One has the feeling that the pro-Israel community in the U.S. is increasingly on the defensive. Jonathan Tobin’s “Anti-Zionists Must Not Be Allowed to Hijack the Jewish Community” is Abe Foxmanesque in its tone of embattled righteousness — and for two (two!) uses of the canard strategy (i.e., the strategy  that if a belief related to Jews is common, it must be false and so obviously false that there is no need to come up with rational arguments).

Canard #1:

This week the Jewish world is discussing two incidents in which large community institutions were forced to account for invitations to prominent writers who are virulent foes of Israel. In one case New York’s Jewish Museum was under fire for inviting academic Judith Butler. In another, the Museum of Jewish Heritage, also in New York, canceled an appearance by New Republic editor John Judis. What both these figures had in common was their bitter opposition to Israel. In Butler’s case, she is a prominent supporter of the BDS (boycott, divest, sanction) movement that seeks to wage economic war on the State of Israel. Judis is the author of a book that questions the legitimacy of Israel’s creation in a revisionist history of President Harry Truman’s role in the creation of the Jewish state, as historian Ron Radosh pointed out in the Jerusalem Post.

Taken together, along with other incidents in the last year involving other BDS supporters being invited to Manhattan’s 92nd Street Y, the decision by the two museums to let outraged members and donors derail the events is seen as a sign of a wave of repression in the American Jewish community. Sounding a theme that has become a constant refrain on the left, supporters of Israel are being accused of cracking down on dissent. But the issue here isn’t free speech or even whether Israel’s policies should be debated. It’s whether an extremist anti-Zionist minority will be able to hijack Jewish institutions.

The accusation about free speech is a canard.

Why is it a canard? Because both Butler and Judis can find other venues to spew their venom outside of venues within the Jewish community. The Jewish community itself should be spared having to listen to “the voices seeking Israel’s destruction.” (Judis has since been reinvited, doubtless infuriating Tobin.) Read more

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There is a traveling exhibit that’s hitting all the major cities and has now set up shop at the Pink Palace Museum here in Memphis. The exhibit is simply called, “RACE.”

Its purpose is to make us believe the fairy tale that race is a social construct and that all whites are evil, as if there might be a shortage of venues with that message. Really, that’s the only thing you’ll walk away having learned after suffering through this pseudo-scientific monstrosity.

After you emerge from your psychological torturing, the museum hosts a “Diversity Dialogue” where yuppies and other assorted guilty white liberals can share with one another about how much they hate themselves.

I would give you a more detailed review, but found that someone from Seattle has already covered it quite well. This video is well worth watching and tells the whole story about an exhibit that is short on science, but loaded with all of the politically correct talking points you can stomach.

The hum of the hive-mind. If you thought it was loud at the Guardian, you should try the New Statesman. Or maybe you shouldn’t. You might get tinnitus. Particularly if you read an article by the famous religious leader Richard Dawkins, who leads the world-wide cult of liberal atheism. He’s been writing about the greatest miracle on earth — the Miracle of Human Equality. In fact, this miracle is even bigger than I previously realized:

Human beings have only recently shown how very special they are. Fifty thousand years ago we had the same bodies and brains as today and we probably had language. But we didn’t have much by way of art, and our artefacts were limited to the functional — stone tools for hunting and butchering, for instance. (Apes with big brains: Richard Dawkins on what makes us human, The New Statesman, 6^th January 2013)

Pope Richard Dawkins

So Dawkins thinks that it’s only “probable,” not certain, that human beings had language fifty thousand years ago. It follows, then, that he thinks language is a supernatural phenomenon, floating free of biology and genetics. After all, those ancient humans had the “same brains” as we have today. If language depended on the brain, Dawkins would conclude that ancient humans certainly had language. He doesn’t and so, to the chief liberal atheist, language must be a supernatural phenomenon.

Culture must be supernatural too:

That changed around 40,000 years ago, when the archaeological record shows a sudden magnificent flowering of art and even musical instruments. Cultural evolution — which outpaces by orders of magnitude the superficially similar genetic evolution that had given rise to our big brains in the first place — went into overdrive. Next came the transition from the hunter/gatherer to the settled agriculture way of life, soon to be followed by cities, markets, governments, religion and war. The Industrial Revolution expanded cities to megalopolises, propelling our species to worldwide (and potentially disastrous) domination, and even to reach out to the moon and planets. (Apes with big brains)

Heavens! Those huge cultural advances took place without any influence on or from the genes. None whatsoever. It was all done with the “same brain” (contra Cochran and Harpending) even though some of those advances were confined to particular regions and are still unevenly distributed around the world (per J. Philippe Rushton). Science is a European invention, for example, and White Europeans have contributed by far the most to its development. Look at Charles Darwin, the Great Prophet of the Liberal Atheist Cult: he was English, just like his disciple Dawkins. But Darwin would have been very surprised to hear that all groups of human have had the “same brain” for “fifty thousand years.” Read more