Did Mahmoud Abbas Apologize?

The headline tells the story, or does it?

The Washington Post headline tells us:

After outrage, Palestinian president apologizes for offending people in anti-Semitic speech

For what was Mahmoud Abbas apologizing?

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas apologized Friday for offending Jews by saying in a speech earlier this week that the Holocaust stemmed from hatred of Jewish banking practices — not anti-Semitism.

His remarks before Palestinian lawmakers in Ramallah on Monday sparked widespread condemnation and reignited accusations that Abbas is a Holocaust denier.

He claimed Monday that his beliefs were based on those of Jewish authors and said “that animosity toward Jews was not because of their religion but because of their social activities,” especially “usury and banking and such.”

In fact, there is nothing new under the Palestinian sun. Abbas has long been a Holocaust denier. What is new is that his political position has become so weak that he could be forced into apologizing.

But, was it a real apology? That means: was it sincere?

But on Friday he said in a statement that “if people were offended by my statement ... especially people of the Jewish faith, I apologize to them.”

“I would like to assure everyone that it was not my intention to do so, and to reiterate my full respect for the Jewish faith, as well as other monotheistic faiths,” he added.

Of course, Abbas did not apologize sincerely. He prefaced his supposed apology with a qualifier: “if people were offended.” The phrase gives away the game: when you use it you are not apologizing. 

An apology ought to focus on the error of one’s ways. It ought not to be directed at whether or not other people took offense. It ought certainly not to suggest that some people might not have been offended. Focusing on who did or did not take offense says that those who took offense are especially sensitive.

If you say something offensive and stupid, you should take full responsibility for your action. You should eat your words. Abbas did not do so, and thus, Israeli officials refused to accept his insincere apology.

Dershowitz Denounces the Surveillance State

Emeritus Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz is quickly becoming one of the heroes of the current political moment. As his friends on the left suspend their rational faculties in order to overturn an election result that did not please them, Dershowitz has stood tall, defending principle, fairly. He has called them out for hypocrisy and for abusing the authority of the state.

And as overzealous prosecutors persecute anyone associated with Donald Trump or his campaign, Dershowitz is sounding a tocsin of alarm. He knows that goes around comes around. The ferocious culture warriors who are trying to destroy Trump and his associates will eventually see their zeal boomerang against them.

His points are clear. Prosecutors are not treating Trump fairly. They are not treating him as they would treat a Hillary Clinton. This undermines the rule of law, decisively. Second, he is appalled at the way the power of the state, especially the power to investigate and prosecute, has been abused by the #GetTrump crowd.

Here, via the Daily Caller, is a transcript of his remarks on MSNBC yesterday:

“I do not trust the government. I do not trust judges. I do not trust prosecutors when they are zealously seeking to go after a particular target, in this case Donald Trump,” the lawyer stated on MSNBC. “Nobody would have been going after Michael Cohen if he weren’t Donald Trump’s lawyer. That’s the reality.”

“People don’t investigate campaign contribution lapses or campaign rule violations generally about people who aren’t in the public life, and I just worry that when you have somebody with a target on his or her back – whether it is Hillary Clinton who could have been elected and had the same thing happen to her, or Donald Trump that civil libertarians ought to express concern.”

“I don’t want to live in the surveillance state,” he continued. “I want to do everything in my power no matter who the target is to prevent this from occurring.”

“… You can go through the federal criminal code and find crimes that virtually any businessman, any politician has committed,” Dershowitz stated. “It is so easy to get a warrant. It is so easy to persuade a judge to give you a wiretap warrant. That simply doesn’t protect American citizens, and any civil libertarian who was exposed to what’s going on here today — if Hillary Clinton were the subject — would be taking exactly the opposite position.”

“There is so much hypocrisy, partisan hypocrisy out there. I don’t mind if conservatives take the view we ought to trust government or former prosecutors take the view we ought to trust government. My gripe is against civil libertarians and criminal defense lawyers who are always on the side of challenging the government, the ACLU, who have suddenly lost its way and forgotten what they’ve preached for 50 years because it is Donald Trump they’re after.”

Time to indict the ACLU for rank hypocrisy.

Churches in Saudi Arabia?

Liberalization proceeds apace in Saudi Arabia. We have been following this story for some time now, so it is fitting that we report the latest step forward. The kingdom will now allow churches to be built within its borders. Can synagogues be far behind?

Breitbart reports:

The agreement was signed by the Secretary General of the Muslim World League Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdel Karim Al-Issa and the President of the Pontifical Council for Inter-religious Dialogue in the Vatican, Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, according to a report Wednesday from the Egypt Independent newspaper.

The Financial Express has reported that Saudi Arabia’s newfound openness to and socio-cultural cooperation with the non-Muslim world stems from a desire to reduce dependency on oil resources, its primary economic driver.

Cardinal Tauran visited Riyadh on April 16-20, where he was received at the royal palace by King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, who acts as the country’s prime minister as well as the custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, and his son, the crown prince Muhammad bin Salman. Tauran and his delegation also visited the Center for the Fight against Extremist Thought, and met with the current Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, Abdul-Aziz ibn Abdullah Al ash-Sheikh.

In his address to Saudi officials, Tauran made mention of the “hundreds of thousands of Christians in the Saudi Kingdom,” insisting that Pope Francis follows their situation “with close attention.” The cardinal also reiterated the Vatican position on the equal treatment of all citizens regardless of their religion, including those who do not profess any religion, and called for establishing a common basis for the construction of centers of worship.

Fruit of the cardinal’s visit was the joint agreement that provides for the building of churches to care for the needs of Christians in Saudi Arabia as well as underscoring the key role of religions in renouncing violence, extremism, terrorism and achieving security and stability in the world.

It’s good news, no matter how you look at it.

The Case of the Neutered Lover

Here is an interesting letter, sent by Anonymous, to therapist Lori Gottlieb. When you read it, I challenge you to figure out whether the letter writer is male or female. He or she does not give any indication about gender, so we are, for all intents and purposes flying blind. 

Gottlieb does not, in her response, give any indication that it matters to her. She does ask whether the couple in question is going to have children, but this, given our culture warp, no longer serves to designate a gender.

Anyway, call this the price of gender confusion. Here is the letter:

I have been dating my current girlfriend for about a year and a half. We are really happy together, and never fought until it was time to decide where to go to graduate school a couple weeks ago. There aren’t schools that we were both accepted to (despite our best planning) and are interested in attending.

I was only accepted to three programs. She was accepted to all her programs, and naturally wants to go to the best programs she got into (I am in favor of this) over ones near my options. The programs can mean a long time apart (one to two years for hers, four to five years for mine).

As my program will take longer, I think that if we want to transition to a long-distance relationship while she finishes her degree, we would probably want to move in together as I finish mine. She has said that she doesn’t want to do that. Instead, she is pushing to remain in the same city the whole time, with me putting off my program until she finishes, and then going “wherever I want” afterwards. Her reasoning for going to these better programs is they offer better degrees for salary and job security.

I can’t help but see the mismatch here. She is pushing me to defer on my career goals when I don’t know if I’ll get into the same programs if I reapply in two years. How do you know whether you are asking too much of your partner, or they are asking too much of you, to be together? What do you think of my situation?

Anonymous

Obviously, we are dealing with college students, or, at least young people just out of college. If the couple is heterosexual and the female is insisting that the male postpone or forego graduate school in order to support her career, then he has become the weaker, more submissive partner. If he wants that, he is welcome to it.

She is pushy. She is bossy. She wants to control him. She wants to make him her appendage. If he stays around or even considers this regimen he deserves what he gets.

For the record, we do not know whether the disparity between the programs that admitted her and the programs that admitted him were the consequence of diversity quotas. If so, diversity quotas are punishing men and rewarding women, regardless of qualifications. This has an obvious impact on their relationship dynamic.

If the letter writer is a female, the situation changes. In that case her girlfriend is staking out the dominant role in the relationship. And the letter writer is being rendered a housewife whose place is to keep girlfriend company while she pursues her degree program. The notion that the two will reverse roles after she finishes makes very little sense. If for no other reason than that once she finishes and gets a high powered job, will she want to work less or to postpone entry into the labor market because it’s now her girlfriend’s turn?

For her part Gottlieb offers some sensible advice about learning how to negotiate levels of commitment. Happily, she sees marriage as an eventual possibility, and she is correct to see that if this couple cannot negotiate their differences, they will have far more serious problems down the road.

She does not say that the girlfriend is acting very much like a demanding, rigid, uncompromising witch. And that the problem really lies with her, not with the letter writer. Why Anonymous has been putting up with a woman who has such a bad attitude is beyond me. If Anonymous is a male, he should stop whining and whimpering and should find himself a suitable girlfriend. He should begin his graduate education at the best place that accepted him and should kiss his girlfriend goodbye. If she doesn't like it, too bad. If he caves in to her imperious demands he will suffer a loss of confidence and self-respect that will make him useless as a boyfriend.

If Anonymous is female, and wants to play the submissive role in the relationship, good luck to her and to the two of them.

The Perils of Cultural Appropriation

From time to time Tucker Carlson provides his viewers with a special treat. That treat is named Cathy Areu. Carlson calls her his special Sherpa, someone who travels up the mountains of politically correct thinking and reports back.

The irony is palpable, though Areu seems actually to believe what she spews. If she does, this makes her a zealous mental midget. With very big hair, incidentally.

If we did not hear it with our ears, we might imagine that those of us who denounce the dumbing down of American education by a brain dead educational establishment are making it up. The facts themselves, measured in educational outcomes, are so bad that, sad to say, we are not.

One understands the method behind this dereliction. If you keep students dumb and dependent you will have a much easier time controlling their minds. The truth is that if you want to learn how to think you should read writings by people who are great thinkers. You should avoid writers who cannot think. And you should not expect to learn how to think by reading the labels on soup cans.

Similarly, if you want to learn how to write, you should read the writings of people who are great writers. Reading mediocre, clotted prose will teach you to write sub-literate prose.

It makes no difference that they look like you or your mother, or that they do not resemble anyone in your family or in your identity politics cult. Great writing is great writing. Learn to live with it. Especially, learn to learn from it.

Obviously, this countercultural argument turns into fairy dust the minute you ask whether a non-Christian should ever study Newtonian physics, given that Newton was a pious Christian? And should a non-Jew study the theory of relativity, given that Einstein was a Jew. We recall a time when books written be Jews, regardless of merit of quality, were thrown on bonfires, the better to purge alien thoughts from pure German minds.

On last night’s Tucker Carlson Tonight show, leftist Sherpa Cathy Areu weighed in on the case of one Keziah Daum. Daum, you see, posed in her prom dress on her Twitter account. The dress was a cultural product of China.

Naturally, college students who have learned nothing more than how to behave like insolent brats attacked the high school debate champion for cultural appropriation. By their dim lights, and by Areu’s, non-Chinese Americans are not allowed to wear such things unless their consciousness has been sufficiently raised. That means, unless they understand that the dress is part of the systematic oppression of Chinese workers by predatory Western capitalist imperialists. Please do not write to explain that such is not the case: we are running on dogmatic belief, not on fact. And do not think that the dress represented a gesture of feminist rebellion against despotic authorities.

For the record, and in order for you not to become overly confused, cultural appropriationism says that what’s mine is mind and what’s yours is yours—culturally speaking. You can only borrow my culture with permission and only then if you have babbled suitably politically correct platitudes. Anyway, it’s all ancestor worship… meaning that you must cling to the products of your culture and must reject that anyone else from a different culture who exploits or uses them or even adopts them. Funnily enough, this makes cultural products into private property.

Daniel Greenfield gets at the essence of the issue on Front Page Magazine. (via Maggie’s Farm) He checks the reports on this unimportant cultural debate coming out of China itself, and finds the perfect title to explain it all:

Chinese Baffled by Marxist Dictatorship American Live Under.

Now that will make the chests of good American leftists swell with pride.

He quotes the story in the South China Morning Post:

Keziah Daum, an 18-year-old from Utah in the United States, who has no Chinese roots, was accused of “cultural appropriation” after posting photographs on Twitter that featured her in a traditional Chinese qipao, or cheongsam. 

The dress symbolised a silent protest to promote gender equality after the fall of the dynasties and the beginning of the republican period in the early 1900s, and was worn during the 1919 reformist May Fourth Movement.

The dress, in other words, made a political statement in 1919. Today’s it's a fashion statement... signifying female empowerment. 

Since you are undoubtedly curious, the SCMP addresses the more salient issue: what do today’s Chinese think of Daum’s dress. Apparently, they have nothing better to do with their time but to opine about American high school students’ prom attire.

“Very elegant and beautiful! Really don’t understand the people who are against her, they are wrong!” one person commented on an article by Wenxue City News. “I suggest the Chinese government, state television or fashion company invite her to China to display her cheongsam!”

“It is not cultural theft,” another wrote. “It is cultural appreciation and cultural respect.”

Weibo users added that Daum looked beautiful and criticised those who have accused her.

“Culture has no borders,” one wrote. “There is no problem, as long as there is no malice or deliberate maligning. Chinese cultural treasures are worth spreading all over the world.”

As it happened, the dress was banned during the Age of Mao Zedong and during the Cultural Revolution:

It fell out of fashion between the 1950s and 1970s, as those who wore it were judged as being bourgeois in a time of anti-tradition movements, but has since regained popularity.

With the recent promotion of traditional Chinese culture, the dress now embodies the idea of being ethnically Chinese. 

Peng Liyuan, China’s first lady and wife of President Xi Jinping, has worn a qipao several times on foreign visits.

There you have it… a gesture of respect for Chinese culture has been rejected as bourgeois by America’s young cultural revolutionaries. One thing we see: they are completely incapable of cogent thought.

Educational System Fail

Yesterday,  we remarked that most American high school graduates were not prepared for college. Happily or unhappily for them colleges do not care. I called it educational malpractice, because that is what it is.

Today, I report, from the Daily Wire, the results from the same survey, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, this time regarding eighth graders in America's public elementary and middle schools. The news is not very good. In fact, it is appallingly bad:

A new report from the National Assessment of Educational Progress revealed that approximately two-thirds of eighth graders in American public schools were not proficient in reading and math last year.

The report, released by the U.S. Department of Education, revealed that 65% of eighth graders in public schools were not proficient in reading and 67% were not proficient in math. The report also revealed that the results were significantly worse in urban districts.

In America’s inner cities, the situation us worse:

Only 5 percent of Detroit public-school eighth graders were proficient or better in math. Only 7 percent were proficient or better in reading.

In the Cleveland public schools, only 11 percent of eight graders were proficient or better in math and only 10 percent were proficient or better in reading.

In the Baltimore public schools, only 11 percent were proficient or better in math and only 13 percent were proficient or better in reading.

I would mention, for your edification, that these children attended school during the Obama presidency. How did the boost in self-esteem these children gained by seeing the first black president translate into academic performance?

It didn’t. 

The Clean Air Derby

Whatever greatness liberal democracy possesses, and despite the earnest protestations of Steven Pinker and the Panglossian faithful, the world is increasingly not buying what we are selling… culturally speaking, that is.

Today’s duel pits democratic India against authoritarian China—two nations that have roughly the same population. It shows how well each nation is cleaning up the air. This is useful because you all know that only a highly democratic nation with a massive bureaucracy and empowered environmentalists can preserve the pristine beauty and preternatural purity of nature.

The facts say otherwise. The Washington Post reports that China has been cleaning up its air while India, that would be, democratic India leads the world in air pollution.

The Post reports:

India’s capital city of New Delhi, choked by rising automobile emissions and construction dust, was named on Wednesday the world’s most polluted megacity by the World Health Organization, which analyzed the levels of the pollutant PM10 in the air in cities with populations above 14 million between 2010 and 2016.

Greater Cairo was the second most polluted large city, with India’s other great megacity of Mumbai ranked fourth on the list and Beijing fifth.

True enough, fifth place is nothing to brag about, but the difference between first and fifth is very large indeed. Delhi came in at 292; Beijing at 92.

When judged in terms of another pollutant, a more deadly one, India scores very high—fourteen out of the top fifteen most polluted cities are in democratic India:

When the health organization studied data for the smaller and more deadly PM2.5 particulate matter, 14 of the top 15 most polluted cities were in India, with the industrial hub of Kanpur ranked No. 1.

Why did China clean up its air? Apparently, its authoritarian rulers were responding to the will of the people:

The report comes at a time when former perennial offender China, in response to citizen outrage, has taken steps to clean up its air, shuttering or reforming factories and reducing its coal consumption in favor of renewable energy. The moves helped improve air quality in Beijing and elsewhere but at a cost — many poor people were denied coal heat during winter or lost jobs.