Pope Benedict XVI, Previously Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Dies at 95

It's always a big deal when a pope dies, former pope or not.

IBenedict was decidedly preferable to Pope Francis, by far.

At the New York Times, "Benedict XVI, First Modern Pope to Resign, Dies at 95":

He defined a conservative course for the Roman Catholic Church, but his papacy was noted for his struggle with the clergy sexual abuse scandal and for his unexpected resignation.

Benedict XVI, the pope emeritus, a quiet scholar of diamond-hard intellect who spent much of his life enforcing church doctrine and defending tradition before shocking the Roman Catholic world by becoming the first pope in six centuries to resign, died on Saturday. He was 95.

Benedict’s death was announced by the Vatican. No cause was given. This past week, the Vatican said that Benedict’s health had taken a turn for the worse “due to advancing age.”

On Wednesday, Pope Francis asked those present at his weekly audience at the Vatican to pray for Benedict, who he said was “very ill.” He later visited him at the monastery on the Vatican City grounds where Benedict had lived since announcing his resignation in February 2013.

In that announcement, citing a loss of stamina and his “advanced age” at 85, Benedict said he was stepping down freely and “for the good of the church.” The decision, surprising the faithful and the world at large, capped a papacy of almost eight years in which his efforts to re-energize the Roman Catholic Church were often overshadowed by the unresolved sexual abuse scandal in the clergy. After the selection of his successor that March — Pope Francis, the former Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires — and a temporary stay at Castel Gandolfo, the papal summer residence, Benedict moved to a convent in Vatican City. It was the first time that two pontiffs had shared the same grounds. The two men were reportedly on good terms personally, but it was at times an awkward arrangement, and Francis moved decisively to reshape the papacy, firing or demoting many of Benedict’s traditionalist appointees and elevating the virtue of mercy over rules that Benedict had spent decades refining and enforcing.

Benedict, the uncharismatic intellectual who had largely preached to the church’s most fervent believers, was soon eclipsed by Francis, an unexpectedly popular successor who immediately sought to widen Catholicism’s appeal and to make the Vatican newly relevant in world affairs. But as Francis’ traditionalist-minded critics raised their voices in the later 2010s, they made Benedict a rallying point of their opposition, fueling fears that his resignation could promote a schism.

In early 2019, Benedict broke his post-papacy silence, issuing a 6,000-word letter that seemed at odds with his successor’s view of the sexual abuse scandals. Benedict attributed the crisis to the sexual revolution of the 1960s, secularization and an erosion of morality that he pinned on liberal theology. Francis, by contrast, saw its origins in the exaltation of authority and abuse of power in the church hierarchy.

Given his frail health at the time, however, many church watchers questioned whether Benedict had indeed written the letter or had been manipulated to issue it as a way to undercut Francis.

Benedict himself was swept up in the scandal after a January 2022 report that had been commissioned by the Roman Catholic Church in Munich to investigate how the church had handled cases of sexual abuse between 1945 and 2019. The report contended that Benedict had mishandled four cases involving the sexual abuse of minors decades ago, while he was an archbishop in Germany, and that he had misled investigators in his written answers.

Two weeks after the report was made public, Benedict acknowledged in a letter that “abuses and errors” had taken place under his watch and asked for forgiveness. But he denied any misconduct.

At the time of his resignation, his decision to step down humbled and humanized a pope whose papacy had become associated with tempests. There were tangles with Jews, Muslims and Anglicans, and with progressive Catholics, who were distressed by his overtures to the most traditionalist fringes of the Catholic world.

It was a painful paradox to his supporters that the long-gathering sexual abuse crisis should finally hit the Vatican with a vengeance under Benedict, in 2010. As Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, charged with leading the powerful Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican office responsible for defending church orthodoxy, he had been ahead of many peers in recognizing how deeply the church had been damaged by disclosures that priests around the world had sexually abused youths for decades and even longer. As early as 2005, he referred to the abuse as “filth in the church.”

Elected pope on April 19, 2005, after the death of John Paul II, Benedict went on to apologize for the abuse and met with victims, a first for the papacy. But he could not escape the reality that the church had shielded priests accused of molestation, minimized behavior that it would otherwise have deemed immoral, and kept all of it secret from the civil authorities, forestalling criminal prosecutions.

The reckoning clouded the widely held view that Benedict was the most influential intellectual force in the church in a generation.

“It’s worth stepping back for a moment and remembering that Benedict is probably the greatest scholar to rule the church since Innocent III, the brilliant jurist who served from 1198 to 1216,” the Princeton historian Anthony Grafton wrote in The New York Review of Books in 2010.

John Paul II had won hearts, but it was Cardinal Ratzinger who defined the corrective to what he and John Paul saw as an alarming liberal shift within the church, set in motion by the reforms of the Second Vatican Council in the early 1960s.

The church’s 265th pope, Benedict was the first German to hold the title in a half-millennium, and his election was a milestone toward Germany’s spiritual renewal 60 years after World War II and the Holocaust. At 78, he was also the oldest man to become pope since 1730.

The church he inherited was in crisis, the sexual abuse scandal being its most vivid manifestation. It was an institution run by a mainly European hierarchy overseeing a faithful — numbering one billion — largely residing in the developing world. And it was being torn between its ancient, insular ways and the modern world...

 

Antisemitism Is Rising at Colleges, and Jewish Students Are Facing Growing Hostility

Yes, and it ain't "right-wing" antisemitism.

At the Wall Street Journal, "Some students report being spat upon and harassed, while some campus groups have forced out those who support Israel":

Some college students say they have started hiding their Jewish identity in fear of rising antisemitism. “We have basically been shunned.” https://t.co/ibsI06h6xa

— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) December 14, 2022

Adina Pinsker commutes to Rutgers University in Newark, N.J., to study supply-chain management. She is also active in Hillel International, the nation’s largest collegiate Jewish organization.

When she arrives on campus, she takes an indirect route to class and tucks inside her shirt the silver Star of David she wears around her neck. These are precautions, she said, to avoid harassment from students who dislike Israel, the people who support it, or both.

“We have basically been shunned,” said Ms. Pinsker, who said she has been subject to derogatory remarks about her beliefs.

Ms. Pinsker’s actions are emblematic of rising fear among some Jewish college students around the country, who have begun shrouding their religious identity and political beliefs to avoid growing ostracism and harassment, according to interviews with dozens of students.

College campuses have long hosted heated debates about the Israel-Palestinian conflict. But now, students say anti-Jewish antagonism is on the rise: Antisemitic incidents have increased, and a growing number of campus groups bar students who support Israel from speaking or joining.

Hostility, including vandalism, threats and slurs toward Jewish students on college campuses increased more than threefold to 155 incidents in 2021 from 47 in 2014, according to the Anti-Defamation League, a New York-based Jewish civil rights organization which has tracked reports of such behavior since 2014. The group counted 2,717 antisemitic incidents in the U.S. overall last year, up 34% from 2020 and the highest number in its records dating to 1979.

Students at schools including the University of Vermont, Wellesley College and DePaul University have ejected Jewish students who support Israel from clubs and study groups, according to interviews with affected students.

Students at Tufts University, University of Southern California and University of California, Los Angeles tried to prevent Jewish classmates from serving in student government or attempted to remove them from positions in student government because of their support of Israel, according to students, administrators and campus news reports.

The uptick in incidents and tension on some campuses comes amid a string of recent high-profile controversies that have drawn renewed attention to antisemitism. This month Twitter suspended the account of rapper and entrepreneur Kanye West—who now goes by the name Ye—after he tweeted to his 32 million followers an image of a swastika merged with the Star of David, weeks after he tweeted: “I’m going death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE.”

On campus, students say that stereotypical antisemitic slurs are directed at Jews, but that much of the hostility derives from growing criticism of Israel’s handling of its political and military conflict with Palestinians over land rights. Jewish students say harassment often compounds when criticism of Israel increases.

Most American Jews feel an attachment to Israel, though many are critical of the Israeli government, according to a 2021 survey from the Pew Research Center.

Some of the conflict on campus stems from competing definitions of antisemitism and anti-Zionism and whether they overlap.

Anti-Zionism is a political position distinct from antisemitism, which is a prejudice, said Dylan Saba, an attorney with New York-based Palestine Legal, which works to support the civil and constitutional rights of people in the U.S. who advocate for Palestinians. The two are conflated by supporters of Israel to discredit critics, he said.

Condemning Israel may make some Jewish students feel uncomfortable, but that doesn’t mean it is antisemitic, he said. “All we are asking for is equal rights,” he said...

Bullshit. 

Anti-Zionism is anti-Israel is antisemitic. Full stop. "From the desert to the sea, Palestine will be free" means wiping Israel --- and all its Jewish citizens --- off the face of the map.

It's easy to prove, too. Just walk up to any pro-Palestine student organization --- literally in any college campus in America --- and ask its leaders if they support Hamas. In my experience they will not answer. Not only that, in my case, they'll call the police on you. 

Why Talk of the 'Abrahamic' Faiths is an Ecumenical Farce

From Raymond Ibrahim, at FrontPage Magazine, "Spearheaded by Pope Francis":

What if you had a deceased grandfather whom you were particularly fond of, and out of the blue, a stranger says: “Hey, that’s my grandpa!” Then—lest you think this stranger is somehow trying to ingratiate himself with you—he adds: “And everything you thought you knew about grandpa is wrong! Here, let me tell you what he really said and did throughout his life.” The stranger then proceeds to inform you that much of the good things you had long attributed to your grandfather were, not just false, but the exact opposite of what he is now attributing to your grandfather—much of which you find immensely disturbing.

Would that endear this stranger to you? Every proponent of the so-called “Abrahamic Faiths” apparently thinks so.

I will explain, but first let’s define “Abrahamism”: because the patriarch Abraham is an important figure in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, all three religions, according to this position, share a commonality that should bridge gaps and foster growth between them.

Pope Francis is one of the chief proponents of this view. Speaking of his recent participation at an interfaith conference in Bahrain, he said his purpose was to create “fraternal alliances” with Muslims “in the name of our Father Abraham.”

Even so, Abrahamism is hardly limited to octogenarian theologians; it’s entrenched in mainstream American discourse. Thus, even the Huffington Post (rather ludicrously) claims that “Muhammad clearly rejected elitism and racism and demanded that Muslims see their Abrahamic brothers and sisters as equals before God.” In fact, Muhammad and his Allah called for perpetual war on Christians and Jews, until they either embraced Islam or lived in humbled submission to their Muslim conquerors (Koran 9:29).

That, of course, did not stop former Secretary of State John Kerry from beating on a mosque drum and calling Muslims to prayer during his visit to Indonesia—before gushing: “It has been a special honor to visit this remarkable place of worship. We are all bound to one God and the Abrahamic faiths tie us together in love for our fellow man and honor for the same God.”

After a Muslim from an Oklahoma City mosque decapitated a woman, “an official from Washington D.C. flew in to Oklahoma to present a special thank you to the Muslim congregation,” lest they feel too guilty over their coreligionist’s actions. He read them a message from former President Barack Obama: “Your service is a powerful example of the powerful roots of the Abrahamic faiths and how our communities can come together with shared peace with dignity and a sense of justice.”

Needless to say, Obama himself has often spoken of “the shared Abrahamic roots of three of the world’s major religions.”

Meanwhile, few people seem to have given this Abrahamic business much thought: How is one people’s appropriation of another people’s heritage—which is precisely what Abrahamism is all about—supposed to help the two peoples get along?

For starters, Islam does not represent biblical characters the way they are presented in the Bible, the oldest book in existence that mentions them. Christians accept the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament, as it is. They do not add, take away, or distort the accounts of the patriarchs that Jews also rely on.

Conversely, while also relying on the figures of the Old and New Testaments—primarily for the weight of antiquity and authority attached to their names—Islam completely recasts them to fit its own agendas.

One need only look to the topic at hand for proof: Abraham.

Jews and Christians focus on different aspects of Abraham—the former see him as their patriarch in the flesh, the latter as their patriarch in faith or in spirit (e.g., Gal 3:6)—but they both rely on the same verbatim account of Abraham as found in Genesis.

In the Muslim account, however, not only does Abraham (Ibrahim) quit his country on God’s promise that he will make him “a great nation” (Gen. 12), but he exemplifies the hate Muslims are obligated to have for all non-Muslims: “You have a good example in Abraham and those who followed him,” Allah informs Muslims in Koran 60:4; “for they said to their people, ‘We disown you and the idols that you worship besides Allah. We renounce you: enmity and hate shall reign between us until you believe in Allah alone.’”

In fact, Koran 60:4 is the cornerstone verse that all “radical” Muslims—from al-Qaeda to the Islamic State—cite as proof that Muslims “must be hostile to the infidel—even if he is liberal and kind to you” (to quote the revered Sheikh Ibn Taymiyya, The Al-Qaeda Reader, p. 84).

Thus, immediately after quoting 60:4, Osama bin Laden once wrote:

So there is an enmity, evidenced by fierce hostility, and an internal hate from the heart. And this fierce hostility—that is, battle—ceases only if the infidel submits to the authority of Islam, or if his blood is forbidden from being shed [a dhimmi], or if the Muslims are [at that point in time] weak and incapable [of spreading sharia law to the world]. But if the hate at any time extinguishes from the hearts, this is great apostasy [The Al-Qaeda Reader, p. 43].

Such is the mutilation Patriarch Abraham has undergone in Islam. Not only is he not a source of commonality between Muslims on the one hand and Jews and Christians on the other; he is the chief figure to justify “enmity and hate … between us until you believe in Allah alone.”

Islam’s appropriation of Abraham has led to other, more concrete problems, of the sort one can expect when a stranger appears and says that the home you live in was actually bequeathed to him by your supposedly “shared” grandfather. Although the Jews claimed the Holy Land as their birthright for well over a millennium before Muhammad and Islam came along, Jerusalem is now special to Muslims partially because they also claim Abraham and other biblical figures.

As a result, statements like the following from mainline Christian groups such as the Presbyterian Church USA are common: “[PCUSA] strongly condemns the U.S. President’s [Trump’s] decision to single out Jerusalem as a Jewish capital. Jerusalem is the spiritual heart of three Abrahamic faiths …”

The Muslim appropriation and mutilation of revered biblical figures is a source of problems, not solutions. When, as another example, Islam’s Jesus—Isa—returns, he will smash all crosses (because they signify His death and resurrection, which Islam vehemently denies), abrogate the jizya (or dhimmi status, meaning Christians must either become Muslim or die) and slaughter all the pigs to boot. Again, not exactly a great shared source of “commonality” for Christians and Muslims.

It is only the secular mindset, which cannot comprehend beyond the surface fact that three religions claim the same figures—and so they must all eventually “be friends”—that does not and never will get it. All the more shame, then, that supposed Christian leaders, such as Pope Francis, rely on such “logic.”

Supreme Court to Hear Nazi-Era Art Cases

Background at the Times of Israel, "Heirs seek return of ‘cursed’ $200m golden treasure bought for Hitler: The Guelph collection, a trove of medieval Christian art, was sold to Nazi-run Prussia in 1935. Was the sale fair, or did Goering make its Jewish owners an offer they couldn’t refuse?"

And now at the Los Angeles Times, "Supreme Court weighs heirs’ claims over forced Jewish art sales during Nazi era":

WASHINGTON — Two years after Adolf Hitler took power in Germany, the Nazis achieved one of their cultural goals: the return of the Guelph Treasure, a collection of medieval Christian relics.

Under pressure from Hitler’s deputy Hermann Goering, a consortium of Jewish art dealers agreed to sell the collection to the Prussian State Museum. On June 14, 1935, Saemy Rosenberg signed the sale documents in Berlin on behalf of his partners, receiving about one-third of what they had paid for the items in 1929.

On Monday, the Supreme Court will consider whether Rosenberg’s grandson and heirs to two other art dealers can sue Germany and its state museum to recover the treasure or obtain compensation for the loss.

“This was a forced sale to one of the greatest art thieves of all time. And it was literally a present for Hitler,” said Jed Leiber, a musician and record producer in Los Angeles. He was referring to reports that Goering later presented the treasures to Hitler.

Most of the collection, known as Welfenschatz in Germany, is on display in the Bode Museum in Berlin.

Not long after the sale, Rosenberg and his family left Germany for Amsterdam, where his daughter is said to have been a playmate of Anne Frank’s. From there, they moved to London before finally settling in New York City after the war, where Rosenberg reestablished himself as a prominent art dealer.

In an interview, his grandson remembered the “wise, kind and elegant man” who taught him how to play chess. But he did not learn until decades later, long after Rosenberg’s death in 1971, about his grandfather’s role in the sale of the Guelph Treasure.

It is one of two Holocaust-era cases to be heard by the Supreme Court on Monday, and both turn on whether a foreign state — in this instance Germany or Hungary — may be sued in the United States for “rights in property taken in violation of international law.”

Usually, foreign governments and their agencies are shielded from suits under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act of 1976. But there is an exception for an “expropriation” that violates international law, and the federal appeals court in Washington last year refused to dismiss the suits against the Hungarian national railroad and the German state museum because the alleged seizures of property were acts of genocide.

“Nowhere was the Holocaust executed with such speed and ferocity as it was in Hungary,” the appeals court said in Simon vs. Hungary. In the summer of 1944, “Hungary rounded up more than 430,000 Jews for deportation to Nazi death camps,” the court noted. Government officials, including agents of the state railroad, organized four daily trains to shuttle victims to their deaths. Before cramming between 70 and 90 people into each freight car, railroad employees robbed them of all of their possessions.

Rosalie Simon and 12 other survivors of the death camps sued Hungary and its railroad, and the D.C. Circuit appeals court, by a 2-1 vote, rejected Hungary’s claim of immunity.

That decision helped clear the way for the suit against Germany over the Guelph Treasure. Before that, Leiber and his two co-plaintiffs, Alan Philipp and Gerald Stiebel, had filed a claim for recovery in Germany with an advisory commission for the Return of Cultural Property Seized as a Result of Nazi Persecution.

The commission, which included several retired German politicians and judges, decided the 1935 sale was the result of a back-and-forth negotiation and “not a compulsory sale due to persecution.” The reduced value reflected the impact of the Great Depression, the commission said.

The heirs then filed suit in federal court in Washington.

“It is beyond serious debate that Nazi Germany took property in violation of international law by systematically targeting its Jewish citizens to make their property vulnerable for seizure,” they argued.

Again, the D.C. Circuit Court agreed and refused Germany’s claim of immunity...

Keep reading.

 

What I Learned as a U.S. Jew After the Pittsburgh Attack

It's John Podhoretz, at the New York Post:

Me on America, Jews, and anti-Semitism: https://t.co/ZAmYuHu7v4

— John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) October 29, 2018

Today's cover: Victims of deadly Pittsburgh synagogue shooting identified https://t.co/EZlQoiKN0p pic.twitter.com/QK18Ivp8A5

— New York Post (@nypost) October 29, 2018

On this day of all days it needs to be said: America has been a blessing for the Jewish people unlike any other blessing given any other people in the history of the world.

One crime — or 29 separate crimes, committed at the same time by a monster in human form — cannot be allowed to overshadow this extraordinary fact.

My own gratitude to America is actually greater today than it was yesterday because of the outpouring of grief and rage and common humanity we have witnessed in the response to the horror in Pittsburgh.

The philo-Semitic response to this unspeakable act of anti-Semitism reveals how American Jews are anchored in America in a way that Jews who live anywhere else outside of Israel are not anchored to the lands in which they reside or have ever resided.

We are Americans. And we are Jews. And there is no contradiction between the two. When people talk freely and foolishly and noxiously about America as having been built on racism, there is one simple answer to their libel: George Washington’s letter to a synagogue in Newport, written in August 1790.

“The citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy — a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship,” Washington wrote. “May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants — while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.”

That final phrase, taken from the prophet Micah, was violated in the most obscene way on Saturday. But the story of America is a story of a country that has indeed served as vine and fig tree for the world’s most beleaguered peoples.

America has allowed us to sit in safety. America has allowed us to flourish due to its “enlarged and liberal policy” that assumes all human beings have inalienable rights.

From the time of the Jewish expulsion from the Holy Land in the first century after the death of Christ, Jews lived all over the world, but none of those places constituted a home. Even when we were treated relatively well, we were other. We were apart.

Because nothing is unmixed, because good can come out of bad, it has to be said that this forced separation is one of the reasons the Jewish people survived when thousands of ancient Middle Eastern tribes died out.

We believed what the Bible told us — that we had a special role, a special mission, a special place in the destiny of humankind. And that kept us alive.

America took us in, by the many millions, and the founding doctrine to which George Washington alluded in his letter made this country something vastly greater than just another dot on the millennia-old map of the diaspora.

The only true threat to the Jewish people from the American experiment comes not from hate but from love. The problem for American Jews, the late Irving Kristol used to say, isn’t that they want to kill us, but that they want to marry us. Our difficulty is maintaining the separateness necessary to the continuation of the Jews as a people — because America has so taken us to its bosom.

This is a tragically low moment, a day when the words we speak on Passover really came home: “In every generation they rise up against us to destroy us.” But this time it was not “they” who “rose up against us to destroy us.” And that makes all the difference.

It was not the Nazi regime. It was not the Spanish Inquisition. It was not Crusaders. It was not Russian or Polish soldiers. It was not an organized effort to extirpate.

It was the work of a lone villain poisoned by the ancient temptation that has guided the hands of Jew-haters from the days of Amalek — the temptation to believe that whatever ails you can be cured by the extirpation of Jews. Any Jews. All Jews...

RTWT.

The Hateful Left's Response to the Pittsburgh Synagogue Massacre

From David Harsanyi, at the Federalist, "The Left’s Response to the Mass Shooting of Jews is an Act of Bad Faith":

How are Americans ever going to 'come together' if the first thing a political party sees when it sees dead Americans is a partisan cudgel? https://t.co/tOIWmv2Boe

— David Harsanyi (@davidharsanyi) October 28, 2018

It was ironic to see many of the same liberals, who recently fought to prop up the world’s most powerful Jew-hating terror state, lecturing us on the importance of combating anti-Semitism. But there they were yesterday.

The same Voxers who had long rationalized, romanticized, and excused the Jew-killing terror organization of the Middle East were now blaming the existence of the evil, anti-Semitic Pittsburgh shooter on Republicans. The same Pod bros whose echo chamber deployed anti-Semitic dual-loyalty tropes to smear critics of the Iran deal were now incredibly concerned about the Jewish community.

There were many others, and that was bad enough. But others decided to dip into a little victim blaming, as well. Hadn’t American Jews been little too Jew-centric and pro-Israel for their own good?

Franklin Foer of The Atlantic demanded that Jews finally dispense with their faith, adopt his, and start expelling co-religionists for their political opinions. (If you want to read about the left’s co-opting of American Judaism, I recommend Jonathan Neumann’s excellent book, “To Heal The World?”) Wire creator David Simon went bold, embracing a transparent anti-Jewish conspiracy theory, accusing the Israeli government of intervening in the American democracy.

For those who confuse progressivism with Judaism — which is to say many — it might be difficult to understand that undermining the Democratic Party isn’t an act of anti-Semitism. The Trump administration, in fact, has been the most pro-Jewish in memory.

Every Jew who’s ever prayed understands the importance of Jerusalem in our faith, culture, and history. It was President Trump, not any of the other presidents who promised the same, who recognized Jerusalem as the undisputed Jewish capital, putting an end to the fiction that it’s a shared city.

It was Trump who withdrew from the Iran deal and once again isolated the single most dangerous threat to Jewish lives in the world, the Holocaust-denying theocrats of the Islamic Republic.

It was Trump who cut more than $200 million in aid to a Palestinian government that was not only inciting terrorists (including the murder of a Jewish-American citizen named Ari Fuld; but since he never wrote for The Washington Post, you might not have heard of him) but also rewarded the killers’ families.

It was his administration that kicked the Palestine Liberation Organization, the most successful Jewish-civilian murdering organization of the past 60 years, out of DC. It was the Trump administration that cut funding to the anti-Semitic U.N. Relief and Works Agency. It was also the Trump administration that turned around the unique Obama-era legacy of standing against Israel at the United Nations. And it is his administration that cracked down on anti-Semitism on college campuses and that deported one of the last real-life Nazis.

At the same time, the liberal activist resistance wing is being led by a couple of Louis Farrakhan fangirls, and most Jewish Democrats are scared to death to say a single word in protest. But that’s another story...

Keep reading.

Is Germany a Normal Country?

Good question.

One reason I read so much German history, especially military history, is because, frankly, Germany's not normal historically. The Fischer thesis specifically points to the origins of World War One in aggressive German nationalism and expansionism (shocking, frankly, in its similarities to German expansionism under the Nazi regime).

So, to that effect, here's Jeremy Cliffe, at the New Statesman, "Is Germany a normal country? Its citizens are finding that a painful question":

It needs to seek a balance: neither forgetting its past, nor succumbing to it.

Near my flat in Berlin, six cobblestone-sized plaques glint from the pavement. The first reads: “Here lived Maria Witelson, née Zuckermann. Born 1892. Deported 1942. Murdered in Majdanek.” Each of the others commemorates one of her five teenage children, who also died in that concentration camp near Lublin in Poland.

Along the street are similar plaques recalling the Holz family, deported one by one over a six-week period in 1943. Old Ernst died a week afterwards in Theresienstadt; Herbert and Lieselotte (née Cohn) in Auschwitz on unknown dates; young Willy in January 1945 on the death march to Buchenwald. Such Stolpersteine, or “stumbling stones”, have been sprouting from German streets since 1992.

These monuments to the country’s terrible abnormality – and its admirable determination never to forget it – are not isolated examples. Every synagogue in Germany gets police protection. The mainstream media often boycotts far-right politicians. Every school pupil must visit a concentration camp. The forest of tombstone-like pillars constituting the Holocaust memorial in Berlin takes up an entire block.

This is the context in which Finis Germania (“The End of Germany”) recently appeared. Written by Rolf Peter Sieferle, a Heidelberg-based historian who committed suicide last September, this collection of essays asserts that a guilt-stricken Germany has swallowed the lie of its own abnormality and is determined to dissolve its identity through European federalism and open-border immigration. Most offensively, it compares Germans to the Jews; claiming that the former are now being collectively punished for the Holocaust as the latter were once collectively punished for the Crucifixion.

The book would have made little impact without its inclusion on June’s “non-fiction book of the month”, a list drawn up by a jury of broadcasters and writers. Since then, sales have soared. It is now top of Amazon Germany’s bestseller list. Berlin bookshops are out of copies.

Uproar has ensued. Johannes Saltzwedel, the journalist who proposed its recommendation more as provocation than endorsement, has withdrawn from the “non-fiction book of the month” jury. Finis Germania appears to have been excised from some bestseller lists. Dark rumours swirl that establishment forces have frustrated reprints by its publisher (a fringe outfit based in right-wing Saxony).

The saga tells a bigger story about today’s Germany. The country spent the immediate postwar years concentrating on reconstruction. But then the generation of 1968 radicals (including a then-leftist Sieferle) began to ask their parents about the recent past and upbraid them for smothering it; inspired partly by the 1967 book The Inability to Mourn by Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich. This generation dismantled what the Mitscherlichs called Germany’s “manic defences” against its past. It produced a culture of remembrance and guilt that still dominates the political class.

All of this is as welcome as it is visible on my Berlin street. Yet it also poses an unanswerable question that must nonetheless be answered: is Germany a normal country? That arose most urgently in 1990. The new, reunified Germany would be the largest country in the EU and by far the largest European economy. This begged questions about its military, economic and political role; about whether it should seek to lead or defer to others; about where the limits of its power and responsibilities should lie. Yet Helmut Kohl, the then chancellor, engineered no such debate. The philosopher Jürgen Habermas complained that: “Essential questions of political self-understanding – in particular the question of how we should understand the ‘normality’ of the approaching Berlin Republic – have remained open”.

This all marks German politics today. On Trump and Macron, on the environment and on the euro, the reunified country bequeathed by Kohl to successors such as Angela Merkel is increasingly expected to show leadership. Yet there is no consensus among its elites about what form that leadership should take, if any. Some urge idealism. Some advocate a rigorous focus on national interests. Most are for an ill-defined fudge. Few debate how the various imperatives might be balanced. Germany is as unclear as ever about the scope and limits of its own normalcy...

I'd say keep Germany tied down, just like it was tied down throughout the Cold War by U.S. power and multilateral institutions. Why take any chances, especially in an era like this.

Continue reading, in any case.

On Linda Sarsour’s Politics of Hate

She even more dangerous because of her out attractiveness. She's like a snake deceiving you in the name of the devil, she comes to you like a dove, only to bite you to deliver the hand of death.

At the Tablet, "On Linda Sarsour’s Politics of Hate and the Pathos of Her Jewish Enablers":

On Linda Sarsour’s Politics of Hate and the Pathos of Her Jewish Enablers https://t.co/NR5PDHabJT via @tabletmag

— Joel B. Pollak (@joelpollak) June 18, 2017

Linda Sarsour is a progressive-media darling. One of Essence magazine’s “Woke 100 Women,” Sarsour was named a leader of the Women’s March that followed President Donald Trump’s inauguration, despite declaring that “nothing is creepier than Zionism”—though her wish to “take away” the “vagina” of clitoridectomy victim and human-rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, praise for Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, upholding Saudi Arabia as a bastion of women’s lib, embrace of the terrorist murderer Rasmea Odeh, and claim that “Shariah law is reasonable” because “suddenly all your loans & credits cards become interest-free,” are all—at least in my humble estimation—definitely creepier.

Yet Sarsour’s ride on the media wonder-wheel continues—thanks in part to Jewish individuals and organizations who embrace the idea that haters like Sarsour can’t actually hate them. Recently, the “homegirl in a hijab,” as a fawning New York Times profile described her, delivered the commencement address at the City University of New York’s School of Public Health. It was a strange choice on the part of CUNY, not least because Sarsour has zero professional experience in the field. Prior to the event, critics, many of them Jewish, called upon CUNY to rescind its invitation in light of Sarsour’s rhetoric and associations. A group of progressive Jews released an open letter in defense of Sarsour. “In this time, when so many marginalized communities in our country are targeted on the streets and from the highest offices of government” the letter solemnly declared, “we are committed to bridging communal boundaries and standing in solidarity with one another.”

Also coming to Sarsour’s defense was the Anti-Defamation League, which presumably stands against the defamation of women, Jews, and the Jewish state. “Despite our deep opposition to Sarsour’s views on Israel,” its head Jonathan Greenblatt said, before offering the following non sequitur, “we believe that she has a First Amendment right to offer those views.”

No one, of course, disputes Sarsour’s legal right to spout whatever vicious nonsense she wants. But there is nothing in the First Amendment that says Sarsour has a “right” to speak at CUNY, or appear on CNN, or publish an op-ed in the New York Times. As an organization ostensibly committed to fighting anti-Semitism and other forms of prejudice, the ADL was under no obligation to defend a Jew-baiting, demagogic, foul-mouthed, sectarian bully—someone who, in fact, asserted that anti-Semitism is “different than anti-black racism or Islamophobia because it’s not systemic.” Not systemic? Tell that to the survivors of the most systematized effort at extermination in human history. If there is a more utterly mendacious claim that perverts the truth about humanity’s oldest, deadliest and very much “systemic” hatred, I’m not sure what it could be.

Still, Greenblatt—whose organization was once devoted to combating anti-Semitism—decided that it was better to side with his fellow progressives in public than risk his position on the team. Why?

This is an important question for Jewish Democrats, since the weird combination of communal masochism and personal arrogance that characterizes Sarsour’s self-appointed “Jewish allies” also makes for a particularly ineffective form of coalition politics—at least for the Jewish side of the equation...

Why? Democrats have been poisoned by the seeds of self-hatred, and thus they'll let people like Sarsour do the work of Satan to destroy them. It's not difficult.

But keep reading.

The Nature of the War Against Us

From David Horowitz, at FrontPage Magazine, "Understanding our enemies both secular and religious":

Love death. This is the improbable instruction that the founder of an Egyptian sect called the Muslim Brotherhood imparted to his followers in the 1920s. A disciple named Mohammed Atta copied this instruction into his journal just before leading the attack on the World Trade Center three days before my biopsy. Was it a coincidence that this dark creed took root in a country of monuments to the human quest for life beyond the grave? The sentence Mohammed Atta actually jotted down was this: “Prepare for holy war and be lovers of death.”

How can one love death? This is a question that is incomprehensible to us unless we are overwhelmed by personal defeats. But it is the enigma at the heart of human history, which is a narrative moved by war between men. For how can men go to war unless they love death, or a cause that is worth more than life itself?

*****

The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in 1928, but the summons to holy war was planted in Arab hearts more than a thousand years before. The prophet Mohammed created the Muslim faith and claimed he was fulfilling the gospel of Christ. But Mohammed was a warrior and Jesus a man of peace who instructed his followers to shun the path of history and separate the sacred from the profane. His kingdom was not of this world: Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, and unto God that which is God’s. Mohammed summoned his followers to make the world a place for God, which meant conquering Caesar himself.

Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian who was executed for treason in 1966, is recognized as the intellectual father of the Islamic jihad. His brother Mohammed was a teacher of its leader Osama Bin Laden and his texts are read by would-be martyrs in madrassas across the Muslim world. The hope that consumed Sayyid Qutb’s life was to establish the rule of Islam throughout the heathen nations and the Islamic umma, to make the world a holy place.

Sayyid Qutb regarded Christianity as a threat to this Islamic redemption. He condemned Christians for their separation of the sacred from the profane, God’s world from Ceasar’s. He called this division a “hideous schizophrenia,” which reflected the very corruption he set out to correct. Christians had created liberal societies, Qutb said, in which “God’s existence is not denied, but His domain is restricted to the heavens and His rule on earth is suspended.” Islam’s task was “to unite the world and the faith.” It was what Jewish mystics called “tikkun olam,” a mission to repair the world by bringing about the rule of God’s law on earth.

Qutb wrote this prescription in one of his most famous texts, which he called Social Justice In Islam. The mission of Islam, he explained, was “to unite heaven and earth in a single system.” To make the world one.

This is the totalitarian idea. When the wave of redemption is complete, nothing will remain untransformed, nothing unholy or unjust. Total transformation is the goal of all radical jihads, including the flight that burned the towers of evil in Manhattan. It is the cause that Mohammed Atta served. Like all revolutionary passions, the totalitarian hope of radical Islam is to redeem the world. It is the desire to put order into our lives and to heal the wound in creation.

But there is no earthly doctor who can cure us. The practical consequence of all radical dreams, therefore, is a permanent holy war.

Inevitably and invariably, the effort to make the world whole begins with its division into two opposing camps. In order to conduct the work of salvation, redeemers must separate the light from the darkness, the just from the unjust, the believers from the damned. For radical Muslims this division is the line separating the House of Islam from the House of War, the realm of the faithful from the world of heretics and infidels, who are impure of heart and who must be converted or destroyed.

*****

A thousand years before Mohammed Atta left on his fatal mission, a Shi’ite named Hassan al-Sabbah began a holy war to overthrow the Muslim state. In Hassan’s eyes, the Sunni caliphate that the Prophet Mohammed had established to govern Islam had already fallen into a state of corruption. It was no longer holy; it was no longer God’s. To cleanse Islam and restore the faith, Hassan created a martyr vanguard, whom others referred to as the “Assassins,” and whose deeds have bequeathed to us the word itself. The mission of the Assassins was to kill the apostate rulers of the false Islamic state, and purify the realm.

Because their mission was a service to God, it was considered a dishonor to return alive, and none did. The Koran assured the Assassins that the reward for the life they gave was paradise itself.  “So let them fight in the way of God who sell the present life for the world to come. Whosoever fights in the way of God and is slain, conquers. We shall bring him a mighty wage.” When the Assassins’ first victim, the vizier in Quhistan was slain, Hassan al-Sabbah said, “The killing of this devil is the beginning of bliss.” Revolutionaries love death because it is the gate of heaven and the beginning of bliss.

*****

Four years before 9/11, Mohammed Atta traveled to Afghanistan to join the International Islamic Front for the Holy War against Jews and Crusaders, whose leader was Osama bin Laden. Atta was a small, wiry man, the humorless son of a demanding father. After his team of modern Assassins turned the towers in Manhattan into a smoking ruin, his father told reporters, “My son is a very sensitive man.  He is soft and was extremely attached to his mother.”

Before the hour of his jihad, on the very page where he had copied the summons to love death, Mohammed Atta acknowledged that it was a call to perform acts unnatural to men. “Everybody hates death, fears death,” he wrote, but then explained why men should love it nonetheless. “Only the believers who know the life after death and the reward after death, will be the ones seeking death.” Mohammed Atta had found a cause that was greater than life itself.

But was Mohammed Atta right? Did his martyrs sign up for death to gain a greater return? This presumes that the only reason people would seek to end their lives in this world is the hope of reward in another. Do they not also run towards what they fear? When we have guilty secrets to hide do we not find ways to end the awful wait before judgment by leaving the clues that betray us? Especially if we are withholding secrets from those we fear and love. Are we not all guilty in the eyes of God, and did not Mohammed Atta fear and love Him?

What if martyrs hate life more than they love death? If we look at the scanty record of Mohammed Atta’s time on this earth, it suggests that escape was always on his mind. “Purify your heart and clean it of all earthly matters,” he wrote in his instructions to his martyr team. “The time of fun and waste has gone. The time of judgment has arrived.”

In his short life, Mohammed Atta does not seem to have had much room for pleasure. His father was a successful lawyer, who was ambitious and austere. The family had two residences but lived frugally and apart from others. “They didn’t visit and weren’t visited,” said a neighbor later. The father agreed, “We are people who keep to ourselves.” An adolescent friend of Mohammed’s described the Atta household: “It was a house of study. No playing, no entertainment. Just study.” Even as an adolescent, to avoid the contamination of the flesh Mohammed would leave the room when Egyptian television featured belly-dancing programs, as it frequently did.

According to those who knew him as a young adult, Mohammed Atta was insular, religiously strict and psychologically intense. The death of an insect made him emotional; the modern world repelled him. A fellow urban planning student remembered how the usually reserved Mohammed became enraged by a hotel construction near the ancient market of Aleppo, which he viewed as the desecration of Islam’s heritage. “Disney World,” he sneered, the Crusaders’ revenge. Mohammed continued to avoid sensual images whether from television screens or wall posters. He hated and feared the female gender, averting his eyes from women who so much as neglected to cover their arms.

Others testified that he could not take pleasure in so basic and social a human act as eating. A roommate recalled that he sustained himself by spooning lumps from a heap of cold potatoes he would mash and leave on a plate in the communal refrigerator for a week at a time. A German convert who hung out with members of the terrorist cell that Mohammed headed, thought it was his morbid seriousness that allowed him to lead others but dismissed him derisively as a “harmless, intelligent, nut.” The people he lived with longed for him to leave. A girlfriend of one of them said, “A good day was when Mohammed was not home.”

Five years before his appointment with death, Mohammed Atta drew up a will in which he admonished his mourners to die as good Muslims. “I don’t want a pregnant woman or a person who is not clean to come and say good-bye to me because I don’t approve it,” he stressed. “The people who will clean my body should be good Muslims… The person who will wash my body near my genitals must wear gloves on his hands so he won’t touch my genitals…. I don’t want any women to go to my grave at all during my funeral or on any occasion thereafter.”

 In life, Mohammed Atta despised women, but on his way to death, he promised his martyrs many, citing the Koranic verse: “Know that the gardens of paradise are waiting for you in all their beauty and the women of paradise are waiting, calling out, ‘Come hither, friend of God.’ They have dressed in their most beautiful clothing.”

Mohammed also wrote down these instructions for the mission ahead: “When the confrontation begins, strike like champions who do not want to go back to this world. Shout, ‘Allahu Akbar [God is great],’ because this strikes fear in the hearts of the non-believers.” Whoever neglected his will or did not follow Islam, Mohammed warned, “that person will be held responsible in the end.”

Like Mohammed Atta we long for the judgment that will make right what is not. We want to see virtue rewarded and the wicked rebuked. We yearn for release from the frustrations and disappointments of an imperfect life. Consequently every God of love is also a God of justice, and therefore a God of punishment and death. If this were not so, if God did not care to sort out good from evil, what would His love be worth?

The emotions of fear and hope spring from the love of self, and therefore make our motives suspect. Are those who claim to be God’s warriors pure of heart and above doubt? Can men serve God if they are really serving themselves? Do martyrdoms like Mohammed Atta’s represent noble aspirations, or are they merely desperate remedies for personal defeats?

Mohammed Atta was a withdrawn and ineffectual man who died without achieving his worldly ambitions. He never realized his goal of becoming an architect or urban planner, never married or had a family. Apart from his jihad, Mohammed Atta never made a mark in life. But in death he was a god, bringing judgment to 3,000 innocent souls.

If Allah is the maker of life, as Mohammed Atta believed, could He desire the destruction of what he had created? What is suicide but rage at the living, and contempt for the life left behind? Mohammed Atta offered his deed of destruction as a gift to God. In his eyes, his martyrdom was unselfish and the strangers he killed were not innocent. His mission was to purge the world of wasteful pleasures, to vanquish the guilty and to implement God’s grace.

But if God wanted to cleanse His creation, why would He need Mohammed Atta to accomplish His will?

*****

These are the questions of an agnostic, who has no business saying what God desires or does not. Nonetheless, an agnostic can appreciate believers like Pascal, whose humility is transparent and who is attempting to make sense of the incomprehensible through faith. Why are we born? Why are we here? Why do we die? An agnostic can respect the faith of a skeptic who confronts our misery and refuses to concede defeat. He can admire a faith that provides consolation for the inconsolable, and in a heartless world finds reason to live a moral life.

But murder is not moral and the desire to redeem the world requires it. Because redemption requires the damnation of those who do not want to be saved.      

*****

My father was an atheist, and a progressive who embraced the secular belief of the social redeemers. Along with all who think they have practical answers to the absurd cruelties of our human lot, my father felt superior to those who do not, especially those who take solace in a religious faith. In this prejudice, my father had impressive company. The psychologist Sigmund Freud regarded religion as an illusion without a future. But, like all revolutionaries Freud could not live without his own reservoir of belief, which was science. Progress was his human faith.

Whether they are secularists like my father and Freud, or religious zealots like Mohammed Atta, those who believe we can become masters of our fates think they know more than Pascal. But in their search for truth where do they imagine they have gone that he did not go before them? What do they think they know that Pascal did not? Their bravado is only a mask for the inevitable defeat that is our common lot, an inverse mirror of their human need...

Keep reading.

Trump Trolls, the Alt-Right, Neo-Reactionaries, and Anti-Semitism

New York Times editor Jonathan Weisman tweeted out Robert Kagan's recent essay the other day, and it's like a volcano erupted with the most vile anti-Semitism you've ever seen. I mean, seriously. It was nasty.

So, actually, this nasty stuff is now a thing, the putrid effluence of the far-right fever swamp of neo-reaction and identitarianism. It remains to be seen how generally widespread is the phenomenon. Some folks speculated that a few trolls were running the whole show, opening new accounts as fast as others were suspended, and using lists of prominent conservative Jews on the "Never Trump" bandwagon. I have no idea. Whatever the case, it's nasty and besmirches all the good things Donald Trump's bringing to the political system.

"This is how fascism comes to America, not with jackboots & salutes but with a television huckster." Robert Kagan https://t.co/9C8rBqyLbR

— Jonathan Weisman (@jonathanweisman) May 19, 2016

When is Trump going to condemn his backers' anti-Semitic attacks on journalists Jonathan Weisman,Julia Ioffe & more https://t.co/ER6CNQSIQC

— Steven Greenhouse (@greenhousenyt) May 21, 2016

In any case, there's more from Claire Berlinski, at Ricochet, "American Anti-Semitism Breaks My Heart."

And from Jamie Kirchick, at Commentary, "Trump’s Terrifying Online Brigades":

When the journalist Julia Ioffe published a profile of Melania Trump for GQ, she had reason to expect that supporters of the presumptive GOP presidential nominee would be disappointed by its portrayal of Donald Trump’s third wife. “Her journey to marrying The Donald is like a fairy tale, or a too-crazy-to-believe rom-com,” Ioffe revealed. “It’s a story full of naked ambition, stunning beauty, a shockingly Trump-like dad, and even some family secrets.” What Ioffe, who is Jewish, did not expect was a torrent of anti-Semitic abuse and death threats.

On Twitter, the candidate’s anonymous backers superimposed images of Ioffe’s face over those of concentration camp inmates. On her voicemail, they left recordings of Hitler speeches. “This is not a heavily critical article. There is nothing in it that is untrue,” Ioffe told the Guardian. “If this is how Trump supporters swing into action, what happens when the press looks into corrupt dealings, for example, or is critical of his policies?”

It’s a good question. For any journalist or political figure who has been remotely critical of Donald Trump over the past year, Ioffe’s treatment came as no surprise. It was hardly news that his backers would traffic in this sort of filth—all the more so if the critic is Jewish, a woman, gay, or not white. Of course, crudity has always existed in American political life, on a bipartisan basis. But there is something new in the pervasive and relentless nastiness of Trump’s supporters, especially as they represent themselves online. While it’s certainly true that most of Trump’s supporters are neither racists nor anti-Semites, it appears to be the case that all of the racists and anti-Semites in this country (and many beyond) support Trump.

To take but one of countless examples, one of the most active pro-Trump Twitter accounts, with 27,000 followers, goes by the handle @Ricky_Vaughn99. Unlike many of his Internet brothers-in-arms, who utilize the likenesses of obscure interwar European fascists and nationalists as their avatars, this troll features the visage of actor Charlie Sheen from the film Major League. What he lacks in visible nostalgia for the Third Reich, @Ricky_Vaughn99 makes up for in his concern about “#whitegenocide,” interpreted as any sign of nonwhite racial advancement. “The Trump presidency will probably be bad for neocon jews, bad for liberal jews, but good for jews who are believers in the nation-state and American nationalism,” he told Armin Rosen, of Tablet magazine, via Twitter. Contrary to most Americans, @Ricky_Vaughn99 thrills at Trump’s every insult, derogatory comment, and affront. On his Twitter profile, he describes himself as a “free speech activist,” an identifier defiantly adopted as a mark of resistance against an alleged campaign by “SJWs” (social-justice warriors) to circumscribe the freedom of white men.

“Free speech activist” is a curiously prevalent appellation on the medium of Twitter for members of the “alt-right,” short for “alternative right,” a populist movement that has been emboldened and bolstered by the fortunes of the Trump campaign. Existing largely on the Internet, which makes the size of its following difficult to gauge, the alt-right is proudly ethno-nationalist, protectionist, isolationist, and culturally traditionalist. It takes intellectual guidance from publications and websites like American Renaissance, Radix Journal, Occidental Observer, Taki’s Magazine, and, increasingly, the popular news website Breitbart.com.

It was at Breitbart that, in March, an extensive article appeared defending the alt-right. While “establishment” conservative institutions and intellectuals have criticized the alt-right as little more than a bunch of gussied-up white supremacists, authors Milo Yiannopoulos and Allum Bokhari explained that these arbiters of good conservative taste have the alt-right all wrong. Praising the “youthful energy” and “taboo-defying rhetoric” of alt-right writers and activists, the two Breitbart columnists led readers through a sort of ideological safari, applying their own taxonomy to the various types of personalities who comprise this “dangerously bright” movement.

Their “Guide to the Alt Right” is a prolix defense of juvenile racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny, and other assorted bigotries as much-needed “provocation” to the enervated conservative movement. One might quickly object that when so much of the alt-right’s rhetoric consists of terms like “peak negro,” “Niggertech,” and “ovenworthy” (the latter meaning “anything that would be substantially improved by immediate incineration”), it becomes difficult to know where the “taboo-defying rhetoric” and intellectual “provocation” end and where the monstrousness begins.

Lest anyone take offense at these and other memes popularized by the dregs of the Internet (such as the cartoon of a hook-nosed Jewish caricature named “Shlomo Shekelburg” who cries, “Remember the 6 trillion, goyim!”) Yiannopoulos and Bokhari reassure their readers that the alt-right is harmless, the cheek of its younger cohort no different than that of the “60’s kids” who “shocked their parents with promiscuity, long hair and rock’n’roll.” Besides, the movement’s “true motivations,” they tell us, are “not racism, the restoration of monarchy or traditional gender roles, but lulz.” (“Lulz” is the Internet term to define the mocking laughter that arises from purposefully shocking someone else’s sense of decorum.)

Yiannopolous and Bokhari insist that the alt-right “is best defined by what it stands against rather than what it stands for.” This makes it the perfect intellectual base of the Trump campaign. Building walls, banning Muslims, “bombing the shit” out of people—there is nothing aspirational or positive about Trump, other than his vague and windy promise to “Make America Great Again.” In this important sense, Trump is truly an anomalous phenomenon, as he has replaced the perennially optimistic message of the American presidential campaign with something more suitable to Venezuela. Though we all have reason to be annoyed by the cultural resurgence of political correctness, the alt-right remedy is the oratorical inverse of the problem they claim they despise. Social-justice warriors needlessly shut down debate and proscribe certain words and ideas to assuage the feelings of allegedly vulnerable minority groups; the alt-right needlessly flings around racial epithets and Der Stürmer cartoons purely to transgress accepted social codes. And that’s only the most charitable explanation for their behavior, assuming as it does that they don’t “really” mean what they say.

But what about that element of the alt-right that actually does have a political agenda beyond annoying its adversaries? The primary alt-right constituency, according to Yiannopolous and Bokhari, consists of “natural conservatives,” largely white, male, middle-class Americans “who are unapologetically embracing a new identity politics that prioritizes the interests of their own demographic.” These voters are “conservative” not so much in the American sense as in the European one; they show no interest whatsoever in the GOP’s traditional free-market economic agenda of trade, low taxes, and flexible labor regulations, preferring instead a strongman leader promising trade protectionism, entitlement expansion, and the assertion of white male privilege.

Illiberalism is sweeping the globe. Coming from left or right—and, as evidenced in this country by Trump and socialist presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, often converging in that place where extremes meet—political leaders and movements across the democratic world are advocating economic and ethnic nationalism, the closing of borders, the imposition of trade barriers, the dissolution of multilateral alliances, and accommodation with dictatorships. Our politics are becoming darker, our peoples more susceptible to the promises of demagogues, and the rise of an explicitly anti-democratic, pro-authoritarian right seems more possible in America than ever before...

More.

Note, though, that leftist anti-Semitism is far-and-away more widespread and heavily institutionalized than anything we've seen so far with the Trump trolls. The British Labour Party is currently mainstreaming anti-Semitic hatred on a scale that's shocked the United Kingdom. There's nothing remotely like this in terms of core establishment Jew-hated among folks on the so-called alt-right. Still, it's a terrible development and I expect that Trump himself is going to repudiate it forcefully as his campaign gears up for the GOP convention, especially considering major Jewish figures --- like Sheldon Adelson --- are primed to be significant sources of campaign finance for the Republican ticket, and Adelson's camp is said to be working in the background on Trump's upcoming visit to Israel. So, expect a major smackdown against the Trump trolls at the top levels of the campaign. Let the Democrats and British leftists stew in the bilge of anti-Zionist hatred. Conservatives must repudiate it root and branch.

Donald Trump and the American Future

From David Horowitz, at FrontPage Magazine:

I have to confess that of late I have become increasingly pessimistic about the future of our country. For awhile I was hopeful that the electorate would finally cut through the fog of political correctness: the racist, collectivist, America-and-white people-are-guilty party line of the Democratic Party. Not so any more. Both the conservative punditry (with a few notable exceptions) and the Republican establishment are proving as feckless in resisting the left’s attacks, and as unfocused on the Democratic adversary as the Republican congress. The Democrats are at it full bore. Having gotten away with disarming the nation in the face of its enemies, and with promoting systematic racial discrimination, along with racist lynch mobs in the streets, the Democrats are busy on the attack. In their election campaign year, they are accusing Republican candidates of being racist and recruiters for ISIS. The only serious - i.e., bloody-minded - fire coming from the Republican side is directed at Donald Trump.  (Think about it – all the Democrats need is a damaged Trump. Then they can condemn Republicans for merely associating with him.) If Republicans want to join Democrats and match their viciousness in taking down the Republican front-runner, Hillary Clinton is going to be our next president.

The most recent explosion of outrage at Trump is his proposal for a temporary moratorium on Muslim immigration “until we figure it out” – i.e., figure out how to vet Muslim immigrants so that we don’t allow anymore Tashfeen Malik’s into the country where they are determined to kill innocent Americans. Otherwise perfectly intelligent conservatives have joined the Democrat smear squad in denouncing Trump’s suggestion as unconstitutional, illegal, and un-American. In fact, as a cursory Internet search should convince anyone free of anti-Republican bigotry, Trump’s proposal is not only constitutional (foreigners seeking entry into the country have no rights under the US Constitution – only US citizens do. It is also perfectly legal. There is an actual U.S. code that says the president has the authority to ban “any class” of individuals he deems a threat to the American citizens.

Moreover, Trump’s proposal is obviously sensible – i.e., is justified by a realistic confrontation with the facts. According to a Pew Poll, 64% of Muslims in Egypt and Pakistan believe that leaving the Muslim faith should be punished by death. In Afghanistan the figure is 78%. While 64% of Muslims are not active terrorists, there was not a single member of the Muslim community in San Bernardino willing to alert authorities to the hateful, indeed murderous ideas of the shooter couple. Punishing apostasy by death is only a crystallization of the jihadists’ belief that all non-Muslims who refuse to submit to the Islamic faith should be killed. That is what the war that Islamists have declared on us is about. Donald Trump has done the country a service by putting this issue – previously unmentionable – before the American public. Thus far he is the only candidate with the guts to do this, and that is why he is leading in the polls by a wide margin.

According to a 2009 “World Opinion Poll” conducted by the University of Maryland, between 30% and 50% of Muslims in Muslim countries approve of the terrorist attacks on America. If 64% of Muslims think that infidels deserve death – and an impressive percentage approve of the attacks on America and the West – that amounts to between 500 million and 800 million sworn enemies of our country and our culture.  Say it’s only a tenth of those numbers. That’s 50 million or more potential killers for Allah, and supporters of killers for Allah. Keep in mind that these terrorists already have chemical and biological weapons. Is there any person not blinded by leftwing ideas that doesn’t think this presents a vetting problem for us in dealing with Muslim immigrants and visitors? Moreover, a vetting problem that we obviously haven’t begun to solve? However, perhaps Trump’s blanket ban, though constitutional, legal and temporary - is also impractical. The details as Trump himself would be the first to admit are still negotiable. A practical plan even one of reduced scope is better than none.

So why are conservatives treating Trump as a pariah? Clinton and Obama have the blood of hundreds of thousands of Christians and non-ISIS Muslims on their hands not to mention the American victims of their rules of engagement. It is they and their party who have undermined the war on radical Islamists for 22 years since Bill Clinton refused to visit the thousand victims of the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. Democrats have fought to try terrorist soldiers in civil courts where they would be given the rights of American citizens; they have fought to close Guantanamo, and have deliberately released terrorist generals to return to the battlefield and kill more Americans; Democrats have fought to abandon our military presence in Iraq, surrendering a hard won victory to ISIS and Iran; Obama and Hillary overthrew – illegally, immorally and unconstitutionally – the anti-al Qaeda government of Libya and turned that country into a terrorist hunting ground. Where are the Republican litanies high-lighting these betrayals?

In the meantime, jihadist mosques protected by Democrats continue to function – including the one attended by the San Bernardino shooters – the city of New York continues to bar first responders from monitoring mosques to see what they are preaching, 350 Sanctuary cities still refuse to cooperate with Homeland Security. All under the enemy-friendly doctrine that all Muslims belong to a protected species that cannot be scrutinized about their commitment to a religion that preaches hatred of non-Muslims, particularly Jews, and whose avowed goal is the political submission of the entire world to the Islamic faith.  On the other side, a Republican/conservative chorus has so tarred and feathered the Republican front-runner who is doing by default the work that they should be doing, that they have made it virtually impossible for him to win a general election. And make no mistake, they have also made it virtually impossible for any Republican candidate to speak frankly about the Democrats’ perfidy and the danger it poses to our country.

How much innocent blood do Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have on their hands? How much innocent blood will be spilled in the next four years if Clinton is elected? These are the questions Republicans should be asking, not whether Donald Trump is a bigot. He obviously is not.  Impolitic yes. Racist no. Donald Trump has many faults but lack of political courage is not one of them. He seems motivated by concern for the pit into which this country has fallen under an administration with catastrophic priorities and uncertain loyalties. That is what Republicans need to think about when framing their next attacks. Otherwise the future is dim indeed.

Palestinian Leaders Have Created a Culture of Death That's Motivating the Latest Violent Terrorism

I think Jeffrey Goldberg's phrase, "the stabbing intifada," really captures it.

And here's more, from Tzipi Hotovely, at the Wall Street Journal, "Abbas: ‘We Welcome Every Drop of Blood Spilled in Jerusalem’":

The latest surge of Palestinian terror attacks against Israelis has come in the immediate wake of explicit calls by the Palestinian leadership to “spill blood.” This well-orchestrated campaign of violence follows many years in which Palestinian children have been taught to idolize the murder of Jews as a sacred value and to regard their own death in this “jihad” as the pinnacle of their aspirations.

Such violence has deep roots. It goes back to the rampages at the behest of Haj Amin al-Husseini, a Muslim activist and at one point grand mufti of Jerusalem, in the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s. It continued with the fedayeen Palestinian militants in the 1950s and ’60s, and evolved into the terrorism of the Palestine Liberation Organization and Fatah under Yasser Arafat and now Mahmoud Abbas. Anyone who claims that Palestinian terror against Jews dates only to 1967, or is a response to Israeli settlements, should become more informed of the conflict’s history.

Yet the apathy shown by the international community to the death-culture fostered by Palestinian elites, and the unbalanced manner in which subsequent violence is often treated by the international media—as if there is any kind of symmetry between terrorists and their victims—is doing long-term, and possibly irrevocable, harm to generations of Palestinians.

A few recent examples underscore the depth of the problem.

Keep reading.

Radical Leftists Demand 'Justice for Palestinians' at Anti-Israel Protest in London (VIDEO)

Behold the complete moral bankruptcy of the contemporary "progressive" left. When you're protesting to defend Palestinians murdering innocent Jews with butcher knives and meat cleavers, there's something deeply wrong with your fundamental values.

Previously, "New Palestinian Intifada 'is drenched in the fever of martyrdom and faith-based hate...' (VIDEO)," and "Fanatical Palestinian Slams Car Into Bus Stop, Jumps Out and Hacks Israeli to Death (VIDEO)."

And at the video, hate-mongering ghoul George Galloway leads despicable, demonic leftists in London's anti-Israel demonstration, via Ruptly:

The Hijrah Into Europe: Islam's Jihad Immigration

From Robert Spencer, at FrontPage Magazine, "“Refugees” colonize a continent":

Approximately 104,460 asylum seekers arrived in Germany during the month of August, setting a new record. That makes 413,535 registered refugees and migrants coming to Germany in 2015 so far. The country expects a total of around 800,000 people to seek asylum in Germany this year. And that’s just Germany. The entire continent of Europe is being inundated with refugees at a rate unprecedented in world history. This is no longer just a “refugee crisis.” This is a hijrah.

Hijrah, or jihad by emigration, is, according to Islamic tradition, the migration or journey of Muhammad and his followers from Mecca to Yathrib, later renamed by him to Medina, in the year 622 CE. It was after the hijrah that Muhammad for the first time became not just a preacher of religious ideas, but a political and military leader. That was what occasioned his new “revelations” exhorting his followers to commit violence against unbelievers. Significantly, the Islamic calendar counts the hijrah, not Muhammad’s birth or the occasion of his first “revelation,” as the beginning of Islam, implying that Islam is not fully itself without a political and military component.

To emigrate in the cause of Allah – that is, to move to a new land in order to bring Islam there, is considered in Islam to be a highly meritorious act. “And whoever emigrates for the cause of Allah will find on the earth many locations and abundance,” says the Qur’an. “And whoever leaves his home as an emigrant to Allah and His Messenger and then death overtakes him, his reward has already become incumbent upon Allah. And Allah is ever Forgiving and Merciful.” (4:100) The exalted status of such emigrants led a British jihad group that won notoriety (and a shutdown by the government) a few years ago for celebrating 9/11 to call itself Al-Muhajiroun: The Emigrants.

And now a hijrah of a much greater magnitude is upon us. Evidence that this is a hijrah, not simply a humanitarian crisis, came last February, but was little noted at the time and almost immediately forgotten. The Islamic State published a document entitled, “Libya: The Strategic Gateway for the Islamic State.” Gateway into Europe, that is: the document exhorted Muslims to go to Libya and cross from there as refugees into Europe. This document tells would-be jihadis that weapons from Gaddafi’s arsenal are plentiful and easy to obtain in Libya – and that the country “has a long coast and looks upon the southern Crusader states, which can be reached with ease by even a rudimentary boat.”

The Islamic State did not have in mind just a few jihadis crossing from Libya: it also emerged last February that the jihadis planned to flood Europe with as many as 500,000 refugees. Now the number is shooting well beyond that in Germany alone. Of course, not all of these refugees are Islamic jihadis. Not all are even Muslims, although most are. However, no effort whatsoever is being made to determine the refugees’ adherence to Sharia and desire to bring it to their new land. Any such effort would be “Islamophobic.” Yet there are already hints that the Islamic State is putting its plan into effect: jihadis have already been found among the refugees trying to enter Europe. There will be many more such discoveries.

Eight hundred thousand Muslim refugees in one year alone. This will transform Germany, and Europe, forever, overtaxing the welfare economies of its wealthiest nations and altering the cultural landscape beyond recognition. Yet the serious public discussion that needs to be had about this crisis is shouted down by the usual nonsense: the Washington Post Wednesday published an inflammatory and irresponsible piece likening those concerned about this massive Muslim influx into Europe to 1930s Nazis ready to incinerate Jews by the millions...

More.

Plus, at the New York Times, "Hungarian Leader Rebuked for Saying Muslim Migrants Must Be Blocked ‘to Keep Europe Christian’."

Of course he was rebuked. Radical leftists are traitors to their respective European nation-states, and they're facilitating the destruction of their own countries with an Islamic jihad conquest. Just standing up for state sovereignty and the culture, like Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban, will get you branded a racist.

Palestinians in Hebron Stalk Hyena on the Highway, Corner It, and Then Stone It to Death (VIDEO)

Hey, it's all fun and games to chase down a hyena to stone it to death, right?

All from the "religion of peace" folks.

Remember, these people feel the same way about Jews.

Demonic.

At Bare Naked Islam, "HEBRON: Palestinian savages corner a hyena in the road with their cars and then have fun stoning him to death."

The Orwellian Obama Presidency

From Bret Stephens, at WSJ, "Under Mr. Obama, friends are enemies, denial is wisdom, capitulation is victory":

The humiliating denouement to America’s involvement in Yemen came over the weekend, when U.S. Special Forces were forced to evacuate a base from which they had operated against the local branch of al Qaeda. This is the same branch that claimed responsibility for the January attack on Charlie Hebdo and has long been considered to pose the most direct threat to Europe and the United States.

So who should Barack Obama be declaring war on in the Middle East other than the state of Israel?

There is an upside-down quality to this president’s world view. His administration is now on better terms with Iran—whose Houthi proxies, with the slogan “God is great, death to America, death to Israel, damn the Jews, power to Islam,” just deposed Yemen’s legitimate president—than it is with Israel. He claims we are winning the war against Islamic State even as the group continues to extend its reach into Libya, Yemen and Nigeria.

He treats Republicans in the Senate as an enemy when it comes to the Iranian nuclear negotiations, while treating the Russian foreign ministry as a diplomatic partner. He favors the moral legitimacy of the United Nations Security Council to that of the U.S. Congress. He is facilitating Bashar Assad’s war on his own people by targeting ISIS so the Syrian dictator can train his fire on our ostensible allies in the Free Syrian Army.

He was prepared to embrace a Muslim Brother as president of Egypt but maintains an arm’s-length relationship with his popular pro-American successor. He has no problem keeping company with Al Sharpton and tagging an American police department as comprehensively racist but is nothing if not adamant that the words “Islamic” and “terrorism” must on no account ever be conjoined. The deeper that Russian forces advance into Ukraine, the more they violate cease-fires, the weaker the Kiev government becomes, the more insistent he is that his response to Russia is working.

To adapt George Orwell’s motto for Oceania: Under Mr. Obama, friends are enemies, denial is wisdom, capitulation is victory...

Perfect. Devastating. Just too honest, my goodness!

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V.S. Naipaul: Islamic State Dedicated to Bringing About Another Holocaust

One of the very best essays I've read on the issue of how Islamic is Islamic State.

Again, ISIS is Islamic. Very Islamic.

Read Naipal at London's Daily Mail, "A grotesque love of propaganda. Unspeakable barbarity. The loathing of Jews - and a hunger for world domination. In this stunning intervention, literary colossus V.S. NAIPAUL says ISIS is now the Fourth Reich":

Are Isis and its followers heretics? The politicians of Europe and America, including David Cameron, Barack Obama and Francois Hollande, after every Islamicist outrage insist on describing them as a lunatic fringe. Their constant refrain is that these perpetrators of murder and terror have as much to do with Islam as the Ku Klux Klan has to do with Christianity or the testament of Jesus Christ. But does such political assurance bear scrutiny?

Of course the politicians, church leaders and others who say ‘these atrocities have nothing to do with Islam’ are not making a researched or considered theological statement. They are attempting, quite rightly, to prevent civil discord in a world in which there are considerable Muslim immigrant populations in most countries of Europe and in the US.

So what impels the tiny minority of young men and women from immigrant communities to volunteer themselves to ‘jihad’ and to almost certain self-destruction, or young women to abscond from their families and from European reality to become jihadi brides.

When I visited Pakistan, I discovered what I have characterised as the effects of an ideological nurture. The Pakistani or Bangladeshi Muslim is taught that he or she has no historical antecedents before the conquest of parts of India and its conversion to the faith.

The pressures of poverty and promise bring this Muslim to Britain. He and his family don’t speak English.

They are confined to work and live in an exclusively immigrant area of an inner city – say Bradford, Tower Hamlets or parts of Greater Manchester or Birmingham.

Their children are raised as Muslims, some strict some not so strict, and are sent to the normal city schools which soon become almost exclusively immigrant.

Some find that the values that traditionally inform them are at variance with those of the lives they see around them. This is true for even those Muslim young men and women who are being educated, through Britain’s by-and-large egalitarian system, to be surgeons or computer programmers.

Islamism is simpler. There are rules to obey, a jihad to fight against the civilisation you can’t comprehend, a heaven to go to when you martyr yourself and now a real fighting force in the world which you can join to simplify and solve your existence: no history to complicate your self-awareness, no art to distract you, no ambivalence and choices that ‘Western’ civilisation offers you, no doubt about the fruits of martyrdom, no allegiance to the country in which you were brought up and which gave you a free education and perhaps welfare benefits. A gun, a half-understood prayer and the simplicity that a simple and singular upbringing craves.

That is why they go. And volunteer for death, and die.

In the past three or four centuries since Descartes, Leibniz and Newton, Islam remained encrypted in the revelations of the Koran and the Hadith of a 6th Century life.

The expansion of the scientific enquiry coincided with or possibly caused the maritime expansion of European colonialism. Empirical science, the progress of liberal religion and the germination of modern democratic ideas coincided with European colonial dominion over Asia and Africa.

The process of decolonisation in the 20th Century gave rise to the idea that every advance in civilisation, scientific or democratic, was to be condemned as ‘colonial’. There may be no ideological answer to such bigotry.

The Islamic world does contain currents that are opposed to the interpretations that Isis gives to the Koran, the Hadith and to sharia. These are yet to declare themselves...

Remember, the people calling for a reformation are attacked as "Islamophobes."

There is no call among the left's terror enablers to reform the religion. Islam is not Islam!

More.

The Holocaust of Left-Wing Anti-Semitism on America's Campuses

These are indeed dangerous times, and the spread of leftist hatred has the imprimatur of the Democrat Party and the Obama administration. It's not just shocking. It's truly frightening. It's already like France for American Jews. A matter of life and death.

Are America’s Liberal Colleges Breeding Anti-Semitism? http://t.co/FvwzDbUXnr pic.twitter.com/gVLBXvkMvh

— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) March 19, 2015

At the Daily Beast, "Berkeley’s Swastika Problem: Are America’s Liberal Colleges Breeding Anti-Semitism?":

A majority of Jewish college students, 54 percent, reported being subjected to or witness to anti-Semitism on campus during a six-month period, according to a 2014 survey published by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and Trinity College. Not only was this survey undertaken before the violent summer conflict in Gaza, which researchers Barry A. Kosmin and Ariela Keysar said led to a “worldwide flare-up in anti-Semitism,” but they also noted that the “data suggest there is an under-reporting of anti-Semitism through the normal campus channels.”

Even more disturbingly, students reported that they often felt universities did not take their concerns about anti-Semitism seriously. “The response of many university faculty and administrators to Jewish complaints and outrage often shows that their threshold for the definition of the existence of the crime of anti-Semitism is set ridiculously high,” write Kosmin and Keysar.

At schools where students strive to protect the rights of ethnic and racial minorities, stomp out sexual and gender discrimination, and regularly remind people to “check their privilege,” hate speech against the Jewish community has become a pernicious problem.

“We still find anti-Semitic slogans written on bathrooms. We see swastikas on doors still, but they’re kind of dismissed. They’re painted over because there are just so many things that happened,” says Ori Herschmann, a senior at UC Berkeley who serves in the student government. “A lot of students find swastikas and come to me. [They see it] on dorms, on bathroom stalls, just random places on campus.”

Herschmann said the during the conflict in Gaza this summer, he also came across sidewalk graffiti on campus that exhorted “Death to Israel” and “Kill all the Jews.” (Herschmann shared a photograph of the former remark painted on a sidewalk but did not have one of the latter).

Herschmann says the Jewish undergraduates who come to him are often scared. He believes that part of his responsibility as a student leader is to make the Berkeley campus safer. Herschmann sponsored a bill condemning anti-Semitism on Berkeley’s campus and calling for the creation of a committee to deal with anti-Semitism. “I take this extremely seriously. The more I let the anti-Semitic rhetoric get me down, the less I can do my job,” he says. The Berkeley measure passed on February 25.
After initially telling The Daily Beast that they had not heard any reports of anti-Semitic graffiti this academic year, a rep with UC Berkeley later investigated and confirmed that they had been made aware of reports of swastikas on campus, as well as the “Death to Israel” graffiti.

In the case of the “Death to Israel” graffiti, the rep, Dan Mogulof, assistant vice chancellor in the Office of Communications and Public Affairs, maintained the graffiti was technically off-campus, near a popular restaurant called Freehouse. “It looks to me like we can account for that graffiti on the sidewalk, but that was in a public area not on campus,” said Mogulof. “The restaurant was in the city, not on campus. It’s impossible to know if that was someone from the surrounding community, high school kids, or someone affiliated with the campus.”

Hershmann noted that the graffiti was “right across from campus. It's literally across the street…for the university to dodge the question and say it's not part of campus is disgraceful. Students live all over Berkeley. If anti-Semitic events occur all over Berkeley, they [the administration] should make students feel safe.” Freehouse also happens to be only 413 feet from the UC Berkeley Hillel house, according to Google Maps.

'Death to America! Death to Israel!' say Houthis in Yemen

And these guys are Shiite Muslims!

Between Islamic State and the Iranian-backed rebels in Yemen, U.S. foreign policy has its hands full.

And I thought Obama was going to heal the rifts with the Muslim world. Yikes!

At LAT:

The worshipers pumped their fists to the rhythm of the chant, the younger ones among them, including children, whipping their arms high above their heads.

“God is great!” came the refrain. “Death to America! Death to Israel! A curse upon the Jews! Victory for Islam!”

The crowd shouted it twice more  in unison, before bowing their foreheads onto the thick carpet of the Bleily Mosque.

The slogan, spray-painted on walls and cinderblock throughout the Yemeni capital, has become the calling card of the Houthis, a Shiite faction that overran the Yemeni capital last year — and in recent weeks consolidated control of the central government. Critics call the move a coup.

The Houthi takeover has brought fears that Yemen — once touted by President Obama as a success of his counter-terrorism policy — could collapse, fall into civil war or disintegrate into warring regions. The country is home to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, considered among the most dangerous branches of the global terrorist network.

The Houthis are sworn enemies of Al Qaeda. But they are also implacable foes of Washington and its regional allies, especially neighboring Saudi Arabia, a key U.S. partner that views Yemen as part of its sphere of influence and has a massive embassy here.

Last week, the United States and Saudi Arabia, among other nations, withdrew their diplomatic missions from the Yemeni capital. The U.N. called on the Houthis to relinquish control of the government.

Friday’s sermon at a signature Houthi mosque provided some sense of the mood of defiance that has come to characterize the northern-based provincial power, which has vowed to destroy Al Qaeda and cut down on rampant government corruption. The fiery collective chant followed an equally blistering political broadside from the preacher, Faisal Atef, who lavished scorn upon Yemen’s recent leadership, including U.S.-backed President Abdu Rabu Mansour Hadi, now under house arrest.

“Those leaders do not care about your concerns and pains!” said Atef, his eyes scanning the crowd before him. “All they care about is seven-star service.”

The comments came only a few hours after Jamal Benomar, special United Nations envoy to Yemen, announced a “breakthrough” in U.N.-brokered negotiations while urging all parties to act “in the spirit of agreement.”

The U.N. envoy said the talks were nearing a deal that would help resolve the nation’s dire security and political crisis. He unveiled the creation of a new transitional council to run the country while negotiations on a comprehensive agreement continued.

The U.N. message hinted of reconciliation in Yemen’s fractured and volatile political landscape. The scene at the Houthi mosque didn’t suggest a mood of compromise...