[Majorityrights News] KP interview with James Gilmore, former diplomat and insider from first Trump administration Posted by Guessedworker on Sunday, 05 January 2025 00:35.
[Majorityrights News] Trump will ‘arm Ukraine to the teeth’ if Putin won’t negotiate ceasefire Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 12 November 2024 16:20.
[Majorityrights News] Alex Navalny, born 4th June, 1976; died at Yamalo-Nenets penitentiary 16th February, 2024 Posted by Guessedworker on Friday, 16 February 2024 23:43.
[Majorityrights Central] A couple of exchanges on the nature and meaning of Christianity’s origin Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 25 July 2023 22:19.
[Majorityrights News] Is the Ukrainian counter-offensive for Bakhmut the counter-offensive for Ukraine? Posted by Guessedworker on Thursday, 18 May 2023 18:55.
Posted by DanielS on Tuesday, 08 December 2015 11:47.
..give ‘who’ hell? For Jewish academics to play both sides of “PC” is nothing new. While the re-normalization and motion to institutionalize social classification is a positive development - via ‘give-em-hell Trump’ in his campaign talk - the most important issue in the end, is not just normalization, but where the lines of institutionalized discrimination are to be drawn.
Trump is saying some things that we might like to hear, with a candor that purports contempt for “political correctness”, a candor that has not been heard from the last 11 Presidents at least, spanning more than 60 years.
With that, he flouts the avoidance of “racial profiling” for having allowed the San Bernadino attack. It is indeed a positive development to assert the validity of “race” as a criteria.
“There were people who knew bad things were going on [with the family], and they didn’t report it because of racial profiling.”
Moreover, he takes the validity of “profiling”, i.e., classifying people, a bit further to say that there should be a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”
Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump on Monday called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” the most dramatic response yet to the string of terrorist attacks that have Americans increasingly on edge.
Trump released a statement citing polling data he says shows “there is great hatred towards Americans by large segments of the Muslim population.”
Trump Calls for ‘Complete Shutdown’ of All Muslims Entering U.S.
“Until we are able to determine and understand this problem and the dangerous threat it poses, our country cannot be the victims of horrendous attacks by people that believe only in Jihad, and have no sense of reason or respect for human life,” Trump said.
Yes, it is a candor and a disdain for pseudo-intellectual and polite appearance that we have not heard from a President since “give-em-hell Harry Truman.”
Excellent though it is that race and other social classifications, and borders, are being re-invoked by “give-em-hell Trump” and that he is taking steps to re-normalize and re-institutionalize these criteria as a legitimate basis for discrimination…
one might wonder what, say, Japanese, et al., might think about who-for and how the “no-nonsense” lines are being drawn.
Playing “for/against PC” is nothing new for Jewish academia; i.e., one side playing “vanguard” while the other is “hand of restraint.”
Playing “for and against PC” is nothing new for Jewish academia: In this 1990 essay for the New York Times, Richard J. Bernstein is playing the role of “restraint” -
Central to p.c.-ness, which has roots in 1960’s radicalism, is the view that Western society has for centuries been dominated by what is often called “the white male power structure” or “patriarchal hegemony.” A related belief is that everybody but white heterosexual males has suffered some form of repression and been denied a cultural voice or been prevented from celebrating what is commonly called “otherness.”
But more than an earnest expression of belief, “politically correct” has become a sarcastic jibe used by those, conservatives and classical liberals alike, to describe what they see as a growing intolerance, a closing of debate, a pressure to conform to a radical program or risk being accused of a commonly reiterated trio of thought crimes: sexism, racism and homophobia.
“It’s a manifestation of what some are calling liberal fascism,” said Roger Kimball, the author of “Tenured Radicals,” a critique of what he calls the politicization of the humanities. “Under the name of pluralism and freedom of speech, it is an attempt to enforce a narrow and ideologically motivated view of both the curriculum and what it means to be an educated person, a responsible citizen.”
The restrained activist vs the activist vanguardist
In a generation before, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter* played the role of “restraint,” viz., the role of “activist restraint” opposed to “activist vanguard” - a role that shabbos goy Earl Warren was duped to take the lead in, as Chief Justice of an “activist Court.”
We should be on the watch as well, then, for the shabbos goy being fore-fronted as the “vanguard activist”, as:
Either Trump or Hillary Clinton can be used for - what? - we might not know exactly what for sure yet, other than that it would be another travesty. Hillary Clinton may well fit the role of shabbos goy “vanguardist” for their next demonstration of “chutzpah.”
* Frankfurter, a Jew, presiding as Chief Justice in the Supreme Court prior, fancied his “a restrained activist Court” and referred to his successor, Earl Warren, as “the dumb Swede” - worried that he would take the bait in such a headlong way of “activist vanguardism” that he would create an overly strong reaction.
EU may take up to 500,000 refugees from Turkey, Orban says
German government official denies that secret deal was made
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, a staunch opponent of accepting refugees into the European Union, said Germany struck a “secret pact” with Turkey to take in as many as half a million people.
The initiative, which wasn’t part of a weekend agreement between Turkey and the EU on curbing the flow of refugees, may be announced by Germany within days, Orban told a forum of ethnic Hungarian leaders in Budapest on Wednesday. European Commission Vice President Frans Timmermans dismissed reports of a covert deal as “nonsense.”
“Beyond what we agreed with Turkey in Brussels there’s something that doesn’t figure in the agreement,” Orban said. “We’ll wake up one day—and I think this will be announced in Berlin as soon as this week—that we have to take in 400,000 to 500,000 refugees directly from Turkey.”
Facing the biggest influx of refugees since World War II and reeling from the terrorist attacks in Paris last month, the EU over the weekend agreed to relaunch Turkey’s bid for membership in the bloc and offered a package of 3 billion euros ($3.2 billion) to help finance refugee camps.
French Reaction
“France and Germany are working together to manage the flow of migrants, which is a challenge to everyone,” French government spokesman Stephane Le Foll told reporters in Paris on Wednesday. “Last weekend the union reached an agreement with Turkey,” and Orban should be aware of the details since he was there, Le Foll said.
A German government official, requesting anonymity because EU-Turkey talks are ongoing, said Orban’s claim that Germany made a secret deal is false.
European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker met with the leaders of eight member states on the sidelines of the EU-Turkey summit in Brussels, spokeswoman Mina Andreeva told reporters on Nov. 30 without disclosing details of the meeting. The EU commission agreed to prepare a framework for a “voluntary scheme” by Dec. 15, she said.
While some leaders, such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel, have insisted Europe must honor its asylum commitments and want EU members to accept refugees according to binding quotas, others such as Orban reject immigration by Muslims and sealed off their borders with fences. Merkel also confirmed after the Brussels summit that she had met with seven other EU leaders to discuss a plan to settle refugees from Turkey.
The plan to take in refugees from Turkey directly was also raised at a summit of EU leaders in Malta last month and was shelved after it became clear that some countries including Hungary were prepared to use their veto power to block it, Orban said.
“There’ll be tremendous pressure on us” and on other central European countries “that if somebody already agreed to this—and to avoid causing a diplomatic tussle by naming the country I’m not going to say where Berlin is—that we shouldn’t just take them in but distribute them according to binding quotas,” Orban said. “This nasty surprise is still waiting for Europeans.”
People have underestimated the Hungarians, but it seems that they are truly acting as Europe’s demographic gendarme at this stage in the game.
Hopefully whatever the people in Berlin are cooking up this time, will be stopped through the valiant efforts of the people on the streets, through mass protests and mass demonstrations.
It is difficult for me, even in the so-called “year of the spy,” to conceive of a greater harm to national security than that caused by the defendant in view of the breadth, the critical importance to the U.S., and the high sensitivity of the information he sold to Israel. - Casper Weinberger
Convicted spy Jonathan Pollard has been freed after three decades behind bars.
The 61-year-old was jailed for life in 1987 for passing US defence documents to Israel, but was released on Friday morning, ending one of the most contentious diplomatic issues between the US and Israel.
Under the terms of his parole, he will not be permitted to leave the US for five years without special permission from the president, but he has offered to renounce his citizenship if granted his wish to move to Israel with the wife he married while in prison.
His request is being backed by two New York Democrats who have written to the attorney general.
Gerald Nadler and Elliot Engel said: “Despite the serious consequences that may follow such a decision, including being permanently barred from returning to the United States, he is willing to undertake this measure.”
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement: “The people of Israel welcome the release of Jonathan Pollard.
“After three long and difficult decades, Jonathan has been reunited with his family. May this Sabbath bring him much joy and peace.”
Mr Netanyahu said: “The people of Israel welcome the release of Jonathan A Pollard. As someone who raised Jonathan’s case for years with successive American presidents, I had long hoped this day would come.”
Pollard’s release from a federal prison in Butner, North Carolina, came nearly three decades after his arrest for handing over classified US government information to Israel.
His release caps one of the most high-profile spy sagas in modern American history. Supporters said he was punished excessively for actions taken on behalf of an American ally, while critics, including government officials, derided him as a traitor who sold out his country.
“I don’t think there’s any doubt that the crime merited a life sentence, given the amount of damage that Mr Pollard did to the United States government,” said Joseph diGenova, who prosecuted the case in Washington. “I would have been perfectly pleased if he had spent the rest of his life in jail.”
[...]
Israeli media said Thursday that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu requested Obama allow Pollard to move immediately to Israel, waiving the otherwise mandatory five years’ parole in America.
A secret document from Austria’s finance ministry, which was leaked to the Austrian broadcasting company ORF, forecasts that if Austria takes in an estimated 85,000 asylum seekers in 2015 and a further 130,000 in 2016 it will cost a total of €6.5 billion over the next four years.
This is much higher than earlier official calculations, and is based on a projected 25,000 positive asylum applications per year.
The figure includes the costs of primary care for asylum seekers, integration, social security, and helping recognised asylum seekers access the labour market. The document estimates that if the cost of family reunification is included this would almost double the figure to €12.3 billion.
In comparison, the 2015 budget for the defence ministry amounts to around €1.8 billion, which corresponds to 0.55 percent of gross domestic product (GDP).
In September, almost 200,000 refugees arrived in Austria, and 8,000 of those have applied for asylum. The interior ministry has said it expects a total of 80,000 asylum seekers this year.
The conservative People’s Party (ÖVP) has argued in favour of granting refugees “limited asylum” and restricting family reunification - where family members of a recognised refugee are given permission to join him or her in Austria.
Austria’s upper house changed the constitution Friday to force local authorities to accept a quota of migrants equal to 1.5 percent of their population despite opposition from the resurgent far-right.
The move, mirroring EU efforts to oblige member states to accept more migrants, is aimed at relieving Austria’s overcrowded main refugee centre at Traiskirchen, and comes into effect on October 1.
It was put forward by Chancellor Werner Faymann’s Social Democrats and the centre-right People’s Party, which form Austria’s governing coalition, and votes from the Greens gave it the necessary two-thirds majority.
The far-right Freedom Party, which wants to restrict the number of migrants entering and which is currently topping national opinion polls with around 30 percent of the vote, opposed the move.
In recent months Austria has become a major transit country for tens of thousands of migrants entering from Hungary—having travelled up the western Balkans—bound for northern Europe, in particular Germany.
But 8.5-million-strong Austria also expects around 80,000 asylum claims this year, putting it high compared to other European Union countries on a per capita basis, and Vienna has been a major proponent of EU quotas.
Marine Le Pen, the president of France’s far-right Front National party, is to appear in court for allegedly inciting racial hatred over comments in which she compared Muslims praying in the streets to the Nazi occupation.
The FN leader made the comments in a speech during a party rally in Lyon in 2010. Asked on Tuesday about being summoned to appear in court on 20 October, Le Pen told Agence France-Presse: “Of course, I’m not going to miss such an occasion.”
Later, she told Europe 1 it was “scandalous to be prosecuted for having a political opinion in the country of freedom of expression.”
At the time she made the remarks, Le Pen was campaigning to become FN president, succeeding her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, himself no stranger to charges of provoking racial hatred.
At the rally, Le Pen made reference to “street prayers” after reports of Muslims praying in public in three French cities, including Paris, because of a lack of mosques or a lack of space in local prayer rooms. The French government later clamped down on the “illegal” use of the public space for prayers.
“I’m sorry, but for those who really like to talk about the second world war, if we’re talking about occupation, we can also talk about this while we’re at it, because this is an occupation of territory,” she told supporters, prompting waves of applause.
“It’s an occupation of swaths of territory, of areas in which religious laws apply … for sure, there are no tanks, no soldiers, but it’s an occupation all the same and it weighs on people.”
Despite numerous complaints from anti-racist organisations, a preliminary inquiry by the authorities in Lyon was dropped in 2011. However, one association pursued the legal complaint, and when the European parliament lifted Le Pen’s parliamentary immunity in July 2013, a preliminary inquiry was opened. In September 2014, the prosecutor’s office announced she would be sent before a judge.
As of 2011, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s speeches had led to 18 convictions, five for repeating that the Holocaust was a mere “point of detail” of the second world war.
Marine Le Pen has been credited with “de-demonising” the FN and throwing out its more xenophobic and extremist elements since taking control of the party in January 2011. Critics accused her of swapping the FN’s historic antisemitism for Islamophobia.
Le Pen’s deputy, Florian Philippot, reacted angrily on Twitter to her summons. “The only people who should be sent before the court are those who allow prayers in the street that are illegal and against the principle of secularism!” he wrote.
Philippot accused the French authorities of trying to smear Le Pen before regional elections to be held in December.
Le Pen also expressed her anger on Twitter. “We’re quicker to prosecute those who denounce the illegal behaviour of fundamentalists … than to prosecute the fundamentalists behaving illegally,” she wrote.
The penalty for inciting racial hatred in France is up to a year in prison and a €45,000 fine.
* France’s Front National has also been charged with fraud in an election finance inquiry.
Posted by DanielS on Thursday, 17 September 2015 15:56.
While E.U. skepticism is more than valid in terms of its extant structure, operation, backing and representatives, can there be any doubt that European nations are better off coordinating their efforts if not cooperating with regard to their mutual interests and concerns?
That unity of effort is what we are calling a union, a European Union of sorts. Let this crisis shake trust in authority to its core and provide an opportunity for ethnonationalists. For we are operating of virtual, parallel nations (4th generation warfare). With that, we can seize this crisis to begin to determine the means and extent of our cooperation in a sovereign reconstruction of our national rule structures and their coordination - but again, who can argue that we have common interest in turning would-be non-European migrants away and repatriating a large percentage of the ones that are here?
Not only are we better off aligned against migrants as opposed to each other, but also aligned against those who are responsible for the pejorative rule structures as they presently exist and the implementation of those rules which brings invading migrants here.
There can be little dispute that European nations are better off with less conflict with one another and more aligned against non-European antagonists and European traitors.
The obvious fact of our allied interests accepted, attention then turns to a balance to be struck somewhere between cooperation and coordination.
With these ideas and the idea of sharing the reconstruction of our rules in our service we have an amazing opportunity to learn from the mistakes of World War II and do things correctly this time. That is, unlike World War II, where we were fighting one another European Nations, we have an opportunity to do what should have been done then: respect one another ethno-nationalist sovereignties and coordinate the blockage, deportation and repatriation of non-Europeans and disproportionate non-native nationals.
This will require something like Frontex. The question is, how much cooperation or coordination do Europeans want to negotiate?
As Europe’s refugee crisis intensifies, the EU border agency, Frontex, is suffering from a drastic shortage of border guards on the Greek islands, on the land border between Greece and Turkey, between Bulgaria and Turkey, and along the Hungarian border with Serbia, according to an investigation by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ).
Five months after EU leaders increased Frontex’s budget by €26.8 million to cope with the refugee crisis, EU member states have not fully responded to repeated requests by Frontex for border guards and equipment to help tackle the problems on Europe’s external borders.
The revelation comes as Frontex’s executive director, Fabrice Leggeri, prepares to be grilled on Tuesday (15 September) by the European Parliament’s civil liberties, justice and home affairs committee.
Committee chairman, Claude Moraes, to whom Frontex reports, described member states’ failure to provide the agency with the necessary resources at this “critical moment” as “scandalous”.
“Frontex is a crucial tool in the response to this crisis and people will therefore be astonished that despite funds being available it’s not adequately resourced so that it can carry out the first-tier response,” Moraes said.
Plea for help
Last April, EU heads of state signed off on the €26.8 million emergency grant at a high-level summit in what was portrayed as Europe uniting in its response to mass tragedies in the Mediterranean.
The money was supposed to allow Frontex to lease border guards and equipment from member states who would then be compensated by Frontex with the extra funds.
Last month, EU migration, home affairs and citizenship commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos wrote to all 28 interior ministers urging them to help.
But even that demand from the commissioner for migration to senior interior ministers across Europe has not delivered enough border guards and equipment.
As chaos continues to grip key migration routes, Frontex officials have admitted that they “badly need border guards on the Greek islands, border guards and technical equipment on the land border between Greece and Turkey, Bulgaria and Turkey and, crucially, along the Hungarian border with Serbia.”
Offers of key personnel and equipment from member states “are still very scarce”, said a Frontex spokeswoman.
“this [crisis] could lead to fundamentally questioning the architecture and functioning of the European Union”
The matter is, if cooperation and coordination among European nations is necessary - and as we have said, of course it is, more or less - how are the blue prints of that (more or less) unionization to be redrawn and its manifest “architecture” to “function” and be managed?
Theoretically, “more” is characterized by more “cooperation”as distinguished from “less” which is characterized more like “coordination”, but it is still a necessary unionized effort to some extent.
More, coordination has more to do with non-interference with fellow ethnonationalists and acting without centralized directive, but rather autonomously and at the discretion of the parallel nation.
It will do no good to say that no level of cooperation or coordination is necessary as European nations will be impacted by what happens in other European nations.
