Freedom of Association and the Right of Exclusion: The Rights Before All Others, Part 1

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What follows is a 2005 exchange between Justice Stephen Breyer of the Supreme Court and Joshua Rosenkranz, an attorney arguing for the unconstitutionality of a law that denied federal funding to law schools that barred military recruiters from campus.[1]

Justice Breyer: — So, in fact, to be clear, you also think schools that are angry at the military because they’re too favorable to gays in the military, they have the same right.

Mr. Rosenkranz: Absolutely, Your–

Justice Breyer: Okay.

Mr. Rosenkranz: — Honor, because–

Justice Breyer: And also the same right Bob Jones University, because they disapprove of social mixing of the races?

Mr. Rosenkranz: — If… to answer the first hypothetical first, if that’s a matter of conscience, absolutely–

Justice Breyer: All right, so–

Mr. Rosenkranz: — if we’re talking–

Justice Breyer: — so, what… and there are a lot of people in the country, they may… there’s few, anyway… may not believe in either affirmative action, they may not believe in… they may not believe in diversity, they may not… they may even believe in racial segregation, for all I know.

I hope there are not too many…  I would like an answer to my question, because I’m thinking, as you correctly say, if you have that right, so do all the worst segregationists you can imagine, et cetera…

Rosenkranz lost his case.  His client, the law schools, opposed military recruiters on campus because of the military’s exclusion of gays.  In other words, they wanted to exclude the excluders.  The justices unanimously rejected the argument on grounds that if the law schools accepted federal money, they also had to accept Congressionally-set conditions – which were, in this case, that they had to allow military recruiters on campus (aka the Solomon Amendment). Read more

Four Woundings and a Funeral: Sometimes Folk Are Happy to be Hated

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Despite being Jewish, the journalist Matthew Yglesias has a Christian surname – it means “Churches” in Spanish. And he displayed a truly Christian spirit of forgiveness when he was assaulted by Blacks in Washington in 2011:

Matthew Yglesias

Victim of Vibrancy #1: Matthew Yglesias

But to be clear about something — insofar as there’s supposedly a “game” here where the contestant tries to knock someone out with one punch, that absolutely isn’t what happened. I was knocked down, but definitely not out, and then after that I got kicked a bunch of times. If you’re familiar with the phrase “don’t kick a man while he’s down,” take note — it really hurts quite a bit to be kicked while you’re down. In fact, this substantial deviation from the “rules” of the “game” is a lot of what made getting violently assaulted for no reason such a physically unpleasant experience. … People shouldn’t minimize these concerns about urban violence, but it accomplishes nothing in terms of tackling them to concoct weird trends and games out of thin air. (Yglesias: I wasn’t a victim of “Knockout Game” because I was only knocked down, not out, iSteve, 25th November 2013)

Nothing to see here. It was a random attack – there are no conclusions to be drawn. In 2008, the Jewish journalist Brian Beutler nearly died at the hands of Blacks in the same city. And guess what? Beutler displayed the same Christian spirit of forgiveness: Read more

Le lobby pro-israélien et la communauté juive organisée veulent un changement de régime en Syrie

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Le lobby pro-israélien et la communauté juive organisée veulent un changement de régime en Syrie

1 Septembre 2013

Kevin MacDonald

Original version here

Le président Obama dit maintenant que son administration a décidé d’attaquer la Syrie mais qu’elle demandera l’approbation du Congrès avant de passer à l’action. La situation deviendrait alors très intéressante, si jamais le Congrès s’y oppose, comme cela semble bien possible.

L’idée qu’Obama puisse ordonner un acte de guerre contre la Syrie sans disposer d’un fort soutien international, ni d’un mandat du Congrès, a toujours laissé perplexe. Voilà donc notre président d’extrême gauche qui préconise une guerre de plus au Proche-Orient, après s’être opposé à la guerre en Irak quand il était sénateur. Ce même président, qui a des rapports glaciaux avec Benjamin Netanyahu, et qui a maintes fois déçu les exigences du Lobby pro-israélien.

Bien sûr, les arguments pour cette guerre sont formulés en termes de bien et de mal—comme pour toutes les guerres américaines, mais ce genre de justification moraliste existait aussi pendant la période menant à la guerre d’Irak. Dans le cas actuel, le point de vue des faucons est plus difficile à défendre du fait que les allégations concernant les armes de destruction massive se sont avérées fausses. N’oublions pas que ces allégations avaient été fabriquées par des agents pro-israéliens à l’identité juive très marquée. Ces agents étaient liés au Bureau des projets spéciaux du Ministère de la Défense, avec parmi eux, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Abraham Shulsky, Elliott Abrams, David Wurmser, Michael Ledeen, David Schencker, et Michael Rubin. Cela s’était fait en étroite coopération avec les services de renseignements israéliens (voir ici, p. 47 et suiv.).

Les suspects habituels, les néoconservateurs du Weekly Standard—y compris nombre de ceux-là mêmes qui ont fait campagne pour la guerre d’Irak— font maintenant pression pour une lourde intervention américaine en Syrie. Il est surréaliste de lire dans la déclaration de ces soi-disant “experts” que le président doit agir «pour s’assurer que les armes chimiques d’Assad ne menacent plus l’Amérique”. Cela rappelle l’Irak de Saddam Hussein, qui s’apprêtait à détruire les Etats-Unis avec ses armes de destruction massive. Comment Assad pourrait lancer ses armes chimiques sur l’Amérique est laissé à l’imagination de chacun.

Le soutien résolu des néoconservateurs à une action militaire en Syrie laisse penser qu’Israël est tout à fait favorable à une campagne américaine. Il n’est donc pas surprenant, comme pendant les jours précédant la guerre d’Irak, que les renseignements israéliens jouent un rôle de premier plan: “Les preuves du déploiement d’armes chimiques par le régime d’Assad – déploiement qui apporterait un fondement juridique essentiel pour justifier une action militaire occidentale – ont principalement été fournies par les renseignement militaires israéliens, selon le magazine allemand Focus” (voir ici). Cela comprend l’appel téléphonique intercepté, dont on a tant parlé, entre des officiers syriens qui discutaient de l’utilisation d’armes chimiques (Ibid.), ainsi que l’affirmation selon laquelle des armes chimiques ont été transportées jusqu’au site de l’attaque (voir ici). Read more

The Canard Strategy in the Service of War with Iran

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The Israel Lobby, temporarily set back with the success of the Iran negotiations, has wasted no time in paving a new path to war via the Nuclear Weapon Free Iran Act of 2013. This bill is now being considered by the Senate, led by Bob Menendez, Chuck Schumer, and Mark Kirk, all staunch supporters of the Israel Lobby.

The bill has two noteworthy aspects. First, it would bar Iran from enriching any new uranium whatsoever. As everyone knows, this is a non-starter with Iran, so adopting the bill would guarantee that even tougher sanctions provided by the bill would kick in, putting Iran in an impossible situation, thus virtually ensuring the much desired war.

Secondly it puts huge pressure on the U.S. to go to war if Israel sees fit to attack Iran. The bill

 includes a non-binding provision that states that if Israel takes “military action in legitimate self-defense against Iran’s nuclear weapons program,”  the U.S. “should stand with Israel and provide, in accordance with the law of the United States and the constitutional responsibility of Congress to authorize the use of military force, diplomatic, military, and economic support to the Government of Israel in its defense of its territory, people, and existence.”
“Should stand with Israel” is deliberately vague. But minimally, if it were to pass, it would be interpreted as constituting Congressional approval of U.S. involvement should Israel decide to go to war. Read more

In Russia, Ten Years in Jail for “Extremist” Speech

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Editor’s note: Below is short article by Igor Artemov, chairman of the Russian All-National Union (RONS). The view of Vladimir Putin presented by Artemov contrasts sharply with the previous featured article, by Robert Bonomo. There is no doubt that the Western media harps on restrictions on free speech in Russia directed against Pussy Riot and propagandists for homosexuality—implying that Russian policies are illiberal, if not fascist. Such policies are clearly out of step with “enlightened opinion” in the West and hence detested by the New York Times, the target of Bonomo’s article.  Bonomo also implicitly suggests that the Western media and the NY Times in particular are concerned with the treatment of certain Jews who have run afoul of the Russian legal system (Browder, Magnitsky, Khodorkovsky), all of whom have become causes célèbres in the West, especially among neocons (e.g., Richard Perle led the campaign to free Khodorkovsky). And of course, Putin is also in disfavor in the West because of policies supporting the Syrian government and Iran, as well as strong ties between Russia and Ukraine.

However, Putin’s policies against the cultural Marxist zeitgeist that  dominates the West is only part of the story. Roman Frolov, who translated Artemov’s article and is in touch with nationalist circles  in Russia, writes that “for each persecuted Pussy Riot member there are thousands of Russian men persecuted for as little as derogatory remarks about migrants made in social networks. However, you have heard nothing about them because mass media is not interested in them and they don’t have powerful advocates.”

The NY Times et al. completely ignore the jailing of Russian nationalists; homosexual activists and Pussy Riot are another matter altogether.

The use of the legal system against Russian nationalists has been described in a previous TOO article by Pyotr Antonov (“Russian political prisoners in the Russian Federation,” August 6, 2013).  Antonov notes that

when reporting about the problem of political prisoners in Russia, mass media in Russia and abroad almost exclusively focus on Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the late Sergei Magnitsky and the “prisoners of May 6, 2012. “This creates an impression that the list of victims of political persecutions in Russia is limited by these people. However, in truth this is only the tip of the iceberg. Many, many others have been imprisoned during last several years for the sole ‘crime’ of being publically active Russian Nationalists. Read more

Vladimir Vladimirovich and the Grey Lady

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Editorial note: This article originally appeared on Robert Bonomo’s http://www.thecactusland.com/ and is re-posted here with permission.
Putin and the Grey Lady

Bill Keller, editorialist for The NY Times and former executive editor of the paper, has recently penned a strong attack on Vladimir Putin arguing that Putin’s leadership “deliberately distances Russia from the socially and culturally liberal West”, describing the Kremlin’s policies as “laws giving official sanction to the terrorizing of gays and lesbians, the jailing of members of a punk protest group for offenses against the Russian Orthodox Church, the demonizing of Western-backed pro-democracy organizations as ‘foreign agents’, expansive new laws on treason, limits on foreign adoptions.”

Keller, who during his tenure as executive editor of The NY Times argued for the invasion of Iraq and wrote glowingly of Paul Wolfowitz, makes no mention of Moscow’s diplomatic maneuvers that successfully avoided a US military intervention in Syria or the Russian asylum given to Eric Snowden.  Keller, who had supported the US intervention in Syria by writing, “but in Syria, I fear prudence has become fatalism, and our caution has been the father of missed opportunities, diminished credibility and enlarged tragedy,” also made no mention of Seymour Hersh’s stinging dissection of the Obama administration’s misinformation campaign regarding the sarin attacks in Syria.  Hersh’s piece, which drives grave doubts into the case against Assad actually having carried out the attacks, was not published in The New Yorker or in The Washington Post, publications that regularly run his work. Read more

TOO Annual Fundraiser for 2013: Much to be optimistic about

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It’s time for our annual year-end fundraising appeal—our only appeal of the year. I’d like to first thank those who have contributed during 2013. Much appreciated. With your generous support, we have been able to put out well over 200 articles and blogs in the past year.

A very promising trend is that we are attracting many excellent writers—people like Domitius Corbulo whose review of Filipe Fernandez-Armesto’s Pathfinders is has recently been our featured article. Armesto’s book is typical of the cultural Marxism that pervades the academic world: lack of concern for the empirical evidence and seething with hostility to Europeans, their history and their culture. The good news is that we now have a critical mass of writers on this site and on other like-minded sites—writers who are on board with our issues and are willing and able to write articles that provide insight into our malaise and provide the sort of cultural confidence that is necessary for long-term success. One of the exciting things about the present state of the Internet is that there are quite a few excellent outlets for White advocacy and other sites opposed to the constant barrage of propaganda from the mainstream media on all things related to immigration and multiculturalism.

Read more