COULD A RADICAL ISRAEL BASHER SOON HEAD THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY?

Boycott Israel movement ally Keith Ellison gets closer to leading the DNC.

Joseph Klein

http://www.frontpagemag.com/

November 16, 2016

Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) is the leading contender to head up the Democratic National Committee. In announcing his candidacy for the position, Ellison said, “When voters know what Democrats stand for, we can improve the lives of all Americans, no matter their race, religion, or sexual orientation.”

Ellison has the support of the progressive wing of the party, including Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, as well as the so-called establishment types such as Senator Chuck Schumer. 

What would a Democratic Party led by Rep. Ellison really look like? One need look no further than Rep. Ellison’s own statements, associations and actions. Under Ellison’s leadership, the Democratic Party will continue to evolve into a pro-Islamist party that helps advance the stealth jihad agenda, and a party that moves away from its traditional support of our closest ally in the Middle East, Israel.

Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress, has a past history of working actively on behalf of the anti-Semitic firebrand Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam. In 1995, writing as Keith X Ellison, he published a column for Insight News, which praised Farrakhan as “a role model for black youth” and denied that Farrakhan was an anti-Semite. In 1997, Ellison defended a statement by Joanne Jackson of the Minnesota Initiative Against Racism, who was reported to have said that "Jews are among the most racist white people I know." 

When Ellison first ran for Congress, Nihad Awad, executive director of the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), provided his support at a fund raiser in Minneapolis for Ellison. Ellison in turn has spoken at CAIR fundraising events. He also defended CAIR against credible charges that CAIR was trying to infiltrate staff offices tied to committees on the judiciary, homeland security and intelligence. At CAIR banquets in late 2008, Ellison urged CAIR supporters to seek jobs in the then incoming Obama administration. 

Some of Ellison’s donors have “a history of Muslim Brotherhood connections,” according to Campus Watch. The Minneapolis branch of the Muslim Brotherhood affiliated Muslim American Society reportedly paid for Ellison’s pilgrimage to Mecca for the Hajj in 2008. 

Ellison is not interested in hearing a diversity of views from moderate Muslims such as M. Zuhdi Jasser, founder and president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, who believe that reform is needed within Islam today. Indeed, Ellison accused Jasser of speaking like those allegedly turncoat blacks “who would seek to ingratiate themselves with powerful people in the white community and would there turn them on the rest of us and give license to attack us all. Now is somebody going to snatch my 13-year-old daughter's hijab off, call her a horrible name, spit on her because of something that you said, Dr. Jasser, I worry about that.”

Ellison’s example of a good role model for a dedicated Islamist appears to be Hamza Yusuf, president and chairman of the Zaytuna Institute in California. Ellison lauded Yusuf as a respected religious authority who had converted to Islam. Ellison’s role model called Judaism a "most racist religion," and said just two days before the September 11, 2001 attacks on our homeland, “This country [America] unfortunately has a great…tribulation coming to it. And much of it is already here, yet people are too illiterate to read the writing on the wall."

As Robert Spencer, the author of Stealth Jihad, has just written, the same media that are falsely claiming President-elect Trump’s choice to serve as his chief strategist, Steven K. Bannon, is a white supremacist and anti-Semite are “hailing Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) for announcing his candidacy for Chairman of the Democratic National Committee – despite Ellison’s very real links to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, two groups that are outdone by no one in anti-Semitism.”

In addition, one wonders why the more so-called establishment Democrats, in particular the likely next Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a strong supporter of Israel, would not be more troubled by Ellison’s virulently anti-Israel positions. 

Ellison has called for the cut off of military aid to Israel. His opposition to supporting Israel with any funding for military purposes even extended to the purely defensive Iron Dome. His cockeyed justification for not even backing an effective means to destroy incoming rockets launched by Hamas from Gaza before they can reach civilian population centers in Israel was that to do so could undermine negotiation of a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. “Because a cease-fire is what we should prioritize now,” Ellison said when asked to explain his vote on Meet the Press. “A cease-fire protects civilians on both sides — it doesn’t just say, ‘We’re only concerned about people on one side.’”

Ellison also wrote an op-ed article for the Washington Post in which he called for “an end to the blockade of the Gaza Strip.” Thus, for the next possible chairman of the Democratic Party, cutting off Israel’s ability to defend itself with the Iron Dome, together with pressuring Israel to remove all barriers to the import into Gaza of sophisticated rockets from Iran and elsewhere for Hamas to use against Israeli civilians, represents what Democrats should stand for.

Ellison has also made himself an ally of the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement against Israel, and he has helped legitimize them through participating in their programming. For example, in July 2016, Ellison participated in a panel discussion co-sponsored by The US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, one of the largest BDS operations in the US. Ellison has been at the top of that anti-Israel organization’s “House Hall of Fame.” It should be no surprise that, as Salon reported on June 2, 2016, “Rep. Keith Ellison shared a photo on Twitter…that refers to Israel’s illegal military occupation of the Palestinian territories as apartheid.”

Finally, with respect to the issue of Syrian refugees, Ellison did not think that President Obama’s decision to admit 10,000 Syrians during the last fiscal year was good enough. Shortly before Obama announced his ramp up decision, Ellison had written a letter to the president stating, “Now, more than ever, we need to live up to our history by increasing the number of Syrian refugees allowed to resettle in the United States.” After the president announced his decision to admit 10,000 more Syrian refugees in just one year, Ellison commented, “Ten thousand is not enough. Aren’t we the people who say, ‘give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses’? We must do more for families who are not safe in their own homeland.” 

Not on President-elect Trump’s watch if there is any potential danger of admitting jihadist terrorists. With Trump intent on curbing the admission of more Syrian refugees until we get a handle on who they really are, one can imagine how Ellison, as head of the Democratic National Committee, will push his open borders policy for Syrian refugees to the top of his party’s agenda, irrespective of the risks to the American people.

If the Democrats do end up selecting Rep. Keith Ellison as the new chair of the Democratic National Committee, they will be elevating a radical Islamist and Israel basher. Contrary to his pitch on Meet the Press last Sunday, his record does not demonstrate how he would successfully lead his party’s effort to “make working America know that the Democratic party is absolutely on their side.” To the contrary, his selection will risk further alienation of a vast portion of Americans who are convinced – correctly so – that the party they had once supported has abandoned them.    

 Tags: Anti-Semitism, BDS, Israel, keith ellison

Don’t blame racism, sexism for Trump’s win

 

By Ira Stoll
Special to the Las Vegas Review-Journal

http://www.reviewjournal.com/

November 12, 2016

Dear liberal friends who are blaming Donald Trump’s election on racism and sexism:

Go ahead, believe any explanation you want for why Hillary Clinton lost the election and Donald Trump won. I understand the temptation to look at exit poll data about how Trump did better among men and white voters, and about how Clinton did better among women and voters of color, and to attribute Trump’s victory to racism and sexism among the voters who supported him.

But allow me, respectfully, to point out some empirical problems with what you might call this “basket of deplorables” narrative about the election outcome.

First, the exit poll data on which those assumptions are based is suspect. Most polls, including exit polls, got the outcome wrong, perhaps because Trump voters didn’t want to answer the surveys. The data on the gender and racial breakdown of Trump voters isn’t any more reliable than the data on the percentage or number of Trump voters. That is, it’s not reliable.

 

Second, if you look at county by county data on actual votes, part of the reason the election went the way it did is that Trump got places that went to Obama in 2008 and 2012 to go for Trump in 2016. Even where Clinton won, she got less turnout than Obama did in 2008 or 2012. What’s the “racism” here? White voters who supported Obama in 2008 and 2012 and Trump in 2016, and we’re supposed to believe that racism is the major factor in their voting behavior even though they elected a black president? Or are the “racists” black voters who enthusiastically supported Obama in 2012 but then stayed home or backed Trump in 2016? Some of these “racist” and “sexist” Trump voters are the same ones who supported Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primary against Barack Obama. Maybe their racism and sexism is only problematic, or worth mentioning, when it results in a Republican victory.

Meanwhile, these same supposedly racist and sexist Republicans, in the same 2016 election in which racism and sexism supposedly motivated them to make Donald Trump president, elected Republican woman Lisa Murkowski their senator from Alaska, Republican Hispanic Marco Rubio their senator from Florida, and Republican black Tim Scott their senator from South Carolina. The racist sexist Republicans are fans of Sarah Palin and Dr. Benjamin Carson. As an explanatory framework, it doesn’t have a lot of predictive power.

But, OK, acknowledge that some portion of the American electorate does, alas, have some racist or sexist inclinations, either conscious or subconscious, that may not totally dictate how they vote, but might have some subtle influence. A political candidate can choose either to deplore the fact, or to use it to help win votes. In 1992, for example, a candidate ran by promising to “end welfare as we know it” and put 100,000 more cops on the beat. This candidate made a point of returning to Arkansas to oversee the execution of a mentally incapacitated black death row inmate, Ricky Ray Rector. The candidate went to the Rainbow Coalition and picked a public fight with Jesse Jackson by denouncing violent comments by a rap musician, Sister Souljah. This presidential candidate picked another white male from the South as his vice president.

That 1992 candidate was the Democrat, Bill Clinton. After he got elected, he expanded the earned-income tax credit and children’s health coverage and warmed relations with African Americans to the point where he became known as the first black president. But again, that was after he got elected.

Bill Clinton showed up in some of the post-election press coverage complaining that his wife’s campaign hadn’t taken his advice. Maybe if it had, my dear liberal friends, you would be shopping for clothing to wear to inauguration parties, instead of Facebooking about how racist and sexist American voters are.

Ira Stoll is editor of FutureOfCapitalism.com and author of “JFK: Conservative.” His column appears Sunday.

Worried About Climate Change and Income Disparity?

For only $150K, you, too, can tour the globe by private jet with the New York Times’ finest thought leaders.

By Heather Mac Donald — November 14, 2016

http://www.nationalreview.com/

The New York Times has been editorializing on a nearly daily basis since the election about the danger posed by President-elect Donald Trump to the very future of the earth. Rallying its readers on Thursday for the coming “Trump Years,” it argued against “fear or despondency” because “there is too much to be done.” For starters, according to the Times: “There is a planet to save. The earth is in peril from a changing climate no matter how many deniers say otherwise.” The day before, the paper had lamented that Trump may “repudiate last December’s Paris agreement on climate change, thereby abandoning America’s leadership role in addressing the biggest long-term threat to humanity.”

In the short term, however, if you’re a Times executive, marketer, or columnist, it’s still time to party, with all the oomph that a gasoline-fueled, capitalist economy can provide. In October, the Times announced its first-ever “Around the World by Private Jet” tour, slated for early 2018. “An Exclusive Private Charter,” in the words of the “luxury travel” firm of Abercrombie & Kent, will transport a mere “50 guests” to exotic locales in luxury hand-made leather flat-bed seats with “relaxing massage and adjustable lumbar support,” as a “dedicated flight crew attends” to their needs. The “guests” will “Enjoy Exclusive Events & Privileged Access,” such as private dining in Bogota’s Salt Cathedral, camping in luxury in the Moroccan desert, and exclusive after-hours access to the Blue Lagoon in Iceland.

The tour’s “exclusively chartered Boeing 757” ordinarily seats up to 295 passengers, of the pathetically non-“high-luxury” variety. So the carbon footprint of the Times’ 50 guests will be close to six times that of a commercial-jet traveler. If any of the guests feels a twinge of guilt over his greenhouse-gas emissions, he can chase it away by “enjoying a champagne toast inside an Icelandic ice funnel,” before learning “how climate change is affecting the land of fire and ice.” That’s after having been whisked to Easter Island to “learn how climate change is affecting” that location.

Among the New York Times’ “most noteworthy journalists” who will be joining the “privileged guests” is columnist Nicholas Kristof, who has criticized Trump for his climate-change skepticism and who rails against income inequality and a tax code that, among other things, provides tax breaks for buying private planes. The “privileged guests” who will pay $148,500 for single occupancy, $135,000 for double occupancy, in such properties as a “former Persian caravansary,” will no doubt nod appreciatively at Kristof’s hand-wringing about income disparities. Naturally, a port-of-call in Havana is planned, where “guests” will surely learn about the wonders of socialized medicine.

Trump’s temperamental flaws are serious and in need of immediate correction if he is to be an effective president. But they are nothing compared with the scale of hypocrisy practiced by his most influential critics.

— Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the author of The War on Cops. 

Today's Tune: Leonard Cohen - Dance Me to the End of Love

Leonard Cohen Dead at 82

By Richard Gehr

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/leonard-cohen-dead-at-82-w449792

November 11, 2016

Leonard Cohen, the hugely influential singer and songwriter whose work spanned nearly 50 years, died Monday at the age of 82. Cohen's label, Sony Music Canada, confirmed his death on the singer's Facebook page Thursday evening.

"It is with profound sorrow we report that legendary poet, songwriter and artist, Leonard Cohen has passed away," the statement read. "We have lost one of music's most revered and prolific visionaries. A memorial will take place in Los Angeles at a later date. The family requests privacy during their time of grief." A cause of death was not given.

"My father passed away peacefully at his home in Los Angeles with the knowledge that he had completed what he felt was one of his greatest records," Cohen's son Adam wrote in a statement to Rolling Stone. "He was writing up until his last moments with his unique brand of humor." 

Before his death, the songwriter requested that he be laid to rest "in a traditional Jewish rite beside his parents, grandparents and great-grandparents," his rabbi Adam Scheier wrote in a statement. 

"Unmatched in his creativity, insight and crippling candor, Leonard Cohen was a true visionary whose voice will be sorely missed," his manager Robert Kory wrote in a statement. "I was blessed to call him a friend, and for me to serve that bold artistic spirit firsthand, was a privilege and great gift. He leaves behind a legacy of work that will bring insight, inspiration and healing for generations to come."

Cohen was the dark eminence among a small pantheon of extremely influential singer-songwriters to emerge in the Sixties and early Seventies. Only Bob Dylan exerted a more profound influence upon his generation, and perhaps only Paul Simon and fellow Canadian Joni Mitchell equaled him as a song poet. 

Cohen's haunting bass voice, nylon-stringed guitar patterns and Greek-chorus backing vocals shaped evocative songs that dealt with love and hate, sex and spirituality, war and peace, ecstasy and depression. He was also the rare artist of his generation to enjoy artistic success into his Eighties, releasing his final album, You Want It Darker, earlier this year.

"I never had the sense that there was an end," he said in 1992. "That there was a retirement or that there was a jackpot."

"For many of us, Leonard Cohen was the greatest songwriter of them all," Nick Cave, who covered Cohen classics like "Avalanche," "I'm Your Man" and"Suzanne," said in a statement. "Utterly unique and impossible to imitate no matter how hard we tried. He will be deeply missed by so many."

Leonard Norman Cohen was born on September 21st, 1934, in Westmount, Quebec. He learned guitar as a teenager and formed a folk group called the Buckskin Boys. Early exposure to Spanish writer Federico Garcia Lorca turned him toward poetry – while a flamenco guitar teacher convinced him to trade steel strings for nylon. After graduating from McGill University, Cohen moved to the Greek island of Hydra, where he purchased a house for $1,500 with the help of a modest trust fund established by his father, who died when Leonard was nine. While living on Hydra, Cohen published the poetry collection Flowers for Hitler (1964) and the novels The Favourite Game (1963) and Beautiful Losers(1966).

Frustrated by poor book sales, and tired of working in Montreal's garment industry, Cohen visited New York in 1966 to investigate the city's robust folk-rock scene. He met folk singer Judy Collins, who later that year included two of his songs, including the early hit "Suzanne," on her album In My Life. His New York milieu included Andy Warhol, the Velvet Underground, and, most importantly, the haunting German singer Nico, whose despondent delivery he may have emulated on his exquisite 1967 album Songs of Leonard Cohen.

Cohen quickly became the songwriter's songwriter of choice for artists like Collins, James Taylor, Willie Nelson and many others. His black-and-white album photos offered an arresting image to go with his stark yet lovely songs. His next two albums, Songs From a Room (1969) and Songs of Love and Hate (1971), benefited from the spare production of Bob Johnston, along with a group of seasoned session musicians that included Charlie Daniels.

During the Seventies, Cohen set out on the first of the many long, intense tours he would reprise toward the end of his career. "One of the reasons I'm on tour is to meet people," he told Rolling Stonein 1971. "I consider it a reconnaissance. You know, I consider myself like in a military operation. I don't feel like a citizen." His time on tour inspired the live sound producer John Lissauer brought to his 1974 masterpiece, New Skin for the Old Ceremony. However, he risked a production catastrophe by hiring wall-of-sound maximalist Phil Spector to work on his next album, Death of a Ladies Man, whose adversarial creation resulted in a Rolling Stone review titled "Leonard Cohen's Doo-Wop Nightmare."

Cohen's relationship with Suzanne Elrod during most of the Seventies resulted in two children, the photographer Lorca Cohen and Adam Cohen, who leads the group Low Millions. Cohen was well known for his wandering ways, and his most stable relationships were with backing singers Laura Branigan, Sharon Robinson, Anjani Thomas, and, most notably, Jennifer Warnes, who he wrote with and produced (Warnes frequently performed Cohen’s music). After indulging in a variety of international styles on Recent Songs (1979), Cohen accorded Warnes full co-vocal credit on 1984's Various Positions.

Various Positions included "Hallelujah," a meditation on love, sex and music that would become Cohen's best-known composition thanks to Jeff Buckley's incandescent 1994 reinterpretation. Its greatness wasn't recognized by Cohen's label, however. By way of informing him that Columbia Records would not be releasing Various Positions, label head Walter Yetnikoff reportedly told Cohen, "Look, Leonard; we know you're great, but we don't know if you're any good." Cohen returned to the label in 1988 with I'm Your Man, an album of sly humor and social commentary that launched the synths-and-gravitas style he continued on The Future (1992).

In 1995, Cohen halted his career, entered the Mt. Baldy Zen Center outside of Los Angeles, became an ordained Buddhist monk and took on the Dharma name Jikan ("silence"). His duties included cooking for Kyozan Joshu Sasaki Roshi, the priest and longtime Cohen mentor who died in 2014 at the age of 104. Cohen broke his musical silence in 2001 with Ten New Songs, a collaboration with Sharon Robinson, and Dear Heather (2004), a relatively uplifting project with current girlfriend Anjani Thomas. While never abandoning Judaism, the Sabbath-observing songwriter attributed Buddhism to curbing the depressive episodes that had always plagued him.

The final act of Cohen's career began in 2005, when Lorca Cohen began to suspect her father's longtime manager, Kelley Lynch, of embezzling funds from his retirement account. In fact, Lynch had robbed Cohen of more than $5 million. To replenish the fund, Cohen undertook an epic world tour during which he would perform 387 shows from 2008 to 2013. He continued to record as well, releasing Old Ideas (2012) and Popular Problems, which hit U.S. shops a day after his eightieth birthday. "[Y]ou depend on a certain resilience that is not yours to command, but which is present," he told Rolling Stone upon its release. "And if you can sense this resilience or sense this capacity to continue, it means a lot more at this age than it did when I was 30, when I took it for granted."

When the Grand Tour ended in December 2013, Cohen largely vanished from the public eye. In October 2016, he released You Want It Darker, produced by his son Adam. Severe back issues made it difficult for Cohen to leave his home, so Adam placed a microphone on his dining room table and recorded him on a laptop. The album was met with rave reviews, though a New Yorker article timed to its release revealed that he was in very poor health. "I am ready to die," he said. "I hope it's not too uncomfortable. That's about it for me."

The singer-songwriter later clarified that he was "exaggerating." "I’ve always been into self-dramatization," Cohen said last month. "I intend to live forever.”

Today's Tune: Leonard Cohen - By The Rivers Dark

Leonard Cohen and the Babylonian Exile of the Modern World

By the rivers dark he wandered on, and he did not forget his holy song.

By Titus Techera — November 12, 2016

http://www.nationalreview.com/

Leonard Cohen is dead. No musician has acquired as much fame in our times for telling the ugly truth about love, so we should look again to learn what he has to teach. Love reveals an existential vulnerability — living is by itself living dangerously. Sometimes, Cohen treated love with a knowing humor to soften the blows and to avoid creating idols. Other times, he turned to the troubled mood of the lover to discover the place of man in the world. At his best, he treated as a search for God the way love reveals man’s loneliness. That is our subject today, and it is a fitting subject on the morrow of his death.

By the rivers dark I wandered on.
I lived my life in Babylon.
And I did forget my holy song:
and I had no strength in Babylon.

“By the Rivers Dark” opens the second half of the album Ten New Songs (2001), Cohen’s return to love songs and the secret councils of the heart, and it may be seen to correspond with the song opening the album, “In My Secret Life.” This song is a rewriting of Psalm 137, so it conceives of the secrecy of human life as God’s call, rather than as erotic disappointment. The main thrust of the rewriting is this, that the modern world itself is Babylon and man cannot leave it. The normalization of Babylon, however, forces us to ask ourselves how we start in our modern lives to look for something beyond the things that drive us crazy. Our new situation is an exile; we are wanderers now, like it or not.

We will start from the most important fact about this song, that it is an account of past events — of the loss and the regaining of the holy song and the strength it requires and rewards. That faith should be presented as a holy song is not altogether a shock, and it is easiest understood together with strength. It is an ancient Platonic saying that music reveals the souls of those who long for God. It is also obvious that song offers not merely joy or merely understanding but also strength and conviction, which is also part of the experience of, say, worship music. This song is, of course, not the holy song. What Jews were supposed not to do, this one has done. What the psalm says the faithful shouldn’t do, accept exile, is now the normal condition. Of course, to be lost is to have once been otherwise. The wandering suggests a longing, an awareness of the lost home. One wonders what to make of the rivers of Babylon. Two of four rivers said to flow through Eden in Genesis reach Babylon. It is not their source that concerns us now, however, but their darkness, which should be understood to mean that it does not reflect the skies and that it conceals God.

By the rivers dark where I could not see
who was waiting there, who was hunting me.
And he cut my lip, and he cut my heart,
so I could not drink from the river dark.
And he covered me, and I saw within,
my lawless heart and my wedding ring.
I did not know and I could not see
who was waiting there, who was hunting me.

We’re moving to a center, which is an encounter. The two crucial facts known to the psalm, love and law, are going to be reexamined. Love of God is with the exiles in Babylon, but no longer the laws under which they lived. That basic opposition does not seem to be working as well in this new situation, but there is an attempt to put love and law together in the wedding ring, which is meant to bind the heart.

The sections of the song are separated by the repeated mention of the dark rivers. This second section starts and ends with hunting. Man is the hunted; God is the hunter. That is one image of love. The darkness of the rivers and the inability to see and the being covered together suggest night and time. This is the condition of the revelation, an inability to distinguish the things of the world and a turn to the soul. Why should God want to prevent man’s drinking from the river dark? There is a complicated suggestion there: forgetfulness, the condition in which the experience recounted takes place, the abyss; the dark rivers, and perhaps death, the terrible sense of danger, of being hunted. We remember something about the original situation, before the series of acts of separation or distinction that constitute God’s creation in Genesis 1. Then the spirit was hovering over the dark abyss. Something like that is again the case. A world where man is in exile rather than at home, wandering rather than at rest, recalls the initial chaos more than the claim that we understand and inhabited an orderly world. The soul, in its strongest longing, may oppose itself to the world and seek to abandon it. The lawlessness of the heart is not merely living in a world that’s not about anything holy — it’s refusing to be at home in the world.

The alternative to man’s surrendering to the abyss is a wounding. Lip and heart are cut by the hunter to prevent speech and forgetfulness. How? Speech will be tied together with blood and therefore life. The heart is no longer free or whole. It is man’s possible self-possession that is compromised. This is similar to the justification of circumcision, by the way. Then there is the wedding ring connected to the lawless heart. It is adulterous love that is being punished; or, in another way, idolatry. The problem is not cleared up until we see that the repetition that concludes the stanza is not a true repetition. Only after our singer encounters God does he know that he did not know before. God must touch man before man can even see that in this world man is hunted by God.

By the rivers dark, I panicked on.
I belonged at last to Babylon.
Then he struck my heart with a deadly force
and he said, “This heart: It is not yours.”
And he gave the wind my wedding ring;
and he circled us with everything.
By the rivers dark, in a wounded dawn,
I live my life in Babylon.

Only now does our singer truly belong to Babylon. Merely being unhappy or wandering is not enough — knowing that this world is haunted by God is what’s necessary to make sense of Babylon and therefore to belong. The possibility of revelation is the terror that souls could become prey. We want to believe we are in control of ourselves, too, of our souls — primarily, that we are responsible ultimately for our fate. This goes beyond believing merely in the thoughtful control we have over an orderly, predictable world in which natural and artificial regularities reassure us that there is no time but the time that repeats itself in cycles. But both claims are endangered by our utter awareness of our mortality. The strongest longing of the soul suggests that there is, beyond mortality, a standard by which we can judge things and that is the key to our dissatisfaction with the limits we perceive in our world. To be at home in Babylon is not to be fully ignorant of the higher law but to live in terror of its possibility. This is the condition set here for a revelation.

The simple speech we are offered as divine command tells us that soul is what ties us to God. The yearning of the heart cannot stop, and therefore man is not properly master of his own heart. This new awareness is said to come with a deadly force. This suggests twin possibilities: punishment and sacrifice. What does that imply? That there is a fate worse than death. The possibility of being at home in Babylon is what is punished. This is the central stanza, and it includes the only quoted speech.

At the end of the night, it should all be over: Life in Babylon is not after all avoidable, but now there is a difference. The lost wedding ring, consigned to the invisible, to the wind, is a haunting memory. That this is a revelation is signaled by the first use of a pronoun in the plural. Mankind is tested in this man. At the same time, something in the world is redeemed. What matters in the world is that it is the setting for man’s life and for the holy song.

Though I take my song from a withered limb,
both song and tree, they sing for him.
Be the truth unsaid and the blessing gone,
If I forget my Babylon.
I did not know and I could not see
who was waiting there, who was hunting me.
By the rivers dark, where it all goes on.
By the rivers dark, in Babylon.

This is the most startling inversion of the psalm: The poet commits to not forgetting Babylon, not Zion. The new condition of man, signaled by the withered limb, leads him, as in the olden day, to God. But now this comes by existential suffering. The emergence of the soul’s longing as being hunted is fit for the age of individualism. There is no community here, at least nothing beyond the audience to whom the revelation is vouchsafed. Even the holy song is replaced by a song about trying to live with the darkness in the world that reveals the darkness in the soul that longs for God. The divine hunter has not offered a command or a teaching. A despairing man, a wanderer could make his peace with the world, or at least a truce. This world is tolerable so long as the deep, secret unhappiness of man is understood as a longing for God, so long as the world is not turned into a comfortable home. Unhappiness begins to look like an adequate answer to the mysterious character of God. There is a dignity in it — in the certainty that God calls to the soul as surely and particularly as the hunter to his prey.

— Titus Techera is a graduate student in political science and a roving writer on American society at Ricochet.com.

THE COMMUNISTS BEHIND THE ANTI-TRUMP PROTESTS

The post-election demonstrations against Trump are being orchestrated by socialists and Marxists.

John Perazzo

http://www.frontpagemag.com/

November 11, 2016

A rioter sets fire to a tree in downtown Portland, November 10, 2016. (KOIN)

Ever since Donald Trump's election victory Tuesday night, the media have been abuzz with stories about massive, sometimes violent, anti-Trump protests breaking out in cities all across the country. We've been told that ordinary Americans everywhere are so frightened and angered by the prospect of a Trump presidency—as opposed to a Hillary Clinton presidency—that they're taking to the streets to express their grave concerns for the future of the country.

In Chicago, for instance, thousands of people held an “emergency protest” outside a Trump hotel, chanting: “No Trump, No KKK, No Fascist USA!”

In New York, some 5,000 people (including the political oracle Lady Gaga) demonstrated outside Trump Tower. “Their concerns,” said CNN, “ranged from policies, such as Trump's proposed plan to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexican border, to the polarizing tenor of his campaign that they say stoked xenophobic fears.”

In Oakland, some of the 7,000+ demonstrators damaged police cars, vandalized businesses, hurled Molotov cocktails and rocks at law-enforcement officers, and started at least 40 separate fires.

And in Los Angeles, more than 1,000 people filled the streets, burned Trump in effigy, and sang John Lennon's Give Peace a Chance. “Several protesters said they feared that family or friends might be deported once Trump takes office,” said CNN.

From reading the various mainstream media accounts of these events, one comes away with the distinct impression that they are grassroots actions that began organically among ordinary, concerned, well-meaning citizens.

But alas, if one were to think that, one would be wrong.

Contrary to media misrepresentations, many of the supposedly spontaneous, organic, anti-Trump protests we have witnessed in cities from coast to coast were in fact carefully planned and orchestrated, in advance, by a pro-Communist organization called the ANSWER Coalition, which draws its name from the acronym for “Act Now to Stop War and End Racism.” ANSWER was established in 2001 by Ramsey Clark’s International Action Center, a group staffed in large part by members of the Marxist-Leninist Workers World Party. In 2002, the libertarian author Stephen Suleyman Schwartz described ANSWER as an “ultra-Stalinist network” whose members served as “active propaganda agents for Serbia, Iraq, and North Korea, as well as Cuba, countries they repeatedly visit and acclaim.”

Since its inception, ANSWER has consistently depicted the United States as a racist, sexist, imperialistic, militaristic nation guilty of unspeakable crimes against humanity—in other words, a wellspring of pure evil. When ANSWER became a leading organizer of the massive post-9/11 demonstrations against the Patriot Act and the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, it formed alliances with other likeminded entities such as Not In Our Name (a project of theRevolutionary Communist Party) and United For Peace and Justice (a pro-Castro group devoted to smearing America as a cesspool of bigotry and oppression). 

Another key organizer of the current anti-Trump protests is a group called Socialist Alternative, which describes “the global capitalist system” as “the root cause of … poverty, discrimination, war, and environmental destruction.” Explaining that “the dictatorships that existed in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were [unfortunate] perversions of what socialism is really about,” this organization calls for a happy-faced “democratic socialism where ordinary people will have control over our daily lives.”

And, lo and behold, many components of Socialist Alternative's agenda mesh seamlessly with Hillary Clinton's political priorities. For instance, Socialist Alternative seeks to: (a) “raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, as a step toward a living wage for all”; (b) provide “free [taxpayer-funded] … public education for all from pre-school through college”; (c) create “a publicly funded single-payer [healthcare] system as a step towards fully socialized medicine”; (d) impose absolutely “no budget cuts [on] education and social services”; and (e) legislate “a major increase in taxes on the rich and big business.”

In short, the anti-Trump protests that are currently making headlines are 100% contrived, fake, phony exhibitions of street theater, orchestrated entirely by radicals and revolutionaries whose chief objective is to push America ever farther to the political left. Moreover, they seek to utterly demoralize conservatives into believing that public opposition to their own (conservative) political and social values is growing more powerful, more passionate, and more widespread with each passing day.

The bottom line is this: The leaders and organizers of the anti-Trump protests that are currently making so much noise in cities across America, are faithfully following the blueprint of Hillary Clinton's famous mentor, Saul Alinsky, who urged radical activists to periodically stage loud, defiant, massive protest rallies expressing rage and discontent. Such demonstrations are designed to give onlookers the impression that a mass movement is preparing to shift into high gear, and that its present size is but a fraction of what it eventually will become. A “mass impression,” said Alinsky, can be lasting and intimidating: “Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.... The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.”

And that is precisely what we are witnessing at the moment.

Tags: Communism, Donald Trump, Marxism, Protest

Trump voters finally had enough, and they voted

John Kass

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/kass/ct-trump-clinton-kass-1110-20161109-column.html

November 9, 2016

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump in Charleston, West Virginia on May 5, 2016 (The Daily Independent)

President-elect Donald Trump may turn out to be a terrible president, or a good one.

Or it could all end up as some horrid TV show, like that 1980s soap "Dynasty," but with The Donald and the trophy wife and the beautiful kids and intrigue and money and power.

We just don't know, yet.

But until we realize how we got here, until we examine the prejudice and foolish thinking by the elites who led us here, we won't know where we're going, not really.

What we do know is that Trump won state after state, bringing with him Republican control in both the House and the Senate, and he is now poised to put a conservative stamp on the Supreme Court.

But how did it happen, really? How did Hillary Clinton, with all her money and institutional support, from the Obama White House to a pro-Clinton American media, let it come to this?

I wrote about it eight months ago, explaining why Hillary Clinton could not win the presidential election: This is the year of anti-establishment insurgency, and Hillary Clinton was the dowager empress of that establishment.

So she could not win. And she did not. There is no mystery to it.

And journalists could have seen the anger out there, if they would have just listened to people talk instead of worrying about polling models like some medieval alchemists trying to turn Americans into Hillary's gold.

So what has happened?

The Democratic Party has been disgraced by its failure. The Democratic National Committee stacked the deck against Bernie Sanders and for Hillary. They were found out by WikiLeaks. Now they own this.

And the collusion between the Clinton camp and the media has been laid out in WikiLeaks too.

Journalism hurt itself in this election. In the minds of most Americans, journalists took Hillary's side. And there doesn't seem to be any attempt to self-inspect, or complete a post-mortem and cleanse this festering wound.

That's dangerous. Trump must be held to account. But the journalistic pack hunting Trump, without dealing with its own credibility issues for putting the thumb on the scale for Hillary, doesn't restore trust.

"Whether it was a herd mentality, an implicit bias on the way they view these things, they never even considered the possibility of a Trump win," said Tom Bevan, co-founder and publisher of Real Clear Politics in an interview on my "The Chicago Way" podcast.

"They would look at the data and say, 'There's no way, it's not going to happen,'" Bevan said. "But it could happen and it did happen."

Clinton, the DNC and the media aren't the only losers.

The most prominent is President Barack Obama. His legacy — such as it is — is about to be erased.

It will be erased by a candidate whose voters were held in complete contempt by the liberal journalism elite, those geniuses who fashion themselves the champions of the little guy.

Unless, of course, the little guy decides to think for himself.

Trump voters, left behind in Obama's limp economy, weren't idealized as working-class heroes as they had been in the past.

Under politics of Obama-Clinton, as expressed by the high priests of journalism, these left-behind were mocked as white racists, knuckle-draggers, fools and "deplorables."

One New York Times pundit was worried they would "vote their gene pool," and I just spotted another headline by a liberal pundit on the Tribune's website:

"Donald Trump won. Let the uneducated have their day."

How nice.

It's no secret that most of American journalism is liberal in its politics. The diversity they prize has nothing to do with diversity of thought.

The leaders in this mean-girl approach to Trump voters are most often white men, as liberally savage in their beliefs as my old lefty college professor insisting that poor mountain villagers yearned for socialism.

"No, they don't," I said, thinking of my cousins back in our family's mountain village. "All villagers want is water for their crops, and to be left alone."

Sadly, I didn't get the A.

But I do get the politics of journalism, like the politics of the universities.

What bothers me, though, is that such tribal thinking, reinforced by threats of shame, has blinded the intelligentsia to the pain of Americans who voted Tuesday.

Willful blindness isn't only stupid, it's dangerous.

Even the son of a villager can see that.

It wasn't the uneducated or the knuckle-draggers or the guys drinking beer in the garage working on their own cars that cost the election for Clinton.

She had Wall Street and K Street lobbyists, and the former Republican Iraq War planner neoconservatives, and the GOP nevertrumpers, the hedge fund guys. She had everything. She had Obama propping her up. And yet she lost.

Why? Because Trump kept saying "Jobs, jobs, jobs," a phrase once used by former Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago during a campaign.

It used to irk me, this chanting of "jobs." But it was simple. And that's what people wanted then and now. They don't want a handout. They wanted to work and to be left alone.

Yet they were shamed by elites and a relentless barrage of news stories, columns, all illustrating how deplorable they had become.

They finally had enough. Not just the unemployed or the underemployed, but even, to the surprise of the Democratic elites, those with educations. And women and minorities in numbers unforeseen.

And they voted.

Listen to "The Chicago Way" podcast — with John Kass and Jeff Carlin — athttp://wgnplus.com/category/thechicagoway.

jskass@chicagotribune.com

twitter@John_Kass