Clinton Admits He Passed on Killing Bin Laden

In a memorably explosive 2006 interview with Chris Wallace, former President Bill Clinton went off on a finger-wagging “tear,” as Wallace put it, when questioned about whether he had done enough during his terms in office to get Osama bin Laden. “I got closer to killing him than anybody has gotten since,” growled a furious Clinton. Now a recently-released audiotape confirms that Clinton did indeed have at least one clear opportunity to kill the world’s most wanted man in 1998 – and passed on it, allowing bin Laden to live to mastermind the 9/11 attacks.

Last week Australian Michael Kroger, the former head of the Liberal Party in the state of Victoria, unveiled on Australia’s Sky News a never-before-released audio of Clinton speaking to a group of businessmen in Melbourne on September 10, 2001, recorded a mere ten hours before the first plane hit the World Trade Center. In that recording, made with the former president’s knowledge according to Kroger, Clinton responded thusly in response to a question about international terrorism:

And I’m just saying, you know, if I were Osama bin Laden — he’s a very smart guy, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about him — and I nearly got him once. I nearly got him. And I could have killed him, but I would have to destroy a little town called Kandahar in Afghanistan and kill 300 innocent women and children, and then I would have been no better than him. And so I didn’t do it.

Questioned by Fox News about the Clinton recording, Michael Scheuer, chief of the bin Laden unit from 1995 to 1999, replied that Clinton was a “disgrace” and a “monumental liar” for claiming that he didn’t kill bin Laden because of the collateral damage. He asserted that only Taliban and bin Laden and his crew would’ve died if Clinton had given the go-ahead for a missile strike on the region in December of 1998. But Clinton didn’t act, said Scheuer, because he’s a “coward morally” and because he’s “more concerned, like Obama, with what the world thinks about him.”

In the 2006 Wallace interview, Clinton referenced a wildly controversial ABC miniseries called The Path to 9/11*, which had aired a mere two weeks earlier and which Clinton angrily called part of a right-wing “disinformation” campaign against him. That docudrama, based in part on The 9/11 Commission Report, dramatized the historical thread connecting the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, Islamic attacks on American interests throughout the Clinton era, the failure to connect the dots under Bush, and the attacks of that September morning in 2001.

Prior to its premiere, a false accusation of “conservative bias” on the part of the filmmakers quickly spun into leftist hysteria that the $30+ million miniseries was a “well-honed propaganda operation” on the part of a stealth cabal of conservatives. Clinton and his supporters, fearing the miniseries would tarnish his political legacy, claimed it was full of lies and pulled out all the stops to suppress it, including threats by the Senate Democratic leadership, led by Harry Reid, to pull ABC’s license if the miniseries aired. With a few very minor edits, the miniseries squeaked by and went on to high ratings; but it has not aired since and ABC-Disney refuses to release a DVD [check out John Ziegler’s riveting documentary Blocking the Path to 9/11 for the whole outrageous story].

The miniseries featured one particular scene vetted, as every scene was, by a battery of ABC lawyers, in which a CIA team and its Afghan allies have bin Laden in its sights, call the White House for approval to make the hit, and are denied the green light. Clinton and his people attacked this scene as an outrageous fabrication.

But in May 2012, CBS’ 60 Minutes broadcast a startling segment featuring former CIA officer Hank Crumpton, Deputy Director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, who discussed with interviewer Lara Logan his participation in operations to capture and/or kill bin Laden well before 9/11. Crumpton complained about “the lack of response on the part of the administration” and described one incident in which his team sighted bin Laden. It sounds very similar to the dramatized scene from Path to 9/11:

Crumpton: Our human sources took us to a village uh, far, not far from Kandahar –

Logan: And what did you see there?

Crumpton: We saw a security detail, a convoy, and we saw bin Laden exit the vehicle.

Logan: Clearly.

Crumpton: Clearly. And we had – the optics were spot on, beaming back to us, CIA headquarters. We immediately alerted the White House, and the Clinton administration’s response was, “Well, it will take several hours for the TLAMs, the cruise missiles launched from submarines, to reach that objective. So you need to tell us where bin Laden will be five or six hours from now.” The frustration was enormous.

Logan: So at that moment you wanted to kill him.

Crumpton: Yes.

Logan: But you couldn’t get permission.

Crumpton: Correct.

Logan then narrates that Crumpton “couldn’t get permission to do anything, including allowing the CIA’s Afghan agents on the ground to attack bin Laden’s compound.”

Now the Clinton admission serves as further vindication for the Path to 9/11’s veracity; in fact, Scheuer also stated, as he has on numerous previous occasions, that the Clinton administration passed on as many as ten opportunities to nail bin Laden.

Imagine how different the world would be if President Clinton had pulled the trigger on bin Laden in 1998. There would have been no 9/11, says Michael Scheuer, and probably no Iraq war. “I worked hard to try to kill him,” Clinton insisted in the Wallace interview. “I authorized a finding for the CIA to kill him. We contracted with people to kill him. I got closer to killing him than anybody has gotten since.” But when he could have, he didn’t. Even if it truly was out of concern for Kandahari civilians, this question posed rhetorically by Scheuer cuts to the heart of the matter: “Who was he elected to protect, Kandaharis or Americans?”

* Full disclosure: The Path to 9/11 was written and produced by my friend Cyrus Nowrasteh, whom I assisted on the project.

(This article originally appeared here on FrontPage Mag, 8/5/14)

Does Art Matter Anymore?

This past spring, a nude performance artist made a minor media stir by publicly pushing paint-and-ink-filled eggs out of her vagina onto a canvas to make a profound statement – okay, perhaps not so much profound as profoundly messy. Around the same time, Lady Gaga, the music industry’s most self-consciously artsy star, incorporated a vomit performance artist into her show (it’s even more repulsive than it sounds). “That performance,” says Lady Gaga, “was art in its purest form.”

I’m not sure what “art in its purest form” means, but was it even art at all? Have we so degraded the definition of art that it includes whatever we decide to spew publicly from bodily orifices? As a critic for The Guardian correctly notes, much of the modern tradition of performance art “is an embarrassing revelation of the art world's distance from real aesthetic values or real human life.”

And that’s the problem. Such acts of disgusting fetishism, desperate self-promotion, and calculated shock value taint the endeavor of art itself as it has been understood around the world for many centuries. They make it difficult for the average person-on-the-street to understand, respect, and value art. They make it hard to remember that there was a time when creating art involved serious training, skill, and vision, and that it isn’t just about attention-seekers acting on their most idiotic or disturbed impulses.

In the past, creating art was the domain of a trained few, employed and appreciated by the moneyed elite. But with the rise of capitalism, gradual breakdown of the class structure, and the proliferation of museums, cheap reproductions, and art education, pretty much anyone could enjoy art. Eventually, access to affordable materials meant that anyone could also attempt to produce art. In time, this democratization downgraded our culture’s definition of art to mere personal expression, as if anything anyone does to express himself or herself rises to the level of art as long as a pretentious enough justification can be fashioned for it.

For example, last week Business Insider reported on photographer Jedediah Johnson, whose art consists of slathering on lipstick, making out with people, and taking pictures of the smeared results. His “Makeout Project” supposedly “attempts to change our preconceived notions about kissing,” which sounds like just the sort of postmodern bull that artists say to get girls – although in this case, he occasionally makes out with men too, and in at least one ultra-disturbing instance, with a baby (as an aside, what kind of parents allow this frankly twisted creep to smear lipstick on their child with his lips?).

It doesn’t help that such postmodern silliness earns insane valuations at art auctions and sales. In an article bluntly titled, “The Overpriced World of Bad Art,” the New York Post reports that collectors are increasingly “spending millions on artists still alive who are producing art that is less and less accessible... It’s a cynical attempt to be cool by consumption, and increasingly, the artists they collect create work for them that verges on contemptuous.”

Examples include “art” like light bulbs on a blank wall ($506,503), a dead tree ($468,000), and a dead shark in a tank ($12 million). “My Bed,” an installation consisting of cigarette butts, used condoms, and stained underwear piled adjacent to artist Tracey Emin’s unmade bed, sold at Christie’s last month for $4.25 million. In museums a hundred years from now, will frauds like this be representative of the best art of our time?

The dead shark went for spare change compared to a Francis Bacon triptych that sold for an auction record of $142 million at Sotheby’s last year. Also in 2013, a collector picked up a Picasso for $155 million in a private sale. Several years before that, a Jackson Pollack splatter-fest fetched $140 million. Now, unlike Tracey Emin’s rumpled sheets, those were exceptional works by recognized modern masters, but the point is that when a piece of art sells for such an astronomical sum, the money becomes the focal point. It distracts from the work itself and makes people view the art world as nothing a scam on obscenely wealthy collectors.

Is all this insanity conditioning people to dismiss art as silly and irrelevant in the real world? Are we becoming too cynical to grasp the power of truly profound art, or to find personal meaning in it? As a culture, we need to revive aesthetic standards that help people take art and artists seriously once more. We need to retrain ourselves to appreciate the visual arts, to feel their aesthetic impact in our lives. In short, art needs to matter again.

(This article originally appeared here on Acculturated, 8/4/14)

Jon Voight Rips Into Anti-Israel Celebs

Among the celebrities I wrote about last week who are speaking out for and (mostly) against Israel during the Gaza conflict were Spanish husband-and-wife actors Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz. They, in addition to dozens of other Spanish artists, signed an open letter condemning Israel for its “genocide” of the so-called Palestinians. In response, Jon Voight, Hollywood’s most vocal conservative actor, penned a strong open letter of his own for The Hollywood Reporter, advising Cruz and Bardem to “hang your heads in shame.”

In a statement on Wednesday Penelope Cruz tried to walk back her denunciation of Israel. After prefacing her clarification with an acknowledgement that she is “not an expert on the situation,” Ms. Cruz explained that “My only wish and intention in signing that group letter is the hope that there will be peace in both Israel and Gaza.” Well, that’s what we all hope for, but some of us understand that peace is not going to come from the hatemongering terrorists of Hamas, and some of us, like Ms. Cruz and her husband, seem to believe that Israel is the problem.

Bardem released a statement as well, in which he tried to clarify his position and complained of the backlash against him and Cruz: “I am now being labeled by some as anti-Semitic, as is my wife — which is the antithesis of who we are as human beings. We detest anti-Semitism as much as we detest the horrible and painful consequences of war.” Bardem went on to try to make a distinction between his criticism of “the Israeli military response” and his “great respect for the people of Israel and deep compassion for their losses.”

As I wrote last week, that distinction would carry more weight if Bardem and others like him didn’t always direct their condemnation toward the one nation in the Middle East that holds the values which liberals like Bardem and Cruz claim to cherish: human rights, women’s rights, gay rights, equality between Jews and Arabs, religious freedom, freedom of speech, and all the rest.

Instead, in addition to his signature on the open letter, Bardem had also written an op-ed for a Spanish newspaper, in which he unjustly labeled Israel’s military operation “genocide” and “a war of extermination… where hospitals, ambulances, and children are targets and presumed to be terrorists.” “Right now,” Bardem wrote in the op-ed, “there is NO place for distance or neutrality.” He’s right about that, but unfortunately he chose to throw his support behind the terrorists.

In his more recent statement, Bardem noted that “Too many innocent Palestinian mothers have lost their children to this conflict. Too many innocent Israeli mothers share the same grief… There should not be any political reason that can justify such enormous pain on both sides.” But there is a reason for the enormous pain – the Palestinian leadership’s relentless determination to kill Jews and wipe Israel off the map. Any further pain would cease overnight if the terrorism ended and Palestinians demonstrated a willingness to coexist in peace.

Incensed by what Jon Voight calls their “ignorance,” he lashed out at the couple in defense of Israel. “I am more than angry,” his open letter began. “I am heartsick that people like Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem could incite anti-Semitism all over the world and are oblivious to the damage they have caused.”

Voight proceeded to deliver a thumbnail history of the Arab-Israeli hostilities and to remind his readers that the current conflict began after the “travesty” of Hamas kidnapping and murdering three Jewish teenagers. He concluded thusly:

After years of trying to make peace, the wars they had to fight, being attacked by their enemies, and still being attacked, and finally after years of running into bomb shelters and having hundreds of civilians killed by suicide bombers, civilians being killed in their sleep, stabbed to pieces, finding enough is enough and finally retaliating, instead of my peers sticking up for the only democratic country in that region, they go and take out poison letters against them.

Voight didn’t let his acting colleagues get away with claiming no ill will against the Jewish people, asking

all my peers who signed that poison letter against Israel to examine their motives. Can you take back the fire of anti-Semitism that is raging all over the world now?... You had a great responsibility to use your celebrity for good. Instead, you have defamed the only democratic country of goodwill in the Middle East: Israel.

The actor concluded by admonishing Bardem, Cruz, and the rest to “hang your heads in shame. You should all come forth with deep regrets for what you did, and ask forgiveness from the suffering people in Israel.”

As is typical of artists, Bardem and Cruz believe that violence is always wrong, that fighting back against terrorism only breeds more violence, that the Arab-Israeli conflict is a “cycle of violence” which it is incumbent upon Israel to end, that 1400 years of religious enmity can somehow be erased by a simple plea for coexistence, and that Israel is an oppressive occupier and the Palestinians are helpless victims. “My signature [on the open letter] was solely meant as a plea for peace,” Bardem tried to explain. But Israel has tried such pleas for decades. The time for pleading for peace with an enemy who will not rest until you and all your kind are violently eradicated is over. Now the time has come for the extermination of the Jew-hating Palestinian leadership. That way lies peace.

(This article originally appeared here on FrontPage Mag, 8/4/14)

Katy Perry and Cultural Appropriation

It’s getting tougher for pop stars to be politically correct these days, since the range of acceptable behavior keeps shrinking. White girls like Miley Cyrus and Katy Perry can’t even twerk or do a geisha-inspired performance without self-appointed critics with too much time on their hands crying Racism! Cultural appropriation!

Perry has been suspected of racism also for her tour featuring dancing Egyptian mummies with exaggerated curves, which she claims had nothing to do with race: “I based it on plastic surgery,” Perry explained in the August 2014 Rolling Stone. “It’s actually a representation of our culture wanting to be plastic, and that’s why there’s bandages and it’s mummies.” As for accusations of cultural appropriation, Perry grumbled, “I guess I’ll just stick to baseball and hot dogs, and that’s it… [C]an’t you appreciate a culture? I guess, like, everybody has to stay in their lane?”

Lauren Duca at Huffington Post thinks so. She asserts that there is “no room for argument” that Perry’s performance was a “definitive” example of cultural appropriation and arguably racist.

What is cultural appropriation, anyway? According to Duca, it refers to “picking and choosing elements of a culture by a member of another culture without permission. This includes traditional knowledge, religious symbols, artifacts or any other unauthorized use of cultural practice or ideation.”

The obvious question that leaps to mind is: who is “authorized” to give this cultural “permission”? Obviously there is no one who speaks for an entire culture, and never has been. “The only time it is OK,” Duca reiterates, “is with permission or authorization by the origin culture.” How does one get permission from an entire “culture”? The very concept is inane and illiberal. Should the Chinese cellist Yo-Yo Ma have sought permission to play Bach? Should the Mississippi-born Leontyne Price have sought permission to sing Verdi?

Duca continues: “In that it belittles a culture while using it for personal gain, cultural appropriation indirectly expresses racial superiority.” [Emphasis added] It is most problematic, she says, when someone “from a position of privilege” borrows from the culture of an exploited or oppressed minority group for that person’s “benefit.”

Her assumption seems to be that this so-called appropriation can never be an homage to, or a sincere affinity for, that cultural expression; it can only be exploitation. Even as playful kitsch, like Perry’s geisha outfit, is it really so offensive that she must be accused of “thoughtlessly Othering and objectifying” Asian culture, as a Jezebel writer phrased it? (I have no idea why “Othering” is capitalized, but I suppose it doesn’t matter since it isn’t even a word). Our obsession today with labeling such innocuous actions as racist and exploitative accomplishes nothing except to aggravate already raw race relations and to trivialize actual racism.

In a previous life I was a musician in San Francisco, where for years I was a percussionist in the thriving, local Afro-Brazilian dance scene. As a white man born and raised in Arkansas, my cultural origins couldn’t have been farther from those out of which that music bloomed, but so what? I learned to play it so well that I taught it to others, even to Brazilians. I was passionate about the music – an Africanized drumming tradition called samba-reggae – and even ultimately led an award-winning group of performers. That pursuit had nothing to do with belittling, exploiting, or “Othering” anything; it stemmed from my genuine appreciation of a musical form that I felt in my soul, regardless of the color of my skin.

The ironic problem with the theory behind cultural appropriation is that “borrowing” is actually one of the significant means by which cultures develop and assimilate; it breaks down barriers. But the divisive grievance-mongering behind the theory of cultural appropriation only perpetuates racial resentment and cultural barriers. It states that you are not allowed to step outside of your skin color or cultural heritage. You aren’t allowed to be an individual with a passion for cultural expressions and ideas that do not happen to stem from your background. We aren’t allowed to participate in our own human variety, embrace it, and find our shared humanity at the heart of it.

It is a way of demanding, as Katy Perry put it so simply, that you must stay in your lane – or be smeared as racist.

(This article originally appeared here on Acculturated, 8/1/14)

The Celebrities Who Get it Wrong – and Right – About Israel

Once Israel’s military operation got underway in Gaza, celebrity actors, who desperately want to be taken seriously, predictably took to social media to express their very special concern. An article in The Hollywood Reporter (THR) examined the differences between American and European celebrities’ positions on the conflict, and concluded, unsurprisingly, that European celebs are much harsher and more vocal about their opposition to Israel.

As partial evidence, the article noted that husband-and-wife stars Javier Bardem (in No Country for Old Men, most famously) and Penelope Cruz (The Counselor, most recently) joined more than 100 other Spanish actors and directors to issue a statement urging the European Union to formally condemn Israel for waging “genocide” in Gaza. THR reports that the letter essentially lays the blame for the entire conflict on Israel, because it “humiliates, detains, and tramples on the rights of the Palestinian population in all of the West Bank every day, also causing many deaths.”

In response to that statement, European Jewish Congress President Moshe Kantor criticized its “gratuitous use of the term ‘genocide’” and pointedly suggested that

Rather than outrageously attacking a fellow democracy for defending itself against radical terrorists, the time of Spanish public figures would be better put to use fighting against the rapidly growing hatred of Jews in their country, which according to recent surveys is one of the highest in Europe.

Bravo. He concluded that the statement “demonstrates grave ignorance or extreme malice.” I suspect it’s a combination of the two. When Bardem, for example, writes, “This is a war of occupation and extermination against a whole people without means, confined to a miniscule territory without water and where hospitals, ambulances, and children are targeted and presumed to be terrorists,” there is so much grave ignorance there that one must assume extreme malice as well.

After taking some heat for their position, Penelope Cruz followed up with a statement trying to walk it back a bit: “I’m not an expert on the situation and I’m aware of the complexity of it.” Well, kudos to her for that admission – it has to be the first time in Hollywood history that a celebrity has acknowledged his or her own ignorance about an issue. She went on to plead that

My only wish and intention in signing that group letter is the hope that there will be peace in both Israel and Gaza. I am hopeful all parties can agree to a cease fire and there are no more innocent victims on either side of the border. I wish for unity, and peace... I believe in a civilization that can be capable of bringing the courage to have a world where humans can live side by side.

That sounds nice, but if Mrs. Bardem really wishes for unity and peace, if she truly yearns for no more innocent victims on either side, if she really believes in a civilization capable of rising above this conflict, then her only logical choice is to support the civilized Israel unequivocally, because it is there and nowhere else in the Middle East that her dream of Jews and Arabs living and working side by side as equals exists.

They aren’t the only European celebrities to jump on the anti-Israel bandwagon. In May, Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters and Nick Mason sent an open letter to the Rolling Stones urging them not to perform in Israel:

Playing Israel now is the moral equivalent of playing Sun City at the height of South African apartheid; regardless of your intentions, crossing the picket line provides propaganda that the Israeli government will use in its attempts to whitewash the policies of its unjust and racist regime.

To their enormous credit, Jagger and the Stones ignored the boycott letter and went forward with their concert in Tel Aviv.

American celebs who have spoken out against Israel have been, as THR put it, “careful to note that their sympathy for the civilians should not be equated with anti-Jewish sentiment.” Thus former actress Mia Farrow tweeted: “We can passionately protest Israel’s assault upon Gaza without descending, even remotely, into the hideousness of anti-Semitism.” That would carry more weight if, among her dozens of tweets about the Gaza hostilities, Farrow ever tweeted about Hamas’ assaults on Israel. Later, she added: “To be clear I do not support Hamas. I care about children everywhere.”

If she and other celebrities care about children everywhere, why do they consistently reserve their condemnation for Israel and not tweet their outrage about Arab terrorists targeting Israeli children, the deaths of Syrian children, or the hundreds of poor Nigerian girls kidnapped by Boko Haram (not to mention the boys slaughtered by those savages) who merited only some temporary “hashtag diplomacy” and photos of posers with scribbled “Bring Back Our Girls” signs shared on Instagram?

Daily Show host Jon Stewart took a similar tack: “Just merely mentioning Israel or questioning in any way the effectiveness or humanity of Israel’s policies is not the same thing as being pro-Hamas.” Actually it is, if you’re not also condemning Hamas for brainwashing their children to become Jew-killers, for creating a culture of martyrdom, for purposefully incurring the deaths of their own civilians in order to smear Israel in the media war. If you’re not openly condemning them for that, if you’re condemning only Israel, then whatever your intentions, you are supporting Hamas.

Act0r Mark Ruffalo clung to the same excuse, tweeting a link to an article entitled, “Empathizing w/Gaza does NOT make me anti-Semitic, nor pro-Hamas or anti-Israel. It makes me human.” If you are an empathetic human, then your only rational choice is to support the Israelis, who love life, unlike the death cultists of Hamas.

It’s easy to dismiss celebrities who decide to weigh in on current events as uninformed and irrelevant, but unfortunately their opinions carry significant weight among their untold numbers of fans – not because those opinions are necessarily insightful or even correct, but because celebrities are cool, and fans don’t want to be uncool by having a different opinion.

And what about the celebs who do support Israel? Rosanne Barr, of all people, tweeted some stone cold truth about Hamas to her 250,000 followers: “They say they won’t stp fighting Israel til evry Jew there is dead. They say it everyday, repeatedly. If ur ignoring/excusing that-yr sick.” I can’t believe I’m saying this, but bravo, Rosanne.

(This article originally appeared here on FrontPage Mag, 8/1/14)

Paul McCartney, Still on the Run at 72

I remember when rock was young, as Elton John sang, so young that no one could even imagine a rock star being over the age of 30. The very thought of someone that old still pumping out power chords onstage would have seemed ludicrous to my generation. Speaking of “My Generation,” the Who’s lyric “I hope I die before I get old” was our creed; and then, to the consternation of us all, we got older, and today some of those early rockers (at least those who didn’t die before they got old) are still playing sold-out tours – like Sir Paul McCartney.

Macca needs – or should need – no introduction to anyone who hasn’t been in a coma for the last fifty years. In an industry in which careers come and go like shooting stars, the 72-year-old has worked steadily for half a century and is currently on tour again, putting on a nearly three-hour, 38-song show that covers hits from his Beatles, Wings, and solo eras. What has sustained his success through those decades, and what keeps him recording and rocking out at an age at which many men are riding chair lifts, is his relentless work ethic and creative urge.

McCartney’s manager Scott Rodger has called him the hardest working artist he’s ever met, a  reputation Paul earned while still a Beatle. Journalist Rip Rense wrote, of the Beatles’ legendary Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album, that

absent McCartney’s obsessive work ethic, there would have been no Pepper at all. Paul was the guy pushing the others to come to the studio every day, especially John, who probably would otherwise have been content to stay home, tripping on LSD. Lennon acknowledged –complained, really – that Paul rang him up at home incessantly, exhorting him to come to the studio and compose, sing, record.

After the history-making group broke up, it would have been easy, or certainly tempting, for McCartney and his bandmates to sit back and rest on their laurels. Moving forward with solo projects must have been a daunting prospect; after all, how do you top being a Beatle? But Paul embraced the challenge and launched into solo work – a self-titled album for which he wrote all the songs and performed all the instruments and vocals (with some contributions from wife Linda), and which was released even before the Beatles’ final album.

As it happens, I recently finished reading Man on the Run: Paul McCartney in the 1970s by Tom Doyle, published late last year. Numerous times throughout the book, Doyle notes how obsessively driven McCartney was/is to work, create, rehearse, move forward. He quotes session musician Laurence Juber as saying, “It was hard to get Paul not to work… It took a lot for Paul to call the session off and say, ‘I just don’t feel up to it.’” McCartney himself barely even views it as work: “I like to record and not have to feel like it’s too much work. I hate to think, ‘I’m going to work now… I’m going to grind out some music.’”

In a Japanese jail after Customs caught him entering the country with a bag of marijuana, Paul was still thinking about work, according to Doyle. Even the day of John Lennon’s murder, a shocked McCartney, never very good at openly expressing his emotions, went to the studio for a scheduled session, explaining later to the curious press that “I have hidden myself in my work today.” It was only afterward, at home, that Paul allowed himself to break down.

McCartney’s commitment to work and creativity led him to release two dozen post-Beatles pop-rock albums (among other musical projects) and to amass a jaw-dropping pile of awards and achievements best summed up by his Guinness World Records title, “the Most Successful Composer and Recording Artist of All Time.”

Now, after refusing to let a recent viral infection stop the show, McCartney is back on the road at 72, with no sign of slowing down. “Paul puts on a very strenuous show — he’s up there two and a half hours singing his heart out and playing his ass off," says an industry manager. Not bad for someone who once sang about a retirement of quiet domesticity in “When I’m Sixty-Four.”

(This article originally appeared here on Acculturated, 7/31/14)

Jews Can Shoot

In the wake of the current Gaza conflict, the supporters of the “Palestinians” – by which I mean the supporters of Hamas around the world – have felt emboldened to express openly their violent Jew-hatred. Throughout Europe, Canada, and even the United States, protests have turned quickly into riots and assaults on Jews, synagogues, and Israel’s supporters.

Even before the Gaza conflict, violent anti-Semitism was proving itself to be on the rise, as this random selection of incidents here and abroad demonstrates: Near Kansas City this April, a white supremacist killed three people in attacks at a Jewish community center and Jewish retirement complex. At the end of May, four people were murdered by a shooter in the Jewish Museum in Brussels. A few hours after that in Paris, two young religious Jews were severely beaten by unknown assailants outside a synagogue. Only days later, a report announced that Arab attacks on Jews in Jerusalem's Old City were on the rise. Less than two weeks later, a pack of North African youths attacked two young Jews with tear gas in a Paris suburb. The next weekend saw a series of Muslim attacks on Jews in Paris.

Doris Wise Montrose*, founder and president of the Los Angeles-based Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors (CJHS) is doing something to reverse the tide of Jewish victimization. Recently Ms. Montrose, whose organization seeks to empower people to resist today’s threats “to the West and to the Western traditions of liberal tolerance and individualism,” organized a firearms instruction class in May largely for beginners. The event inspired such interest that Montrose decided to take things a step further and establish JewsCanShoot.com, which focuses on preparing participants to defend themselves. I recently posed a few questions to Ms. Montrose about this new aspect of her organization’s mission.

Mark Tapson:    What prompted you to take CJHS to the next level, to go from speakers and newsletters to firearm training and JewsCanShoot.com?

Doris Montrose:    I realized two things: One, educating people is important but there is no way we will be able to convince everybody of the threats that face our way of life and our civilization. Two, if we are not trained and in possession of weapons, merely understanding the threats does not enable us to resist the threats. JewsCanShoot.com, besides providing weapons safety and training classes, will also provide information and action on ensuring that the Second Amendment stays in place, and how to resist attempts to chip away at the Second Amendment and eliminate it from our Bill of Rights. Everywhere genocide has prevailed, it was superseded by requiring the registration of guns followed by the confiscation of guns.

Education – speakers, newsletter, articles, books, films – is extremely important and must continue by all the organizations that are doing this, including CJHS. But when people leave a lecture, finish an article or book, and so on, there is more of an empowerment to what they have learned if they also possess the ability to defend themselves by being well-trained in the use of firearms.

Whether it is an attack on our way of life by the government or being attacked by a criminal in the street or attempting to break into our homes, the attacker is far less likely to succeed if he knows that there will be resistance from an armed citizen.

MT:     What has been the reaction so far to your shooting event, from the actual participants to people who have reached out to you after hearing about it?

DM:    I could not believe the reaction to the invitation! The response was overwhelmingly positive, greater than the response to anything else we have done. Not just from people wanting to take the class but from people applauding and praising me for arranging it, for embracing the very idea of Jews defending themselves with weapons. People actually seemed surprised that a Jewish organization was doing this. They wanted to know if such classes were available where they live. I also received emails from Jewish certified instructors with their contact info should anyone be interested (at some point, I do plan to offer a directory of certified firearms instructors). It was clear I had struck a nerve.

There are so many organizations providing access to information. Mine is one of them, and I will continue to educate people about the threats we are facing. But we cannot afford to fool ourselves – just as history has shown how easily and how much we want to be fooled – into believing that knowledge alone is enough. Education alone will not save us from an enemy coming at us in such full force. We must be prepared to defend ourselves as well. If enough people are armed and are trained, and if we make sure the Second Amendment is in full force, there is hope.

MT:     The CJHS website states that your organization believes “that Jews have a right, codified by the League of Nations and the United Nations, to flourish in peace and strength in a Jewish State located in their ancestral homeland of Israel.” What is CJHS’ position on a solution for peace in the Middle East?

DM:    I believe that the decades of Israel being forced to participate in a “peace process” or the goal of a “two-state solution” that would result in “peace” puts Israel – and by extension the Jewish people – in the same position as prior to the Holocaust. Therefore, CJHS is opposed to even the discussion of a “peace process” or “two-state solution.” The only two-state solution we support is Jordan and Israel and not one which carves yet another Muslim nation out of the state of Israel.

The word “peace” has one meaning to the Western world, which includes Israel, and a completely different meaning to the Arabs considered by the international community to be Israel’s “peace partners” – and that meaning is the complete obliteration of the Jewish state, which would put Jews back to being a people without a country and a military. This impossible and absurd objective has brought nothing but terrible suffering and tragedy to this very day.

MT:     The CJHS banner reads “New Holocaust Resistance.” Do you really believe that the threat of another Holocaust exists?

DM:    It’s already happening. While it may not look the same as the Holocaust in Europe with ghettos and concentration camps, Jews – and Christians – are targeted by Muslims because of who they are. It is a slower genocide – but genocide nonetheless. And the Muslims have stated their goals directly. As they move forward and spread out and find little or no resistance, they will quicken their pace.

People may say the overused phrase “Never Again” with conviction but it has no meaning unless we really take action to prevent another Holocaust. And since Israel – and the Jews – are the canary in the coal mine, Israel’s survival should be everyone’s goal – because the next Holocaust will not be limited to Jews.

* Full disclosure: the David Horowitz Freedom Center has co-sponsored many of CJHS’ events, and Doris Montrose is a close friend of mine.

(This article originally appeared here on FrontPage Mag, 7/31/14)

Justin Theroux On Political Correctness

Many people only know Justin Theroux, if they know his name at all, as the future Mr. Jennifer Aniston. They probably don’t realize that he’s a successful actor in his own right, with a résumé ranging from comedies like Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion and Zoolander to much creepier fare like American Psycho and Mulholland Drive. They are almost certainly unaware that he is a screenwriter as well, whose credits include Iron Man 2, Rock of Ages, and Tropic Thunder. But if he can make an impact with his newest project, with which he hopes to tear down the walls of political correctness, he might become a household name.

Theroux is no stranger to testing the boundaries of PC. Tropic Thunder featured Robert Downey. Jr. essentially performing in blackface (technically speaking, Downey’s character, an actor, underwent “pigmentation alteration” for his role as the black sergeant). In one controversial scene, Downey’s character explains to Ben Stiller’s that an actor should never go “full retard” if he wants to win an Oscar. The politically insensitive phrase drew a lot of criticism, which irked Theroux. In a recent interview with Elle, he said,

There’s a certain point where political correctness becomes extremely conservative and it skews to a point where it becomes humorless… You have to be sure of what your target is, who the joke is on. I was so saddened that people were offended by the full-r-word scene, because we worked really hard making sure that joke was aimed at Hollywood and actors portraying mentally challenged people. I remember being so bummed out. They literally picketed us. It was like, ‘Really? Satire is allowed to do this!’”

The Elle article noted that Theroux’s “aversion to PC” is leading him to work on an animated series that would challenge our politically correct sacred cows: “a long-germinating project modeled on All in the Family.”

In case you are too young to have experienced it firsthand, the groundbreaking All in the Family was one of the most controversial and yet beloved sitcoms in entertainment history. Featuring the brilliant Carroll O’Connor as lovable old conservative crank Archie Bunker clashing with hippie son-in-law Michael “Meathead” Stivic (a young Rob Reiner), it captured the fiery generational conflict of the era and handled it with humor, insight, and fairness (neither ultra-conservative Archie nor ultra-liberal Meathead had a monopoly on wisdom, and they often learned from each other). It dealt with a whole raft of social issues that network television (the only television there was) normally wouldn’t touch. There hasn’t been anything quite like it since.

Apparently, in Theroux’s new All in the Family, the Archie Bunker character will be liberal rather than conservative. It remains to be seen whether this will be a positive or not, or whether the show will grapple seriously with the social issues of the day or simply aim to offend; Theroux hints that it might be the latter, which would be a disappointment: “When was the last time you were super offended?” he asked the Elle interviewer. “I might be like, ‘That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard!’ Or, ‘It’s not my thing,’ or, ‘It was a stupid joke.’ But there’s such a sensitivity now. Political correctness has become really insidious.”

Insidious indeed. In fact, I’m often surprised and disturbed that many young people don’t understand what political correctness actually is, or how threatening it is to our freedom of speech, a precious freedom often taken for granted. Too many believe that PC is simply a set of language guidelines to protect people’s feelings from hurtful words – which sounds very considerate. But the term actually began in reference to the Communist party line, which determined the “correct” positions on political matters. It defined the boundaries of what ideas and language were “acceptable” to discuss and hold, and which ones would get you a midnight knock from the secret police. It is a means of controlling ideas and attitudes by restricting, and in some cases redefining, language. The totalitarian possibilities of that are terrifying.

Taking on political correctness shouldn’t be just about preserving the right to be offensive. It’s a matter of holding free speech sacred. If Justin Theroux can pull off a fair-and-balanced program that seeks to champion that concept rather than simply insult, then it will be a welcome, important change in the television landscape.

(This article originally appeared here on Acculturated, 7/28/14)

Israel’s Pyrrhic Moral Victory

As the Israeli-Hamas conflict rages, a familiar pattern asserts itself: Israel bends over backward to demonstrate her moral innocence to the world, and the world heaps condemnation on her anyway. Israel always feels compelled to restrain her military superiority because victory in that arena means losing the battle in the arena of public opinion despite extraordinary efforts. It’s worth questioning whether the moral victory Israel is striving for accomplishes anything except to perpetuate the hostilities and ensure more Israeli deaths at the hands of Arab terrorists.

Forced to defend herself, but under the microscope of worldwide scrutiny, Israel has gone to extreme lengths to avoid civilian deaths. Business Insider calculated that Israel has taken such unprecedented measures that she is “raising the standards of what can be expected in warfare.” The IDF issues warnings to civilians prior to neighborhood incursions. Israeli doctors treat wounded Gazans. Israel agrees to a ceasefire only to have Hamas break it. In one instance, Israel even spared the lives of fourteen Hamas operatives in order not to incur civilian casualties. And yet she is still decried for a “disproportionate response” against the craven Hamas, who hide behind women and children, store weapons in hospitals, and happily press their own citizens into martyrdom to wage a very effective propaganda war.

“Disproportionate response” is a completely idiotic complaint that has never before been raised in wartime except to punish Israel, itself surrounded by a massively disproportionate Arab population. No one ever won a war by countering an aggressor with carefully measured, tit-for-tat responses. Conflicts are won by striking back so disproportionately that the enemy’s military forces are devastated and, more importantly, its will to fight is crushed so thoroughly that the threat is extinguished.

Defense Minister and former chief of staff Moshe Ya’alon recently accused Netanyahu of not combating terrorism with a strong enough hand: “Why are we, a sovereign nation with a strong army, begging a terror organization to give us calm? We need to recover the deterrence in a way that they are the ones begging for calm. What are we teaching our enemies all over the world? That they can do anything to us and we'll turn the other cheek.”

It is worth reminding ourselves what sort of enemy Israel is dealing with, and what kicked off this most recent warfare: the murder of three Jewish teenagers – one an American citizen – kidnapped by Hamas and left in a shallow grave last month, which left the world – or at least the civilized world – heartsick and angry. The boys had been shot shortly after they went missing, “killed in cold blood by human animals,” as Prime Minister Netanyahu said. So Israel and decent people everywhere mourned, because we love life; meanwhile our nihilistic enemy, who boasts that they love death more, celebrated. 

Around the world, those who sided with those human animals had expressed their sick joy over the three kidnapped teens with a three-fingered salute which they taught to their brainwashed children, preparing the next generational wave of Jew hatred. Then, their viciousness not sated with having executed three innocents, they even attacked the IDF ambulance transporting the bodies home.

Feckless President Obama, who has never been a friend to Israel (and Israel’s enemies there and abroad are keenly aware of that), decried the kidnapping/murders as “a senseless act of terror.” But terrorism is never senseless; by definition, terrorism is not random and pointless but waged with a terrible, specific intent. Eyal Yifrach, 19, and Gilad Shaar and Naftali Frenkel, both 16, were kidnapped and murdered because they were Jews, the people whom Hamas has sworn to wipe from the face of the earth.

Abroad, meanwhile, Jews – particularly in France – have become the targets of raging anti-Israel “protesters” using the Gaza conflict as an excuse to firebomb synagogues, burn down Jewish-owned stores, and chant for the murder of Jews in ovens. “Anti-Semitic incidents are an almost daily occurrence,” the president of France’s National Bureau for Vigilance Against Anti-Semitism told The Blaze even before the Gaza operation began. British Jews have experienced a doubling of anti-Semitic incidents, from verbal abuse to attacks on buildings and people. From Boston to Berlin, Palestinian sympathizers have called for the hunting of Jews. In the understatement of the year, the president of the Council for Jewish Institutions in France said, “This is not a good time for Jews.”

As Jordan Chandler Hirsch wrote in Tablet, “Israel’s operation in Gaza is not causing deep-seated prejudices, it is revealing them.” In the eyes of the Jew-haters, Israel can do no right. And still Israel suffers from what Bret Stephens called, in the Wall Street Journal, “the Jewish state's most obvious weakness”:

a certain kind of vanity that confuses stainlessness with virtue, favors moral self-regard over normal self-interest, and believes in politics as an exercise not in power but in self-examination. People, and nations, with such attitudes cannot be beaten militarily. But they can easily—too easily—be shamed.

In a joint call on both Israelis and the self-proclaimed Palestinians to end the violence, Israel’s President Shimon Peres and President-elect Reuven Rivlin expressed their desire to live in peace with their Arab neighbors and their faith in the ability to live together. “The bloodshed will only stop when we all realize that we have not been sentenced to live together, but destined to live together.”

That is a very lofty sentiment, but the reality is that there can be no coexistence with a ruthless, relentless enemy whose very raison d’etre is your total and complete extermination. There will be no peace until either that murderous hatred or the bearers of it themselves are stamped out. This can only be accomplished by making the enemy pay terribly; that is how wars are won. Victory and lasting peace cannot be achieved through rules of engagement that tie both hands behind one’s back in order to curry the world’s “favor” – a favor Israel will never win, no matter how extraordinarily well she behaves.

(This article originally appeared here on FrontPage Mag, 7/25/14)

The NY Times’ Nicholas Kristof Becomes an Islamophobe

In the New York Times last week, columnist Nicholas Kristof officially became an Islamophobe. More precisely, he finally adopted somewhat the same stance toward Islam as the Cassandras whom Kristof and his ilk relentlessly demonize as Islamophobes – all the while trying to distance himself from them.

“In country after country,” a concerned Kristof begins, “Islamic fundamentalists are measuring their own religious devotion by the degree to which they suppress or assault those they see as heretics, creating a human rights catastrophe as people are punished or murdered for their religious beliefs.” No, really? Surely it is no surprise to him that writers such as those of us at FrontPage have been expressing our concern about Islamic fundamentalists for many years. We’ve noted repeatedly that the most numerous victims of Muslims are other Muslims, many of whom are ostracized (at best) or killed (at worst) precisely because they aren’t sufficiently hardcore believers.

But Kristof dismisses such writers as “Islam-haters in America and the West,” who “denounce Islam as a malignant religion of violence, while politically correct liberals are reluctant to say anything for fear of feeding bigotry.” It’s not bigotry or hate to point out that orthodox Muslims themselves demonstrate its malignance and violence every day around the world. Moreover, “politically correct liberals” aren’t silent only because they don’t want to feed bigotry; the most radical are silent because they see Islam as an ally in their multiculturalist siege of the West.

“Yet there is a real issue here of religious tolerance,” Kristof continues, “affecting millions of people, and we should be able to discuss it.” No kidding. As I mentioned above, the freedom fighters that the left dismisses as Islam-haters have been trying to discuss the Islam problem for decades, but have been relentlessly attacked and delegitimized for it. Now however, Kristof decides we need to have an open discussion, as if it’s his idea.

He was apparently prompted to address this topic by the murder of a Muslim friend at the hands of his friend’s co-religionists. “Such extremists,” he posits, “do far more damage to the global reputation of Islam than all the world’s Islamophobes put together.” This is his grudging way of admitting that orthodox Muslims themselves are the ones responsible for Islam’s dismal reputation. Now if only he would connect the dots and acknowledge that perhaps the world’s “Islamophobes” have legitimate concerns.

But Kristof hedges his newfound realistic perspective on Islam with an historical aside: “The paradox is that Islam historically was relatively tolerant… Anti-Semitism runs deep in some Muslim countries today, but, for most of history, Muslims were more tolerant of Jews than Christians were.” He cites the Holocaust and “the killing of Muslims by Christians at Srebrenica in Bosnia and Herzegovina” as evidence for this. First, anti-Semitism has always run deep in Muslim lands, not just today, because Jew-hatred is endemic to Islam itself. Secondly, Islam has not been “tolerant” for most of its history, and whatever its historical sins, Christianity has evolved and Islam has not; the pressing issue is that Islam remains violently intolerant today.

Kristof asserts that “some of the bravest champions of religious freedom today are Muslim” – for example, Iranian lawyer Mohammad Ali Dadkhah, who successfully defended a Christian pastor from charges of apostasy, but suffered for it by being jailed himself. This is genuinely commendable. Unfortunately, this example does not demonstrate that Islam itself champions religious freedom.

He goes on to note that Saudi Arabia and Iran “are twins in religious repression. Saudis ban churches; it insults Islam to suggest it is so frail it cannot withstand an occasional church.” Actually, the fundamentalists know full well that Islam cannot withstand an occasional church, which is why apostasy is punished by death and Christians are brutally persecuted. They are keenly aware that the freedom of conscience to choose one’s religion would mean a vast exodus from, and possibly the end of, Islam.

“I hesitated to write this column,” Kristof concedes, “because religious repression is an awkward topic when it thrives in Muslim countries. Muslims from Gaza to Syria, Western Sahara to Myanmar, are already enduring plenty without also being scolded for intolerance.” The only reason it’s “awkward” for Kristof and other leftists is their defensive sympathy for Islam; if Christians around the world were massacring Muslims, putting mosques to the torch, and executing apostates, you can bet Kristof and his fellows would have no trouble “scolding” them.

Kristof is also uncomfortable addressing worldwide Muslim atrocities because he believes that “we in the West live in glass houses, and I don’t want to empower our own chauvinists or fuel Islamophobia.” Excuse me? The West has no moral high ground on the issue of religious intolerance? That is frankly a crock. A January 2014 Pew Research study which Kristof himself describes as “a sad index of rising intolerance” notes that the world’s only region essentially untouched by religious repression is the Americas, and that the worst regions for it, as in previous years, are the Middle East and North Africa. Kristof himself concedes that “some of the worst abuse actually takes place in Muslim-dominated countries.” Indeed, and things are getting worse there and in Western countries with burgeoning Muslim minority populations.

“Some heroic Muslims,” Kristof closes, “like my [murdered] friend Rashid in Pakistan, have sacrificed their lives to protect religious freedom. Let’s follow their lead and speak up as well, for silence would be a perversion of politeness.” What gall. Again, those he derides as “Islam-haters” are the ones who have been and still are leading the way in speaking up against the rising tide of Islamic supremacism, only to be met with vicious smears from progressives such as Kristof. Apparently it’s not bigotry if the left does it.

(This article originally appeared here on FrontPage Mag, 7/18/14)