

But the difference between now and then is that by 1968 over 30,000 U.S. servicemen died in Vietnam in a war that seemed to have no end.

Women were still objectively second-class citizens.

And bigotry throughout the country was violent in a way that makes the contemporary South look like a racial shangri-la. 

I was born in 1963, the very year that Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his famous I Have a Dream speech on the Mall in Washington, D.C. and almost exactly one year before Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney were murdered in Neshoba County, Mississippi, during Freedom Summer.

Despite the fact that I am a New York Jew, I can assure you that from a historical perspective race relations in the South are far better today than they were in 1963. It's not even close. An observer from Mars should be able to see that, yet somehow it seems lost on much of the contemporary American Left.

The causes of political tensions in the United States today are not due to war or sexism or racism like they were in 1968.

On every social-political level, the U.S. has made great strides toward social justice from that day to this.

The truth, in fact, is that the U.S. is among the most liberal countries on the planet.

This may sound old-fashioned but we hold out a greater opportunity to any man or woman of any "race, color, or creed" - as they used to say - than almost any place else on Earth.

We should be proud of how far we have come in so short a period of time.

We are well beyond where we were when Martin Luther King, Jr. stood on the Mall.

But we do not recognize it.

Instead, we tear down statuary of Robert E. Lee.

The Week on Nothing Left

Michael Lumish


This week Michael Burd and Alan Freedman speak firstly with Prof Bill Rubinstein about his article discussing the drift to the Left by our communal organisations.

We then hear from Middle East correspondent Benjamin Weinthal, and speak with Prof Efraim Inbar who was in Australia recently to promote his new think tank.


And Isi Leibler joins us as usual from Jerusalem.

3 min Editorial: Alan's observations on Europe

11 min Prof Bill Rubinstein controversial article on JCCV

27 min Benjamin Weinthal, Jerusalem Post European correspondent

52 min Prof Efraim Inbar in Australia

1 hr 25 min Isi Leibler on why we should be working with the Right wing Parties that support Israel

The podcast can also be found on the J-Air website.

Or its Facebook page.

NOTHING LEFT can be heard live each Tuesday 9-11am on FM 87.8 in the Caulfield area, or via the J-Air website www.j-air.com.au

Contact Michael and Alan at Nothing Left:

michael@nothingleft.com.au

alan@nothingleft.com.au