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The situation of Jews in Europe and the UK today has been described as a slow pogrom. Pogrom is a Russian word pronounced with the accent on the second syllable (pogrom‘). These were small scale actions during the late 19th Century against Jews in the area known as the “Pale of the Settlement”. Which is an area comprised of parts of Belarus, Moldova, much of Ukraine and parts of Poland. This was where Jews were directed to settle starting in the reign of Catherine the Great. This restriction was ended by a decree of Kerensky’s Provisional Government in March 1917.  Melanie Phillips in Commentary is first with “Time to Leave?” 

These are alarming times for Jews in Britain and Europe.

The British Labour Party is convulsed over the realization that it is riddled with anti-Semitism. Jeremy Corbyn, its leader and a friend to Hamas, has been exposed as belonging to Facebook groups hosting claims that the Jews were behind ISIS and 9/11, that the Rothschilds controlled the world’s finances, and other such paranoid theories. The backwash from the exposure of these groups revealed a tsunami of anti-Jewish insults, smears, and libels by Labour supporters. Corbyn’s responses, often truculent and insulting to the Jewish community, have only deepened the crisis.

Last year, according to the Community Security Trust, saw the highest number of anti-Semitic incidents in Britain since the CST started recording such data in 1984. In the past, surges in these incidents had occurred in response to the reporting of Israeli military action. That’s disturbing enough. But what was more disturbing here was that this record surge had occurred in the absence of any such Israeli activity.

Worse is happening in mainland Europe. In Paris, an 85-year-old survivor of the Shoah, Mireille Knoll, was stabbed to death and her body burned by a young Muslim. Last year, a man shouting “Allahu akbar” beat up Jewish schoolteacher Sarah Halimi and threw her to her death out of her Paris apartment window. In January, a teenage girl in the Paris suburb of Sarcelles wearing the uniform of her Jewish school was slashed in the face with a knife. Later that month, an eight-year-old boy was beaten in the same area because he was wearing a kippah. In February, two Jewish men in Paris were attacked with a hacksaw amid a volley of Jew-hating abuse. …

… There are three different sources of anti-Semitism in Britain and Europe: on the left, on the right, and in the Muslim community. All these threats to the Jews are connected to one another. All are rooted in threats to Britain and Europe. All are creating a perfect anti-Jewish storm. …

… ANTI-WEST LEFT-THINK

This left-wing prism is responsible for eroding Western values, undermining the defense of Britain and Europe against jihad, and exposing Jews to attack. These are all connected. You cannot understand the resurgence of paranoid, unhinged anti-Semitism unless you understand that the West has been tearing up the very idea of reason itself along with the moral codes at the heart of Western civilization.

Leftists view the West as the historic and current oppressor of the entire developing world. This Western cultural self-hatred has a complex history, at the root of which lies the erosion of biblical morality by the tides of secularism. But in my view, the key political driver of this cultural demoralization was the Holocaust.

It simply smashed to smithereens Europe’s belief in itself as the exemplar of superior cultural values. The Holocaust was conceived and directed, after all, in the heartlands of high European culture, the supposed crucible of enlightenment and rationality. It wasn’t just the Jews who died in the extermination camps: It was also the West’s (or Europe’s) concept of itself as moral and rational.

Lethally demoralized, Western cultural elites took an axe to the building blocks of their civilization: an axe to education as the transmission of that civilization, an axe to the traditional family as the best way to generate emotionally resilient inheritors of that civilization, and an axe to national identity as the political expression of that civilization.

Policies and laws passed by national governments now had to take second place to transnational institutions, such as the UN and EU, and legal frameworks, such as international human-rights law. With no Western nation or values thought worthy of defending to the death, wars to establish justice and freedom were deemed inferior to conflict resolution, negotiation, and peace processes. Between God and the devil, Western liberals would split the difference and broker a triumphant compromise. …

… WHY LEFT-ING ANTI-SEMITISM?

This is the new anti-Semitism. Trying to understand it, however, is like peeling a rotten onion: Beneath every rancid layer lies a yet more rancid layer.

The outer, most visible layer is fairly obvious. The left in general now subscribes to beliefs once considered extreme. It has absorbed the Marxist concept that everything has to be understood in terms of political power. The world is divided into the powerful and the powerless. Those with power can never be good; those without power can never be bad. Those who make money have power over those who don’t make money. Those who make money are bad; those without money are good. Jews make money. Therefore Jews are powerful and bad.

The 19th-century German anti-Semite Wilhelm Marr, who is credited with inventing the term, ascribed to the Jews the attribute of global power. Israel —which isn’t really Western at all—is seen as menacingly powerful. That is its crime, and that is also why anti-Israelism is umbilically connected to anti-Semitism. Even though Jews are now equipped with military power solely to defend themselves against annihilation, this breathes life into the paranoid delusion that the Jews are so powerful that they pose a threat to everyone else.

The next layer of the onion is even more rank. This is that—as the black joke that isn’t a joke at all would have it—the West will never forgive the Jews for the Holocaust. This isn’t just because of the terrible legacy of guilt carried by the West. It is because of jealousy.

What on earth about the Holocaust can provoke such jealousy? It gives the Jews what many in the West perceive as the trump card of victimhood. …

After a recitation of French events cited by Melanie Phillips above, Guy Milliere, a University of Paris professor goes on in a post from last February. 

… Those French Jews who can leave the country, leave.

Those who have not yet decided to leave or who do not have the financial means, move to safer neighborhoods.

Most departures are hasty; many Jewish families sell their homes well below the market price. Some families end up in apartments that are too small, but prefer discomfort to the risk of being mugged or killed.

The French Jewish community may still be the largest in Europe, but it is shrinking rapidly. In 2000, it was estimated at 500,000, but the number now is less than 400,000, and sinking. Jewish districts that once were thriving are now on the verge of extinction.

“What is happening is an ethnic cleansing that dare not speak its name. In few decades, there will be no Jews in France,” according to Richard Abitbol, president of the Confederation of French Jews and Friends of Israel.

Without the Jews of France, France would no longer be France, said Former Prime Minister Manuel Valls in 2016 . But he did not do anything.

Recently he said that he had done his best, that he could not have done more. “The problem,” he said, “is that anti-Semitism today in France comes less from the far right than from individuals of the Muslim faith or culture”.

He added that in France, for at least two decades, all attacks against Jews in which the perpetrator has been identified have come from Muslims, and that the most recent attacks were no exception. …

… Politicians see that the number of Muslims in France is now so large that it is virtually impossible to win an election without the Muslim vote, and that the difference in birthrate between Muslims and non-Muslims will make that arrangement even more obligatory in years to come.

Politicians also see that the country’s 600 “no-go zones” are growing; that radicalized Muslims may kill, and that violent riots can break out at any time. In France, more than 500 people were murdered or maimed by Islamic terrorists in less than four years.

Politicians also see that waves of migrants from the Middle East and Africa have created slums largely beyond the control of the police; that French prisons are on the verge of exploding, and that Jews have no electoral weight and are essentially powerless.

Politicians therefore choose inertia, denial, cowardice.

In French Muslim neighborhoods, Islamist imams denounce the “bad influence” of Jews and spread anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. French politicians stay silent.

Islamic bookstores in France sell books banned elsewhere, such as the fraudulent Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and CDs and DVDs of violent anti-Semitic speeches by radical preachers. For instance, Yussuf al-Qaradawi, the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, who is prohibited from entering France and the US, says he regrets that Hitler did not “finish the job”. French politicians stay silent.

Although synagogues in France have not been attacked since 2014, they all are guarded around the clock by armed soldiers in bulletproof vests who are protected behind sandbags, as are Jewish schools and cultural centers.

Meanwhile, laws meant to punish anti-Semitic threats are now used to punish those who denounce the threats.

Six years ago, the author Renaud Camus published Le Grand Remplacement (“The Great Replacement”), a book noting that Jews and Christians are not only being replaced by Muslims, but that they are often harassed and persecuted. He lamented the destruction of churches and described attacks on Jews as a “slow pogrom”. …

 Since we’ve been away for awhile, there’s lots of cartoons from Krauthammer to the Red Hen.

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Trump says he’s gonna “wing it.” Hilarity ensues. Roger Simon has some thoughts.

Gasp! Gasp!  Trump is going all the way to Singapore to wing it with Kim Jong-un! What does he think he’s doing — negotiating for a golf course?

At least that’s what we’re being led to believe by news reports, …

… What, no briefing books?  Doesn’t the president know how well they worked for presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama when they and their envoys negotiated with North Korea in the past? Oh, wait…

And, come to think of it, didn’t Obama and Kerry have briefing books, filled with expertise, when they negotiated the Iran deal that gave the mullahs all the money upfront, including millions in untraceable cash, allowing them to run rampant all over the Middle East? …

… Of course, there is a lot more to it, including the role of China, but the real question is who would you trust to negotiate the U.S. and the world out of this mess — some diplomatic veteran of twenty-three visits to Pyongyang or Donald Trump?  I would imagine most objective observers would, reluctantly or not, choose Trump.

That won’t stop his critics for a second. Chuck Schumer, on Twitter, is clearly “worried,” or pretending to be: “With ICBMs and nuclear warheads in the hands of North Korea, the situation is far too dangerous for seat of the pants negotiating.”

Many of these critics — in a sad commentary on human nature — would unconsciously or even consciously prefer the negotiations to fail than to deliver Trump such a significant victory.  Call this Trump Envy that is now superseding Trump Derangement Syndrome as the president is appearing more successful and seems likely to serve a second term.  In a way, that’s a form of progress.

Ed Driscoll of Instapundit links to a good “two Tony’s” comparison by Rod Dreher.

The late Anthony Bourdain kicked off his current season of CNN shows by visiting West Virginia and writing:

“… I’ve gotta tell you, I was absolutely rocked back on my heels by, first of all, how beautiful it is, and how kind people were to me, and generous. I mean, in the same way that my preconceptions are upended so often around the world, I felt the same thing happening in West Virginia. In the stereotypical coal mining town in West Virginia — which is pretty much where we went, into the poorest area of West Virginia coal country — I was utterly moved and enchanted by the people and the place. And I like to think I came back from it with a more nuanced picture of what it means to be a coal miner, and why people voted for a sketchy businessman from New York who’s never changed a tire in his life.

You know, I went right at those things — guns, God, and Trump — and I was very moved by what I found there. I hope that people who watch the show will feel the same kind of empathy and respect, and will be able to walk in somebody else’s shoes, or imagine walking in somebody else’s shoes, for a few minutes in the same way that hopefully they do with one of my other shows. …”

In contrast, fellow leftwing New Yorker Robert DeNiro made his in-kind contribution to the Trump 2020 re-election campaign last night, shouting “F*** Trump” on the air during the Tonys. As Rod Dreher writes, “I can’t imagine that many Trump voters were watching the Tony Awards last night, so they wouldn’t have seen that virtue-signaling display. But it will enjoy a long life on social media, where it will do Donald Trump a lot of good with the masses, because it will solidify their entirely accurate belief that the cultural elites hate them. De Niro and the standing-ovation-giving audience are so vain that they don’t recognize this.”

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The UK is not Downton Abbey writ large. 

A good example would be the game of football (soccer) which in the UK and Europe is the Joe six-pack, blue collar sport of thugs. Which makes it amusing to see American europhiliacs and their slavish devotion to the sport of the violent hooligans of Europe’s cities. The fan violence started in Great Britain but spread to the continent and took hold. In a list of the ten worst soccer riots over the last 35 years, four were in Great Britain, the balance in Europe. And in the 21st century, of the six worst riots, five were in Europe. One in Switzerland, for God’s sake! 

Perhaps because the game is so boring, they enliven it with thuggishness in the stands. If they need excitement, we should send them baseball, which compared to soccer, is a hotbed of activity. Maybe if there was something exciting on the playing field, the spectators would behave. 

Today is hooligan day because of Tommy Robinson, a soccer hooligan of sorts, who is on a crusade trying to expose and stop the pattern of male muslim sexual abuse of young English girls. The first time this came to our attention, it was in the city of Rotherham 150 miles north of London where 1,400 young, mostly white, girls, were gang raped from 2009 to 2013 by a collection of muslim males. 

A Pickings reader in the UK explains the hooligans.

“If you can imagine that every Saturday, in season, normal people with jobs, kids, mortgages and dogs morph into animals that are escorted through the streets by hundreds of Police at enormous cost to watch a game of football, then this is the religion of Football Hooliganism. When they arrive at the amphitheatre that is a sports ground, they are segregated and fenced in singing abuse songs at the opposition all to be watched over by more police . Violence can break out at any  time and racial abuse is common whilst at the end of the game the visiting fans are escorted to the nearest station to be put on trains to return to their normal working class homes in the normal suburbia. 

Some team fans are more notorious than others, the Millwall club from London being possible the most famous. Groups meet in pubs before the games to plan attacks on other team fans . The visiting buses of the teams can be attacked as well as random attacks on groups of fans wandering to the game. 

All in all this costs the country millions of pounds every weekend to enable Football fans to enjoy themselves. 

Tommy Robinson is very much at home in this environment; an uneducated shit stirrer not worthy of your hollowed pages. He is a career criminal extremist who has been indirectly legitimatised by Trump with his reference to the BNP . He is one of many who are feeding off the Muslim hate problem  in Europe . Yes it is a problem, but we need better people than him to fight our cause. Do your home work on him before championing him!! 

Simply put the exploitation of young innocent girls by Muslims is a matter of political correctness, not just class. We are obsessed by the need not to be racial in all things and not to prosecute these poor people because the Police have to be so careful that such actions are RACIST . This is why it took years to take action against these scum bags and yes as we speak its still happening throughout the UK every day. The town of Rotherham is in a very poor working class area built on Steel , however this issue is all over the UK not just in the low class areas.

The failure to address the abuse was attributed to a combination of factors revolving around race, class and gender contemptuous and sexist attitudes toward the mostly working-class victims; fear that the perpetrators’ ethnicity would trigger allegations of racism and damage community relations; the Labour council’s reluctance to challenge a Labour-voting ethnic minority; lack of a child-centered focus; a desire to protect the town’s reputation; and a lack of training and resources  

There is an enormous gulf between the US and UK when it comes to policing. You have a vast resource and we are woefully under financed. Our jails are full and short sentences are given to stop overcrowding in our decaying prisons.  

Wow! What am I doing here? I need to spend more time in the US.”

Authorities turned a blind eye because of class and racial concerns. It is hard for US citizens to understand the class consciousness endemic in the culture of the UK. But it is probably fair to say the police had little interest because of the lower class origins of the girls involved and because the Labour Councils had no wish to antagonize a group of sympathetic muslim voters. 

Tommy Robinson was angry, and many more like him were angry, because these muslims were bedding their girls. A movement was formed – the English Defense League (EDL). The league seeks to ban mass muslim immigration. Last week Tommy was live-casting outside a courtroom where muslim males were on trial for child rape. The government put him in jail because they do not want attention attracted to the disgusting crimes that have become an epidemic in the UK. Furthermore, the government forbade any news outlets, print or broadcast, from reporting on Robinson’s arrest and incarceration.

Craig Pirrong of Streetwise Professor posted on two European items. First on Italy, which we cut out, and then on Tommy Robinson’s arrest.

… Robinson is in the news–well, sort of, as will soon become clear–for having been arrested and incarcerated (after a “trial” lasting minutes), for livecasting from the outside of a courthouse where a group of child rapists, who happen to be Muslim, are on trial.

The charge against Robinson was that he violated the terms of his suspended sentence.  Said sentence was not for any conduct remotely related to his activism, or racism, but for providing misleading information on a mortgage application. (Arguably the original charge was pretextual, but leave that aside for the moment.)  But the judge leapt at the opportunity to clap Robinson behind bars for daring to call attention to one of the most sordid and colossal failures of the British establishment.*

But that’s not the most outrageous thing here.  The judge also imposed a gag order forbidding any reporting on Robinson’s arrest and incarceration in the British press.  Several outlets that had posted articles online immediately took them down.

This is revealing on so many levels. …

… as the judge clearly fears, Robinson evidently represents the views of a large portion of the British populace.  Yet though many agree, few speak out, and it is left to a marginal and truculent figure to launch a kamikaze attack on the system.  This illustrates the relentless and ruthless application of social pressure by the establishment–the politicians, the media, and the police, who repeatedly tell people that their social media posts are being monitored for “hate speech”–and the consequent intimidation of pretty much everybody but the likes of Tommy Robinson and a few like him.

That is, silence and preference falsification are the rational responses of those who are deeply uneasy about the social changes that the UK has undergone.  These responses are decidedly characteristic of repressive societies, not free ones.

The UK at present differs from China’s “Social Credit” system in degree, but not in kind. Social control enforced by the threat of ostracism and even imprisonment is a pervasive reality.

To which I say: thank God for the Revolution, and the Bill of Rights.  There is no right to free speech in the UK as guaranteed by the First Amendment–and people are quite aware of that, and trim their expression accordingly.

I also repeat something that I have said often: the UK is the US’s Ghost of Christmas Future. …

UK authorities, in the true spirit of Lavrentiy Beria, chief of Stalin’s secret police, (“Show me the man, and I will find you the crime.”) went through Robinson’s life and found a mortgage application with problems. Hence his jail sentence. Remember last June’s Pickings on Jane Sander’s credit fraud problems when we pointed out how easy it was to commit bank fraud in loan applications? 

Bruce Bawer in Pajamas Media tries to make sense of the criticism Robinson has been dealt by James Delingpole, Nigel Farage, and Daniel Hannan, all of whom you would think would be defenders of Robinson’s right to publicize the court proceedings.

… What the hell is going on with these “friendly” critics of Robinson? One factor, indubitably, is class. (It’s hard for most Americans to process it, but Tommy’s accent is a very big deal in the UK.) I also suspect that Tommy’s friendly critics are acting, at least in part, out of a reflexive respect for British public order and establishment institutions, something instilled in them from an early age, at Eton and Oxford and so on. They claim that — as unpleasant as it is to say so — Robinson deserved what he got because he knew what he was doing. They then proceed to cite ridiculous legal technicalities and absurd details about, for example, how close he was standing to the courthouse when he was broadcasting on Facebook on the day of his arrest. And they insist that his arrest was fair because, as they put it, “justice must not only be done, but must be seen to be done.”

I have seen this line repeated like a mantra in the last few days — but never with any irony. The idea of justice being “seen to be done” seems to be a beloved concept in Britain. But no objective observer of the current behavior of cops and courts in that country could say that justice is being done, or being seen to be done, when it comes to Islam.

If justice were being done, the courts would be overwhelmed with trials of serial Muslim rapists and other Muslim felons — as well as with the trials of the British police, politicians, journalists, social workers, and others who covered their crimes up over a period of decades.

Every single one of those offenses is far more serious than anything Robinson has ever done.

Supposedly “friendly” critics of Tommy, by way of showing that he’s not perfect, dredge up his conviction a few years back for mortgage fraud. The crime? He loaned money to a relative so that the latter could get a housing mortgage. Tommy was imprisoned for this. He was imprisoned for it because the authorities had combed through his finances in search of something, anything, to send him up the river for — and this was the best they could do. Meanwhile, what offenses could some of Britain’s more reprehensible imams be nabbed for, if the authorities were as eager to jail them as they have been to punish Tommy? The mind boggles. …

 

… It seems to me that these people who, while having a certain degree of sympathy for Robinson, nonetheless defend his imprisonment, can’t quite wrap their minds around the fact that the savior of their ancient country might yet prove to be some rough-around-the-edges chap who never attended Oxford or Cambridge, and who speaks in what they consider a horrid low-class dialect.

I also suspect that they’re looking desperately for a reason to believe that their nation’s system is still working — and that it’s still fair.

Their desperation is understandable. It’s touching.

But the system isn’t fair. On the contrary, it’s become the cruel instrument of cynical and cowardly officials who are manifestly determined to cover up evil — and to utterly destroy those few courageous souls who are standing in their way, driven to bring evil into the light and to drive it from their once-great country.

 

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A Columbia undergrad speaks truth to the campus and everywhere. He is a black man who thinks his people shouldn’t live on stale grievances. The guys at Power Line think he will need a bodyguard if he keeps writing like this.

In the fall of 2016, I was hired to play in Rihanna’s back-up band at the MTV Video Music Awards. To my pleasant surprise, several of my friends had also gotten the call. We felt that this would be the gig of a lifetime: beautiful music, primetime TV, plus, if we were lucky, a chance to schmooze with celebrities backstage.

But as the date approached, I learned that one of my friends had been fired and replaced. The reason? He was a white Hispanic, and Rihanna’s artistic team had decided to go for an all-black aesthetic—aside from Rihanna’s steady guitarist, there would be no non-blacks on stage. Though I was disappointed on my friend’s behalf, I didn’t consider his firing as unjust at the time—and maybe it wasn’t. Is it unethical for an artist to curate the racial composition of a racially-themed performance? Perhaps; perhaps not. My personal bias leads me to favor artistic freedom, but as a society, we have yet to answer this question definitively.

One thing, however, is clear. If the races were reversed—if a black musician had been fired in order to achieve an all-white aesthetic—it would have made front page headlines. …

… Though the question seems naïve to some, it is in fact perfectly valid to ask why black people can get away with behavior that white people can’t. The progressive response to this question invariably contains some reference to history: blacks were taken from their homeland in chains, forced to work as chattel for 250 years, and then subjected to redlining, segregation, and lynchings for another century. In the face of such a brutal past, many would argue, it is simply ignorant to complain about what modern-day blacks can get away with.

Yet there we were—young black men born decades after anything that could rightly be called ‘oppression’ had ended—benefitting from a social license bequeathed to us by a history that we have only experienced through textbooks and folklore. And my white Hispanic friend (who could have had a tougher life than all of us, for all I know) paid the price. The underlying logic of using the past to justify racial double-standards in the present is rarely interrogated. What do slavery and Jim Crow have to do with modern-day blacks, who experienced neither? …

… The celebrated journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates provides another example of the lower ethical standard to which black writers are held. In his #1 New York Times bestseller, Between the World and Me, Coates explained that the policemen and firemen who died on 9/11 “were not human to me,” but “menaces of nature.”1 This, it turned out, was because a friend of Coates had been killed by a black cop a few months earlier. In his recent essay collection, he doubled down on this pitiless sentiment: “When 9/11 happened, I wanted nothing to do with any kind of patriotism, with the broad national ceremony of mourning. I had no sympathy for the firefighters, and something bordering on hatred for the police officers who had died.”2 Meanwhile, New York Times columnist Bari Weiss—a young Jewish woman—was recently raked over the coals for tweeting, “Immigrants: They get the job done,” in praise of the Olympic ice-skater Mirai Nagasu, a second-generation Japanese-American. Accused of ‘othering’ an American citizen, Weiss came under so much fire that The Atlantic ran two separate pieces defending her. That The Atlantic saw it necessary to vigorously defend Weiss, but hasn’t had to lift a finger to defend Coates, whom they employ, evidences the racial double-standard at play. From a white writer, an innocuous tweet provokes histrionic invective. From a black writer, repeated expressions of unapologetic contempt for public servants who died trying to save the lives of others on September 11 are met with fawning praise from leftwing periodicals, plus a National Book Award and a MacArthur ‘Genius’ Grant. …