Bill Ackman Snatches Defeat from the Jaws of Victory

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It is said that Jews of a certain vintage would pick up the New York Times at the breakfast table, back when it was consumed in its physical form, and ask “well, is it good for the Jews?”

What is picked up at this morning’s breakfast table — in paper or I-phone format — is most certainly not good for the Jews.

Just when the Jewish people were about to bask in the greatest outpouring of American sympathy since the 1967 war, an idiot named Bill Ackman has seized defeat from the jaws of victory, launching a vicious attack on a bunch of Harvard students for dissenting from the approved Israeli war narrative — a dissent that would probably have been ignored by most but for his attack.

As is well known by this point, early on Saturday, self proclaimed members of Hamas, numbering about 2–3,000, stormed across the (so we are told) lightly guarded border of Gaza into Israel, apparently killing or raping everything in sight, in addition to taking somewhere around 100 hostages, all with typical middle-eastern barbarity.  While some stories, like that of the decapitated infants, are in dispute at this point, see Blumenthal, Source of dubious ‘beheaded babies’ claim is Israeli settler leader who incited riots to ‘wipe out’ Palestinian village – The Grayzone, enough appears to be confirmed that the methods — if not the strategic object — of the attacks have been condemned by most Western nations.  In a word, this was far from a “surgical” strike at solely military targets with some inevitable, unfortunate, “collateral” civilian casualties like the strikes the US claims to enact.  It was obviously aimed at creating civilian casualties.

These events of course represent a tragedy for the people involved even if, from a Jabotinskyite point of view, such events were and will remain inevitable so long as Palestinians ring the borders of Israel.  But the silver lining for Israel and its Jewish supporters — if there can be one to such killings — was the huge outpouring of support for Israel from most Americans and most members of the Western block, most of whose knowledge of history terminates with last night’s CNN broadcast.

Of course, not all Americans bought the narrative.   Students at a number of universities, including that university to whom all heads must bow — Harvard — have pointed out the historically irrefutable fact (as is the case in most wars) that there are two sides to the story.  Some even expressed solidarity with the Palestinians and with Hamas, justifying their positions by equally horrific (though differently delivered) Israeli barbarity against Palestinians.

Although the Harvard groups’ letter has apparently been scrubbed from its original site on the internet, the following, taken from a purported copy on a Twitter (sorry, X) post, apparently represents a copy of the letter:

If this is the complete letter, frankly, it seems relatively anodyne.  It expresses no rejoicing at the deaths nor even in the attack itself.  It simply takes the point of view that the fault of this attack — and presumably all the violence of the last 75 years — is with Israelis, the people who evicted (or more accurately, were permitted by Britain and the US to evict) 700,000 Palestinians from their homes through massacres like Dar Yasein.  Although most (though not all) Jews would disagree, the position certainly is a viable one based on the historic record.  It also merely states what undoubtedly is (or is close to) the official position of the various groups representing the Palestinians.  Even a number of (outlier and outcast) Jews, such as Max Blumenthal of Greyzone appear to agree with this analysis, and, in fact, add an edge totally absent from the Harvard statement.

It should be noted that one of the organizations that signed the letter, at least according to the above partial reprint re-posted on Twitter, lists the “Harvard Jews for Liberation,” an apparently Jewish group, composed of persons who will undoubtedly be labeled self-hating Jews.  The letter is certainly more restrained than the bloodthirsty statements by scores of “pro-Israel” commentators, including the Israeli defense minister who labeled the Gazans “human beasts” and who pledged to make the whole Gazan people — more than 2 million — accountable for last Saturday’s atrocities; or former member of the Knesset Michael Ben Ari, who states “There are no innocents in Gaza.  Mow them down.  Kill the Gazans without thought or mercy”;   or Rabbi Yisrael Ariel, the Chief Rabbi of the evacuated Sinai Penninsula settlement of Yamit, waxing Biblical in September 2015:  “If the Muslims and the Christians say from now on no more Christianity and no more Islam … then they would be allowed to live.  If not, you kill all of their males by sword.  You leave only the women.”  All quoted at Information Clearing House.

Wow!  No those are “no holds barred” statements.  Not like the cucky, weakling, soy-boy Harvard “pro-Palestinians”!  Where the hell was Bill Ackman when those statements were made and did he, for example, propose that Congress bar the entry of followers of such people into the United States or warn Wall Street firms not to interview them?  Ho, ho, ho.

In fact, a member of the EU Parliament, Clare Daley, made the same point as the Harvard folks to the head of the EU in a response tweet.

Similarly, such former government officials as Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst who was the Presidential briefer for Reagan and Bush I, analyzes the situation much as does the infamous Harvard letter. “Can you give a brief synopsis of what’s happening in Israel?”; also talking on the “Israel as ally” issue at the National Press Club.  Ray McGovern – Does Israel act like a U.S. ally? – YouTube .

The Jewish Norman Finklestein asked two days ago “What were they [the Gazans] supposed to do?”.  He also agrees with the narrative set forth in the Harvard letter.  The Palestinians Had NO OTHER OPTIONS — Norman Finkelstein – YouTube

To top it off, there are now reports that Israel was warned by Egypt 3 days before the attack and apparently chose to ignore the warnings. On purpose? Rachel Blevins on X: “How did Israeli intelligence miss that Hamas was planning such a massive attack? Well, it appears they didn’t. Reports are now revealing that Egypt repeatedly warned Israel of an attack coming from Gaza, but Israeli officials chose to ignore it and focus on their settlements in the West Bank instead. Also: Simon Ateba on X: “BREAKING: US confirms Egypt warned Israel ‘three days’ before Hamas attack. “We know that Egypt had warned the Israelis three days prior that an event like this could happen.”

Why? To create an excuse for a Jewish jihad into Gaza?  This in addition to the fact that most experienced observers believe Israel — and Netenyahu himself — in the beginning helped promote Hamas to counter the then powerful Palestinian Fatah organization.  Ron Paul: Hamas was created by Israel and the US to counteract Yasser Arafat… – Revolver News.

One thing for sure — we will never know.  And if Ackman has his way, we will not be allowed to talk about any of these things either.

So, had the Harvard chicklings been better informed, and had they wanted to be truly nasty, they could have accused Netanyahu of working covertly with Hamas to create an horrific false flag attack justifying the taking of Gaza and its valuable gas fields.  My God, what if they had said that!!

In any case, given that America thinks of itself as a free country with freedom of speech and given that Israel, after all, is not technically an “ally” of the U.S. — the U.S. has never entered into a formal security agreement with Israel such as it has through NATO with the European countries — Americans should be free without consequence to air their views on this difficult and complex subject, free from extortion, whether privately or publicly enforced, on any topic, particularly on Israel.

However, this is definitely not the case for Bill Ackman and a group of like-minded “CEO’s”.

Ackman, a Jewish hedge fund manager, has publicly demanded, on behalf of himself and a number of “CEOs” that he did not initially name, that Harvard release the names of the Harvard students behind the letter quoted above   It appears that among the “CEO’s” Ackman is Abe Renick, the Jewish CEO of rental housing management startup Belong.  In addition a number of other CEOs have followed suit,  including Jonathan Newman, CEO of salad chain Sweetgreen (Newman is married to billionaire heiress Leora Kadisha who is a member of the Nazarian Clan, which is one of the world’s wealthiest Jewish Iranian families; she is the middle daughter of business tycoon Neil Kadisha and Dora Nazarian). Also: David Duel, CEO of health care services firm EasyHealth (David Duel is Jewish and “passionate” about giving back to the Jewish community), Hu Montegu, the CEO of construction company Diligent, Michael McQuaid, the head of decentralized finance operations at blockchain firm Bloq, Art Levy (presumably Jewish), head of strategy at payments platform Brex; Jake Wurzak, the CEO of hospitality group Dovehill Capital Management, and Michael Broukhim, apparently an Iranian Jew now a US citizen.A good number of these appear to be relatively small companies — perhaps a reason Ackman kept the names to himself initially.

And, as if on cue, we have Israel patriot Alan Dershowitz, former professor at the Harvard Law School (formerly the “Dane Law School” at Harvard, named for Nathan Dane, a donor who rescued the Law School in the early nineteenth century; he is long since forgotten, like most of Harvard’s non-Jewish donors). Dershowitz echoed Ackman, saying that students that “support murder and rape” should not be allowed to remain anonymous Students in groups that support rape, murder and Hamas should be named – YouTube   No mention was made by Dershowitz of the many, many Jewish Harvard students that have over the years expressed support for Israel and implicitly its air strikes, use of phosphorous bombs, destruction of Palestinian homes, and use of collective punishment.  Presumably, they’re all Goldman Sachs’ priority hires!

And today we read that a “big law” law firm named Winston & Strawn has just withdrawn an offer of employment to a Black NYU student, Ryna Workman, because of her tweet supporting the rights of the Palestinians. She was targeted specifically by Alan Dershowitz. See:  Students in groups that support rape, murder and Hamas should be named – YouTube .  The totality (apparently) of Workman’s tweet simply echoes the Harvard statement:

“I want to express, first and foremost, my unwavering and absolute solidarity with Palestinians in their resistance against oppression towards liberation and self-determination. Israel bears full responsibility for this tremendous loss of life. This regime of state-sanctioned violence created the conditions that made resistance necessary.”

Note that she references the “tremendous loss of life.”  At least in this clip she does not, contra Dershowitz, “support rape [and] murder,” although, if one interprets Dershowitz to say that all Palestinians commit murder and rape (an astonishing charge which could be used to justify the genocide of the Palestinian people), then, perhaps.  In fact, she appears, if anything, to decry the “tremendous loss of life.”  What she says is that Israel’s policies are responsible.  Dershowitz’s problem with her is obviously not that she supports murder, but that she holds the “wrong” party responsible.

Ryna Workman is now unemployed because of a nasty, vindictive Jewish supremacist law professor who is a fixture on conservative media in the US.   She should talk to Norman Finkelstein, who was also pursued by the good professor for Norman’s apostasy on Israel, as well as his accusations that Dershowitz was guilty of plagiarism.  Or ask Sue Berlach, Alan’s first wife, whom he left in the mid 1970’s for an affair with a young law aide, thereafter using his legal skills to get custody of her kids.  She later simplified his life by committing suicide, jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge into the unforgiving waters of the East River 119 feet below. Dershowitz 1st Wife — Tragic Abuse, Divorce, Suicide) ; see also 5 Surprising Details From That New Yorker Alan Dershowitz Profile (forbes.com). So I guess Ryna can’t talk to Alan’s first wife after all, unless she’s a psychic medium and a really good swimmer to boot.

So, from Jews to Blacks:  if you have an independent opinion on world affairs, fuck you.  So much for the “Black-Jewish alliance”!

More recently, Ackman is reported to have doubled down on his demand, as follows:

“If you were managing a business, would you hire someone who blamed the despicable violent acts of a terrorist group on the victims? I don’t think so,” Ackman wrote. “Would you hire someone who was a member of a school club who issued a statement blaming lynchings by the KKK on their victims? I don’t think so.  It is not harassment to seek to understand the character of the candidates that you are considering for employment.”  Quoted at: Bill Ackman: It’s Not Harassment to Name Pro-Hamas Harvard Students (businessinsider.com)

The arrogant implication, of course, is that anyone who disagrees with the Israeli and Jewish opinion on this is of “low” character.    But I guess that is what you get in a nation that now appears to operate on the principal, as E. Michael Jones would say, that truth is the opinion of the powerful.

It is worth noting that American statesmen like George Marshall (U.S. Secretary of State under Truman), the distinguished U.S. diplomat Loy W. Henderson, Ambassador to both India and Iran and Director of the State Department’s Office of Near Eastern Affairs under Roosevelt and Truman, and George Ball, Undersecretary of State under President Johnson, along with scores of other distinguished Americans, have been smeared with the “anti-Semite” label for raising significant questions about Israel’s activities — not to mention the propriety of its very creation; men who would undoubtedly have views not inconsistent with the letter issued by the Harvard students, having predicted 75 years ago events such as those just occurring.  So, apparently, they would also be judged by the Jewish establishment today to have such “low character” as to be unemployable.  The only Jewish pushback this author has seen is former president of Harvard, Larry Summers.  Former Harvard president Larry Summers thinks Bill Ackman asking for lists of student names is the ‘stuff of Joe McCarthy])

It should be noted that a few radicalized Harvard students are not the only ones in the gunsights of these Jewish gangsters.

The Presbyterian Church of the United States has unequivocally endorsed boycotting and disinvesting from Israel and its products, as has the United Church of Christ, the Methodist Church, and the Quakers.   The World Council of Churches has also called for divestment from Israel.  Other Churches that have at least partially divested include the Alliance of Baptists, Church of the United Brethren in Christ, Mennonite Church USA, Roman Catholic Church, Unitarian Universalist Association, as well as the World Communion of Reformed Churches (a confederation that overlaps some of the above).  Oy Vey, that’s a lot of Churches, bro.  And the Jews thought the Catholic Church was their only enemy!!!  Oops!!

Presumably congregants of these Churches will soon also make Ackman’s “unemployables” list for implicitly “blaming the victims”.

Student opponents of BDS certainly are on a very similar list, such as the list displayed on the so called “Canary Mission website, reputedly financed by Adam Millstein, another Jewish supremacist centimillionaire.

So will we soon come to a point where no member of the Presbyterian Church, the Congregational Church, or the Quakers — the denominations of most of the founding fathers including Thomas Jefferson, draftsman of the Declaration of Independence and James Madison, a principal architect of the Bill of Rights (Presbyterians) or John Adams or Roger Sherman (Congregationalist) — can ever again be offered a job on Wall Street or, perhaps, by a Fortune 500 company?  Holy shit!  We all better learn the “Hatikva” and throw that old musty painting of the signing of the Declaration in the waste bin if we want to earn a living in the America to come!

But at this point, it is worth noting whom these people pick on.  Not on Max Blumenthal, who would just tell them to “go fuck themselves”.  Not to Ray McGovern, who would just shake his head and smile “what’s new?”  Not to Norman Finklestein, who would intellectually eviscerate them.  Apparently Ackman is too scared even to take on the Harvard administration — adults.  No, Ackman picks on soft targets, college kids, who, with some justification will believe their careers, and perhaps lives, are ending before they have begun.  In a word, Ackman doesn’t dare pick on the strong.  He picks on the weak.  He is a cheap bully.  The lowest form of scum.

And, we must ask, have we come to the point where, to get a degree from Harvard, to get a job, to keep a job, you need to kiss Jewish ass from morning until night?

The blunt fact is that Wall Street, the media, the universities, and the government are all now run by Jewish supremacists.  In fact, it appears that, if the Jews get enough power, they will do to us in the U.S. exactly what they are doing in their other occupied territory to the Palestinians. Or as they did in the early decades of the Soviet Union.  Ackman’s attack is just the start.  Before the phosphorous bombs start raining down on our heads, if Ackman’s attitude is indicative of how Jews behave when acquiring positions of enormous power — and it clearly seems to be — perhaps we should ensure, au contraire, that a certain group should be barred from holding certain jobs, just as Ackman is proposing for people who disagree with his views on Israel.  And that group is not comprised of the signatories to that Harvard letter, or George Marshall, or Loy Henderson, or George Ball.

Here’s some analogous proposals:

If this is how Jews use their power, how about barring them from any job in financial services?
How about barring Jews from holding any position as an officer or director in a publicly traded company?
How about barring Jews from holding any position of authority at any level of federal, state, or local government?
How about barring Jews from owning or operating any media assets?
How about barring Jews from voting, making campaign contributions, serving on juries?
How about offering physical protection to Jews but also preventing Jewish influence on the greater society?

Given the current viciousness of the Jews currently in power — Ackman, Schumer, Garland, are only the most prominent examples — would it be too much to ask for a Constitutional amendment depriving Jews of citizenship, replacing the passports they appear to disdain with residency certificates, revocable at will and requiring that the Jewish nation (both in and out of Israel) be represented by ambassadors rather than lobbyists, political fundraisers, and political hacks?

How would Bill Ackman like that?  Maybe then he could actually go to Israel and sign up with the IDF.  Then he could defend his true country — not the one of which he is a fake citizen, but his real one — Israel.

The proposal to bar Jews from financial service jobs is not so far-fetched as one might assume.  In fact, a while ago, a number of Jews were indeed expelled from their chosen marketplace:

And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves, [13] And said unto them, It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves. Matthew 21:12–13

Perhaps the man that kicked them out remembered his earlier words:

Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it. John 8:44

Maybe our Lord and Saviour knew more than we think he did.  Maybe He was actually pretty smart.  Maybe we ought to listen to Him.

Thank you Bill Ackman, et. al. for reminding us — through your vicious, uncalled-for, activities — of that fact.

__________________________

1.  The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit (Fidelity Press), by E. Michael Jones.

 

Emil Kirkegaard: Palestinians in your country: what to expect?

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Emil Kirkegaard has posted on a natural experiment in Denmark with Palestinian refugees. Excerpt:

With a war looming and probably lots of Palestinian refugee applications on the horizon, I thought it would be wise to summarize what we have so far about them. The horrors of war aside, how good immigrants are the Palestinians? Denmark decided to try it out in 1992 by giving 321 rejected Palestinian asylum seekers extraordinary residence permits, granted directly by parliament by a special law (Danish Wikipedia Palæstinenserloven). These people have been followed since then to see how this experiment went. Here’s the data for the 2019 follow-up written about here:

  • Of the 321 who were given asylum 270 are still residing in Denmark, meaning the rest either left or are dead.
  • Of the 321, 204 (64%) have received a serious find or jail time for crime, with 71 of them being given jail time.
  • A very large proportion of them are receiving some kind of welfare especially the “early pension” (førtidspension) usually given to people with severe physical or mental issues (e.g. handicapped), but also used for immigrants who are basically useless on the job market for whatever reason.
  • Of their 999 children, so far 34% are convicted for serious crime and some large chunk are already on welfare.

Note that some of the numbers are slightly too low because of the ones who have left.

Why so bad outcomes? Well, let’s summarize the existing intelligence studies of them.

The Coloured Progressive Matrices (CPM) was standardized in Palestine in 2011 on a sample of 257 children aged 6.0 to 11.5 years, tested individually. The sample obtained a British IQ of 85.

…

Britain’s Worst Amendment: The Online Safety Bill

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Our new online safety laws will make the internet a safer place for everyone in the UK, especially children, while making sure that everyone can enjoy freedom of expression online.
From the summary of an early reading of the UK’s new Online Safety Bill, 2022.

Matilda told such dreadful lies
It made one gasp and stretch one’s eyes.
Hillaire Belloc, Matilda, 1907.

There are doubtless many technical differences between soft and hard totalitarianism, but one of them is surely the nature of power at its point of application. We might call the infringement of power as it impacts the individual “capillary”, after the tiny blood vessels that connect the body’s blood supply with its major organs and without which those organs could not function. Power is nothing without its application. Capillary power under soft totalitarianism does not take the form of night-sticks, tear-gas, and jail cells, but often presents as legislation. You will watch what you say in public if you know it may lead to your door being kicked in at 2am. But you will also be circumspect if the law of the land is engineered to outlaw certain opinions, and which, if infringed, could lose you your job, your bank account, and your credit rating. One such statutory instrument receives royal assent (and thus becomes UK law) this month, and King Charles III could be signing away his countrymen’s freedom of speech.

The Online Safety Bill: Emo

The Online Safety Bill (OSB), in its early parliamentary readings, was known as the “Online Harm Hill”, but re-branding was deemed necessary. (The word “harm” won’t go away, however, as we shall see). Governments have to sell legislation to the public in the same way as companies have to sell their product to potential customers, and there are rhetorical techniques that become familiar over time. Here, the stratagem is a classic advertising maxim: use children. With the OSB, the main point stressed to the British media — now a governmental policy delivery system — is the safety of children, who are thus used as a virtual human shield to make commentators reluctant to criticize the bill. This is the same country that endorses drag queen story hour in infant-school classes.

But the OSB cannot distract us with the little ones; it is aimed at adults. The first intimation of special interest comes 23 pages into a 255-page document, in Section 12, “Adults’ risk assessment duties”, which looks at the following:

5d. The level of risk of harm to adults presented by priority content that is harmful to adults which particularly affects individuals with a certain characteristic or members of a certain group. [Italics added].

This category will soon pull to the front of the pack of priorities, and the criteria for group membership will require close scrutiny as it is not inventoried. The issue of who might potentially be harmed is left vague:

“Section 18, 6b: “A member of a class or group of people with a certain characteristic targeted by the content.”  [Italics added].

Does this mean that if I go to a Morris Dancing Facebook page and tell them they look stupid in those bells and flowery hats, I have harmed them by the criterion above? We are entitled to expect definitions of these groups and characteristics. We do not get them. We’ll look instead at what might harm these characteristic groups, and at what form that harm might take.

It is always worthwhile, in the UK at least, to look at already existing laws which cover the same area and see if the new legislation has extended powers already in place. With the OSB, we can go back to two legislative instruments which both cover much of the same ground, and show that the OSB, in terms of its capability to repress free speech, has had what we might call “gain of function”.

The OSB includes many things that are already illegal, but these are distractions from the online activity the government is actually going after, and how they intend to close it down. Dan Milmo is Global Technology Editor at The Guardian, and in a piece on the OSB he notes that it has been revised from its draft version to make clearer exactly what it is that is being criminalised, or at least having its criminal status aligned with online communication. As he writes;

The DCMS (The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport) has published an updated list of … content, which includes: revenge porn; promoting suicide; people smuggling; drug and weapons dealing; hate crime; fraud; encouraging suicide.

They seem particularly keen on suicide, mentioning it twice. The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, incidentally, covers four areas which are pure private sector. The government should have nothing to do with them apart from ensuring financial probity.

It seems to me that these categories are covered by the Public Order Act of 1986, which states that an offence has been committed if a person “displays any writing, sign or other visible representation which is threatening, abusive or insulting”.

But it is the second category which introduces what we might call “usable ambiguity”. A new offence, the paper states

…will make it easier to prosecute online abusers by abandoning the requirement under the old offences for content to fit within proscribed yet ambiguous categories such as ‘grossly indecent’, ‘obscene’ or ‘indecent’. Instead it is based on the intended psychological harm, amounting to at least serious distress, to the person who receives the communication, rather than requiring proof that harm was caused [Italics added].

This last sentence dispenses with “proof” of “proscribed yet ambiguous categories” and shifts its ground instead to the even more ambiguous category of “psychological harm”, which does not require any proof other than the perception of the individual.

Again, I thought this was already covered, this time by the Malicious Communications Act of 1988, but in fact this is a perfect example of re-engineering legislation. The 1988 Act finds an offence has been committed if, firstly, a communication has been sent via media which include electronic transmission and containing the following:

i. A message which is indecent or grossly offensive.

  1. A threat, or

iii. Information which is false and known or believed to be false by the sender.

Although the 1988 Act goes on to consider the causing of “distress or anxiety to the recipient”, this reaction is measured against what the OSB is calling “proscribed yet ambiguous categories” fit only to be discarded. The checks and balances formerly provided by legal definition are thus being replaced by the unquantifiable measure of “psychological harm” which requires no proof. As always in these times of destabilization, emotio is allowed to outrank ratio.

The OSB specifically and explicitly does away with defined categories, and we are left in the now familiar situation of the perception of grievance, upset, or threat by the receiver of the communication rather than the weighing of these responses against existing objective categories whose presence can be proved or otherwise in a court of law. What is known as “standpoint epistemology” is now present in legislation passed by the mother of all Parliaments.

The British would be used to this had they paid more attention to 1999’s Macpherson Report on the death of Black London teenager Stephen Lawrence. This report stated that any incident is deemed racist if the “victim” felt it to be so, or any third party. Presumably this third party could be your protective mother or another gang member. It’s all about how people feel about things, not what they are and are agreed to be.

The whole idea of replacing objective evidence of harmful online content with subjective perception and its attendant degree of psychological harm makes meaning rudderless and subject to whim. What if I were to write a barbed email to my ex-girlfriend, rich in expletives and full of truths aggressively expressed, and she read it and snorted with laughter, pausing only to have a good laugh about the email with her new boyfriend before deleting it? As I intended to cause distress, have I committed a crime even though none occurred? Or suppose my email was mild and rather affectionate, although it did inform my ex that I had slept with her sister. Does she then put on her tragedienne mask and go out to look for a police station (if she can find one in the UK) to report a hate crime and online abuse, because she is so upset? If emotio is given precedence over ratio when crafting legal legislation, then the criminal law becomes mere mood music.

The government’s wily use of language throughout the passage of the OSB is, as always, worth forensic inspection. Nadine Dorries, boss of the CDMS during the early stages of the bill and described rather appropriately as “Digital Secretary”, wrote the following:

This government said it would legislate to make the UK the safest place in the world to be online while enshrining free speech.

Fitting, really. A shrine is where people gather to remember the dead.

As well as the strategic vagueness of “psychological harm” or, as the press release also phrases it, “ruining people’s lives” (the life of a sensitive plant on social media doesn’t take much to ruin it), there is a very explicit type of online Thoughtcrime which interests the new lawmakers. Here, as well as seeing what worries the government as a narrative-spoiler, we see every ideologue’s old and trusted friend: moral equivalence.

The new communications offences will strengthen protections from harmful online behaviours such as coercive and controlling behaviour by domestic abusers; threats to rape, kill and inflict physical violence; and deliberately sharing dangerous disinformation about hoax Covid treatments.

Just look at the company kept by those anti-vaxxers! Rapists, killers and wife-beaters.

Many on the Right are frustrated that a nominally Conservative UK government should come down so hard on free speech, something that should be a core principle for them. But why should they care about the loss of such a liberty when it is the only luxury they can’t themselves enjoy? Three categories mentioned in the early-stage OSB as beneficiaries of the protection the Bill seeks to afford are MPs, celebrities and footballers. These people have no freedom of speech, far less than we little people do, and the Klieg lights of the media are trained on them at all times for potential gaffes or hasty Facebook posts. Of course, they don’t care if the peons go to jail for voicing an opinion. MPs have to spend every day clinging to the guard rail of the gravy train, scared to death that they might tweet the wrong thing and lose their grip.

Then there is the question of messaging, and the bill aims to end double-ended encryption because, as you have doubtless guessed, this creates “a safe haven for paedophiles”. Won’t someone think of the children? We will be advised to do that while government turns its attention to its real quarry, adults.

Quite apart from anything else, encryption is a feature which attracts users, and if your business niche loses its USP (unique selling point, the grail of marketing), then you are just another provider duking it out with the others, who now have everything you have. But more importantly, encryption is essential for many people in these Stasi-esque times. I use an encrypted service because I have it on good authority that young and zealous social justice warriors frequently work for at least one major email provider, and are not above cancelling accounts for Wrongthink found while they rifle through your private correspondence, or at least correspondence you thought was private.

Media Coverage

British press coverage has been interesting through the course of the OSB’s passage through parliament. Britain’s Daily Mail is one of the leading newspapers in the world now, largely because they adapted to online publishing quicker than their competitors. They are also deemed “Right-wing” by the Left, and always have been. The Mail made some noise about the dangers of the OSB during its early readings in 2022, but the downside pieces tailed off in Spring of this year, to be replaced by features by and about women worried about their children’s potential misadventures online. The last piece the Mail ran on the subject had the headline: “Becoming a mother has convinced me we MUST protect children from the ‘Wild West’ of social media”. The piece was written by Michelle Donelan. Ms. Donelan is not a journalist by trade, but rather Britain’s Technology Secretary, and thus in charge of the OSB. As I said earlier, government has to package and sell legislation like any other consumer good, and the British MSM double as their PR department.

Enforcement

Finally, the government has the problem of enforcement, and for that it has weaponized the Office of Communications (OfCom). This body, among its many other duties, oversees political partiality in broadcasting, which generally amounts to going after the likes of GB News — as I wrote about here at Occidental Observer — while giving the BBC a pass on everything. But now they are free to roam social media looking for suspicious ideas too freely expressed.

Here is confirmation, if such were needed, that big tech are now essentially governmental sub-contractors, very powerful NGOs to which the political class has outsourced enforcement — malicious examples of what the British used to call PPEs, or public/private enterprises. Big tech is now the Man from MiniTru. And the OSB is also a flick of the riding-crop on the rump of big tech to make sure it does what it is told:

Previously the firms would have been forced to take such content down after it had been reported to them by users but now they must be proactive and prevent people being exposed in the first place.

That’s quite a statement. A government is telling private companies not to listen to its audience, but to listen to the government. This is how soft totalitarianism hardens.

It might be assumed that the battle for free speech is being fought on level terrain on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. It is not. While America still has the First Amendment woven into the very origins of its founding constitution, the United Kingdom has no such thing, and is about to add to its own body of regulatory law in less libertarian ways. The Magna Carta is often invoked as the British equivalent of the First Amendment, but this is wishful thinking once you see the denuded state of that founding document. Of the original 63 clauses present when King John signed Magna Carta in 1215, 59 have been repealed. The only important one left states that the government can’t throw you in jail without a trial. What the current government is doing to get round that is to widen the criteria of what can land you in court with the Crown as your opponent.

Conclusion

The OSB is a legislative instrument essentially intended, despite its pretensions, to police social media. Policing speech (or writing, if expressed online) is interesting in the UK. The fact that the actual British police are more likely to be found snooping online or participating in a gay pride march than doing any actual policing is duly noted, but this legislation will empower the state literally to act as commissars of what is said online, and by extension what is thought. It’s okay to like the British Blair — not Tony Blair but Eric Blair (aka George Orwell, which was a pen-name), but he must be lying in an unquiet grave.

The OSB is being presented as the benevolent state guarding its children from the predations of malevolent parties, but its own malevolence will be reserved for adults who speak out of turn. And this type of online infraction no longer leads merely to account suspension or deletion, but in some cases to jail.

We are used to Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World being held up as a mirror to our current predicament. But there is a third novel in Britain’s dystopian trilogy. In Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, a politician visits a jail to look for a subject for the Lodovico treatment which is designed to cure the offender of the impulse to violence. The reason the minister wants prisoners released safely back into society, and something of the sort is already happening in the UK, speaks to us: “Soon we may be needing all our prison space for political prisoners”.

It Wasn’t a Mistake. It Was Social Justice

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I was innocently reading my New York Times last week when I was startled by this ghastly headline:

“Judge Let Abusive Parents Keep Daughter. Days Later, She Was Dead.”

As we shall see, this wasn’t a mistake; it was the logical consequence of a demented ideology that demands “reuniting” helpless children with their psychotic parents.

See if you can spot any telltale signs that Ella Vitalis should not have been sent back to her parents, Johnson Vitalis and Lafeyette Browne, ever, under any circumstances, even if they were the last people on Earth.

Ella first came to the attention of the authorities last year when she was just 3 weeks old and police, responding to a domestic violence call, found her with two broken ankles, a fractured skull and a brain hemorrhage. The parents had no explanation for any of this.

Child welfare authorities promptly placed both Ella and her 1-year-old brother, Liam, in foster care with their grandmother.

Just a month later, Ella’s father was left alone with her during a child visitation and, in that short amount of time, managed to slice the little girl’s tongue with a “sharp object,” requiring her to be fed intravenously for six days.

So far, Ella’s parents had spent a total of three weeks and a few hours with her, during which time she ended up with multiple broken bones, a brain hemorrhage and a bloody, mangled tongue.

So naturally, when family court judge and de Blasio appointee Erik S. Pitchal was assigned Ella’s case this past August, he ordered the children to be “reunited” with their parents. What a happy homecoming that must have been!

Over the next month, Ella’s parents managed to avoid sending her to the hospital, but judging by the cuts and bruises found on her body in September, it was not from lack of trying. The parents blew off all five follow-up appointments with child welfare specialists, so in September, case workers returned to court and again asked Judge Pitchal to remove the children.

He denied the request. (If only they’d said the parents were objecting to Ella becoming a transgender!) The next day, her parents delivered the fatal blow, striking Ella’s head with a blunt object, leaving her unresponsive. They explained to authorities that the welts all over her body resulted from her “drinking too much milk.” After five days on life support, she died.

Who could have seen that coming besides anybody? One of the judge’s defenders, Gladys Carrion, a former children’s services administrator and currently a senior fellow at the Columbia Justice Lab (and apparently a world-renowned expert on circling the wagons), told the Times, “This is not an exact science.” It’s not “science” at all. It’s having the common sense of a basset hound.

Most people have no idea, but the obsession with keeping “families” together is another zany progressive cause. Part of the reason is that godless liberals who dismiss religion as a bunch of hocus-pocus believe there’s some mystical, supernatural connection between kids and their biological parents — even if the parents are Charles Manson and Lizzie Borden.

But a big reason are those fatal words, capable of annihilating everything in their path: “Disparate impact.” It seems that Black parents are more likely to abuse their kids than White parents. As put by NBC News/Pro Publica last year, inspired by “the 2020 demonstrations for racial justice nationwide, family rights activists have made a renewed push to change the child welfare system — including the repeal of the [1997 child safety law].”

(They’re great people, aren’t they?)

Before the “rights activists” dismantle another basic pillar of civilization in the name of “social justice,” let’s pause to remember why the 1997 Adoption and Safe Families Act was passed in the first place.

In 1996, Sister Josephine Murphy, who worked at St. Ann’s Infant and Maternity Home, appeared before Congress, begging members to reconsider the “families first” policy of the Family Reunification Act and replace it with “children come first.”

Here’s a portion of her testimony:

“Alice, a little 2-year-old who had to have stitches for vaginal lacerations because she had been raped. Kathy, 2 weeks old, came to us with gonorrhea of the throat. Pam, who at 15 months of age suffered from venereal warts. She had been sexually abused by her mother’s boyfriend and needed surgery because of it. Surgery was scheduled, but before it took place, she was discharged to her mother and right back to the same situation.”

A report by the U.S. Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect listed some of the ways children had been killed by their parents in 1993: Here are a few:

2-month-old: force-fed fatal amounts of Epsom salts and liquid antacids;

5-month-old: scalded to death;

1-year-old: beaten with shoe heel;

2-year-old: severely beaten after bed-wetting;

3-year-old: forcibly hung by neck;

7-year-old: bludgeoned to death;

8-year-old: stabbed in heart.

At that time, about 1,200 to 1,500 kids were being killed by their parents every year. After passage of a law putting kids’ safety above keeping “families” together (and avoiding racial stereotypes!), that number was cut in half. Today, about 700 kids die at their parents’ hands every year.

Under Joe Biden’s active, hands-on leadership, progressives are getting everything they’ve ever wanted. They’ve flung open the border, emptied the prisons, embroiled the nation in faraway wars and established anti-white racism as our national creed. Giving homicidal parents a “second chance” is surely coming up on the agenda.

Let Ella Vitalis’ hideous death remind Americans why we shouldn’t let progressives anywhere near child welfare laws.

COPYRIGHT 2023 ANN COULTER

The Enemy of Your Enemy

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The vicious attack by the Palestinians in Gaza is certainly understandable given the apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and essentially establishing Gaza as an open-air prison where supplies allowed in are strictly limited to ensure an essentially starvation-level diet for Gazans. The Western media is replete with images of Jewish suffering and civilians who have been raped, murdered, or taken hostage, but we are well aware that that same media routinely ignores atrocities against Palestinian civilians, as the above-linked article notes—atrocities that have been going on for decades.

It’s always psychologically difficult to be a dissenter from the moral panic that is now gripping all the high ground of Western culture. It’s a moral panic similar to the outpouring of concern for Ukraine even though a Western victory would be the establishment of all the poisonous trends of the West, from mass immigration from the rest of the world to gender insanity.

Most of us want to be seen as the good guys. And we are. I’m fairly used to being condemned as a moral reprobate by now, since writing critical pieces about Jews will definitely bring down a deluge of hatred. But it’s never easy. We’re advocates for our people at a time of unprecedented hatred against Whites throughout the West—hatred that in my opinion can be traced to the rise of a new, substantially Jewish elite in the media, the academic world, and (via donations) politics. Jews are a powerful component of our elite, and in general they are suffused with historical grudges against the West, from the destruction of the Temple by the Romans, to medieval expulsions, to nineteenth-century pogroms in Eastern Europe, to the 1924 immigration law, to the holocaust. It is a group that is utterly incapable of attributing any hostility toward Jews as understandable responses by non-Jews to Jewish behavior.

The current Israeli-Gaza war is yet another example. As always, Jews are innocent victims, end of story. And the result is we are inundated with context-free accounts of Jewish suffering. Such accounts are the entire focus of the vast majority of the Western media. And of course politicians fall in line, knowing full well that departing from this media-manufactured moral consensus would be the end of their careers.

But what I want to emphasize here is that this does not mean that I am a cheerleader for Palestinians. The Palestinians are a typical Middle-Eastern people and all that that entails in terms of non-Western social forms—the clans, the collectivism, and Islam with its long history of hatred against Europe. I recall going to a Palestinian protest at the University of California-Irvine and coming to the conclusion that these people are not our friends.

Let’s frame it at its most hopeful: If the Israel Lobby loses its control of the political process in the US, it would mean that Jewish power in general loses. And that would have major implications for a wide range of issues, from immigration to the legitimacy of assertions of White identity.

One thing that struck me was that almost all the ~150  students who came to [Alison Weir’s] talk were Arabs. The women wore scarves, and almost everyone wore a black anti-Israel tee shirt, so the meeting had the air of a uniformed, homogeneous, almost military group, with a couple of White outliers like me. Her talk was sponsored by the Muslim Students Association. It was preceded and followed by the reading of a passage from the Koran in Arabic, followed by an English translation. The event was held in the campus Cross-Cultural Center which has offices for all the ethnic activist student organizations. Immediately following her talk, the MECHA activists set up their meeting … . (MECHA and all the other student ethnic lobbies and leftist groups are co-sponsors of Israel Apartheid Week [IAW]. [BLM in Chicago is now supporting Hamas.] …

So even though I was cheered by the thought that more people are becoming aware of what’s going on in Israel, it was depressing to think that the anti-Apartheid doings are basically just another ethnic lobby. These students identify with the left, and I rather doubt they would be sympathetic to my view that they really shouldn’t have been allowed into the US in the first place. And they would be rather hostile to the idea that Whites have interests too.

I felt like a foreigner viewing someone else’s show. Outside the lecture hall, I felt like a foreigner even more. Despite the fact that UC-I is in the heart of Orange County (formerly considered a bastion of White Republicanism), spotting a White student was almost a rarity.  Whites officially make up around 23% of the students at UC-I, well below their proportion in the state. UC-I is often called the University of Chinese Immigrants, but Chinese were not particularly noticeable. It was all manner of non-Whites, from every part of the world.

Just walking around campus the percentage of Whites seemed to be far less than what the university says. The official statistics are based on freshman enrollment, and I suspect that a lot of White freshmen decide UC-I is not the place for them and transfer to some other university.

It was actually rare to see a White student. When I got into the student union, there were two or three Whites in a total of about a hundred. Four White guys later came in and sat together–probably at least implicitly realizing that their association was based on their race. But it was eerie how Whites stood out because of their minority status–almost like being in Hong Kong or Karachi and noticing a few stray Americans.

Like the Palestinians, I had the feeling of being displaced. Only I very much doubt that the Arab students who were involved in the Israel Apartheid Week would sympathize with my feelings.

The increasing presence of such people in Western societies is a disaster. And one could be forgiven for thinking that Israel would be happy to export Palestinians to Western countries, as has been proposed for African refugees in Israel. Problem solved.

Meanwhile in Context-Free Jewish Fanaticism Land…

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The only relevant fact is that some Jews are suffering.

In the Tablet, by Ani Wilcenski and Isaac De Castro.

In the past two days, Jews in the diaspora have experienced the horrors of a 1940s-style pogrom through our phones. We have been frantically refreshing Twitter and Israeli news, worrying that the next victim will be our sister or friend or grandmother or nephew—because it could be. We all know someone in Israel. …

War crimes and murdered toddlers are not a “complex political situation” with “arguments on both sides.” You can support Palestinian statehood—in fact, you can have any opinion you want about the regional politics of the Middle East—and still believe that jihadist terrorists abducting 85-year-old Holocaust survivors should be condemned. Conflating those two things only gives credence to the idea that violence against Jews is political; violence against anyone else is unquestionably evil. Insisting on that distinction, in the public arena where narratives are created, is the only way to break the cycle of demonization and intimidation-into-silence. …

In case those population statistics weren’t clear, we are a tiny minority waging an uphill battle, and we’ve been fighting it for centuries. Ask your Jewish friends how they’ve felt over the past few days, and we bet they’ll tell you that they feel isolated, hopeless, and alone. And you should understand that you are part of why they feel this way. We notice when you reach out in private but go radio silent when, and where, you need to put your own skin in the game, leaving us to defend our basic humanity alone.

Two Comments on Israel-Gaza War: Jonathan Cook and James North

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Jonathan Cook on the historical blindness and hypocrisy of the Western media.

All the current analysis focusing on Israel’s intelligence “blunders” distracts from the real lesson of these rapidly evolving events.

No one really cared while Gaza’s Palestinans were subjected to a blockade imposed by Israel that denied them the essentials of life. The few dozen Israelis being held hostage by Hamas fighters pale in comparison with the two million Palestinians held hostage by Israel in an open-air prison for nearly two decades.

No one really cared when it emerged that Gaza’s Palestinians had been put on a “starvation diet” by Israel – only limited food was allowed in, calculated to keep the population barely fed.

No one really cared when Israel bombed the coastal enclave every few years, killing many hundreds of Palestinian civilians each time. Israel simply called it “mowing the lawn”. The destruction of vast areas of Gaza, what Israeli generals boasted of as returning the enclave to the Stone Age, was formalised as a military strategy known as the “Dahiya doctrine“.

No one really cared when Israeli snipers targeted nurses, youngsters and people in wheelchairs who came out to protest against their imprisonment by Israel. Many thousands were left as amputees after those snipers received orders to shoot the protesters indiscriminately in the legs or ankles.

Western concern at the deaths of Israeli civilians at the hands of Palestinian fighters is hard to stomach. Have not many hundreds of Palestinian children died over the past 15 years in Israel’s repeated bombing campaigns on Gaza? Did their lives not count as much as Israeli lives – and if not, why not?

After so much indifference for so long, it is difficult to hear the sudden horror from Western governments and media because Palestinians have finally found a way – mirroring Israel’s inhumane, decades-long policy – to fight back effectively. …

No hiding place

By indulging Israel in its deceptions, Israel’s allies have allowed it to perpetrate ever more outrageous lies. At the weekend, Netanyahu warned Palestinians in Gaza to “leave now” because Israeli forces were preparing to “act with all force”.

But Netanyahu knows, as do his Western enablers, that Gaza’s population has nowhere to flee. There is no hiding place. Palestinians have been sealed into Gaza since Israel besieged it by land, sea and air. …

There are two immediate, and contrasting, lessons to be learnt from what has happened this weekend.

The first is that the human spirit cannot be caged indefinitely. Palestinians in Gaza have been constantly devising new ways to break free from their chains.

They have built a network of tunnels, most of which Israel has located and destroyed. They have fired rockets that are invariably shot down by ever more sophisticated interception systems. They have protested en masse at the heavily fortified fences, topped by guntowers, Israel surrounded them with – only to be shot by snipers.

Now they have staged a daring escape. Israel will batter the enclave back into submission with massive bombardments, but only “in retaliation”, of course. The Palestinians’ craving for freedom and dignity will not be diminished. Another form of resistance, doubtless more brutal still, will emerge.

And the parties most responsible for that brutality will be Israel and the West that supports it so lavishly, because Israel refuses to stop brutalising the Palestinians it forces to live under its rule.

The second lesson is that Israel, endlessly indulged by its Western patrons, still has no incentive to internalise the fundamental truth above. The rhetoric of its current government of fascists and Jewish supremacists may be particularly ugly, but there is a broad consensus among Israelis of all political stripes that the Palestinians must continue to be oppressed.

Which is why the so-called opposition will not hesitate to support the military pounding of the long besieged enclave of Gaza, killing yet more Palestinian civilians to “teach them a lesson”, a lesson no one in Israel can articulate beyond asserting that Palestinians must accept their permanent inferiority and imprisonment.

Already, the “good Israelis” – opposition leaders Yair Lapid and Benny Gantz – are in discussions with Netanyahu to join him in an “emergency unity government”.

What “emergency”? The emergency of Palestinians demanding the right not to live as prisoners in their own homeland.

Israelis and Westerners can continue their mental gymnastics to justify the Palestinians’ oppression and refuse them any right to resist. But their hypocrisy and self-deceptions stand exposed for the rest of the world to see.

James North in Mondoweiss:

The mainstream U.S. media is using the word “hostages” to describe the Israelis who Hamas militants have captured and taken into Gaza. Analyzing this usage is a good way to introduce how the mainstream is distorting this latest crisis. First, some of the captured Israelis are soldiers, who should properly be called “prisoners of war,” especially as Benjamin Netanyahu has actually declared war on Gaza. But, in fact, other captured Israelis are in fact civilians, and “hostages” is arguably the appropriate description.

But wait. This conflict didn’t start at 6:30 a.m. on October 7. Israel has occupied both West Bank Palestine and Gaza for nearly 60 years, and over that time has arrested and imprisoned hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, often without even show trials. Nathan Thrall, in his impressive, just published book, explains that during the First Intifada (1967-1993) the Israeli occupiers jailed some 700,000 Palestinian men and boys on the West Bank, roughly 40 percent of the entire male population there.

Today, the Israeli occupiers continue to arrest Palestinians, holding them for long stretches without anything resembling a fair trial. But the U.S. mainstream never seems to describe these Palestinian people as “hostages.” …

The double standard perfectly illustrates the U.S. media’s playbook on how to distort the crisis. First, twist your actual reports, with one-sided language and biased framing. But second, and arguably even more important; ignore any of the history in Israel/Palestine, so that the attack from Gaza looks like an inexplicable, unprovoked spasm of violence and Jew-hatred. …

CNN’s color-coded map of Israel/Palestine, which it displayed on screen regularly all week-end, was another instance of slanting. The map showed the entire occupied West Bank as “Palestinian-controlled,” which will be a surprise to Palestinians who every single day have to pass through Israeli military checkpoints.