Is It Fair To Describe Land Acquisition By Jews In East Jerusalem As "Ethnic Cleansing"?

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Several days ago a friend brought to my attention a December 2 article from something called “The National,” with the headline “How Palestinians in Jerusalem are being targeted in a campaign of ethnic cleansing.”  If you haven’t heard of it, The National bills itself as “the Middle East’s leading English-language news service,” and is produced in the UAE.

Now, “ethnic cleansing” is a rather charged term.  I first heard that term used in the 1990s in the context of efforts by the Serbian army to remove Muslims and Croats from certain areas of Bosnia.  Here is a description of what that “ethnic cleansing” consisted of from Wikipedia:

The ethnic cleansing campaign that took place throughout areas controlled by the Bosnian Serbs targeted Muslim Bosniaks and Bosnian Croats. The ethnic cleansing campaign included unlawful confinement, murder, rape, sexual assault, torture, beating, robbery, and inhumane treatment of civilians; the targeting of political leaders, intellectuals, and professionals; the unlawful deportation and transfer of civilians; the unlawful shelling of civilians; the unlawful appropriation and plunder of real and personal property; the destruction of homes and businesses; and the destruction of places of worship.

The worst single event in the Bosnian ethnic cleansing occurred in and around the town of Srebrenica in 1995.  From the same Wikipedia article:

The events in Srebrenica in 1995 included the killing of more than 8,000  Bosniak("Bosnian Muslim") men and boys, as well as the mass expulsion of another 25,000–30,000 Bosniak civilians, in and around the town of Srebrenica in Bosnia and Herzegovina,

I have also seen the term “ethnic cleansing” used in connection with the events in Rwanda, also in the mid-1990s, that included the 1994 killing of an estimated 500,000 to 1 million members of the Tutsi tribe by members of the Hutu tribe.  The term “genocide” is also frequently used to describe these events.Now, is it remotely accurate to describe current events in Israel using this highly charged term “ethnic cleansing”?  The article from the National particularly focuses on developments in a neighborhood of East Jerusalem known to Palestinians as Silwan, located in a steep valley immediately south of the walled Old City of Jerusalem.  In recent decades the area has been inhabited mainly by Palestinians. Jews often refer to the same area, or at least part of it, as the “City of David,” based on a belief that this was the location where King David first established the city and built his palace back around 1000 BC.  Apparently there is substantial archeological evidence to support this belief, but I have not personally evaluated that.  When I visited Israel in 2017, there was a large archeological dig going on in some of this area, which you could look into from the adjacent higher ground; and there are plans to turn the archeological site into a visitors’ center.  Clearly, if there had previously been homes on this spot, they had been removed.

So how have Jews or Jewish organizations obtained control of this area to conduct their archeological dig? . . .

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Children Buy Into Climate Tipping Point

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twelve years left.jpg

The two-week UN climate conference has now come to an end in Poland.  And what good is a big UN conference without some serious propaganda?  

So the final message from this conference was, as far as I can tell, that the children of the world have accepted the now-official twelve year "tipping point" to save the world, and are demanding that the adults "take action."  Above is a photo from the Washington Post showing a group of Polish teenagers going on "#CLIMATESTRIKE" because there are only "12 YEARS LEFT".

Didn't these poor kids read the October 11 Manhattan Contrarian post about climate "tipping points"?  If they had, they would have known that the tipping points have already passed.  For example, Al Gore has already officially told us that the planetary "point of no return" was reached in 2016; James Hansen (of NASA) has already officially told us that the year when the "West Side Highway will be under water" was 2008; UN IPCC head Rajendra Pachauri had already officially announced that after 2012 it was "too late" to stop climate catastrophe; and head of UN Foundation Timothy Wirth had already told us that 2012 would be our "last chance" to save the planet.  Yes kids, I'm sorry to have to tell you, but we're already doomed.  So what's the point of setting another "tipping point”?  We're already tipped.  I recommend that you go out and enjoy an ice cream cone.

If you want to see something even worse, check out this Twitter tag #climatestrike.  Scroll a little down to find the speech delivered by Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg, with high moral dudgeon.  It's really creepy.

The New York Attorney General's Office Sinks To Yet A New Low

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It was 20 years ago – November 1998 – when the desperately ambitious Eliot Spitzer got elected Attorney General of New York.  Spitzer proceeded to show the world how this office could be thoroughly politicized, using phony prosecutions of one financial institution after another to get his name in the papers on a daily basis.  By 2007 Spitzer had moved on to the office of Governor (in which he lasted barely more than a year before seeing his career implode in a prostitution scandal).  But the lessons that Spitzer taught about how to abuse the law enforcement powers of the AG’s office in the pursuit of personal ambition were not lost on his successors.

In the 2012 election, we got the even-more-desperately-ambitious (and darling of the progressive left) Eric Schneiderman as AG.  Schneiderman took the politicization of the office to a level even far beyond that of Spitzer, which is saying a lot.  For a review a small selection of Schneiderman’s improper activities, see my May 8, 2018 post, “Good Riddance To Eric Schneiderman.”  By the way, that post was occasioned by Schneiderman’s own resignation from office, again over an issue of mistreatment of women.  What is it about these guys?  Could it be that bad guys are actually bad in more than one aspect of their lives?

And now the 2018 election has given us one Letitia James as our next AG, to assume office on January 1.  Ms. James has most recently served as New York City “Public Advocate” – an elected office without observable responsibilities that principally serves to keep its holder in the public eye at taxpayer expense ready to step in to fill the next office when its occupant either implodes or is term-limited.  (The prior Public Advocate was Bill de Blasio.)  

What are the prospects for Ms. James? . . .

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When Will It Be OK To Laugh At The Climate Campaigners?

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When Will It Be OK To Laugh At The Climate Campaigners?

The climate campaigners are so terribly, terribly earnest.  I guess it’s what we should expect.  After all, they have a mission to “save the planet.”  

A great opportunity to demonstrate your earnestness and fervor as a climate campaigner has been the latest UN climate confab, known as “COP 24,” taking place in Katowice, Poland this week and last.  22,000 bureaucrats and functionaries have gathered to tell the world that it must promptly do away with the evil fossil fuels and transition to clean energy. Over and over, the alarm was sounded.  From Think Progress on December 10:

The conference comes only two months after the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released an ominous report projecting that the world only has around 12 years before crossing a dangerous global warming threshold.  A subsequent report released two weeks ago, the congressionally-mandated National Climate Assessment, found that every region of the United States is already suffering the impacts of climate change.

And then, into the middle of what should have been universal acclaim for immediate UN-directed action, there dropped a U.S.-sponsored panel with the title “U.S. Innovative Technologies Spur Economic Dynamism.”  The lead speaker was a guy named Wells Griffith, advisor to President Trump at the Department of Energy.  Other panelists included “speakers representing natural gas, fracking, and nuclear energy proponents.”  Griffith was quoted as saying “We strongly believe that no country should have to sacrifice economic prosperity or energy security.”  Such incredible chutzpah!  What is the proper response?Anger and protests, of course.  Oh, and also laughter.  I mean, this was completely outside the bounds of polite conversation.  What kind of dolts could be saying such preposterous things?  From the Independent:

Mr. Griffith spoke for about ten minutes before the audience started laughing, mocking, and yelling at him.  Eventually, they started chanting “keep it in the ground” and “shame on you.”

Meanwhile, out here in the real world, are we allowed to notice that absolutely no one is remotely taking seriously the idea that carbon emissions from fossil fuels are really going to be significantly reduced? . . .

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George H.W. Bush And The Problem With The WASP Establishment

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The passing of President George H.W. Bush has occasioned many reassessments of both his person and his presidency. On the side of his person, H.W. had a long and (almost) universally-recognized list of admirable qualities. There was no one more fundamentally decent, more honorable, more devoted to family and country, more patriotic, more dedicated to true public service. And although he certainly had his share of ambition — it would be impossible to become President without that — he did not have the sort of blind and desperate personal ambition that has characterized, for example, Obama and Clinton, or for that matter Nixon and Trump. Overall, what more could you ask for in a President?

But if you want an assessment of the success of his presidency, my answer would be, it was not particularly successful. Why? The simple answer is that he was too nice. The slightly more complex answer is that he thought that he was dealing in good faith with reasonable people in a loyal opposition, and that the right approach to dealing with those people was to compromise. Or to put it another way, his Establishment Wasp sensibility left him highly vulnerable. The result was that time and again, on the most important issues, he got taken to the cleaners.

Let’s consider three of the most important examples. . . .

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Is "Action Against Climate Change" A Winning Political Issue?

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“Action against climate change”— that’s one of the big planks that the Democrats ran on in the recent election. For new socialist “it” Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, it’s the “Green New Deal”: “100% of national power generation from renewable sources". A few days ago, Ocasio-Cortez was joined in a Capitol Hill press conference by some 17 of her congressional colleagues, most of them newly-elected, to advocate for the Green New Deal program. Supporters included six of the new Democrats from California, as well as the woman from Minnesota who replaced Keith Ellison, Ilhan Omar. Here is Common Dreams reporting on the press conference on November 30:

In recent actions organized by the youth-led Sunrise Movement, thousands of people have swarmed the offices of Democratic lawmakers to demand they back a Green New Deal. One included a sit-in at the office of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi to urge Democratic leadership to commit to a climate plan in line with the crisis's scale and urgency. "Tens of thousands of young people have rushed to join our movement since Ocasio-Cortez proposed the Select Committee on a Green New Deal. The enthusiasm from young voters is clear: Pelosi and the Democratic leadership must put the Green New Deal at the top of the agenda for the new Congress in January," said Sunrise co-founder and spokesperson Varshini Prakash.

You can feel the excitement, and the momentum. At the Atlantic yesterday, Robinson Meyer compliments the activists on their new political strategy, destined to save our planet.

The Green New Deal aspires to cut U.S. carbon emissions fast enough to reach the Paris Agreement’s most ambitious climate goal: preventing the world from warming no more than 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100. . . . The Green New Deal aims to get us there—and remake the country in the process. It promises to give every American a job in that new economy: installing solar panels, retrofitting coastal  infrastructure, manufacturing electric vehicles. In the 1960s, the U.S. pointed the full power of its military-technological industry at going to the moon. Ocasio-Cortez wants to do the same thing, except to save the planet.

It would be hard to dispute that the “action against climate change” plank worked to the Democrats’ advantage in November. But then, neither the federal government nor any state has yet enacted carbon emissions restrictions that have really been at a level sufficient to be seriously noticed by the people. You might wonder, if a carbon tax or other emissions-restriction proposal gets to a level sufficient to start impacting overall emissions significantly, will it still be a political positive? Or will it inevitably be so costly as to cause a massive blowback. We can get an idea of the answer to that question by looking at some international experience.

For example, there’s Australia. . . .

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