The Lost Palestinian Cause

By my reading, often proposed on this blog, the Palestinian cause is a lost cause. The terrorist organizations that comprise the Palestinian Authority and Hamas have lost the support of their primary backers in the Sunni Arab world. By my reading Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt have decided that defending Palestinian terrorism is not worth the price.

Thus long time readers of this blog will not be surprised to read Walter Russell Mead on the situation in the Middle East:

Most Arab rulers now see Palestinian demands as an inconvenient obstacle to a necessary strategic alliance with Israel. The major Gulf states and Egypt apparently have agreed on two goals. The first is to strangle Hamas in Gaza to restore the authority of the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority. The second is to press the authority to accept the kind of peace that Israel has offered repeatedly and that Yasser Arafat and his successor have so far rejected.

These facts were reported here, thanks to the Debkafile site.

Evidently, Mahmoud Abbas is enraged. He does not know how to lose gracefully, so, for now he is playing for time:

Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority are playing for time. They support the first goal by refusing to pay the salaries of government employees in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip even as they resist pressure to make peace with the Jewish State. It is not yet clear what the authority’s final response to the peace pressure will be. Even if it ultimately decides to accept an Arab-sponsored compromise, making a show of resistance can improve its credibility with the Palestinian public and, perhaps, extract better terms.

As for the Hamas-run Gaza strip, the situation is dire:

Hamas is in an even more desperate plight. The Arab blockade and donor strike cripples Gaza in ways the Israelis never could. Food is growing scarce, electricity is erratic, unemployment exceeds 40%, and raw sewage runs into the sea. Many Gaza residents presumably want the only thing Hamas can’t offer: relief.

This means that the recent Palestinian protests on the border between Israel and Gazan were theatre, designed to gin up the outrage machine in Europe, the better to extract concessions from the Israelis. One remarks that they were not a rousing success.

Also:

The Arab governments want Hamas crushed, and they won’t stop Israel from doing the job.

The current demonstrations, Hamas hopes, can whip up a global wave of rage and indignation against Israel without provoking a full-on war. That might weaken the Arab coalition against it. But the prime audience for Hamas’s performance this time isn’t the Arab world; it is Turkey and Iran, whose support Hamas will need to survive if it is driven from Gaza (as Arafat was once driven from Jordan and Lebanon).

The wild card in the equation is the situation in Syria. Mead suggests that victorious Turkish and Iranian forces in that nation threaten Sunni Arabs. He adds that the apparent American willingness to walk away from the theatre represents a grievous error, one that will empower Turks, Iranians and Russians.

Sunni Arab states are left to fend for themselves, and are looking to Israel for protection. They also, Mead argues, believe that Israel can exert the most influence on the United States, thus keeping America in the game.

But the American protection on which Arabs rely cannot be taken for granted, as President Trump’s apparent determination to withdraw U.S. forces from Syria in the near term demonstrates. Under these circumstances, Israel’s unmatched access to Washington makes Jerusalem even more important to Arab calculations. Perhaps only Israel can keep the U.S. engaged in the region.

The Mental Health Industry

Writing in the City Journal James Panero reviews D. J. Jaffe’s new book: Insane Consequences: How the Mental Health Industry Fails the Mentally Ill. (Via Maggie’s Farm)

Mental health care is being disbursed by an industry that is controlled by lawyers and bureaucrats. The school shooters are only the most obvious sign of a system that does not help people. And that is unlikely to change. After President Trump and others recommended that one of the best approaches to school shooters was through the mental health system, his views have been drowned out by shrieking high school students who blame the NRA.

Panero summarizes Jaffe's view:

As Jaffe makes clear, the headline-making cases involving gun violence and mass murder are only the most atrocious symptoms of a much greater systemic failure, one that leads to the expense of billions a year on mental health yet leaves hundreds of thousands of mentally ill Americans to the cruelties of the streets, the “trans-institutionalization” of the prisons, and the life-threatening dangers of their own diseases.

We have mentioned the anosognosia problem before. People who are mentally ill often do not know that they are mentally ill. An illness that involves brain structure, that many psychiatrists now call a brain disease, does not make an individual fit to evaluate treatment options... or even to understand that he is mentally ill.

The system malfunctions at the most elementary level by allowing people with severe neurological problems to diagnose themselves and to choose whether or not to accept treatment. This is the contribution of the civil liberties lobbyists:

One problem is “anosognosia,” the clinical term for the lack of understanding of one’s own mental fitness. Anosognosia is “present in up to 50 percent of those with untreated schizophrenia and 40 percent of those with untreated bipolar disorder,” writes Jaffe. In a system that relies on patients serving as their own health-care agents and that no longer permits consultation on treatment with parents or loved ones, the consequences of anosognosia mean that the severely mentally ill often go untreated or undertreated. The result: “there are ten times more people with mental illness incarcerated as hospitalized.” Those are just the ones who make it to jail. Thousands die each year by their own hand or are shot by police committing crimes that shouldn’t have happened.

As I have often recommended, Jaffe agrees that involuntary commitment is the most effective way to reduce gun homicides committed by the mentally ill.

Panero explains Jaffe’s viewpoint:

Federal law already bans the sale of firearms to people who have been involuntarily committed. Written into existing policy, institutionalization therefore remains a proven path to reducing gun deaths, if only such intervention were still readily available to the severely mentally ill.  

Traumatized for Life

Herewith a mug shot of Kenleigh Prendergast. Her crime: she brazenly seduced a sixteen or seventeen year old high student. She did it in the context of her job as a guidance counselor at same high school.

Prendergast lost her job and is being indicted for sexual battery. Local law enforcement suggest that no force or coercion was involved. As you can imagine, the poor high school student who was seduced by Prendergast has been traumatized for life.

The Decline of American Manliness

In the time leading up to the last presidential election I often remarked on the manliness factor. Clearly, Donald Trump promoted himself as more manly than the other candidates. He certainly presented himself as more manly than Hillary Clinton… though, in the end, it was a close call. Trump by a nose… so to speak.

As I noted, Trump’s vulgar, bare-knuckled version of manliness was certainly not the only kind. Trump was not Eisenhower or MacArthur.

Yet, as president, however, Trump has surrounded himself with many traditionally manly men, from John Kelly to James Mattis. We would add Rex Tillerson and H. R. McMaster, men of unimpeachable manliness, but who seemed, nonetheless, not to have been up to their jobs.

Harvard Prof. Harvey Mansfield explains in a Wall Street Journal interview that there are several kinds of manliness. Among them are the gentleman. By definition, the gentleman is proper and courteous, genteel and respectful. He is neither a bully nor a thug. He did not take his marching orders from Friedrich Nietzsche.

And yet, Mansfield continues, no one embodied aristocratic gentility more than the Bushes, father and son. Unfortunately, the first went back on his sacred vow not to raise taxes. And if anything denotes manliness, it is the willingness to keep one’s word, come what may.

Bush the younger seemed to be too much the frat boy and not enough the grown up. He seemed too conciliatory and even weak when faced with the onslaught of Democratic criticism. You might say that the Golden Rule precluded his fighting back against the attacks, but still, he appeared more to be a punching bag than a fearless leader. In so doing he discredited WASP gentility.

One might say that Barack Obama was genteel, at least in his own way, but he consistently projected weakness on the world stage. And, when the time came to stand tall and proud, to represent America in the world stage, to be our fearless champion, he walked away. He did not want to compete as the alpha male, but to exercise what he would have called moral leadership. He wanted to plant his flag on the moral high ground. He talked American down, apologized for a nation of war criminals and manifested a patriotism deficiency.

People around the world cheered. Yet, world leaders, considerably more savvy about these matters, saw that occupying the moral high ground merely made you a target. And they saw that Obama’s weakness left the role of alpha male open, up for the taking. Around the world today we are seeing different male leaders, from Vladimir Putin to Xi Jinping, even including Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Narendra Modi… vying to occupy the empty place of the world’s alpha male.

Clearly, Donald Trump understands the competition and is engaging it.

His detractors vacillate between hysterical rants about how he is going to provoke a nuclear war and equally hysterical rants about how he is not being tough enough on Russia. Even today, when Trump is acting far more forcefully against Russian interests than Obama did, the commentariat is seriously whining that his words are not sufficiently insulting.

You will note that, when it comes to the competition to be alpha male, Western European leaders are not in the game. Theresa May and Angela Merkel have shown themselves to be weak leaders. Emmanuel Macron seems to be doing a good job for France, but he exudes youth… and besides, he married his mother. Scandinavian nations are completely feminized, run by feminists, overrun by invading Muslim refugees. They are sitting on the sidelines watching the competition for alpha maledom.

Mansfield offers a succinct and on-point analysis of the Obama attitude toward manliness:

In Mr. Mansfield’s view, Mr. Trump’s success wasn’t a racial reaction to President Obama as much as a backlash in favor of masculinity. Mr. Obama “had the scolding demeanor of a schoolmarm—very much, I think, following the temper of today’s feminists. It’s all a matter of correcting the behavior of misbehaving juveniles, and of condescension.” Here, he checks himself, allowing that this observation “is a little unfair to Obama, because some of his speeches were pretty good, and he did have a vision of America and the way America ought to be.” But it was not an America that “throws its weight around. That’s precisely what he wanted to avoid. So, in his foreign policy, and in his domestic role as condescender-in-chief, he showed his hostility to manliness.”

Obama ceded worldly leadership to more manly men, so his supporters are up in arms against Trump’s more vulgar version of manliness. Mansfield believes that Trump is a reaction to the gender neutering that has been going on in America for lo these many years.

He agrees that there’s a connection between the campaign for gender-neutrality in the U.S.—seeking, as he sees it, to erase all differences between the sexes—and the “hunger” that made Mr. Trump’s political rise possible.

I would offer a slightly different analysis here. America’s schools, from elementary schools to universities, have set about to diminish manliness, to beat down boys and men in favor of girls and women. While they are in school the males can do nothing more than acquiesce. When they are out of school many of them rebel against their feminist schoolmarms by harassing and abusing women. The current wave of sexual harassment did not come from the moon. It is a reaction to the attitude toward boys and men that has been on the march in school.

In a matriarchal culture like the school system, a gentlemanly approach to manliness seems weak. Thus, men resort to more dramatic, more overt, even more vulgar versions of masculinity, the better to repudiate the posture of weakness they were forced to assume in school.

Mansfield points out that in America’s universities, manliness has become taboo. These schools are in the business of producing what Arnold Schwarznegger famously called “girly men.” Mansfield adds that America’s bureaucracy, its deep state is filled with such girly men… and that Trump is trying to expunge them. Consider James Comey, Andrew McCabe and Peter Strzok … where would you locate them on the manliness scale.

Now in Washington there has been “a replacement of the people who reflect the values of American universities, where manliness is taboo.”

Of course the deep state and progressive Democrats are fighting back against Trump’s vulgar manliness. And yet, unmanly leaders who happily served one of our least manly presidents want to assert their manliness by overthrowing America’s current alpha male. While they denounce Trump as a vulgar hater, they manifest complete vulgarity and uncontrollable hatred.

Mansfield sees it in the #MeToo movement:

The movement “represents a particular critique of Trump for his sexual harassment, or at least his lamentable sexual reputation. It’s against the aggressive male, the presumptuous male, the male who hasn’t had his ‘consciousness raised’ sufficiently. That’s Trump, and the #MeToo campaign sees him as the embodiment of everything male they don’t like, and want to oppose.”

Currently, the war against men also manifests itself as a children’s crusade against guns. It’s like the anti-war movement—which was the precipitant for the anti-male bias.

You know, as I know, that the fault for the Parkland shooting lay with government agencies. From the FBI to the local sheriff to state authorities to the Obama administration policy of trying to keep disruptive children in school… put them all together and you produce Nikolas Cruz. A minimal intervention, a couple of days of involuntary commitment, would have prevented him from buying a gun.

And yet, all of the government officials were displaying empathy. They were doing exactly what our man-hating therapy culture prescribed. They were making nice to a boy who was out-of-control and who was threatening violence. Like Barack Obama’s approach to Islamist terrorism—look weak and apologetic, blame ourselves— government officials chose not intervene forcefully to prevent the massacre.

When it was over none of them took responsibility for their failures. They blamed the NRA.

Now, bands of junior Red Guards have joined forces to declare war on guns… and of course on toxic masculinity. They have learned their lessons well. They are a new vanguard in the war on men and boys.

After all, guns are a guy thing. They are a quintessentially guy thing. In a culture that admires and supports military power, taking guns away signifies an effort to weaken the nation. These children are making a dramatic display of impotent rage.

Heck of a Job, Sadiq

Heck of a job, Sadiq.

It turns out that London has surpassed New York City in murders. As Glenn Reynolds comments: “Sadiq Khan’s Doing a Bang-Up Job.”

As occasionally noted on this blog, London's mayor, Sadiq Khan has perfected the resting frightened face. He oozes cowardice. Criminals look into his weak eyes and see a freeway to murder.

The Times of London reports:

London overtook New York in murders for the first time in modern history in February as the capital endured a dramatic surge in knife crime.

Fifteen people were murdered in the capital, against 14 in New York. Both cities have almost exactly the same population.

London murders for March are also likely to exceed or equal New York’s. By late last night there had been 22 killings in the capital, according to the Metropolitan police, against 21 in the US city.

Eight Londoners were murdered between March 14 and March 20 alone and the total number of London murders, even excluding victims of terrorism, has risen by 38% since 2014.

As Reynolds adds, we are all consoling ourselves with the knowledge that there is an “anti-knife crime charity” on the case. Where are the adolescent peace marchers when London needs them.

Bigotry of Bigotries; All Is Bigotry

Famed economic historian Niall Ferguson was recently denounced for being insensitive to diversity. He does not mention the point-- perhaps it does not need mention-- but Ferguson is married to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, long a target of Islamist assassins, and the father of a biracial child. Calling him a bigot is a bit rich. Failing to feel some pride in his wife's courage bespeaks a special kind of bigotry.

Anyway Ferguson recently convened a conference at Stanford's Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank. No one much cared about what was discussed and debated. For those who believe in diversity uber alles, a conference on history and public policy must be judged by the number of representatives from different oppressed groups.

The virtue of this approach, Ferguson explains in his Times of London column this morning, is that you do not need to think. You do not need to consider the facts and the evidence. You do not need to activate your rational faculties. In this case, you need but know the gender breakdown of the group… to know what to believe.

The New York Times was appalled at the lack of diversity. It blared out the shrill headline… there were no women at the conference. Which means, to Times readers, that the whole thing was an exercise in bigotry. You need not know anything else.

As it happened, Ferguson did invite five women to participate. All declined. He described the result:

Last month I organised a small, invitation-only conference of historians who I knew shared my interest in trying to apply historical knowledge to contemporary policy problems. Five of the people I invited to give papers were women, but none was able to attend. I should have tried harder to find other female speakers, no doubt. But my failure to do so elicited a disproportionately vitriolic response.

Under a headline that included the words “Too white and too male”, The New York Times published photographs of all the speakers as if to shame them for having participated. Around a dozen academics took to social media to call the conference a “StanfordSausageFest”.

Shaming the participants as bigots. Two Stanford historians, wanting to show why they had not been invited, took the occasion to display their own special kind of bigotry:

So outraged were Stanford historians Allyson Hobbs and Priya Satia that they demanded “greater university oversight” of the Hoover Institution, where I work. Other Stanford institutions had embraced diversity, but Hoover had “proved impervious to the demographic changes transpiring in the academy.” It was “an ivory tower in the most literal sense”. The most literal sense?

Embracing diversity means hiring historians who want the world to know that they were hired to fulfill diversity quotas. And also, to promote radical leftist political causes. What other conclusion would you draw from their overreaction: they are especially sensitive about diversity because it seems to have been a primary consideration in their hiring:

What we see here is the sexism of the anti-sexists; the racism of the anti-racists. In this Through the Looking Glass world, diversity means homogeneity. I was struck by the objection of professors Hobbs and Satia that, whereas Stanford has the “high-minded purpose” of “fostering education, research and creativity for the benefit of humanity”, the Hoover Institution’s values are “very different . . . economic freedom, private enterprise, and commitment to facts and reason”. Good grief, not those discredited tenets of white patriarchy!

These professors are so woke that they have invented new words, words like whitesplaining… because, don’t you know, whites, and white men in particular are a plague visited on the earth:

“The whitesplaining of history is over,” declared another heated article by Satia last week. The historian’s role, she explained, was not to help improve policy but to be a “critic of government . . . to speak to the public, so that people may exert pressure on their elected representatives”. Her exemplar in this regard? Step forward the very white, very male British social historian EP Thompson.

Hideous Newspeak terms such as “whitesplaining” and “mansplaining” are symptoms of the degeneration of humanities in the modern university. Never mind the facts and reason, so the argument runs, all we need to know — if we don’t like what we hear — are the sex and race of the author.

Emphasize the point. They want to use the educational system as a way to brainwash students into adhering to the ideologically correct position, based on the sex and race of the author. As we have seen in many other cases, they denounce anyone who has ever taken a divergent political position and want him to be shut up or shut down.  Now, that will surely help America to compete in the world.

Of course, mindlessly attacking bigotry risks turning one into a bigot:

But does it really constitute progress if the proponents of diversity resort to the behaviour that was previously the preserve of sexists and racists? Publishing the names and mugshots of conference speakers is the kind of thing anti-semites once did to condemn the “over-representation” of Jewish people in academia. Terms such as “SausageFest” belong not in civil academic discourse but in the pages of male-chauvinist comics such as Viz.

In a world where it has recently come to everyone’s attention that the British Labour Party, through its leader Jeremy Corbyn, has been infested with anti-Semitism, we should not be surprised that leftist academics are trafficking in the same tropes. I am sure that I do not need to tell you where these woke professors stand on the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

Migrants Riot in the Streets in Germany

Here’s some more good news from Angela Merkel’s Germany. Ever since Frau Merkel opened Germany’s arms to a flood of Muslim refugee, the nation has changed. Unfortunately, not for the better.

The advantages of increased diversity have been overshadowed by the spike in violent crimes. Since Germans do not have a right to bear arms, they are prey to  refugees stabbing them with knives. Now, in the city of Druisberg, three groups of refugees get involved in a public riot, during which they attacked each other with machetes. The groups were Turks, Kurds and Lebanese.

Time to ban all sharp blades instruments.

The story, from Jim Hoft at the Gateway Pundit, was described in The Sunday Express:

Police were called to the Altmarkt area of the city over reports of the mass bawl. Officers used CS gas to control the brawling men.

The scores of men were also using telescopic batons in the fight in Druisburg, which is on the west of Germany.

Police said they were spat at and had objects hurled at them.

Around 50 people were arrested and onlookers captured the brutality in shocking photos.

Those arrested refused to explain what sparked the fight and 30 people were later released.

One is heartened to see that these refugees show respect for the local constabulary.

The story continues:

A police official told the newspaper Der Westen: "There are three rival groups. It may be a conflict between Turks, Lebanese and Kurds.

"Unlike with a demonstration of that size, we do not have a contact person, nobody wants to talk to the police.”

He added: "The officers got the situation under control before it escalated."

Of course, it was not the first time. The Express suggests that it was the third such conflict. One suspects that there were many more.

Between 20 to 30 people were on each side of the fight in Monday night's incident and police said the majority of those arrested were from a Lebanese background.

The police spokesman said similar incidents had taken place the previous night and the week before. Police are looking into whether there is a connection.