Trump gives Israel a 70th birthday present

The New Neo Posted on by

The US embassy has officially moved to Jerusalem today. All that had to happen in the architectural sense (for now, anyway) was the sprucing up of a building that was already operating as a consulate, but in the psychological sense the move is much bigger.

I read a number of articles and portions of articles published today on the subject in the MSM, and so far all of them have made two points that are basically propaganda. The first (quoting the Vox article I just linked) is this:

It’s a controversial move that breaks with decades of official US policy…

And similarly, from CNN:

The US officially relocated its Embassy to Jerusalem on Monday, formally upending decades of American foreign policy…

Oh, really? In fact, the move actually fulfills decades of American foreign policy. The CNN article doesn’t breathe a word of this fact.

The Vox article is marginally better, but only 696 words into it. For the first 696 words (and how many readers will ever read that far?) the text ignores it—and then suddenly, any readers who have hung in there get a startling surprise (if they were previously unfamiliar with US policy on this, which I assume most people are):

To be clear, Trump isn’t the first US president to talk about moving the American embassy to Jerusalem. As Politico points out, Bill Clinton said he supported the idea in principle. George W. Bush declared he would move the US ambassador there in 2000. And Barack Obama, for his part, referred to the city as the capital of Israel and said it must remain “undivided.” Congress has also repeatedly passed legislation calling for the embassy move.

But none of the previous presidents followed through…

Why didn’t they follow through? Because they didn’t want to be seen as favoring Israel, which of course (until Obama) was an absurdity, because until Obama all US presidents quite obviously favored Israel. They wanted to keep Jerusalem as a bargaining chip, too, although Trump has also said that he will be doing the same. But the Vox article waits till 1439 lengthy words have been written—many of them alarming, such as predictions that this move of Trump’s will make peace in the region unattainable (as though it was so close to being attained before by conventional diplomatic means)—before it reveals the following:

The Trump administration says that it’s not taking a stance on final status issues like the boundaries of Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem. And during a White House call on Friday, US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman said the move was done to create “a better dynamic for peace,” and that “from a broader perspective, this helps stability.”

But of course:

And experts say this move essentially shuts down any potential talks with Palestinians.

Those “experts” have done so very well so far in the region, haven’t they?

I wrote that there were two points all the articles I read seem to mention. The second points tends to be mentioned in the articles’ headlines: the fact that Palestinians protested and were met with a violent response from Israel. For example, the sub-headline in the Vox piece reads like this: “Israeli soldiers have killed at least 50 Palestinian protesters along the Gaza border today as tensions ramp up.” Oh, those murderous Israeli soldiers, killing those peaceful protestors!

This time it takes Vox fewer words than before to get to the clarification, which appears in paragraph 6:

But as the embassy event got underway on Monday, Israeli soldiers killed more than 50 Palestinian protesters and wounded more than 2,200 others on the Gaza border. Many of the protesters were unarmed, though some hurled rocks and Molotov cocktails. The Israeli military said that they shot three protesters who were attempting to detonate a bomb. Thousands of Palestinians are in their seventh week of protests there, calling for the right of return to territory that is now part of Israel.

And how did that “50 killed” statistic get reported?:

Gaza’s health officials say a total of 52 Palestinians have been killed and more than 1,200 wounded by Israeli fire on Gaza’s border, 1,113 from live rounds.

The track record of truthfulness in such reports from Gaza health officials, however, is very very poor. Digging a bit deeper:

In a show of anger fueled by the embassy move, protesters set tires on fire, sending plumes of black smoke into the air, and hurled firebombs and stones toward Israeli troops across the border. Later on Monday, Israeli forces fired from tanks, sending protesters fleeing to take cover.

The military said its troops came under fire in some areas, and said protesters tried to break through the border fence. It said troops shot and killed three Palestinians trying to plant a bomb.

So which is it, three bombers killed by Israel, or fifty sort-of-peaceful protestors?

By late afternoon, at least 52 Palestinians, including five minors, were killed, the Gaza Health Ministry said. One of the minors was identified as a girl.

The [Gaza Health] ministry said 1,204 Palestinians were shot and wounded, including 116 who were in serious or critical condition.

The statement says about 1,200 others suffered other types of injuries, including from tear gas.

Just for starters, what on earth would children be doing at protests that were guaranteed to be violent? Other than being offered as propaganda martyrs? Remember, also, the Pallywood theater of al-Durah. And yet every single article I’ve seen reports these Palestinian statistics as though they are undisputed facts, with no reason to disbelieve their veracity.

There’s much more I could say, but this post is long enough as it is. For an alternate point of view to that of CNN and Vox and those diplomatic “experts,” I refer you to this. If you read only sources such as CNN, you might be forgiven for thinking that the move to Jerusalem is simply a mindless provocation devoid of plan or strategy. But actually:

As the United States takes a historic step towards recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capitol, a point vehemently protested by Palestinian leaders, the senior administration official told the Free Beacon that this new reality is not being viewed as an impediment to peace.

The United States is in the “late phase,” in fact, of finalizing its peace plan that will be presented to both sides in the coming months.

The plan has been in the works for at least the past year, according to Trump administration officials, and will be presented “when the time is right.”

“We’ve been working hard and want to give the plan the best chance for success,” a senior administration official told the Free Beacon. “We want to get a lasting deal that is livable for both parties.”

Details of the plan are being kept tightly under wraps, but it is expected a public roll out of the peace plan will arrive within the next month to two months, sources said.

“We’re not going to preview elements of the plan because no one is going to like everything in it””so anything you reveal is going to make someone angry because it will not be in context,” the administration official said, explaining that the Trump administration is being extremely sensitive to both sides.

Should be very interesting. One prediction I will make is that, if any good comes of this, the left and the MSM will be highly reluctant to give Trump any credit whatsoever.

{NOTE: Also, see this from Roger L. Simon, as well as this at Legal Insurrection.]

Cold comfort

The New Neo Posted on by

I was away in New York for a few days and came back last night with a cold. So this morning I canceled a bunch of things I was supposed to do and just crawled back into bed, hunkering down. When I got up again, hours later, I felt a mite better.

A cold is a funny thing, and I don’t mean funny ha-ha. If you’re not in poor health already, it’s a minor blip in your life. But still, for a few days or longer, you feel miserable. Sometimes I think that if you didn’t know it was a cold, if you didn’t know it was of no real import, you’d think you had some dreadful ailment and would be really worried.

On the other hand, colds vary. Some are a piece of cake, but some bring with them quite a bit of misery. The duration is unknown at the outset—is it going to lay you low just for a few days or will the cough and congested nose linger on…and on…and on?

Each person has a basic pattern, although there are variations on that theme. I tend to have long drawn-out colds, although zinc lozenges have helped modify that in recent years. But when I was younger a month of soreness and stuffiness and hacking away was not unusual for me. A friend of mine recently said that her colds last about two days. Two days! I don’t think I’ve ever experienced that short a duration.

Recently my son and his wife visited, and we were looking at a baby book of his that I’d kept when he was an infant and then a toddler, recording incidents funny and/or touching and/or frustrating. I came across something he’d said when he was about three years old: “It’s a little bit fun to be a little bit sick.” Hmmm. I think he might have been referring to the chicken soup, the hugs, and the unlimited TV.

Happy Mother’s Day!

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a repeat of what has become my annual Mother’s Day post. It was written while my mother was still alive.]

Okay, who are these three dark beauties?

A hint: one of them is the very first picture you’ve ever seen on this blog of neo-neocon, sans apple. Not that you’d recognize me, of course. Even my own mother might not recognize me from this photo.

My own mother, you say? Of course she would. Ah, but she’s here too, looking a bit different than she does today—Mother’s Day—at ninety-eight years of age. Just a bit; maybe her own mother wouldn’t recognize her, either.

Her own mother? She’s the one who’s all dressed up, with longer hair than the rest of us.

The photo of my grandmother was taken in the 1880’s; the one of my mother in the teens of the twentieth century; and the one of me, of course, in the 1950s.

Heredity, ain’t it great? My mother and grandmother are both sitting for formal portraits at a professional photographer’s studio, but by the time I came around amateur snapshots were easy to take with a smallish Brownie camera. My mother is sitting on the knee of her own grandfather, my grandmother’s father, a dapper gentleman who was always very well-turned out. I’m next to my older brother, who’s reading a book to me but is cropped out of this photo. My grandmother sits alone in all her finery.

We all not only resemble each other greatly in our features and coloring, but in our solemnity. My mother’s and grandmother’s seriousness is probably explained by the strange and formal setting; mine is due to my concentration on the book, which was Peter Pan (my brother was only pretending to read it, since he couldn’t read yet, but I didn’t know that at the time). My mother’s resemblance to me is enhanced by our similar hairdos (or lack thereof), although hers was short because it hadn’t really grown in yet, and mine was short because she purposely kept it that way (easier to deal with).

My grandmother not only has the pretty ruffled dress and the long flowing locks, but if you look really closely you can see a tiny earring dangling from her earlobe. When I was young, she showed me her baby earrings; several miniature, delicate pairs. It astounded me that they’d actually pierced a baby’s ears (and that my grandmother had let the holes close up later on, and couldn’t wear pierced earrings any more), whereas I had to fight for the right to have mine done in my early teens.

I’m not sure what my mother’s wearing; some sort of baby smock. But I know what I have on: my brother’s hand-me-down pajamas, and I was none too happy about it, of that you can be sure.

So, a very happy Mother’s Day to you all! What would mothers be without babies…and mothers…and babies….and mothers….?

All that Fosse

The New Neo Posted on by

Another confession: I never much cared for Bob Fosse’s choreography, except for the very early stuff in “Kiss Me Kate” and “Damn Yankees.” And Gwen Verdon—that wonderful, wonderful dancer and impish spirit—was very much a part of my early admiration.

After Fosse really got famous and he became the dance king of Broadway, his later work not only didn’t interest me, it rather repelled me.

Static, full of posing, hyper-sexual without being sensual or romantic, it reached its tentacles further and further into show dance and popular dance and cancelled out the flow of it and what I consider the dance of it.

Here’s a review of two new books about Fosse that don’t paint a pretty picture. I’m a bit surprised, actually; I thought I was very much in the minority on this.

[NOTE: Go here for some wonderful early Fosse.]

Ta-Nehisi Coates and Kanye West

The New Neo Posted on by

Ta-Nehisi Coates weighs in on the Kanye West Trumplove, as might be expected.

I’ve written about Coates before (see also this). In that first post I wrote:

The larger message [Coates received from his father’s treatment of him] was that he would always get beaten at someone’s hands, either parental hands or public official hands via the police, and that his father attributed his own violence towards his son as originating from and being intended to forestall that official violence. His father was claiming that the private violence the father doled out to son was administered to prevent the public violence, both at the hands of the police and by the son or daughter who might be wanting to act in a criminal manner out in the larger and very dangerous world.

I think that Coates is describing some sort of powerful emotional (and also physical) trap that he got caught in early on, as a child, and has never gotten out of. The way it goes is this: I am a small powerless boy, my father whips me, my father loves me, he says he whips me so the others won’t, therefore they are causing my father to hurt me, it is their fault not my father’s, the world is a dangerous and violent place, how can I ever be safe?

I often can’t wade through the thicket of Coates’ prose; his style of writing is highly admired by a lot of people but I’m not one of them. It’s self-consciously ornate and pretentiously over-written, at least to my way of thinking, and his content (in the pieces I’ve read, anyway) sounds a single note, the one I’ve described above.

Coates’ opinion of Kanye West is in line with that single note, although he introduces variations on the theme. He starts with Zinnish history and finishes with West as white.

Here’s the Zinn part:

…[W]hat happened to America in 2016 has long been happening in America, before there was an America, when the first Carib was bayoneted and the first African delivered up in chains. It is hard to express the depth of the emergency without bowing to the myth of past American unity, when in fact American unity has always been the unity of conquistadors and colonizers””unity premised on Indian killings, land grabs, noble internments, and the gallant General Lee…

Coates seems to have greatly admired West’s musical output, writing, “when I heard Kanye, I felt myself back in communion with something that I felt had been lost, a sense of ancestry in every sample, a sound that went back to the separated and unequal, that went back to the slave.”

Okay, I confess it now—I tried to read the rest of the Coates essay and I got bogged down before I finished. But the message of it is pretty much encapsulated here:

…West calls his struggle the right to be a “free thinker,” and he is, indeed, championing a kind of freedom””a white freedom, freedom without consequence, freedom without criticism, freedom to be proud and ignorant; freedom to profit off a people in one moment and abandon them in the next…

So Coates considers that West’s saying something laudatory about Trump (or not knowing every single relevant fact) makes West’s freedom of thought a suspect, “white” type of freedom, loaded with all the bad history Coates always seems to associate with whiteness.

As Andrew Sullivan says:

There was something about the reaction that just didn’t sit right with me, something too easy, too dismissive of an individual artist’s right to say whatever he wants, to be accountable to no one but himself. It had a smack of raw tribalism to it, of collective disciplining, of the group owning the individual, and exacting its revenge for difference. I find myself instinctually siding with the independent artist in these cases…

Or the individual anybody, I would add. Anybody—black or white or any other color, smart or dumb or eloquent or tongue-tied—has the right to think what he or she decides to think without anyone telling that person what color freedom is being demonstrated. What a deeply offensive thought, that freedom has a color.

Sullivan adds:

Coates reserves the worst adjective he can think of to describe West, the most othering and damning binary word he can muster: white. Just as a Puritan would suddenly exclaim that a heretic has been taken over by the Devil and must be expelled, so Coates denounces West for seeking something called “white freedom”…

Indeed.

Botanical cultural appropriation

The New Neo Posted on by

All hail the tree peony, as I did a few days ago in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. It’s that time of year, and the Brooklyn garden has a huge display of these gorgeous plants, which feature enormous blossoms that look like velvet or crepe paper or silk.

Hmmm—velvet or crepe paper or silk, all of which seem to have originated in China. As does the tree peony.

The tree peony was originally a Chinese plant, cultivated there for beauty and medicinal purposes for about the last 1500 years. In the eighth century peonies traveled to Japan and became popular, then to England in 1787 and next the rest of Europe, arriving in the US in 1820. Is this isn’t cultural appropriation? Then so be it. It just points out how preposterous the concept is.

The tree peonies at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden are not just lush and plentiful, but they also have a special history. They were sent from the Japanese town of Yatsuka-Cho in orde “to bring peace of mind to people in the United States” after the events of September 11, 2001. The first shipment ran into a longshoreman’s strike, and languished in containers on the docks at Long Beach, California for 6 weeks with predictable results: their demise. The next shipment made it, and those are the peonies growing in Brooklyn today.

Here are some of the photos I took:

The cop stop that wasn’t

The New Neo Posted on by

The other day while driving in a moderate-sized town, I glanced down to look at my cell phone GPS for a quick moment. Next thing I knew, I saw a police car in back of me turn on its blue light, and I pulled over to the right in response. The police car pulled over directly in back of me and very close to me.

I racked my brain to figure out what I had done wrong. Glancing down to look at a cell phone for a moment didn’t seem to be any kind of offense, and I wasn’t even sure the police officer could have seen me do it. My registration and stickers were all up to date, as well as my headlights and taillights.

So, trying to compose myself—I am always upset by any encounter with police and a possible ticket—I waited, license and registration at the ready.

And waited.

And waited.

The policeman stood just a few feet behind my car, talking to another officer. I knew better than to get out of my car to ask what was going on, but about fifteen minutes passed. Traffic kept going by, but we were the only two cars parked on the side of the road.

Then the policeman crossed the street (it wasn’t a wide boulevard either; just a regular old street) and went into a store. I was beginning to suspect that I was the McGuffin of this tale.

Sure enough, a few minutes later the policeman came out of the store. By this time 20 minutes had passed since I was pulled over—or thought I was pulled over. And at this point he got into his car and drove away, without ever having said a single word to me.

So here’s my question: what should I have done once I realized about halfway into the incident that I was probably not the target of the officer at all? I couldn’t figure out how to get away without risking his ire. I couldn’t even come up with a way to safely get his attention and ask a question about it.

And what should he have done? There didn’t seem to be any sort of big emergency happening. Shouldn’t he have figured out that I had pulled over because of him—it seemed rather obvious—and just waved me on?

More news on the blue wave front

The New Neo Posted on by

At least in the Senate, here’s more evidence it might be rough going for the Democrats:

Among more than 200 experts and veterans of Florida politics surveyed in the latest Tampa Bay Times Florida Insider Poll, nearly six in 10 this week said they expect Scott to unseat the three-term Democratic Senator. Just over two months ago, more than 57 percent of the Florida Insiders surveyed expected Nelson to win.

“I’m very worried about Sen. Nelson,” said a Democrat. “I think the Democrats need to reevaluate our candidate and Gwen Graham should jump to the Senate Race immediately.”

A Republican had a similar thought: “Bill Nelson’s best chance is a run for Governor. He should pivot now before Scott pastes his face to the floor. At least Nelson would win his party’s nomination. Better chance to win in the general than any other declared candidate in his party.”

“Rick Scott is focusing on Hispanics way before Nelson is…”

Then again, how can you believe the experts anyway, especially when they’ve reversed themselves that much in about two months?

The “Trump bump”

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m not referring to the possible effect of Trump’s presidency on the economy, which is the way the expression has sometimes been used. I’m using it more like a sort of speed bump in the narrative—that little obligatory hiccup in which the speaker on any given topic must pause to make a pejorative reference to Donald Trump before going on, in order to establish his or her bona fides as a good person.

Lawsuit: free speech in academia

The New Neo Posted on by

The University of Michigan has a comprehensive anti-free-speech policy.

Oh, the school doesn’t call it that. They say it’s:

…a disciplinary code that prohibits “harassment” and “bullying,” and increases the penalties if such actions are motivated by “bias.”…Michigan defines harassment as “unwanted negative attention perceived as intimidating, demeaning, or bothersome to an individual.”… Michigan has created a Bias Response Team that receives complaints of “bias” and “bias incidents” from offended students and is tasked with investigating and punishing those who commit offenses.

More than 150 reports of alleged “expressions of bias”””through posters, fliers, social media, whiteboards, verbal comments, classroom behavior, etc.””have been investigated by the university’s bias response team since April 2017. According to Michigan, “bias comes in many forms,” can be intentional or unintentional, and “can be a hurtful action based on who someone is as a person.” In the school’s words, “the most important indication of bias is your own feelings.” As a result, a student whose speech is seen by another student as hurtful to his or her feelings may receive a knock on the door from a team of school officials threatening to refer the student for discipline unless he or she submits to “restorative justice,” “individualized education,” or “unconscious bias training.”

Back when I was at school, if someone had told me this was the future for a place like the University of Michigan, I would have thought they were stark raving mad or describing the plot of some dystopian novel. But we here are.

Progress. Progressive progress.

The website I linked in this post is for a group called Speech First, which I just heard about for the first time today and which has filed a lawsuit challenging the University of Michigan’s speech code as a violation of the First Amendment, and asking “the court to declare that Michigan’s speech code is unconstitutional and to enjoin the bias response system.”

Good for them for fighting the pernicious effects of a policy that can’t help but have a chilling effect on freedom of speech, all in the name of protecting the feelings of students who profess to be grownups.

I went back to school in the early 1990s to get my graduate degree, and noticed these trends were already in place for faculty, although they had not yet taken root in codes that targeted the students themselves. I wrote this post about an experience I had back then that opened my eyes to the problem:

I discovered it when the young women in an undergraduate class I was required to take for my Master’s””a class which, being in the social sciences, consisted almost entirely of women””were virtually all in favor of a definition of actionable offensive speech that went something like this: “speech that offends any person in the subjective sense, rather than speech that is in fact objectively offensive.” In vain I stood up in front of the 100-or-so students, most of them around twenty years younger than I, to ask what the limits of this might be, to suggest that it was wrong to allow the most sensitive among us to dictate what was unacceptable, and to speak up for free speech in general. I was met with uncomprehending stares and impatient dismissal, a fossil in my own time.

I realized that something was terribly, terribly wrong. Not one person appeared to agree with me, or if they did they weren’t saying so publicly or privately.

I also remember saying something about the dangers of using a subjective measure of what was offensive speech. It all fell on deaf ears.

I wish the Speech First people well. Here is a description of the organization:

…[W]e’ve created a nationwide community to reassure students that they won’t fight these cases alone ”“ and that they’ll be supported every step of the way: on campus, in the media, and in court. We’re a membership association of students, parents, faculty, alumni, and concerned citizens from across the country who’ve had enough, and who want to fight back.

We believe that free and open discourse is an essential component of a comprehensive education. We are committed to restoring the freedom of speech on college campuses because we believe that by exposing students to different and challenging ideas, they will emerge stronger, smarter, and more resilient.

Speech First will protect students’ free speech rights on campus. Through advocacy, litigation, and other means, we will put colleges and universities on notice that shutting down unwanted speech will no longer be tolerated.

I’m glad to see a growing number of such organizations fighting the pernicious effect the left has had on freedom of speech on campus and elsewhere (see also this).

[NOTE: England is way ahead of us. And I don’t mean that in a good sense.]

I wouldn’t count my Senate chickens yet

The New Neo Posted on by

The GOP still might find a way to lose it all.

But it was always the case that the Democratic dreams of taking over the Senate in 2018 faced a possibly harsh reality, considering which seats were up for grabs.

Simply put, the map has never favored the Democrats in 2018. In the Senate, only a third of the seats are in contention in any one even-numbered year, unlike the House were everyone must be re-elected (or not) every two years. Big difference.