Alex Ovechkin is painting his masterpiece

The Capitals’ captain is scoring goals, making plays, and killing off lazy ideas about his career.

By Alex Kirshner

https://www.sbnation.com/nhl/2018/5/24/17374474/capitals-stanley-cup-final-ovechkin

May 24, 2018

Washington Capitals left wing Alex Ovechkin, left, poses with NHL Deputy Commissioner Bill Daly and the Prince of Wales trophy after the Capitals defeated the Tampa Bay Lightning 4-0 during Game 7 of the NHL Eastern Conference finals hockey playoff series Wednesday, May 23, 2018, in Tampa, Fla. (Chris O’Meara / Associated Press)

The goal Alex Ovechkin scored 62 seconds into Game 7 against the Lightning was the same goal he’s scored hundreds of times. Of all the ways this generation’s best scorer has beaten goaltenders over the last 13 years, no method has been more common than Ovechkin opening up in or above the left faceoff circle, getting a pass from across the ice, and viciously one-timing it past some poor goalie who barely had a chance.

Everyone on the ice knew what was happening before it happened. Lightning goalie Andrei Vasilevskiy, Ovechkin’s teammate on the Russian national team, definitely knew. It didn’t matter, because an Ovechkin slapper is one of the few things in hockey that leaves a team almost entirely at its mercy. The other team has to hope it hits something, ideally a stick and not a defender’s body, or that Ovechkin misses the net or shoots into the goalie’s logo.

His devastating shot is the biggest reason Ovechkin has scored 196 more regular-season goals than anyone else since entering the league in 2005. When the puck comes to him, he’s still the most dangerous man in the game. Now he’ll play in the Stanley Cup Final for the first time. More goals are coming, but what’s set Ovechkin apart during the Capitals’ deepest playoff run in 20 years isn’t just the goals. It’s his complete, well-rounded game.

Ovechkin has always had a rep as a shooter first. He does shoot a ton, but this playoff run should lay plain how much more he is than that.

These things are simultaneously true:

• Ovechkin has led the NHL in shots on goal in five of the last six years. Since his rookie season, he’s registered 4,896 shots in the regular season. That’s 1,535 shots more than anyone else, a rate of about 4.9 per game.
• Ovechkin is 12th in the league in assists since his rookie year, with 515. He’s third among wingers, just a hair behind Daniel Sedin and Patrick Kane.

It would be an exaggeration to call Ovechkin one of the best passers of his time. But he’s been a playmaker for others almost as much as he’s been one for himself. His wicked shot turns into a rebound most of the times it gets stopped. And in this playoff run, he’s set up massive goal after massive goal with sublime plays.

The Capitals won Game 5 of the second round against their longtime foil, the Penguins, because Ovechkin drew the defense to him and set up Jakub Vrana for a tap-in:

The winning goal in the clinching Game 6 of that series came off a smooth Ovechkin pass to spring Evgeny Kuznetsov on a breakaway in overtime:

And this pass Ovechkin used to set up Kuznetsov in Game 4 against the Lightning is the most picturesque backhand saucer pass that has ever been made:

“Obviously, everybody thinks of Alex as a goal-scorer and a shooter,” his head coach, Barry Trotz, said during the conference final, the same night as that last pass above. “One thing that I was surprised when I came here a number of years ago: how well he makes plays. He’s a great passer. He doesn’t get enough credit for that, and he has good vision. He sees things. But everybody thinks he’s just a shooter. He’s more than that. He takes what’s given. You take away his shot, he’s gonna make some real good offensive plays with a pass or deception, whatever. He sees the ice very well. Surprisingly. When I first got here, I thought he might just have a one-track mind, shoot all the time, but he can make some plays.”

Ovechkin is second in the playoffs in points (22) and tied for 15th in assists (10). The only guy ahead of him in the points race is his teammate Kuznetsov.

These playoffs should eliminate one other fiction about Ovechkin, too.

In some musty corners of the hockey world, an idea has persisted that Ovechkin can’t win big games. He’s had to contend with frequent comparisons to Sidney Crosby, the Penguins captain who — until this year — had always beaten Ovechkin’s teams in the playoffs and Olympics. Ovechkin has been a clear top-three player in the world for almost a decade and a half, but he’s had to wear the Capitals’ inability to get over a hump around his neck.

The idea was always absurd. Hockey’s not like basketball or even football, where one brilliant player can bend the whole game to his well. The best forwards only play a third of every game, and they’re heavily reliant on help from others. If the LeBron James Cavaliers played hockey, they’d be the Connor McDavid Oilers, missing the playoffs altogether.

Ovechkin needed the right team around him to mount a run like this. With Kuznetsov riding shotgun with him on offense, secondary scoring popping up all over the lineup, and Braden Holtby leveling up in goal, he has the right time now. Ovechkin’s moment has arrived.

NEXT UP IN NHL

• This is what the world was like the last time the Capitals made the Stanley Cup Final
• The Capitals are going to the Stanley Cup Final. Here’s how badly D.C. deserves it.
• 7 reasons the Capitals vs. Golden Knights Stanley Cup Final is going to be a classic
• The Capitals beat the Lightning to clinch their first Stanley Cup Final appearance in 20 years
• Here’s the 2018 Stanley Cup Final schedule between Vegas and Washington
• Stanley Cup NHL playoffs 2018: Bracket, schedule, scores, and more

CLAPPER SPILLS THE BEANS ON ‘SPYGATE’

It was all a set-up from the get-go.

Kenneth R. Timmerman

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270251/clapper-spills-beans-spygate-kenneth-r-timmerman

May 24, 2018

Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper spilled the beans on Tuesday in an exchange with Joy Behar on The View that will undoubtedly make its way into the history books.

The question was whether the FBI had ordered undercover agents to “spy” on the Trump campaign in the spring and summer of 2016, well before Donald Trump had won the Republican nomination for president.

Here is the transcript:

Behar: … So, I ask you, was the FBI spying on Trump’s campaign?

Clapper: No, they were not. They were spying on, a term I don’t particularly like, but on what the Russians were doing. Trying to understand were the Russians infiltrating, trying to gain access, trying to gain leverage and influence which is what they do.

Behar: Well, why doesn’t he like that? He should be happy.

Clapper: Well, he should be.

Clapper’s admission – for that’s what it was – was astonishing: the FBI had in fact infiltrated the Trump campaign and was spying on the candidate and his team. 

That’s a first. And it’s on the record.

Remember all the indignation from the deep state when Trump claimed that the FBI had “wiretapped” Trump Tower? While Trump might not have used the term of art, he was right. He and his campaign were the targets of hostile U.S. government surveillance.

Clapper has tried to wrap himself in the flag, spinning his monumental admission as an effort to “protect” the Trump campaign from nefarious influence from bad Russian actors.

But such claims fall flat for one simple reason: whenever the FBI discovers through a counter-intelligence investigation that an American has been targeted by a foreign power, they almost always inform the American to warn them off. 

I know. It has happened to me. (More on that below).

So when did the FBI warn the Trump campaign of the hostile Russian attempts to penetrate the campaign?

Certainly not in the spring of 2016, when the FBI detected the first effort to penetrate the Trump campaign by a suspected Russian agent, Joseph Mifsud.

How do we know this? Because in their cockamamie indictment of George Papadopolous, Robert Mueller’s legal team told us that a suspected Russian agent, code-named “the Professor,” twice approached Papadopolous in London with an offer to provide damaging information on Hillary Clinton obtained by the Russian government. Papadopolous then blabbed about the stolen emails at a bar with an Australian diplomat, an event the FBI claims “triggered” the investigation into the Trump campaign.

The next attempt to penetrate the Trump campaign came soon afterwards, when Stefan Halper, a long-time CIA asset, again dangled the Clinton emails to a Trump campaign volunteer, Carter Page. As we learned on Wednesday, Halper also met with top Trump advisor Sam Clovis, in a failed attempt to insinuate his way into the campaign.

But Halper wasn’t acting on behalf of the Russians. As we learned just recently, he was an FBI mole.

Clapper wants us to believe that the intelligence community was protecting the Trump campaign and that the President should thank them.

But the truth is just the opposite. Once the intelligence community detected some type of approach by Mifsud – possibly by a Russian agent, possibly not –- they took no steps to notify Donald Trump or anyone involved in his campaign in order to “protect” our political process. Instead, they launched a classic undercover operation in an attempt to entrap campaign workers, and hopefully the candidate himself, into accepting Russian offers to help them against candidate Clinton.

But this also failed, because there never was any Russian offer. The Russia-collusion spin, jinned up in January 2017 by Clapper, Comey and Brennan, was just a sham, a deception to take our eyes away from what had really been going on.

They wanted to hide the sting operation. And no wonder: it’s called treason, a series of overt and covert acts aimed at overthrowing the duly elected government of the United States.

Who was behind the plot against Trump?

Clearly Clapper was involved; he has admitted as much. Senior officials at the FBI and the DoJ also were involved, but according to their accounts, not until they filed the first wiretapping request with the FISA court in late July 2016.

So what other U.S. intelligence leader would have the power and the authority to engage covert assets operating overseas in an operation against an American political campaign? Only one: CIA director John Brennan.

Both Brennan and Comey have been furiously attacking Trump in recent weeks, as Congressional investigators and the Department of Justice Inspector General gets closer to revealing their illegal acts. I believe they both should be indicted for treason.

In 1996, I was reporting on the Gore-Chernomyrdin commission, which the U.S. and Russian governments established to exchange information on (then) alleged Russian assistance to Iran’s ballistic missile programs.

One of my sources at the time was a Russian diplomat, ostensibly a press officer, who offered hard information on the Russian companies helping Iran that he said had been presented by the Russian government to Vice President Al Gore.

I suspected my “source” was an intelligence officer. But I was able to corroborate his information and found it to be genuine—if embarrassing to Al Gore, who was trying to downplay Russia’s involvement in Iran.

I was not terribly surprised when I got a call from an FBI agent, who asked to meet me in a public park in Georgetown. He proceeded to tell me that the Russian was an intelligence officer the FBI was keeping tabs on, and that I should be careful about his efforts to cultivate me.

I thanked the agent, and promised to let him know if the Russian ever pumped me for information (he did not). The Russian was later targeted by the FBI in March 2001 for his alleged involvement in the Robert Hansen case and quietly left the United States before he could be expelled.

That’s how the FBI is supposed to work. Under Jim Comey and his merry band of partisan hacks, it went woefully astray.

Clint Walker, Star of TV Western ‘Cheyenne,’ Dies at 90

By Carmel Dagan

http://variety.com/2018/tv/news/clint-walker-dead-dies-cheyenne-dirty-dozen-1202819083/

May 22, 2018

Clint Walker, who starred in the television Western “Cheyenne” and had a key supporting role in the WWII film “The Dirty Dozen,” died on Monday in Northern California, according to the New York Times. He was 90.

For seven seasons from 1955-61, he played Cheyenne Bodie, a rambunctious wanderer in the post-Civil War West, on the ABC series “Cheyenne.” (He also guested as the character on “Maverick.”)

The actor’s seriocomic confrontation with star Lee Marvin was one of the highlights of the classic 1967 war picture “The Dirty Dozen.”

After “Cheyenne” ended, Walker made some guest appearances on TV — “77 Sunset Strip,” “Kraft Suspense Theatre” and “The Lucy Show,” in an episode called “Lucy and Clint Walker.”

But the actor became more interested in movies both theatrical and for TV. In 1964, he had a supporting role in the Doris Day-Rock Hudson comedy “Send Me No Flowers.” His acting was not distinguished, but he did participate in a memorable sight gag in which the enormous man popped out of an exceptionally small car.

Impressively, Frank Sinatra, directing the thought-provoking WWII film “None but the Brave” (1965), cast Walker in the lead as a Marine captain who, along with his men (including one played by Sinatra), reaches a detente of mutual benefit with the Japanese troops, led by a lieutenant played by Tatsuya Mihasi, who have come to inhabit the same Pacific island.

He next starred in bear-vs.-man adventure Western “Night of the Grizzy,” but a more interesting choice, perhaps, was “Maya,” in which Walker played a hunter in India whose son, played by Jay North, flees into the jungle after a quarrel with his father, who must seek far and wide for the teen.

Walker in 1967 joined the all-star cast of WWII classic “The Dirty Dozen.” The actor played one of the 12 miscreants rescued/recruited from military prisons for a particularly hazardous mission. Lee Marvin was a big man, but Walker was far bigger, and in their famous scene together, Marvin’s character enjoins Walker’s Samson Posey to take a swing at him; a reluctant Posey, essentially a gentle soul (except when pushed) says, “I don’t want to hurt you, Major.”

Major Reisman, provoking him, responds: “You’re not gonna hurt me, I’m gonna hurt you.”

To use him as an example of how the Dozen need to learn self-defense, Marvin’s Reismam gives Walker’s Posey his knife and starts pushing him, starts to enrage Posey.

So Posey, pushed to the limit, thrusts the knife at Marvin, who grabs it and flips Posey to the ground, subduing him.

In the 1969 Western “More Dead Than Alive,” Walker was first credited, above Vincent Price and Anne Francis. The New York Times paid him a half-baked compliment: “There is something winning about his taciturn earnestness as an actor, although real emotion seldom breaks through.”

The Times was more impressed with his performance in the comedy Western “Sam Whiskey,” the Burt Reynolds-Angie Dickinson vehicle in which Walker was third billed.

He followed that film with a much zanier comedy Western, “The Great Train Robbery,” also with Zero Mostel and Kim Novak, and began a transition to TV movies thereafter, aside from an execrable 1972 feature called “Villa,” starring Telly Savalas as the Mexican bandit.

Walker starred in the 1971 ABC Western movie “Yuma,” among his other TV work. In 1974, he gave series TV another stab, starring as an Alaskan state patrolman in “Kolchak,” but its run was brief.

He made more TV movies with names like “Killdozer” and “Snowbeast.”

Walker starred with Kim Cattrall in 1977’s “Deadly Harvest,” about a famine plaguing the entire world.

The actor reprised the role of Cheyenne Bodie for an episode of “Kung Fu: The Legend Continues” in 1995 and retired after voicing Nick Nitro for the movie “Small Soldiers” in 1998.

Walker was also a singer. He sang a number of tunes on a 1957 episode of “Cheyenne,” issued a Christmas album in 1959, performed on an episode of “The Jack Benny Program” in 1963 and sang in the film “Night of the Grizzly.”

Though often taken for a Southerner, Norman Eugene Walker was born in Hartford, Illinois and left school at the end of WWII to enlist in the Merchant Marine.

His first credited feature role was the Sardinian captain in Cecil B. DeMille’s “The Ten Commandments” (1956). Walker’s first feature starring roles came in the Westerns “Fort Dobbs,” “Yellowstone Kelly” and “Gold of the Seven Saints” (1958, 1959, 1961, all directed by Gordon Douglas).

The handsome, blue-eyed actor was a beefy 6-foot-6; the terms “mountain of a man” or “man-mountain” were often used to describe him. Walker won a Golden Boot Award in 1997 and a Star on the Walk of Fame decades earlier, in 1960.

He was married three times. He is survived by third wife, Susan Cavallari, and a daughter, Valerie, by his first wife, Verna Garver. His twin sister died in 2000.

Related:

Clint Walker Interview -

http://www.cowboysindians.com/2015/08/clint-walker/

Today's Tune: The Call - I Don't Wanna

Bernard Lewis was right about ‘the return of Islam’

Dominic Green

https://usa.spectator.co.uk/2018/05/bernard-lewis-was-right-about-the-return-of-islam/

May 22, 2018

Bernard Lewis. Credit: Agence Opale-Alamy

When Edmund Burke died, he asked that his grave be hidden, so that his enemies wouldn’t disinter him and defile his leftovers. Bernard Lewis, who has died just short of his 102nd birthday, might have been advised to make a similar request. 

Lewis was the English-speaking world’s most eminent modern scholar of the Middle East. His prose, while it didn’t exactly leap off the page, drew on decades of archival research and a deep grounding in historical method. His analysis was measured, and his conclusions were thoughtful. He said that the Arabs were the authors of their own misery, and that the ‘return of Islam’ meant that unhappy Islamists were going to share their misery with the rest of the world. No doubt his death is being quietly celebrated in departments of Middle Eastern Studies the world over.

Lewis was an Orientalist before Edward Said made that a term of abuse. Said was not a scholar of the Middle East, but a polemicist from the Middle East. He was also an intellectual impostor. Ever sinceOrientalism came out in 1978, proper historians have concluded that it would be a masterpiece, if only it were true. The only people who take Edward Said’s books seriously are, in no particular order of irrelevance, academic poseurs, chippy lefties, and the legions of chippy academic lefty poseurs churned out by the departments of Middle Eastern Studies. 

Unfortunately, Said’s fellow-travelers were in the process of taking over the academic humanities at the time Orientalism came out. The result was that the study of Islam and the Middle East, once one of the jewels in the crown of Western scholarship, became a stage for salon Maoism and callow anti-Westernism. Said became a sort of intellectual pet for guilty white Americans, and Lewis and the traditional, which is to say, professional Orientalists, were driven from Middle Eastern Studies, many of them to regroup in a ghetto called Jewish Studies. All very entertaining if intellectual perversion or academic careerism or avenging the Arab nation’s humbling by the treacherous Zionists is your thing, but also fundamentally false, and not really related to historical reality, either.

Lewis had a close relationship to political reality. Too close, in Said’s estimate. If you were to put Said on the couch—late-Ottoman, preferably with French stylings—you might conclude that his central thesis in Orientalism was an assault on Lewis, the daddy of the field. Veiled, of course, but full-frontal. Said claimed that classic Orientalist historiography was nothing more than the intellectual armor of European colonialism. Lewis had got his field experience among the Arabs in the French and British colonies of the Middle East, and had served in British military intelligence in Cairo during the war. After moving to American in the 1970s, Lewis criticized the Soviet Union. He was a Zionist Jew too. 

So, who was right, Ed the Arab or Bernie the Jew? In 1979, while Bernie warned that Ayatollah Khomeini was up to no good, Ed was complaining in The Nation  about the ‘depressing and misleading’ image of ‘Islam’ in the Western media: ‘What emerges is that Ayatollah Khomeini, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani and Palestinian terrorists are the best-known figures in the foreground, while the background is populated by shadowy (though extremely frightening) notions about jihad, slavery, subordination of women and irrational violence combined with extreme licentiousness.’

Call me a Zionist, but haven’t subsequent events tended to confirm that image? The only change is that the Palestinian terrorists, instead of being secular leftists like Ed, are now religious lunatics. Bernie also warned that ‘the return of Islam’, which Ed said was a ‘fiction’ of the Western academic-media complex, was actually happening, and that all that resentment was all going to blow up in the West’s face like an exploding waistcoat. Full marks, Bernie, and thank you for that handy phrase, ‘clash of civilisations’. 

But Bernie also had his failings, and some of them closely resemble Ed’s. Ed never let the truth get in the way of his politics, and Bernie might have let his politics get in the way of the truth. In 1950, having realized that he wouldn’t be able to work in Arab archives because he was Jewish, Lewis found himself in the right place at the right time. When Turkey opened the Imperial Ottoman archives to researchers, Lewis was first through the door. In 2001, he was in the wrong place at the right time. After 9/11 he became an influential adviser to the Bush administration. They would have invaded Iraq anyway, but Lewis’ imprimatur added a certain intellectual weight to the invasion. Certainly, he didn’t tell the Bush administration that democratizing Iraq was a bad idea.

Lewis was a superb historian, probably the last in the line of the Western Orientalists. He educated millions through his books, rather than indoctrinating dozens through his lectures. He got the big questions right, and correctly foresaw the moral and political breakdown of the Islamic world. But when it came to the invasion of Iraq, his professional opinion was wrong. It could have been worse. Most of the time, historians don’t even predict the past correctly.

Jordan Peterson Plays in the Left’s Cultural Sandbox

By David French
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/05/jordan-peterson-new-york-times-hostility/
May 22, 2018



 Rarely in my life have I read a more hostile or vicious takedown of a public figure than last week’s New York Times profile of Canadian author and psychologist Jordan Peterson. Rarely have I witnessed a more bizarre and bad-faith interview of a public figure than journalist Cathy Newman’s January interrogation of Peterson on Britain’s Channel 4 News. Few public figures inspire more vitriol and mockery on Twitter than, you guessed it, Jordan Peterson. And never before have I seen vitriol so out of proportion to the “threat” of the man’s underlying message.

I don’t claim to be an expert on everything the man’s said, but I read and reviewed his most recent book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote for Chaos, and I’ve watched many of his most popular YouTube videos — and the contrast between the actual content of his message and the rage and mockery it elicits never fails to surprise me. Have we really reached the point where the basic argument that men and women are different, or that free men and women will often make different choices in large part because they are different, or that religion and ancient traditions can inform and guide our lives today, are now so toxic that their advocates must and should face a relentless campaign to drive them from the public square?

Or, given the obvious crisis that young men face — with rising rates of suicide and drug overdose, and diminishing educational outcomes — why the extraordinary hostility to a man who is reaching those same young men with a message of hard work, personal responsibility, honor, and integrity?

After all, if you’re a theologically conservative Christian or Jew — a person who is Biblically literate and strives to live according to Biblical morality — the flaw of the Peterson message is that it feels a bit basic. As I wrote in my review, “readers who are already grounded in a Biblical worldview will find some of the counsel extraordinarily elementary.”

But that’s the issue. If Peterson were writing to a Christian audience, he’d be one voice among many. An interesting and quirky voice, to be sure, but his core message about men and women would be conventional, not revelatory. Instead, however, Peterson stands out because he is playing in the Left’s cultural sandbox. He’s disrupting an emerging secular cultural monopoly with arguments about history, tradition, and the deep truths about human nature that the cultural radicals had long thought they’d banished to the fringe.

That’s the reason for the fury. That’s the reason for the rage. When Peterson walks into a secular university or a secular television studio and addresses a secular audience by referencing ancient theological arguments, the effect is not unlike inviting a genderqueer women’s-studies professor to a Baptist Sunday-school class. Some things (in some places) are just not said.

Then, when people actually respond to that message, the shock is even more seismic. It’s difficult to overstate the extent to which the Left has long been (and, crucially, felt) culturally ascendant in America’s secular spaces. The academy, pop culture, mainstream media, corporate America — all of these spaces have drunk deeply of the Left’s cultural Kool-Aid, especially when it comes to matters of sex and gender. The holdouts are in the church and synagogue, and their borders are shrinking under relentless cultural assault.

That’s the arc of history, you see, and the only place where its ultimate triumph was in doubt (or, more precisely, delayed) was in politics — and those setbacks were transient and temporary until the “coalition of the ascendant” could claim its rightful place at the pinnacle of political power.

The problem, however, was a failure to thrive. The new culture left too many young men behind. The new, fractured family claimed too many lives. When “deaths of despair” are so prevalent that the world’s wealthiest and most powerful nation now faces declining life expectancies, it’s hard to argue for the unqualified success of the modern leftist cultural project.

And so, as the secular Left pressed up against the church, it looked behind and saw the flames in its own camp. Peterson held the match, but the kindling was all around him. It’s not that men (and many women) failed to adjust to the new gender ideologies, it’s that the new gender ideologies too often fail to reckon with our deepest human longings and fail to recognize our fundamental human nature. As Peterson writes in 12 Rules, “We cannot invent our own values, because we cannot merely impose what we believe on our souls.”

No one should believe that Peterson is always right, or that his every utterance is profound, but he has served a truly invaluable cultural service. His success and — critically — his method, which relies as much on scripture as it does on psychology, should serve as a clarion call for Biblical Christians and Jews. There is no need for the defensive crouch. In the spiritual wasteland of secularized America, the harvest is plentiful, and ancient truth can indeed provide the seed for new beginnings.

Bernard Lewis, ‘the Imam’

By Jay Nordlinger

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/05/bernard-lewis-the-imam/

May 20, 2018

More than once, after 9/11, I asked Bernard Lewis, “Did you ever think your expertise would be so useful? And so in demand?” “No!” he’d say, sometimes with a laugh.

Bernard Lewis was an historian of the Middle East, and one of the great scholars of our time. His first name, by the way, is pronounced in the British style: BER-nerd, rather than Ber-NARD.

In a long teaching career, he had hundreds or thousands of students, some of whom called him “the Imam” — the ultimate authority. Lewis, by the way, was a great friend of the Arabs. This is poorly understood both by his enemies and by some of his fans. I’ll have more to say about this in due course.

I was never in a classroom of Lewis’s, but he taught me nonetheless, chiefly through his books. The same can be said by countless others around the globe. Professor Lewis passed away on Saturday afternoon, a couple of weeks shy of his 102nd birthday.

I enjoyed talking with him about his youth. He was born in London during a dark time for his country: 1916, in the middle of World War I (as it came to be known). In ’29 (another bad year), he was due to be bar mitzvah’d. So, he was studying a little Hebrew.

“I was very fortunate in that my teacher was a real scholar, a man who was able to inspire and guide me,” he said. After the bar mitzvah, Bernard did something highly unusual: He continued to study Hebrew — “and that led on to Arabic, Turkish, Persian, and the rest.”

Thus was a Middle East scholar born.

Lewis went to the School for Oriental Studies — now the School for Oriental and African Studies, or SOAS — part of the University of London. He earned both a B.A. and a Ph.D. there. Among his professors was Sir Hamilton Gibb, the famous Arabist (infamous to some). Another was Norman H. Baynes, the historian of Byzantium.

As a student, Bernard had two great loves: languages and history. He was a natural, then, for Middle East studies. But in those days you had to choose. Middle East scholars were either linguists or historians, not both. Bernard said, “Nothing doing,” and excelled in languages and history alike.

In World War II, incidentally, he served in British intelligence. In whatever activities he undertook, I bet he was good.

If you would like to read more about his life, consult his autobiography of 2012, Notes on a Century. Lewis is, in addition to a great scholar, an elegant writer.

I asked him how many languages he knew. He said he had played with about 15. Those were his words, “played with.” He said that he had a gift for “making noises.” That is, he could reproduce sounds in other languages, even when he could not properly speak the languages in question.

And this led to some awkward situations. Why? Because a native speaker might think you know the language, on the basis of your pronunciation. And when you cannot quite converse with him, he may think you’re having him on.

Bernard pointed out a nice thing about language, or the learning of them. Often, you can buy one and get one free — or two free. Bernard learned Danish, via a Danish wife. And that led on to Norwegian and Swedish.

I first heard about Bernard Lewis when I was in college, doing some Middle East studies. My teachers were opposed to him, damning him as an “Orientalist,” a backward gent of the old school. Still, you could tell they respected him. That was a measure of the scholarly heights Lewis had attained.

When I was in graduate school, Lewis published a book called Semites and Anti-Semites, a superb volume, typical of the author. It was clear that this was someone who had labored to learn a lot, and from whom you could learn a lot.

After 9/11, Professor Lewis wrote for us at National Review. The world was hungry, even desperate, to know about the Arab world, and Lewis had spent 70 years preparing to tell them. He became a frequent guest on NR cruises, in the company of his “best girl,” Buntzie Churchill. She was his literary collaborator as well.

I can see Bernard now, dressed in a tux, holding court in a lounge. His fellow passengers loved him, understandably.

From Lewis, you got endless and valuable stories. About the Shah of Iran, for example, or Golda Meir. He told me once about a man from China, I believe, who summed up all he knew about the Jews in one sentence — a memorable, delightful one: “One God, no pork.”

In 2011, I filmed an interview with Bernard, lasting an hour, which you can see here. In his home, outside Philadelphia, two chairs had been set up: a big, comfy armchair and a modest, uncomfortable-looking chair. Bernard insisted he would be more comfortable in the second chair — leaving me in the grand one, and feeling sheepish.

He was open to any and all topics, except one: He did not want to discuss Europe and its prospects, especially in light of Muslim migration. He was very gloomy about Europe. You could see the pain in his face, when the subject came up.

Once — I don’t remember the year — he was being interviewed by a Dutch journalist. Bernard mentioned, in the course of the interview, that, if present trends continued, Holland would be majority-Muslim in 20 years. The journalist said, “So?” Bernard thought, You poor sap. You don’t have the foggiest what’s coming.

At the same time, Lewis insisted on Arab rights — on the right of Arabs to live freely, or at least decently. He thought the Middle East should liberalize. He saw no reason that Arab people should not have a say in their own government.

I can just hear Bernard say something with perfect irony: “Some people believe that Arabs should be free of dictatorship, like others in the world. This is known as the anti-Arab, or Western-imperialist, view. Other people say or imply that Arabs are destined to live under dictatorship, as the natural and rightful state of affairs. This is known as the pro-Arab view.”

His antagonist, Edward Said, once charged that Lewis was “dripping with condescension and contempt toward the Arab world.” I love the following story about Lewis, and he did too.

A book by Lewis was translated into Hebrew and published by the Israeli defense ministry. The same book was translated into Arabic and published by the Muslim Brotherhood (unauthorized). In his preface to the Arabic version, the translator said, “I don’t know who this author is, but one thing about him is clear: He is either a candid friend or an honorable enemy, and in either case is one who has disdained to falsify the truth.”

Lewis always said that this was one of the great compliments of his career.

When he co-founded ASMEA — the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa — he said, “A lot of people in the Middle East are with us. We in the West complain about these odious tyrannies, but they are the first sufferers, the first victims.”

Lewis was a founding member of MESA, the Middle East Studies Association, in 1966. Forty-one years later, in 2007, he and Fouad Ajami found it necessary to start ASMEA, as an escape from MESA. The older organization had been taken over by radicals and ideologues, just as the Maoists had taken over China studies.

That’s the way Lewis put it to me: What happened to China studies, happened to Middle East studies. Moreover, the Chinese government has a corrupting influence on Western departments, and so do Arab governments (and Arab money).

When ASMEA began, Lewis gave an inaugural speech. At the outset of it, he quoted Dr. Johnson, to wit, “A generous and elevated mind is distinguished by nothing more certainly than by an eminent degree of curiosity. Nor is that curiosity ever more agreeably or usefully employed than in examining the laws and customs of foreign nations.” Bernard then pointed out that this was a uniquely Western statement.

And it is one that Lewis certainly exemplified.

He wanted the United States to be more confident in its principles and values, and indeed in its greatness. There’s an old saying, “My country, right or wrong.” Lewis said that Americans had turned this into “My country, wrong.”

Early in 2011, as Egypt and other Arab countries were exploding, Lewis said to me, “At the moment, the general perception, in much of the Middle East, is that the United States is an unreliable friend and a harmless enemy. I think we want to give the exact opposite impression.”

On another occasion, he was praising George W. Bush. In doing so, he cited Harold Nicolson, the British diplomat, who said something like, “You can never really know the Oriental mind, try as you might. But what is absolutely necessary is that they have no doubt about your mind.” Bush, said Lewis, had the virtue of making himself clear.

In the midst of the Egyptian explosion in 2011, Lewis made a statement I thought was very interesting. I asked, “Are we witnessing a democratic revolt?” He answered, “I don’t know what ‘democratic’ would mean in this context. It is certainly a popular revolt.”

I could keep on quoting him, but I should probably wrap up. Maybe after one more quote? A witticism? This was so typical of Bernard. Sometime in 2014, the word “ceasefire” was in the air, as it often is. Buntzie reported that Bernard had made a comment — four words — that expressed an important, alarming truth: “We cease, they fire.”

Four years earlier, in 2010, I wrote,

I’m tempted to think that there will never again be anyone like Lewis — that he is the last of a certain type of scholar. The last of the first-class scholars. But this cannot be true. . . .

I’m sure that, in the time of Thucydides, and shortly thereafter, people said, “That’s it — history-writing has come to an end. There will never be another one who is up to the job.” And it wasn’t true.

Nonetheless, I can’t imagine another scholar — another scholar of the Middle East — like Lewis.

I went on in this vein before saying, “I’ll stop whining and worrying now, and simply say how grateful I am that Bernard Lewis is here.” Yes. I am so grateful for Bernard Lewis. A great mind, and a brilliant, useful life.

Today's Tune: Glasvegas & Florence - Suspicious Minds (Live)

The Freud Fraud Underlies Political Correctness

BY DAVID P. GOLDMAN

https://pjmedia.com/spengler/the-freud-fraud-underlies-political-correctness/

May 18, 2018

It's still Sigmund Freud's world. The rest of us are imprisoned in it. The whole intellectual apparatus behind political correctness, micro-aggression theory, totalitarian campus speech codes, the #metoo obsession with sexual mistreatment--all of it begins with Freud. Frederick Crews' new book Freud: The Making of an Illusion shreds the reputation of the founder of psychoanalysis. It's a detective story worthy of the ages and a terrific read, but more importantly, it's a corrective to reigning liberal ideology. You can't understand liberalism unless you know Freud, and you can't appreciate what a tissue of lies and half-truths liberalism is without knowing what a charlatan Freud was.

I had the privilege to review Crews' book in the current issue of conservatism's premier intellectual journal, the Claremont Review of Books. "A generation ago one could speak of America as a therapeutic society. Today we resemble a gigantic asylum," I concluded. CRB relies on subscriptions (so please subscribe!) but the editors have generously unlocked my review.

The whole essay can be read here.

A sample:

By 1897 Freud had concluded that all neurotics repressed memories of childhood molestation. The shameful witch trials of the 1980s that sent Kelly Michaels, the Amiraults, and many others to prison on fabricated child molestation charges marked a new summit of Freud’s influence. Tireless reporting by Dorothy Rabinowitz (reprised in her 2003 book, No Crueler Tyrannies) and others publicly discredited the theory of recovered childhood memory—but not before hundreds of lives were ruined and scores of communities traumatized.

The resemblance of the ’80s molestation cases to medieval witch trials was no coincidence..., As [Freud] would write in 1923, “The demonological theory of those dark times has won in the end against all the somatic views of the period of ‘exact science.’ The states of possession correspond to our neuroses, for the explanation of which we once more have recourse to psychical powers.” 

Child-abuse hysteria has abated, but the public is still consumed by witch hunts against micro-aggressions, triggering, sexual harassment, and so forth. To remedy the dysfunctional sexual life of millennials, the abysmally low college graduation rate of minority men, and other perceived ills, whole universities have been transformed into controlled therapeutic environments, subjecting every aspect of life to inquisitorial control. 

Political correctness is a generalization of Freudian theory; it presumes that the waking consciousness of women as well as ethnic, racial, and sexual minorities consists of a minefield of traumatic memories. Public policy must prevent the triggering of these minds. Public institutions, starting with universities, must be converted into the functional equivalent of psychiatric hospitals and all communications censored to minimize trauma.

Freud invented cases, misreported results, maltreated patients, slept with his sister-in-law and committed every sort of professional breach in the book. All of this has been thoroughly documented and put before the public by a generation of researchers, ably summarized and supplemented by Crews. What made Freud so influential during his lifetime and, sadly, even more influential today?

The answer, I argue, lies in the depthless misery of human existence premised on arbitrary self-invention and sexual gratification.

 Sigmund Freud was a dreadful physician but a brilliant salesman who understood all too well what the world wanted to buy. After two centuries of the Age of Reason, he grasped that a world that had given up its religion wanted permission to be irrational once again. The world wallowed in hysterical misery; he offered to replace it with ordinary unhappiness. Thanks to scholars like Crews, we no longer believe in Freud, even if we remain, unwittingly, under his thrall.

Freud wasn't looking for a new cure, but a new cult. He and his followers did lots of harm and negligible good, but they made hay out of the misery that modern liberal culture inflicted on its sufferers.

Again, if you're not reading Claremont Review of Books, you're missing the best intellectual line-up in the conservative world (despite the fact that they let me write for it).