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The US Capitol Building in Washington, DC. Photo: Reuters / Jim Bourg.

This years Yom HaShoah was observed months before the US presidential election, and just after another Israeli election.

As spring turns to summer, there is little doubt that the already elevated temperatures and tensions of political discourse will soon begin to rise. Policies will be debated, disagreements will be had, and the relatively minor fault lines that separate us will be accentuated by the fervor of the days ahead.

It is not my place to despair about the political fracturing that exists in the United States or the unresolved tensions within Israel. But in the spirit of collective confinement, I offer a challenge to all of us to engage in a bit of introspection, to understand that the words we use in the coming days will shape the debates we have and ultimately the political reality that follows.

It has somehow become predictable in the marketplace of political ideas to hear of individuals or their associated groups being referred to as Nazis, communists, or antisemites. If one seeks to provide free medical care for ones countrymen, that person must be a communist. If one disagrees with Israeli territorial claims, one must be an antisemite. These ad hominem attacks are usually factually incorrect and poor bargaining tactics. And in the broader picture, they injure both the reputation of the recipient and the objective of the proponent.

April 24, 2020 12:04 pm

When we label individuals as ideologies, we run the risk of conflating entire groups with ideologies they simply do not hold.

While it might seem appealing to relegate the arguments of all Democrats to the category of communist propaganda, or the proposals of all Republicans to the category of religious extremism, doing so suggests that we are only willing, or able, to exclusively hear the arguments of the fringe.

If it is only the extreme argument that we are willing to debate, then that is the debate we will get, rather than the debate that we need. We will deafen our opponents, ignore any of their persuasive points, and risk losing the greatest gift provided by any discussion: the opportunity to change our own minds.

The right to speak is coupled with a responsibility to listen and to engage. We are nations of people, not pundits.

I am not Jewish. Unlike that which is the case for so many members of the Jewish faith, my family has no historical memory of fleeing oppression or having our right to exist challenged anywhere, much less in the place we call home. But every generation of my family as far back as we can recall has supplied men who fought to protect and liberate the victims of oppression and to promote the freedom of expression that all peaceful peoples deserve.

I have traveled to many parts of the world. I have studied at predominantly conservative institutions and at liberal institutions. I have debated policy with Democrats, Republicans, Likud and Avoda. I have friends and colleagues that span the political spectrum; from the radical left to the reactionary right. Even within that experience, never have I known an avowed communist nor met a Nazi. Despite what popular media circles would have you believe, the radical left and right are not the majority.

To be clear, Nazis exist. If the internet has done anything for us, it has highlighted the existence of otherwise obscure groups that seek to foment nothing but hate and discontent or violent opposition to our democratic institutions. The cult of Nazism persists in the United States and abroad, as do more subtle forms of antisemitic rhetoric. These individuals and their messages of hate should be challenged at every opportunity. But we who stand against these forces of evil should be wary of the type of misguided zeal that inadvertently creates more of the enemies we seek to overcome.

At the end of every election, there is a winner and there is a loser, and everyone will have a favorite. The person whom you debated across the table or at whom you yelled across the police line may be the person who approves your next stimulus check. Regardless of what they may do for you, at the end of the election cycle, they shall inhabit this world the same world as you inhabit. They are entitled to the same dignity you are afforded. Their vote will still count, whether you value it or not.

It is in that vein that we would all do well, in the spirit of Yom HaShoah and the coming elections, to take stock of the words we use. Avoid vilifying the other side of an argument as an ideological pariah. One should have conviction in ones beliefs, not chip away at the identity of ones opponents.

This election season, lets not call people Nazis or communists; unless thats what they are. Failing to rise to such a challenge is akin to becoming the proverbial one-tool carpenter, he who has only a hammer and sees every problem as a nail. Our problems are more complex than that. They are deserving of a more substantive debate.

The author is a publishingAdjunct at The MirYam Institute, a graduate of the United States Naval Academy, and a veteran of three tours as an officer in the US Navy.

The MirYam Institute is the leading international forum for Israel focused discussion, dialogue, and debate, focused on campus presentations, engagement with international legislators, and gold-standard trips to the State of Israel. Follow their work atwww.MirYamInstitute.org.

Originally posted here:
We Must Stop Demonizing Liberals and Conservatives, and Distorting Facts - Algemeiner

The white US liberal intelligentsia has been constantly frustrated since the election of President Donald Trump in 2016.

The more attacks the white and corporate-controlled liberal US media outlets launch against the business-supported Trump, the more popular he becomes.

As white liberals feign concern over Trumps continued dismantlement of the welfare state and restoration of an unapologetic white supremacist system, his many supporters celebrate these achievements and demand more.

What is it that makes Trump so much more persuasive to so many Americans than the liberal media and its pundits?

To comprehend how US political culture understands the welfare state and the dismantlement of institutional white supremacy, we must go back and understand how they came about in the first place.

When amid the Great Depression, then US President Franklin Roosevelt opted for the New Deal to transform the country into a welfare state beginning in the 1930s (expanded by his successors through the 1960s), he did so to save US capitalism from the impending communist threat while maintaining white supremacy, and not because of any socialist leanings.

US liberal journalism, mortgaged to big corporations and their crusade against communism, celebrated these transformations

The Russian Revolution was institutionalising itself by the mid-1920s as an example for the world to follow, and by the 1930s the US Communist Party's influence on American workers became a veritable threat to the capitalist order.

Indeed, with the major triumph of the Soviet Union over Nazi Germany, the threat of communism had become so great by the end of WWII that the white capitalist powers opted to stop their competition and unite against the communist threat.

Anti-Soviet propaganda began in earnest after the war, as the Americans launched a religious war against the Soviets, condemning them as secular and Godless atheists. Former President Dwight Eisenhower decided to get baptised in office and brought the fanatical reverendBilly Graham in as a spiritual adviser to the White House.

Eisenhower began the tradition of the National Prayer Breakfast and started his cabinet meetings with a moment of silent prayer. The Pledge of Allegiance was transformed in 1954 by Eisenhower from I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all, to pledging allegiance to one nation under God.

In 1956, Congress enacted a law signed by Eisenhower that introduced the phrase In God We Trust to be printed on American paper currency, replacing the erstwhile phrase E pluribus unum (out of many, one), in use since 1776.

Two years later, Congress enacted a law introducing the phrase In God We Trust as the national motto of the US.

US liberal journalism, mortgaged to big corporations and their crusade against communism, celebrated these transformations. It was the Eisenhower administration that enlisted religion and invented anti-communist Islamist jihadism as a weapon against Soviet communism and Third World socialism, with Saudi Arabia subcontracted for the role soon after.

As a result of Eisenhowers Protestant Christian institutionalisation, the proportion of religious Americans rose from 49 percent in 1940 to 69 percent in 1960.

How coronavirus is fuelling American hate

These transformations took place when the US South was run by a white supremacist, racial segregationist system, while racist institutions and structures dominated the north and the federal government.

Federal laws created white-only towns called the suburbs, enforced by racially restrictive covenants for home ownership, while the 1944 GI bill made benefits in housing and education available only to white people.

In the context of an institutionally white supremacist US, American journalists and intellectuals sang the glories of US democracy against Godless communism.

But if the welfare state was able to pull the rug out from under the communists, white supremacy made the US vulnerable to anti-racists, communist or otherwise, around the world. This was especially grave for US imperialism, as recently decolonised countries around the world,who had just rid themselves of the European colonial racist yoke,looked to the Soviets as an anti-racist, socialist example with which to ally, rather than the white supremacist US.

Just as the welfare state put a human face on capitalism, there was a need for a human face to be placed on US white supremacy. The 1954 Supreme Court case of Brown v Board of Education began the dismantling of the racist apartheid educational system. This was mainly done not as a concession to African Americans, but as part of the imperialist strategy to attract Third World countries repulsed by US white supremacy.

But the momentum of the black struggle to end white supremacy within the US could not be stopped, and it proceeded apace in the 1960s, with increasing white liberal concessions from the state and its judicial system - especially as the dismantlement of formal white supremacist structures seemed to beautify the ugly reality of US white supremacy.

US liberal journalism and the liberal white intelligentsia again celebrated the states achievements - while simultaneously targeting black radical civil libertarians with racist propaganda campaigns - as proof of the glories of US democracy against totalitarian communism.

This, however, did not appeal to the massive white racist political culture, especially as racist depictions of non-whites in US culture continued on liberal white-dominated television screens and in the culture at large.

Horrified by these concessions that weakened formal white supremacy, the new right, emboldened by white liberal anti-communism, racism, and Eisenhowers institutionalised religion, began to organise in the late 1960s, demanding the reinstatement of white supremacy and the dismantling of the welfare state.

The New Jim Crow system was instituted in the 1970s and has intensified since the 1980s to keep African Americans in their place, while former President Ronald Reagan and his successors heeded corporate demands to get rid of the Soviets once and for allso that the New Deal could be safely dismantled.

Once the Soviets were gone, presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama intensified the destruction of the welfare state, while putting a lovable human face on US neoliberalism and white supremacy. This is why Obama, especially, was and remains the best thing that ever happened to white liberals.

With the fall of the communist threat, the liberal discourse of US democracy deployed since the 1960s lost its efficacy. Liberal notions of multiculturalism and diversity, which had not improved the lives of the majority of blacks, Latinos or Native Americans, whose poverty and oppression persist, as is the case with poor whites (and the majority of the poor in the US are indeed white), were quickly understood as neoliberal and liberal ruses of white supremacist racial tokenism.

The liberal US corporate media never laid blame for the poverty of Americans on the white owners of big business, having itself been part of the white supremacist corporate attacks on the welfare state since the 1970s as a system of privilege for lazy non-white Americans at the expense of hard-working white Americans.

As a result, the majority of the white poor became ingrained with the idea that their real and only identity was white, not poor, and that their enemy was not the white owners of the corporations that impoverished them, but the victimised poor non-whites and immigrants.

When Trump arrived on the scene, he did not tell poor white Americans anything that they had not been taught by US culture, media, and evangelical Protestantism

When Trump arrived on the scene, he did not tell poor white Americans anything that they had not been taught by US culture, media, and evangelical Protestantism since Billy Graham.

Trumps strategy, like that of the white supremacist right of which he is a part, was to tell the white poor that as white people, he was on their side, and that their enemy was not only what remains of the US welfare state, but also (the pretend) US multicultural democracy that white liberalism has used to cover up US white supremacy since the 1970s.

Yetwhat Trump promises poor white Americans who lack white and class privilege - and whom white liberals, such as Hillary Clinton, find deplorable - is a restoration of formal white supremacy, which they mistake for an amelioration of their poverty.

As there is no longer a communist threat, and Third World neoliberal elites have been converted since the 1970s into the biggest fans of the US (now that they can be inducted into the one percent through diversity and multiculturalism programmes), conservative US white supremacists correctly realised that they could come out of the closet and demand the reversal of all the concessions the liberal white supremacists had instituted during the communist threat years.

Trump's vision of what makes America great: Hegemonic state violence

Trump represents these corporate aspirations, which have been pushed by the US liberal media and culture for decades. Indeed, Trump is a creation of white American liberalisms own trajectory, not a contradiction to it.

This is why when hypocritical US liberal journalists and pundits question Trump during press conferences - most evident during the recent coronavirus crisis - or debate his appeal on liberal television networks, he shows them up easily for the hypocrites they are.

What accounts for this achievement is Trumps sincere commitment to the restoration of an unabashed, unapologetic US white supremacy and runaway capitalism that easily withstandsthe wishy-washiness of white US liberalism and its continued commitment to white supremacy with a human face,whether a white one or in blackface.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

Read more:
Liberalism is the human face of white supremacy - Middle East Eye

When elections stop giving the results you want, why not turn to fascism? In 2014, the Indian electorate rose in revolt against the old elite. In 2019, they looked the elite in the eye and screamed out their verdict with even greater force.

How do you get back at common people who refuse to vote your way? You find the weakest, most vulnerable and you go after them. Its the liberal way.

So there are millions of common Indians working in the Gulf. Those are theocratic countries ruled by religious law. Many apply the death penalty for blasphemy, for apostasy, for homosexuality and so on.

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But Indians being Indians, they carry within themselves a bit of the democratic spirit wherever they go. A spark of the open minded, free society where they come from. They are used to speaking their mind. Sometimes they forget where they are and commit crimes of speech and thought. It was only a matter of time before Indian liberals realized these people were vulnerable and decided to go after them.

Right now, the Indian liberal corner of social media is on a dangerous power trip. They are scanning the online footprint of common Indians who work in the Middle East, flagging any sign of disobedience to ultra conservative religion. They have become the online eyes and ears of the religious police, which then picks up these hapless victims for prosecution under conservative religious law.

In trying to smear India, liberals had so far used some pretenses, spreading their message to America, Europe, Canada, Australia and the like. In doing so, they could hold up the fig leaf that these are all free societies. They could hide behind noble ideals such as human rights, liberty and free expression.

Not any more. Liberals have crossed the big red line and approached theocratic regimes in the Middle East. The other day, Communist trolls gleefully handed over to prosecution a man who had dared to say that the gleaming skyscrapers of the Middle East were built by the sweat of Indian workers.

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The irony is think on that one. Communists on the side of the king and not the worker. By the way, the workers strike, the most sacred of all Communist rituals, is illegal in the Middle East.

What do you make of it when prominent journalists, who publish in mainstream outlets, say openly that Indias internal matters are not internal any more? Instead they are trying to get foreign Islamic governments involved in our affairs. Where does this stop? Now they are approaching theocratic Islamic states to interfere in our politics.

Well, Pakistan is an Islamic state. Will Indian liberals approach them as well for support? Have they already done so? Who is next in line to be approached by Indian liberals against the Indian government? China? North Korea? Territories controlled by ISIS or Taliban or Al-Shabab?

By reaching out to Islamic countries, liberals have dropped all pretense that this is about human rights or free expression. This is now about religion. And tapping into transnational loyalties to impose their will on common Indians.

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Imagine this scenario. An Indian in a Middle Eastern theocracy comes home after a hard day at work and pulls out a chilled beer. The next moment, there is a loud banging on the door. The religious police is here. They have been alerted by Indian liberals who noticed the photo he had casually posted on Facebook. Caught with alcohol, he now faces an uncertain and brutal future. Years or even decades in jail, mutilation, possibly even death.

Tomorrow, these online liberal vigilantes could report an Indian to thIslamists e religious police for being gay. Or perhaps an Indian Muslim, who decides to leave the religion or convert to a different religion. Or perhaps even a single woman, who posted pictures of herself taking a casual walk without a male guardian.

At the moment, Indian liberals have started out with reporting thought and speech crimes of a political nature to the religious police. This can only get more intrusive. Online vigilantes will soon prey on anyone who breaks any rules of ultra conservative orthodoxy.

Life isnt fair. Despite all our outrage over the hypocrisy of Indian liberalism, we have to accept the bitter reality that they win this round. We know that these theocratic countries arent likely to change their ways. Theres no use going against their customs, whether knowingly or otherwise.

So, it is up to Indians working in such places to police themselves and observe extreme caution. They have to give up the freedom to express themselves in thought, speech, sexuality, everything.

For people who are used to liberty, this is not an easy transition. But this is the price we must pay for incorporating undemocratic regimes into the global supply chain. A bit like China. Think of existence in a theocratic Middle Eastern country as a permanent state of mental lockdown.

Depressing, but true.

If it is any comfort, understand that the power of these theocratic regimes is transient. And soon to be done to dust. Why?

Quite simply, because the world will pass them by. Right now, they have a single resource and they live off those lottery winnings.

But think about it. They must have had that resource for thousands of years. It didnt bring them any prosperity. Until human knowledge advanced to the point that we figured out how to use that resource. And just like that, human knowledge will move past them, discovering newer and better resources.

These theocratic regimes have not used their windfall gains to invest in the knowledge economy. And sooner or later, nations that do not produce new knowledge will be left nowhere. In the long game, the open mind, which welcomes knowledge, will always win over the closed mind.

See the rest here:
Indian liberals joining hands with theocratic regimes is a terrifying development for India - OpIndia

Andrew Stiles ( Washington Free Beacon )

The only Democratic voters significantly bothered by Joe Bidens race and gender are white liberals with graduate degrees, according to a Pew survey published this week.

According to the poll, a majority of Democratic voters are not concerned that their partys presumptive nominee for president is an elderly white man. Nearly 60 percent of respondents said Bidens age and race do not bother them. Among black voters, 72 percent said they werent bothered by Bidens race and gender, while 70 percent of Hispanic voters said the same.

Concern over Bidens whiteness was considerably higher among white Democrats, nearly half of whom said they were bothered that their partys nominee was not a minority. A majority of liberal Democrats reported being bothered by Bidens whiteness, as did 58 percent of Democrats with a postgraduate education. Among Democrats with a high school education or less, 76 percent said they didnt care about Bidens race or gender, the highest result among any of the demographics measured.

Pew even broke down the numbers by which candidate each voter supported in the early stages of the Democratic primary. The results were not surprising. Early Biden supporters were the least likely to care about the former vice presidents race and gender, while 73 percent of Elizabeth Warren supporters were bothered by the fact that the likely Democratic nominee was not at least going to be an elderly white woman.

Warren was one of the first Democratic primary candidates to use the term Latinx on the campaign trail. The non-gendered alternative to Latino and Latina is most popular among white liberals with graduate degrees and left-wing activists. A 2019pollof Hispanic voters found that just 2 percent prefer the politically correct Latinx, while 68 percent said they preferred Latino/Latina or Hispanic.

Biden will be the Democratic Partys first white male nominee since John Kerry in 2004 and the first Democratic nominee without an Ivy League degree since Walter Mondale in 1984.

More here:
POLL: White Liberals Most Bothered by Joe Biden's Whiteness - The Jewish Voice

OTTAWA The idea that crises bring opportunity as well as danger is becoming trite.

But it doesnt make it less true.

Canadian officials are intrigued by what is happening in France and Australia, where governments have moved with alacrity to take measures aimed at forcing Google and Facebook to share advertising dollars generated locally with domestic publishers.

Competition authorities in both countries are devising a new payment for content regime, so that the social media giants pay for the news stories that help drive traffic on their sites.

One Canadian government source said the measures are being studied to see if they could work here.

The Liberals should stiffen their spines and follow the lead of the French and Aussies.

The consequence of not doing so could be no less than the demise of the Canadian news industry.

Google and Facebook consume around 70 per cent of advertising revenue, yet provide little in terms of news content.

The government passed on the option of taxing the tech giants two years ago, preferring to introduce a $600-million media bailout fund that offers publishers a 25 per cent refundable tax credit on the salaries of eligible reporters. It also included a 15 per cent tax credit on digital subscriptions.

But this was nothing more than a Band-Aid and it has taken the 30-40 per cent drop in revenues experienced by some publishers during the COVID crisis to bring the issue back onto the agenda.

A more lasting solution was offered by the Public Policy Forum in its Shattered Mirror report in 2017. It suggested using the Income Tax Act as a means of encouraging Canadian advertisers to use local media or more accurately, to discourage them from using foreign companies. The act currently restricts the deduction of business expenses to advertisements that appear in Canadian-owned media.

Nobody is more aware of how unpalatable it is to rely on the government than news organizations themselves

The Policy Forum proposed to extend that idea to the online sphere. However, to avoid abrogating trade and income tax agreements, the government would introduce a withholding tax to be paid by companies that advertise through foreign social media companies money that would be funneled into a journalism fund.

Some contribution to the system that provides content that benefit their enterprises seems reasonable, the report concluded.

That wasnt how the government saw it when it rejected the idea. It argued there was a public interest argument for supporting the media, which justified backing the fund with money from general revenues.

There were concerns that Google and Facebook would simply pass on the cost to advertisers who did not see local publishers as a viable online alternative to the dominant social media channels.

Officials looking at the issue today are further concerned about the reaction from the White House, should Canada go down the same road as the French and Australians.

But, make no mistake, this is not an industry that is warning of an imaginary danger. Print organizations were already at the cliffs edge, despite incremental gains in online advertising.

The deteriorating state of media puts at risk the health of our democracy. As the Forum summarized: Sources of opinion are proliferating, but sources of facts on which opinions are based is shrinking.

Nobody is more aware of how unpalatable it is to rely on the government than news organizations themselves.

With so many other demands on Ottawas coffers post-COVID, reliance on a fund paid for from general revenues is not sustainable.

Even increasing the subscription tax credit to 50 per cent is not a long-term solution.

But some form of payment for content by companies that have been freeloading for years is simple fairness.

The whole debate foreshadows a far larger discussion about the role of government when we all finally emerge from this impasse.

There is growing opinion that the Washington consensus of trade agreements, financial deregulation and offshore production is dead and that new rules will govern the economy of the near-future.

The idea that Canada can rely on traditional market forces to remain competitive, while everyone else adopts more active industrial strategies is foolhardy, wrote Sean Speer, a former adviser to Stephen Harper, and Robert Asselin, a former adviser to Justin Trudeau, recently.

The debate about open and closed economies is as old as Canada.

The country has veered between the poles of protectionism and free trade, never fully embracing either one.

But it seems we are at a point in our history where actions that hint at mercantilism are in the ascendancy.

Email: jivison@postmedia.com | Twitter:

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John Ivison: Liberals should follow the French lead and force tech giants to pay for news content - National Post