Brunson, US pastor held in Turkey, released

The New Neo Posted on by

This is very good news:

A Turkish court freed American pastor Andrew Brunson on Friday after he spent nearly two years in jail and more time under house arrest on charges related to terrorism and espionage. Brunson had become entangled in a diplomatic dispute between Turkey and the United States and American officials had been pushing hard for his release…

“We’re grateful to the president, members of Congress and diplomatic leaders who continued to put pressure on Turkey to secure the freedom of Pastor Brunson,” lawyer Jay Sekulow, who represents Brunson’s family, said in a statement received by the Reuters news agency. “The fact that he is now on a plane to the United States can only be viewed as a significant victory for Pastor Brunson and his family.”

It also seems to be a victory for President Trump, who has a good track record with this sort of thing, although I have no idea how much the pressure from the US caused Turkey to decide to releave Brunson. My guess is that it certainly had some effect.

Why was Brunson imprisoned in the first place? After all, he’d been in Turkey for two decades.

He was caught up in the post-coup sweep by Erdogan that Erdogan used as an excuse to lock up a host of people he thought represented a danger to him or an opportunity for him. The coup occurred in the summer of 2016 and I wrote about it several times (see this, for example). I had never heard of Brunson when I wrote this post about Erdogan’s plans, but it seems to me in retrospect that the reason Brunson was included in the sweep was to attempt to use him as a bargaining chip for Gulen, whom he blamed for the failed coup and who resides in the US.

Erdogan rounded up many thousands of people, using the failed coup as an excuse. But to Obama’s credit, he didn’t turn over Gulen to Erdogan. However, Erdogan explicitly suggested that the US accept a prisoner exchange in which Brunson would be released in exchange for the US turning over Gulen. This was not done; Brunson is on his way home, and Gulen stays here as well.

[NOTE: By the way, Erdogan is not exactly the duly-elected leader of Turkey, certainly not in any conventional way. He had been banned from running again by a term-limits law, but he got around that in a very clever manner, and then consolidated his power still further. Meanwhile, during the summer of 2016 coup, Barack Obama supported Erdogan against those who would overthrow him.]

Apparently Kanye West’s embrace of Trump represents a temptation that Democrats can’t resist

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s puzzling to me why the left doesn’t just ignore Kanye West, because all their over-the-top race-based criticism of West draws attention to—and actually validates—his message that the left and the media want black people to think only one way, their way. Mocking and reviling West by calling him crazy, a house negro, a minstrel, and (in probably the most absurd and offensive accusation of all) a white supremacist, isn’t really designed to win over the legions of Kanye fans, is it?

The people making these statements have turned what would probably have been a relatively minor photo-op for Trump and West into a cause célèbre, and by playing West’s rambling and yet totally comprehensible message over and over again they force people to pay attention to it.

I can’t see how they would imagine this to be a good move. And yet their hatred and fear drives them inexorably towards it like moths to a flame.

Weinstein revisited

The New Neo Posted on by

One of the charges against Harvey Weinstein has been dropped:

The behind-the-scenes drama spilled into court, with Weinstein looking on, as the Manhattan District Attorney’s office elected to drop the lone charge stemming from Lucia Evans’ allegations that he forced her to perform oral sex on him in 2004, when she was a college student and aspiring actress.

Charges made by two other women are still included in the case against Weinstein, but I wonder how this news will affect the trial as a whole:

Prosecutors said in a letter unsealed Thursday that they learned weeks ago that a woman who was with Evans the night she met Weinstein had given the police detective a contradictory account of what happened, but the detective had instructed her to keep quiet, telling her that “less is more.”

The woman, prosecutors said, told the detective in February that Weinstein had offered them money to flash their breasts during the restaurant encounter. They initially declined but Evans later told her she had gone ahead and exposed herself to the film producer in a hallway.

The woman also told the detective — identified by Weinstein’s lawyer as Nicholas DiGaudio — that sometime after Evans’ office meeting with Weinstein, she had suggested what happened was consensual. Weinstein had promised to get her an acting job if she agreed to perform oral sex and she agreed.

According to the witness, who was not named in the court filing, Evans had been drinking and “appeared to be upset, embarrassed and shaking” when she told the story.

Evans was among the first women to publicly accuse Weinstein of sexual assault.

In the court of public opinion—the only court in which Weinstein has been tried so far—the charges against him have been almost universally considered so strong that his guilt is pretty much assumed. And yet he has not had his day in court.

Of course, the fact that one woman may have lied—or been mistaken, because perhaps she was drunk—about the nature of their sexual contact does not mean they all have lied or been mistaken. As I’ve said before, each accusation must be taken on its own merits (although few people seem to do that): even assuming that the weight of accusation indicates that Weinstein is guilty of some violations “does not mean that all his accusers are telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”

I also hark back to this post I wrote during the initial furor over Weinstein:

I don’t automatically believe or disbelieve anyone. When I hear charges of abuse, I try to evaluate the truth or falsehood of those allegations in a systematic way. I consciously try to apply the same standards to all, and to be consistent.

Here are just some of the elements I think people ought to take into consideration in terms of seriousness and/or truthfulness (most of these relate more to adult victims than to children):

Was the coercion overt? What was the age of the victim? Was “no” communicated by the victim (for adult victims only; for a child it’s irrelevant)? Was it just a verbal proposition by the accused with no behavioral follow-up? Was the offender a therapist or teacher or priest or parent? When did the victim report it—was there an enormous time lag? Does the victim have a separate grudge against the accused that might have motivated a false accusation? Is there any other evidence to back up the victim’s report? If so, how persuasive is that evidence? Was there any violence involved? Is the accused a politician who is currently running for office—and has the revelation come out right before the vote, with very little time to evaluate its truth or falsehood? Does the accuser have a history that indicates she/he is a habitual liar? Does the accused have such a history? Are there other alleged victims, and (this next part is very important and not often taken into account) did all the other victims tell their stories only after the initial accusations got a lot of publicity, or had their stories been told earlier? If the latter, was the story told to the police or other authorities, or to some friend or relative whose word we have to take for it? If we have one or more very credible accusations and then a new accusation comes out, is the new one in the mold of the old ones or does it up the ante dramatically? Has each accuser’s story remained consistent, or has it morphed?

There’s much more, but I think you get the idea. Since we don’t usually have a smoking gun (Anthony Weiner’s emailed photos, for example), we have to rely on this sort of thing.

I hate to see abusers go undetected and unpunished, free to continue their abuse with others. But I also hate to see people empowered to make false accusations that are insufficiently scrutinized and could ruin the life of a possibly innocent person. I’ve described the best way I know to try to figure out how to minimize both of these occurrences. Despite its flaws, I can’t think of a better way.

With Weinstein, there are so many stories that it is easy to think that most of them must be true. But that temptation must be resisted. The trouble is that truth and falsehood can be fiendishly difficult to ascertain in cases such as this. And here I’m going to say something that might be surprising—I’m not so sure that even Lucia Evans knows whether she gave consent or not.

Are people usually that clearly in touch with their own behavior, thoughts, and feeling around complicated situations of a sexual nature, in which fear mixes with desire to advance one’s career, and in which all of it is mixed with the liberal consumption of alcohol or other substances? The vagaries of memory are part of the problem as well, and revisionism can occur either much later or very shortly after the act in question. Regret, confusion, trauma, forgetfulness, defensiveness, rationalization—all can play into it in various ways for the alleged victim.

I have no idea what really happened between Harvey Weinstein and Lucia Evans. I have no idea which time she was telling the truth and which time she was lying or mistaken. Even further, I’m not at all sure whether we’ll ever be able to find out. And what’s more, I’m not so sure that either Harvey Weinstein or Lucia Evans themselves know the correct answer, either.

Rethinking Trump

The New Neo Posted on by

One aftermath of the Kavanaugh hearings is that quite a few NeverTrumpers on the GOP side have decided Trump’s not so bad after all, and have said so in print. Public declarations of having changed one’s mind about something important and basic are unusual, particularly for well-known pundits.

A mind is a difficult thing to change, indeed. And yet minds do change.

Those who follow this blog probably recall that during the primaries I was not a NeverTrumper, but I was very negative about Trump and would have preferred almost any of the other candidates (almost—I drew the line at Kasich) to have won the primary instead. This was for several reasons: I thought Trump had no political track record, I noted that his previous statements on politics were inconsistent and many were liberal and some were alarming, he had character flaws that were quite obvious, and I felt he was very likely to lose to Hillary Clinton and the prospect of her presidency filled me with dread.

But I always understood Trump’s appeal (for example, see this). And once he became the GOP nominee I always said that if he were to win I’d be happy, very happy, to be proven wrong about how he would perform. Since Trump has become president I feel that I’ve evaluated him fairly and objectively, and most of the time I’ve been pleasantly surprised. In fact, at this point, I’m no longer surprised to be pleasantly surprised when he does things of which I approve (which does not mean I approve of all things he does).

But one group I’ve never seen change their minds about Trump has been the Democratic Party and of course the left. It’s been total opposition and ridicule from the get-go. That’s why this article by Devin Stewart, a self-described Democrat and an adjunct professor of international affairs at Columbia University and New York University, surprised me.

Here are some excerpts:

Like most Democrats, I reacted to the stunning 2016 election of Donald Trump with a combination of confusion and dread. After all, Hillary Clinton was the favorite and, to Democrats like me, a Trump victory seemed to portend certain economic disaster, nuclear war, and pretty much the end of America as we knew it.

But now nearly two years into his administration, Trump has presided over a “winning streak” that includes a booming economy and stock market, an unemployment level at a nearly 50-year low, two Supreme Court appointments, no new foreign wars or domestic terrorist attacks emanating from abroad, a significant degree of progress on trade relations with Canada and Mexico, a “needed reset” on the China relationship, and the prospect of peace on the Korean Peninsula.

Perhaps it is time that even his opponents reconsider Trump…

Trump’s presidency marks a return to realpolitik and great power politics. No one knows what goes on in Trump’s mind or if even he believes he has a strategy. What matters is what Trump does, so this essay looks at his actions, considers the bias of his critics, and seeks a new way to understand his policies. It considers the possibility that Trump has a method to his madness…

Of course, the verdict on Trump’s effort with North Korea is not yet in. But much of the press has not paid sufficient attention to the progress Trump has already made. His approach has secured the remains of some American troops lost during the Korean War, contributed to successful inter-Korean talks, and promised a follow up U.S.-North Korea summit. He is trying an unorthodox approach, but it is too soon to render conclusions about them because we are right in the middle of it. Experiencing the discrepancy between mainstream coverage of North Korea and my own analysis was eye-opening….

Like many Gen-Xers who studied politics or international relations in the 1990s and 2000s, I absorbed this gospel of liberal internationalism almost completely. But Trump’s early successes have already caused me to question those tenets of my education.

The Trump Doctrine takes previous policy assumptions and turns them on their head. Trump’s “America First” approach is a reversion to the idea of realpolitik and great power competition. It is better suited to a moment in which American power is much less dominant. The president takes each state-to-state relationship on its own terms. That’s why he’s often antagonistic with allies and friendly with threatening dictators. The consequences of insulting friendly countries, such as Canada, might be hurt feelings in exchange for better trade terms, while souring relations with an antagonistic one, such as North Korea, could result in serious security threats. He pursues the optimal outcome in a utilitarian sense rather than follow previous rules about diplomatic etiquette.

The entire article is worth reading.

The author appears to still be a Democrat, but he’s clearly an open-minded one who thinks for himself. Writing an article like that is no small act of courage.

Ever wonder what’s happening in Iraq these days?

The New Neo Posted on by

Austin Bay tells you:

After four months of vote recounts and bitter negotiations following May’s indecisive election, in September Iraq’s strife-ridden Council of Representatives voted to form the nucleus of a stable government when its parliamentarians agreed to select Barham Salih as president…

The three main posts are still distributed according to an ethnic-sectarian formula. The largely ceremonial Iraqi presidency has been reserved for a Kurd and Salih is a Kurd. Adel Abdul Mahdi, in the prime minister’s power position, is a Shiite Muslim Arab. The Speaker of the Council of Representatives is Mohammed al-Halbousi, a Sunni Muslim Arab.

All three have flaws and possess complex political backgrounds, but then Iraq is a complex place. Iraqi media regard Salih and Abdul-Mahdi as “consensus” political leaders, meaning they have worked with almost everyone.

When Iraq is relatively quiet, that’s a good thing. It’s been relatively quiet lately, as far as I can tell. Good.

Here’s an article from last March, not long before the election:

Iraq has defeated IS [ISIS] and avoided the wave of Shia-on-Sunni violence that many predicted would follow. The number of civilians killed each month in fighting is a fraction of what it was in 2014. The government in Baghdad saw off a premature Kurdish push for independence last year. Oil production is up and the state has money. The power of foreigners, including Iran and America, has diminished as Iraqi politicians have learnt how to play one off against the others. In six weeks Iraq will hold an election, affirming its status as the only Arab democracy east of Tunisia.

Good.

Thanks to everyone who donated to thenewneo!

The New Neo Posted on by

I want to thank everyone who donated during my recent funding drive. I really cannot express how grateful I am. Every single contribution, small or large, is important to the continuation of this blog. All are deeply appreciated.

Of course, you don’t have to wait for me to ask. You can donate any old time, and there’s also a mechanism for monthly donations. And now that it’s October, don’t forget to use my Amazon portal if you are Amazon shoppers. That’s a big help to me, as well.

It’s my readers who make this blog possible, and also make it rewarding in the personal sense, whether you donate money or not. I don’t think I’d be writing this blog if I didn’t get to read your comments and receive your emails. Yes, getting some money is great, and it helps me to continue on, although so far I certainly haven’t gotten rich on writing this blog. But the interaction is what it’s really about for me.

A friend of mine keeps teasing me about my “seething cranium.” And it’s true that I’ve always had a lot of thoughts swirling around and little outlet for expressing them. My friends not only often disagree, but for the most part they’re not interested in the topics that fascinate me. This blog has given my seething cranium an outlet, and provided a bunch of readers with seething crania of their own. It’s been hard work, but it’s been a pleasure, too.

Greece’s old Jewish city: Salonika

The New Neo Posted on by

Paul Mirengoff of Powerline has written a post about the Greek city of Salonika (also known as Thessalonki) and the fate of its Jews during World War II. It’s a beautiful piece, unusually personal because his father-in-law was a Jew born in Salonika, who was fortunate (or prescient) enough to emigrate to France during the 1920s and to live out WWII in Casablanca, thus surviving the conflagration.

I had heard of Salonika before, in the context of the Holocaust, particularly in the writings of the late great Primo Levi, who encountered the Greeks of Salonika at Auschwitz. Continue reading →

The politics of reporting on left-wing violence against the right

The New Neo Posted on by

Senator Rand Paul has had a rough couple of years of it. He was present but not injured when Steve Scalise was almost murdered on the baseball field by a Republican-hating shooter. And Paul had his very own incident of being beaten quite badly by a neighbor with a political beef.

Both incidents have almost certainly left Paul very aware of the escalating violence on the left, and how verbal threats can lead unhinged people to actual physical attacks. He is also aware of how the MSM covers up the leftist origins of such attackers, and has called them out on it:

“I was there at the ball field when Steven Scalise almost died from a very, very angry violent man who was incited really by rhetoric on the left,” Paul said.

“And this hasn’t been reported enough, when he came on the field with a semi-automatic weapon firing probably close to 200 shots at us, shooting five people and almost killing Steve Scalise, he was yelling ‘this is for healthcare!” Paul said. “He also had a list of conservative legislators, Republicans, in his pocket that he was willing to kill.”

The fact that it “wasn’t reported enough” is no accident. Inconvenient truths about the left are ignored as much as possible. The Scalise shooting has been minimized, but it was extremely serious and the only thing that prevented a massacre was the fact that the shooter was killed by police before he could do more damage. As it was he put a lot of people in the hospital and nearly killed Scalise. From my post:

Hodgkinson [the shooter] was a Sanders supporter and worked on the Sanders campaign, as even Sanders has admitted in the course of his own condemnation of the attack. More importantly, I think, Hodgkinson was member of groups such as one entitled “Terminate the Republican Party” and “The Road to Hell is Paved with Republicans.”

But much of the media tried to cover that up or at least minimize it, and I bet they succeeded with a lot of people. If the parties had been reversed we’d never hear the end of how the awful right-wing extremist tried to kill virtuous Democrats. But instead, here’s what we got, according the The Federalist‘s Mollie Hemingway:

Progressive Democratic activist James Hodgkinson spent years on social media and in local and national politics focusing on his hatred of Republican politicians. On Wednesday, he went after a group of Republican politicians as they practiced baseball in the early morning, shooting a member of the Republican leadership, two capitol police, a legislative aide, and a lobbyist. Rep. Steve Scalise remains in critical condition.

Hodgkinson’s social media trail and the accounts of neighbors leave no question that the man was politically engaged, aligned with progressives, and upset with Republicans.

Some media coverage of the incident has been fine, if restrained. The media have not chosen to make this shooting a referendum on leftist political violence, on the use of extreme rhetoric and conspiracy theorizing by major mainstream media, on the dangers of the resistance movement. There has been no rush to introspection.

Some media treatment has been disgusting. The New York Times ran an editorial that is dangerously dishonest.

The article then describes how the right was wrongly blamed for the Giffords shooting (including a Sarah Palin PAC) although the Giffords shooter was a paranoid schizophrenic. The contrast with the Scalise shooting is stark. Here’s what the Times wrote. “Disingenuous” would be a euphemism for what this is; it’s an Orwellian lie in which up is down and down is up:

Was this [Scalise] attack evidence of how vicious American politics has become? Probably. In 2011, when Jared Lee Loughner opened fire in a supermarket parking lot, grievously wounding Representative Gabby Giffords and killing six people, including a 9-year-old girl, the link to political incitement was clear [sic]. Before the shooting, Sarah Palin’s political action committee circulated a map of targeted electoral districts that put Ms. Giffords and 19 other Democrats under stylized cross hairs.

Conservatives and right-wing media were quick on Wednesday to demand forceful condemnation of hate speech and crimes by anti-Trump liberals. They’re right. Though there’s no sign of incitement as direct as in the Giffords attack [sic], liberals should of course hold themselves to the same standard of decency that they ask of the right.

Hemingway goes on to fisk the Times editorial very effectively. But Hemingway is not the audience the Times is addressing, then or now. It doesn’t need to be logical or truthful, it merely needs to be good at writing propaganda and spreading the desired meme, which is, as Hemingway succinctly put it:

…[The Times’] standard is to blame Republicans for violence against Democrats when there is no relationship of any Republican to that violence, and to blame Republicans for violence against Republicans when the perpetrator is a progressive Democratic activist.

But most people are unaware not only of this ploy, but of the fact that it’s not the least bit new. In fact, it was already well-established over fifty years ago with the press response to the JFK assassination.

Kennedy’s assassination was an act of extreme political violence perpetrated against a Democratic but moderate president by a leftist. There is zero doubt that Oswald was a rabid leftist, but some of the media of the time managed to blame the right in an act of journalistic jujutsu that has rarely been equaled. And that blaming continues to this day.

At the time of the Scalise shooting I wrote this post comparing the reaction of the press and the left after Kennedy’s assassination to the left and press reaction to the Scalise shooting. In both cases it was blame the violence of leftists on the “climate of hate” supposedly created by the right. Here’s an article from 2013 by Mark Hemingway (husband of Mollie, by the way) describing how, all these years later, the left is still blaming the right for the act of rabid leftist Oswald.

[NOTE: I have written many times before about the Kennedy assassination and the popularity of conspiracy theories about it, and why they are all bunk. I know that many of my readers disagree, and we’ve had it out many times. If you want to take a look at just a few of these posts of mine and the discussion threads that ensued, please see this, this, and this.

I’m not interested in another go-round of that discussion. But I do want to add that conspiracy theories abound on right and left, but many of them have the effect of clearing the left of responsibility for the act.

I also wrote a post in 2009 that quotes some of the general liberal/leftist rewriting of JFK assassination history in order to exonerate the left and blame the right. Here are some samples:

Exhibit A – Liberal talk radio host Mike Malloy, August 27: …I remember feeling that way in 1963 and in 1968-when [Ted Kennedy’s] two brothers were murdered by the right wing in this country…

Exhibit B – Novelist Lorenzo Carcaterra, September 13:…In the summer months of 1963, the voices of the right were tossing hate bombs at another young President…messages of hate, threats and warnings.

One such warning was for President John F. Kennedy to stay out of Texas.

To stay out of Dallas…

Exhibit C – Eric Boehlert, Media Matters for America, September 18:…A President was killed the last time right-wing hatred ran wild like this

That being John F. Kennedy, who was gunned down in Dallas, of course…But I’ve been thinking about Dallas in 1963 because I’ve been recalling the history and how that city stood as an outpost for the radical right, which never tried to hide its contempt for the New England Democrat.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose ]

The “new” Democrats: “We kick them”

The New Neo Posted on by

Eric Holder, who used to be the Attorney General of the United States not so long ago, said this recently:

Michelle [Obama] always says, ‘When they go low, we go high.’ No. No. When they go low, we kick them. That’s what this new Democratic Party is about.

I guess they’re not planning to run Michelle in 2020, unless she gets with the program. Even Obama seems tame now.

Of does he? Remember this from June of 2008?

“If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun,” Obama said at a Philadelphia fundraiser. “Because from what I understand folks in Philly like a good brawl. I’ve seen Eagles fans.”

Obama made the comment in the context of warning donors that the general election campaign against McCain could get ugly. “They’re going to try to scare people. They’re going to try to say that ‘that Obama is a scary guy,’” he said. A supporter yelled out a deep accented “Don’t give in!”

That’s pure Obama. In Obama’s 2008 campaign, when I first began observing him, I noted quite early on that he liked to demonize Republicans by predicting what they would do or say before they ever did or said anything of the sort. For example, he kept predicting they would be racist in their attacks on him. It was a rather sophisticated way to blame the opposition for doing what it hadn’t done, and quite sneaky. But that was Obama.

And the above quote from him was pretty scary, too, and said in the context of saying he wasn’t scary and that the Republicans would be accusing him of being scary. At the time Obama said it, the tone of the rhetoric was noticeably different from the sort of thing we usually heard back then in politics.

It’s not so different from what we commonly hear now, though, is it? Obama set the tone, and now his students have exceeded him, and they are falling all over themselves to be the toughest guy (or gal) on the block. Of course, they blame Trump and his tough talk. But I don’t recall him using violent images, except for talking about punching out protesters at his rallies during his campaign, something I condemned at the time and have not changed my opinion about (I haven’t got time to find the original post right now, but it’s there somewhere). I can’t recall Trump talking that way about the Democrats in general, though, although I don’t have total recall of everything the man has ever said.

The truth, though, is that this has been going on from Democrats for at least a decade. Speaking in this more explicitly violent way seems to have been introduced by Obama, as far as I can remember. And lately among the Democrats it’s certainly gotten far more frequent, widespread, and bold.

Words are just words, but they can incite. Lately, the violent words of Democrats have been followed by actions. As Rand Paul recently noted, someone could easily get killed soon. It has almost happened already.

I wrote a post a little while ago mentioning that I keep hearing casual Trump assassination rhetoric among people I know. These people are Democrats, and not formerly especially radical or activist. They’re not about to assassinate Trump themselves, but my guess is that if it were to happen they wouldn’t mind one little bit and might actually applaud.

Workplace segregation of the sexes: this could certainly have been predicted

The New Neo Posted on by

The law of unintended consequences strikes again.

Men are trying to protect themselves against false accusations in the workplace and on business trips. They observe that these days the woman doesn’t have to offer much or any evidence of sexual wrongdoing in order to make a “credible” [sic] accusation, and so men are thinking that one way—and perhaps the only way—to protect themselves would be to strictly limit their contacts with women at work.

But I don’t see see how that would succeed in keeping false accusations at bay, although I hear the suggestion often. After all, if an accusation is false it can be false in its entirety, can’t it? A man doesn’t actually have to have been alone with the woman to be falsely accused of making a sexual advance, although it helps. So I suppose it might reduce the chances of being falsely accused. But if a woman is willing to make up the story of a sexual assault or harrassment, why wouldn’t she be willing to make up the part of it that indicates the two people were once alone? And if she isn’t asked to offer proof of the assault, why would she be asked to offer proof that they were once alone?

If it’s the stupid and dangerous mantra “believe the women,” it’s “believe the women” all the way, isn’t it?