Do the U.C. Regents Really Know What is Going On?

Several weeks ago, my friends Tammi Rossman- Benjamin, a lecturer in Hebrew at U.C. Santa Cruz and Leila Beckwith, Professor Emeritus at UCLA,  contacted me about a letter which they wished to address to Mark Yudof, President of U.C. California – the largest college system in the United States.    They expressed their outrage with the failure of Yudof and the U. C. Regents to adequately address the rising tide of anti-Semitism on  California college campuses and the apparent ease with which Muslim groups and other left wing organizations are able to demonize Jews and Israel in the most vile and inciting language.

In the letter, to which they asked me to append  my name and the endorsement of the American Freedom Alliance, they outlined some of the outrageous attacks to which Jewish students have been subjected over the past several years.  To wit:

“ Over the last several years, Jewish students have been subjected to -  swastikas and other anti-Semitic graffiti; acts of physical and verbal aggression; speakers, films and exhibits that use anti-Semitic imagery and discourse; speakers that praise and encourage support for terrorist organizations that openly advocate murder against Israel and the Jewish people; the organized disruption of events sponsored by Jewish student groups; and most recently, the promotion of student senate resolutions for divestment that seek to demonize and delegitimize the Jewish State.”

The crowning incident of these macabre developments occurred when grotesque gestures and obscene epithets were hurled at Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, when he attempted to deliver an address to students at U.C. Irvine on February 8.  Eleven students , most of them belonging to the college’s Muslim Student Union, were arrested for civil disturbance.

The incident not only shone a kleig light on the problematic campus but also pointed to intense problems of oversight within the U.C. system itself.   The failure of the Board of Regents to adequately discipline  a campus which has witnessed repeated instances of  anti- semitic outbursts from Muslim students and has paid little attention to the growing climate of intolerance, was a making a farce of  the Regents’ professed multicultural ethos.

President Yudof’s answer was to institute a series of  campus climate committees -  groups of academics, campus administrators and lay leaders who might represent a broad multicultural approach to resolving campus problems.

Tammi and Leila’s letter attacked the Yudof plan as being out of touch with reality since it does not expressly deal with the most egregious form of bigotry and hatred -  the attack on Jews and supporters of Israel.  In other words, their contention was that the campus climate committees have not been convened to specifically address anti-Semitism – which accounts for 80% of the threatened violence and racial slurs on campus, but have been given wide purview for an investigation embracing all forms of racism.   The letter composed by Rossman- Benjamin, Beckwith and U.C. Irvine lecturer Roberta Seid, gave explicit recommendations for the course the U.C. President ( himself an observant Jew) , should undertake.

They are too numerous to enumerate here but fall under the rubric of one basic directive : Call this intolerance and bigotry for what it is -  a resurgence of the same anti-Semitism which has  its roots planted deeply in Western history.

Yudof, disappointingly, has not risen to this challenge.  In a letter, dated July 2 and addressed to the fourteen named leaders of organizations who signed the original June 28 letter( myself included)  he ducks the demand that the Board of Regents  expressly name anti-Semtism as the number one cause of disturbances  on our campuses.   Instead he urges that the multicultural campus climate change committees be given the opportunity to do their work and provide their recommendations for dealing with outbreaks of racism.

Fair enough.   I can take Yudof at his word and wait for his committees to do their work.   But we are  all, nevertheless, absolutely correct to be skeptical.   For multicultural panels throughout the West , such as the ones he has convened, have proved themselves regularly inept in addressing outbreaks of anti-Semitism, particularly from within the Muslim community.  Read almost any British newspaper these days ( or the reports that we present weekly from that country in The Western Word) and you will find evidence of multicultural city councils, police boards and government agencies  surrendering to the cultural sensitivities of Muslim communities, abjectly bowing to their supposed ‘multicultural’ and rights of free speech to express anger about  Israeli policies and against any Jew who supports them.

I rather like Sharon Rappeport’s response to Yudof’s letter.    She states that sensible monarchs learned centuries ago that  there is never a  substitute for first hand experience and every now and then it is good for the King to wander amongst his subjects to see for himself what is really going on in the streets of his towns and villages.

“  May I suggest then that you dress as do many of your ( observant Jewish)  students:  with a beard, kippa, and tzitzit–the strings hanging on the outside. Then attend a free speech “talk” by Abdul Malek at U.C. Irvine or Santa Cruz and discover what it feels like to be pointed at and screamed at by him and intimidated by his menacing bodyguards. Hang out at “the wall” during “Israel Apartheid Week”–choose any of the U.C. campuses–and try entering a discussion with the organizers of that hate fest, surrounded by banners equating Jews with Nazis. They will tell you straight out that they believe you should be killed.”

It seems inevitable that while the climate change committees slowly deliberate over the nature of  violent rhetoric that has engulfed California campuses in recent years,  actual violence and murder may not be too far away.

At that point, with blood  spilled on our campuses, it may be too late for Mark Yudof and his Board of Regents to officially recognize that, yes, indeed, we have an antisemitic problem that cannot be met by subscription to the usual multicultural pieties or soft touch policies.  They can only be stamped out by resort to the most draconian methods  – either the dissolution of campus organizations, expulsion of the offending students or direct charges of criminal behavior.

Diversity’s Failing Grades

When I first came to the United States 26 years ago to undertake some post-graduate work, I lived with a group of Jewish students in a large dormitory near UCLA.    After about a year, I became acquainted with a startling fact about my fellow lodgers – their level of academic achievement was well below what I had experienced among my fellow students in Australia.  Many could not spell simple words; their grammar was atrocious; their conversation was filled with non- sequiturs and was riven with an over-dependence on the word “like.”

I was part of the U.C. system then and have been associated with UCLA in one way or another, ever since.

During that time, I have seen not only seen academic standards fall, but the rise of a campus culture which places cultural sensitivity training above all other priorities, including academic distinction.

I wasn’t aware of  it when I arrived in 1984, but only six years had then passed since the landmark law suit Regents of the University of California vs Bakke,  which had gone all the way to the U.S.  Supreme Court. The case involved one Allan Bakke, who had applied to U.C. Davis Medical School but was denied, despite an impressive academic record.

The U.C. Davis Medical School claimed that its affirmative action/ diversity policies prevented it from increasing the number of white males who could be admitted.   However after he was denied a second time, Bakke filed suit for mandatory injunctive relief, demanding that the school allow his admission and to render its restrictive policies unconstitutional.  The case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court with Bakke eventually gaining the right to attend U.C. Davis but with no conclusive majority opinion on the constitutionality of its affirmative action policies.

Yet Justice Lewis F. Powell’s lone opinion in the case was consequential.   It concluded that though race could not be the basis for excluding a candidate, race could certainly be one of many factor in admission’s considerations.   That opinion was seized upon by affirmative action enthusiasts and became part of the U.C. admissions policies thereafter.

Ten years ago, after having read The Tyranny of Diversity, a book on the state of universities in an age of affirmative action, I launched my own inquiry into how universities, committed to integration of minorities through affirmative action policies and a commitment to diversity, were coping with the changes to their student populations.

The results of that inquiry were sobering:  a rapid fall in academic standards; an increase in reports of date rape and sexual assault and the decrease of civil discourse on campus.

The system had become a zero-sum game that opened the door for jobs, promotions, or education to minorities while shutting the door on whites. Not only that, but in a country that prized the values of self-reliance and meritocratic achievement,  it had imported into our educational system ideals which were foreign  to it, providing opportunity that had not been earned and eroding rather than encouraging respect, tolerance and openness.

Recognizing that affirmative action policies had, appallingly, become a means of engineering reverse discrimination, California voters in 1996 therefore soundly approved Proposition 209, which  amended the California State Constitution to prohibit public institutions from considering race, sex or ethnicity for the purposes of admissions or public employment.

But that was not the end of affirmative action.  Not by a long shot.  Chameleon-like, it merely morphed into “diversity” as a new expression of its determination to integrate multiple cultures, lifestyles, sexual preferences and points of view into the wider campus community.

I was reminded of all this last Thursday when the U.C. Regents decided, in a public meeting, to apologize to the black community of U.C. San Diego for an off campus party that had mocked Black History Month. The Regents promised  to help create campus environments in which minority students would feel more comfortable.

In fact, U.C . President, Mark Yudof, declared that he would seek changes in admissions policies as well as the creation of scholarships for underrepresented minorities “in order to improve diversity.”

Hmmm…. so, here we are  again – 50 years after John F. Kennedy introduced the term ‘affirmative action’ into our vocabulary, 32 years after Powell’ s opinion in Bakke and 14 years after Proposition 209  -  and we find that not only is there an outright denial of diversity’s failure, but a general agreement among our academic leaders that our universities are not quite diverse enough.

For Yudof was not only referring to the offense to black students.  His remarks were made against a backdrop of racial slurs and near rioting which interrupted a speech by Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, at a speech at U.C. Irvine on February 12th.   The outrageous behavior of Muslim students there, in which 11 were arrested for disorderly conduct, drew public attention to the fact that Muslim students on campuses throughout the West often do not feel bound by the same rules as non-Muslims, particularly when it comes to the expression of their views on the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Yudof, of course, would not admit it, but the riots at places like U.C. Irvine and  U.C Berkeley, are as much a result of the diversity policies in the U.C.  system as they are the capstone of  a half century of attempted integration policies, which focus on freedom of expression and the promotion of cultural identity at the expense of  educational advancement.

For administrations are increasingly loathe to clamp down on hate speech on campus for fear of tripping the wires of cultural sensitivity.  So professors and students alike can compare Israelis to Nazis, the War in Gaza to the Holocaust or call for the murder of an ambassador – and university administrations can barely bring themselves to blink an eyelid.

Meanwhile, affirmative action lives on in its diversity disguise, as pernicious an ideology as ever.  In the same forum where Yudof debased himself by begging forgiveness from the black community for not making the U.C. system diverse enough, U.C. Regent Eddie Island added:

“It is our own standards and slavish adherence to grade point averages and SAT scores that have put us in this dilemma.  We value those things higher than we value other human qualities that are just as important and that can make a contribution within the UC environment.”

How ironic, for the truth, of course, is quite the opposite.  It is affirmative action and diversity which have put us in this dilemma  – and the problems that they encourage, are only growing.

“We stand in solidarity with the Irvine 11,” declared Victor Sanchez, president of the University of California Student Association in his opening remarks to the regents during the meeting.  This was a  sly reference to the Chicago 7 – essentially making the case that screaming racial epithets and encouraging incitement to murder constitute protected speech, as long as it is are attached to  a cause to which the U.C. students are popularly aligned.

Did any of the U.C. Regents rebut this hateful notion?  None.  For to do so would to be contravene diversity’s golden rule:  all opinions and viewpoints  are equally valid, no matter how viciously expressed.

And how is the new found meritocratic emphasis of our universities faring in all of  this?  Well just ask Jocelyn Devault of Newbury Park, whose 18-year-old senior, despite possessing a 4.1 GPA, all Advance Placement, International Baccalaureate course work and high SAT scores, could not manage to get into even one of the U.C.s  she applied to for the Fall of 2010.

Why would any thoughtful parent wish to send their child to a tertiary institution where hate speech is given such protective cover, where academic achievement is devalued and where the leaders are weak, supine sychophants who bend in the direction of  whatever multicultural wind  is blowing their way?

Perhaps we should all be asking these hard questions as the U.C. Regents get to work on strengthening their diversity agenda.

The Modern Feminist Agenda

Twenty-two years ago, when I was working for a cultural center in Los Angeles, it was decided to invite Betty Friedan to present a lecture.  Friedan had been vaunted for years as one of the founders of the modern feminist movement and her book, The Feminist Mystique, paved the way for a host of successive feminists, younger and more rabidly determined to shake up gender bias around the country.

During that visit I spent considerable time with Friedan, driving her from location to location and learned much about her ideas on feminism.

By 1988,  already in her late 60s, Friedan was in no mood to reflect on the great achievements of the feminist movement over the preceding 25 years.  She had authored The Second Stage in 1981, in which she had critiqued what she saw as the extremist excesses of some of her  colleagues who could be broadly classified as gender feminists. (Gender feminists typically criticize contemporary gender roles and aim to eliminate them altogether.)  She fulminated against them as I drove her back to her hotel in Santa Monica:

” They’ve stripped us of everything. Any real legtimacy. The feminist movement is in ruins!”  

I believe  she was right.  By the late 80′s, the entire feminist movement was moving beyond its traditional role of seeking equal rights for women and fast embracing far left wing ideologies and lesbian and transgender advocacy as its primary focus. 

In took only another four years before the feminist movement was upended when Christina Hoffs Sommer published Who Stole Feminism?  in which the author identified gender feminism as characterizing most modern feminist theory and serving as its prevailing ideology in academia. 

Because she had identified some of these excesses, Friedan progressively saw her leadership eclisped by Gloria Steinem, who knew how to coddle the radicals without necessarily embracing their ideologies.

But it has become fairly clear from Steinem’s rule of the roost, that women’s issues are not nearly as important as subscribing the movement to left wing causes.   From the anti- War movement, to Black victimhood politics to gay rights, Steinem  has been involved in almost every left wing cause of the past 50 years trailing the obliging feminist movement behind her.

Perhaps that is why so many women regard  “feminist” as a dead term these days, restricted to hard core man haters who have no patience nor respect for a woman’s expression of  femininity.  

So I had to laugh when Steinem was asked in this interview in the Los Angeles Times on Saturday, why so many women shrink from the term  feminist today?   She answered:

“Because it has been demonized by the right wing. Every time I  can bear to turn on Rush Limbaugh he’s talkling about femi-Nazis.  It has been distorted, just like liberal has. “

What a poor excuse for an argument.  Feminism long ago painted itself into a radical corner and needed nothing from Rush Limbaugh or any other right wing commentator to characterize it as out of touch with the needs of most modern women.

The feminist movement’s myriad failures are on par with many other left wing causes that have lost sight of their original goals.  For instance, where is the National Organization of Women, Independent Women’s Forum, Feminists for Life and Feminist Majority Foundation in condemning through international campaigns the grave indignities suffered by women in Muslim countries from stoning, wife beating, genital mutilation and denial of civil rights?   Where is the feminist movement in addressing the way young women, particularly on our college campuses, debase themselves through casual sexual encounters ( the hooking up culture!) and exploitative relationships?  

Where are the feminists in praising a woman with the strength of character of a Sarah Palin who, no matter what you think of her politics, has demonstrated that women can rise from almost nowhere and play a very signficant role in national politics, competing with men on almost every level.

Palin is not lauded , of course, because her politics puts her beyond the pale of feminist acceptability.   In fact, the feminists barely regard her as female at all.  Steinem famously declared as much in this Los Angeles piece in September, 2008, when she said that “Palin  shares nothing but a chromosome in common with Hilary Clinton.”

Tomorrow will mark International Women’s Day, the 99th time it will be celebrated.  Given what we have seen from the feminist movement in the years following its inauguration, perhaps it won’t surprise anyone that that first auspicious date in March, 1911 was observed  following a declaration by the Socialist Party of America. The IWD was its brainchild.

The Rise of the Watermelon Activists

It was a startling fact to learn.   Watermelon, one of the most popular fruits on our planet, is 92% water.   Those big, oblong cylinders are then, surprisingly enough, actually more barrels of H2O than they are a food stuff.  

How looks can deceive.

There are many kinds of watermelon – nearly 1200, in fact - but whenever we think of one it is usually the Carolina Cross variety-  very green on the outside and very red on the inside –  that pops into our imagination. 

I thought about that color contrast at AFA’s recent Los Angeles seminar  The  Green Movement: From Common Sense and Compromise to Coercion and Control, held  in Los Angeles on Sunday, February 21.  After the day was over I actually had an entirely different view of watermelons. 

The seminar presented five speakers, who, one after the other, described the green movement and its operating philosophy of sustainability as a rehash of the same communist principles and ideas, effectively discredited  in the West for over a generation.  

Steve Milloy,  the author of Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them, opened the seminar with a sweeping history of the environmental lobby and how it has always masqueraded as a benign, non-ideological movement, when in fact its focus is on the acquisition of  political power and the control of our most vital institutions, in order to impose a new form of  social and political order on society. 

Claudia Rosett, a journalist and fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington D.C.  followed with a bracing commentary on the United Nations and its use of international environmental policy to penetrate sovereign jurisdiction of Western nations.  She pointed out the life long quest of  U.N. potentates such as Canadian industrialist Maurice Strong to impose a new order on humanity, one in which the rights of the environment are elevated above human rights and national law is superceded by international jurisdiction.   

Michael Shaw, the President of Freedom Advocates, presented an eye-opening examination of the way the Green movement’s philosophy of sustainability has penetrated into the very heart of our society, with local councils and even homeowners associations adopting the tenets of Agenda 21  (see my own article about this U.N. document  here).  Shaw presented damning evidence of the way ICLEI – the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives, the U.N.’s vehicle for Agenda 21, uses its extensive influence in American townships through its  plans for  social engineering and behavior modification, to bring individuals in line with its environmental objectives. 

More important than this though, Shaw demonstrated how ICLEI’s focus on land usage is an attempt to impose a regime of land redistribution in the name of environmental protection.  It promotes a modern form of  collectivization wherein citizens will be told where and how they will live.  (You can get more an idea about this by visiting the ICLEI site  here)  

 It is also ICLEI’s job to implement United Nation’s policies that restructure our representative form of government through global and regional development.  Policies and programs take control from our representative government and put that control into the hands of regional, non-elected boards.  It  threatens, according to Shaw, a soviet-styled system that is based on regionalism.   

Ashley Thorne,  the Director of Communications at the National Association of Scholars, followed with a convincing presentation of the way the  philosophy of sustainability is being indoctrinated into our students all over the country.    Several universities, such as the University of Delaware, maintain compulsory sustainability training for freshmen and there are  schools which make a course in sustainability mandatory.  Nearly 650 college professors have signed on to the ACUPP ( American College and University President’s Climate Commitment) which is a document calling upon University presidents to impose stringent sustainability restrictions upon their campuses and to institute more courses in sustainable growth. 

Ms. Thorne pointed out how the United States government became complicit with this  movement when Congress passed all provisions of the Higher Education Sustainability Act (HESA) as part of the new Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008 (HR 4137) in July, 2008.  This Act creates pioneering “University Sustainability Grants” which will offer funds to institutions of higher education to develop, implement and evaluate sustainability curricula, practices, and academic programs. 

Holly Swanson , the author of Set Up and Sold Out: Find Out What Green Really Means and the Director of Operation Greenout! in Oregon,  concluded the day with a presentation on the role of the Greens in fostering political change.   She drew a direct line between the writings and pronouncements of former communist leaders both nationally and internationally and Green Movement political action today.   From Gus Hall, the former Chairman of the Communist Party of the United States (“ The fact is , the bigger the stake people have in the struggle for a more livable world, the greaterthe  fighters they will be in the struggle to save humanity from extinction” ) to Mikhail Gorbachev, the former Secretary-General of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, who has acknowledged creating Green Cross International in the early 1990s in order promote communist ambitions, the Green movement has been infused with ideological energy from the collapse of the Soviet Union.  Many of the stalwart members of the Communist party  have become enthusiastic boosters of the Green movement and the connection between the two camps is unassailable.    

You could not have heard five more compelling speakers address a subject that 99% of Americans know almost nothing about.   Even those of us who have feared the growth of the environmental movement and its outlandish attempts to impose its orthodoxies on our lifestyle, were shocked to discover how the philosophy of sustainability has penetrated our local governmental institutions, our universities and our national thinking.  In a workshop following the presentations, I was dismayed to hear of political leaders whom we thought could be recruited to help fight this rising tide, being dismissed as already in the environmentalists’ camp.  

I was also not too happy to hear that even most of the conservative movement,  besides a few stray voices, have accepted sustainability doctrine.  That is certainly the case in the U.K. , where opposition leader David Cameron has made a point of declaring himself an environmentalist and a supporter of sustainable development. 

What hope, then, is there?   The answer lies in education on a grass roots level. Adapting the model of the Tea Party movement, working with churches, synagogues, homeowners associations and local councils, reaching out to high schools and junior colleges, are all essential measures in encouraging the development of a broad based network of activists dedicated to combating this threat to freedom and property rights.

Americans need to begin to understand that ‘sustainable development’ is a mere pseudonym for centralized control over lives and property.  They need to visit the websites of the United Nations Agenda 21, ICLEI, Earth First and Eco-America to read the literature on the real plan of these latter day totalitarians for their future.   They must begin to appreciate that the “green”that this movement is trying to sell us, is in fact a deep red  – in color, in texture and in character. 

Only the color blind could mistake it for anything else.  

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Prepare Ye for the Apocalypse: The Fundamentalist Left’s Vision of Your Future

Doomsday prognostications are big business these days.  In just the past four months, our movie theaters have offered several scenarios depicting the end of the world as we know it.   They include the block buster 2012,  the feature The Road,  the documentary, Collapse  and sci-fi thriller, The Book of Eli.  All have  projected, in one way or another,  a future so mercilessly bleak and human conduct so damnable, that there is almost nothing left to redeem.

The high prevalence of doomsayers during times of economic or social turmoil is nothing new to Western culture.   From Nostradmus (The Prophecies) to Malthus ( The Principle of Population) to Ehrlich ( The Population Bomb),  every generation seems to sprout a new crop of  nightmare scenarios in which man has neither the will nor the resources to support the continuation of the species.

Apocalyptic visions have usually been the stock in trade of  the religious right and indeed, among certain evangelical Christian and ultra Orthodox  Jewish communities, the Apocalypse may well be nigh, portending a world convulsed in mortal combat as the decisive battle of Gog and Magog ensues among the ruins of Western civilization.

But the left also has its doomsayers, given to febrile maunderings about the imminent destruction of the planet.  This is no more in evidence than what we see occuring in the environmental movement these days.  From predictions of  the catastrophic rise of sea levels, to population explosion and a world unable to feed itself, the sky- is -falling- crowd think they know something about the impending catastrophe(s)  about to overwhelm us and what you, as an individual, can do to stop it.

In Britain this week,  some of these views were given full public expression - and a government imprimatur – with the publication of Land Use Futures: Making the Most of Land inthe 21st Century. The report, commissioned as a part of the  UK government’s Foresight Project, is a  marvel in government scare-mongering, a view of a future in which households will be monitored for their use of energy, land usage will be strictly controlled by buereaucratic fiat and citizens will be told where and in what they can live. 

Taking catastrophic climate change as a given,  the report suggests that mass migrations will occur to the north as the southern regions  of the British Isles dry out;  a projected increase of the population by nine million by 2031 and an increase in the number of single-person households would result in unprecedented demand for land for development and put pressure on natural resources such as water.  According to the report, by 2050, hotter, drier summers could reduce river flows by 80 per cent.

The report’s researchers present a number of scenarios in which the British citizen is forced, then, to make some dramatic changes in his lifestyle.

For instance, in 2014, World leaders are gathered and informed that the climate change situation is far more worse than anyone imagined and that without draconian measures there will be nothing much left to save.

The Government responds by taking control of vast tracts of land and using it to grow wood and crops for biomass power stations. An agricultural productivity Bill requires farmers to increase yields per hectare but most have to sell up because they lack the resources to comply.

 This indeed starts to look like real life aping fiction – 2012 crossed with The Book of Eli  melding with Collapse.  

But fiction it certainly is.   As the entire climate catastrophe scenario unravels ( is there a day that goes by without another lie or fabrication from the climate change crowd not being exposed?)  so too has the population explosion myth.

Paul Ehrlich’s famous prediction  in the December 1967 edition of  the New Scientist ” that the world would experience famines sometime between 1970 and 1985 due to population growth outstripping resources”  was demonstrated to be completely inaccurate.    He said then  ”the battle to feed all of humanity is over … In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” Ehrlich also stated, “India couldn’t possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980,” or “be ever self-sufficient in food.”

No predictions this side of Nostradamus would ever prove so preposterous. 

In my own lifetime, the estimates for total world population has fallen from a height of 20 billion to 15 billion to 11 billion ( the U.N. estimate around 1990) to 9 billion.   In fact, according to the 2004 U.N. World Population Division Report, due to decreasing fertility rates, world population has been decelerating for the last half century or so and the projections show that it may actually decline after 2040.

India has also proven itself eminently capable of feeding its population and the stagggering rise in prosperity in that country over the past 25 years has put the lie to the claim that its 1 billion person population is unsustainable.  In September, 2009, the Indian Minister  for Agiruclture announced that in spite of its three year long drought, India, with the world’s second largest population, would not need to import food. He was followed by the prime minister Manmohan Singh, who announced:

“We had record production and procurement of foodgrains in both 2007/08 and 2008/09. We thus have adequate food stocks and there is no cause for concern or fear of shortages of foodgrains in the country as a whole.”

But the British government’s scientists nevertheless seem certain that the world’s future, and Britain’s in particular,  is unavoidably grim.  Their answer is for goverment to seize property and redistribute it in the name of energy efficency;  for humans to be constantly monitored  for their contribution to environmental degradation and to educate the population in the inquities of home ownership in favor of communal “stewardship” of shared natural resources.

For the authors of this report, the future of the  UK  is dependent on  making  ”a significant cultural shift away from meeting present desires and towards protecting the needs of future generations.”

We have been called on for such self sacrifice before.   Almost every modern dictator has voiced similar admonitions to his countrymen.  Offered now with a smile and wrapped in a new environmental package, this lefitst vision of our future  is no less threatening to our lives and liberty than any of these other manifestations of ideology run amock.   Lenin, Stalin, Hitler and Mao might be proud. 

But for me,  if the Apocalypse is indeed almost upon us, I think I could find better companions to ride out the storm than those four horsemen, thundering towards us from our very unhappy past.

Shooting Michael Moore

Documentary:  97 minutes

Director:  Kevin Leffler 

I’ll admit it from the beginning.  I have never trusted Michael Moore.  From his very first aw-shucks days filming Roger and Me, that sly and ultimately savage depiction of corporate America, I have found his irreverent film making approach shallow and self -serving.   At the time the documentary was released however, not many Americans agreed with me.   Moore, as country  bumpkin, cleverly springing traps for General Motors CEO Roger Smith, was regarded in many circles as the late 20th century cinematic answer to Mark Twain,  skewering self-important businessmen and politicians and taking delight in exposing their foibles.

But subsequent Moore directed documentaries proved my hunch correct.   Farenheit 9/11, Bowling for Columbine and Sicko, all with their trademark boffo humor, increasingly revealed Moore to be a sensationalist, generally more interested in a punchline than either truth or balance.  Yet  possessing a keen sense of what hot button issues and raw footage would sell popcorn, he has been able to pack them into the theaters, oblivious to the impact of his hucksterism on impressionable minds.

With all that said, I still didn’t expect Moore to be a shyster too, who, as a film maker, would prove himself blithely disinterested in the welfare of his film subjects, while in his private life conducting himself  as much of a money grubbing capitalist as the Wall Street bankers, corporate raiders and conservative kingpins he so gleefully pillories in his films.

But that is the indeed the image that remains upon a vewing of college professor Kevin Leffler’s profoundly disturbing Shooting Michael Moore.  Adopting Moore’s now famous technique of seeking out his prey through relentless stalking, Leffler sets out to find the “real” Michael Moore – not the baseball hat-graced figure of his  numerous films, but the fat cat multi-millionaire who has left dreary Flint, Michigan far behind for a swank apartment on New York’s Upper Westside. 

And he finds him alright, but not before uncovering an extraordinary trove of information that would, if publicly known and accepted, transform Moore into the great American anti-hero.  For this is a Michael Moore who cheats on his taxes,  maintains a non-profit organization that invests in such “malign” corporations as Exxon Mobil,  Pfizer and Halliburton;  whose $2 million property in Michigan is in violation of innumerable environmental ordinances;  who pays the impoverished main subejects of his films (remember the “rabbit lady” from Roger and Me?) a pittance while his films rake in millions;  who edits his films in such a way to take his subjects’ quotes out of context and distorts the representation of their beliefs.

No greater evidence of Moore’s fraudulent approach to film making is offered than his decision to use the British and Cuban health systems as the measure to judge the American.  In Sicko, Moore takes us to the U.K. to witness the supposedly beneficent free health care system operated by the Brits’ NHS – the National Health Service.  Immigrants are shown to be beaming with the good fortune of having landed in the U.K.  A couple, leaving the hospital with their new born child, relate the great service they received, sharing a good laugh about how free it all is.  

Leffler also travels to Britain but reveals a very different state of affairs.  Over crowded hospitals and long wait lists strain the system, forcing the elderly to wait months, if not years, for scheduled operations. Pregnant women can’t find beds at local hospitals and there are reports of some delivering their children on bean bags.  The NHS itself is shown to be on the verge of bankruptcy, forced to shutter innumerable hospitals in impoverished areas for lack of funding.

But Leffler reserves his greatest bile for the way Moore represents the Cuban system.   Far from the utopian, patient-oriented welfare system presented in Sicko, Cuba’s  universal health care service is revealed to be a cesspool of neglect and avarice, with patients in elderly hospices forced to lie on filthy cots for days in their own excrement and routine check ups impossible to schedule without the right connections.  Moore, it is speculated, could not have conducted his interviews and filming in Cuba without the direct assistance of the Cuban government, who in turn, would only have given permission for the tour if it believed that the film maker’s ultimate product would prove useful as anti- American propaganda.

Ultimately, Leffler, who grew up in the same town as Moore ( Davison, MI – not Flint, MI) , went to the same school and even knew him as a child, comes to know the grown up version of his schoolmate in a more substantial way than Moore has ever known any of  his subjects.  Because public tax records, evidence of local citations and other written materials by Moore himself, don’t lie and cannot be manipulated,  without the most grevious consequences.  They all go to prove that the  Michael Moore of public acclaim, is not the humanitarian and defender of the “little man” whom his admiring public thinks him to be, but an unrepentant con-artist and raconteur, who, since his earliest days, allowed his quest for for “truth and  justice” to be overwhelmed by his infatuation with fame, wealth and himself.

There is an ironic injustice that with each sensationalistic documentary, bathed as they are in anti-Americanism and self -reverence, Moore gets richer and his films win more awards.    But the good news is that there do exist “little men” such as Kevin Leffler who are willing to take such true fat cats to task for their  hype, hypocrisy and hubris  and then lacerate them with the same stinging observations that these doyens of the far left once applied to others.   For anyone out there thinking of following in his footsteps, I have just two words:  Al Gore.

 

Israel Does the West’s Dirty Work

The outrage in Britain that has followed the revelation that eleven Israelis, traveling under false British passports, executed a Hamas mastermind in Dubai last month, is a wonder to behold.    Prime Minister Gordon Brown has sputtered that Israel has questions to answer about the theft of the passports.  The British foreign secretary, David Millband, has gone on record threatening to sever ties with the Mossad.  Opposition leader David Cameron, together with his shadow foreign secretary, William Hague, are demanding an inquiry. And the British press is howling for retribution. 

The British establishment has made it clear that it has very little interest in the maintenance of  Israeli security.  But does it have any real interest in the maintenance of its own? .  Just this week, the second most senior justice in  the country exposed   the workings of  Britain’s own intelligence network and its link with the Americans, when he excoriated the agency for its handling of the ex-Guantanomo inmate Binyam Mohamed, severely compromising MI5’s ability to work in concert with foreign intelligence services; Lax British immigration policies, its ludicrously benevolent welfare system and an insistence of the right of free speech for even those who preach the overthrow of the British government and the destruction of the West, has transformed London into “terrorist central”  and a major node for the financing of terrorist activity world wide.

You’ll notice though that none of the British protests actually involve a denial that Mahmoud al Mabhouh was an innocent.  That is because the British government is well aware  that the Israelis bumped off a dangerous guy, a weapons purchaser and smuggler, whose activities have caused hundreds of Israeli deaths and injuries over the past 15 years. He trafficked in death and knew the risks of doing so. 

Lets also not forget that the British government and public are  no strangers to extra-judicial killings by British agents.  Countless works of  British fiction, from the 1840s and the Great Game onward, have been based on real life British spies knocking off villains who threaten British security in places as distant as Singapore, Kabul and Kenya. 

Today, however, we live in a different world, where terrorists use technology to network with one another and share their own forms of intelligence.  Hamas is a vital part of this network and no one should think for a moment that it does not have its own operatives in the U.K. supporting the financing  and coordination of military operations in Gaza and Damascus.  When are the British elites going to understand that this worldwide terrorist network, is poised as much at the heart of Britain as it is against the United States  and Israel?   Will it ever appreciate that those countries’ enemies  are as much their own  as any?

 Mahmoud al Mahbouh  stood as much  a  threat to  British security as it does to Israel’s. Rather than lambasting that country for its impudent use of British passports, it should be expressing its gratitude, much as it should have following the Entebbe Raid in 1976 and the Iraq’s Osirak Reactor Raid in 1981.   As a Western democracy, the Israelis demonstrated that they will not sit by idly, lugubriously building legal justifications for intervention, while terrorists plot and plan the murder their citizens.

The New Goodnight Kiss

In last week’s AFA Weekly Gazette, we offered a story on the release of a new DVD and book Oral Sex is the News Goodnight Kiss by Canadian author and film maker Sharlene Azam.

In the film, pre-teens and teenagers as young as 11, discuss their attitudes to oral sex as a legitimate form of ‘ romantic ‘ exchange between boys and girls.  It offers a portrait of a society in which such girls consider oral sex ” no biggie”  especially when it comes to potential rewards such as drugs, alcohol or money. 

Blurring the lines between romance and prostitution is a deadly game being played in our society encouraged by television programming, internet access, billboards, magazines and even shop windows.   In short, our children, no matter where or how they are raised, cannot escape the propaganda of our highly sexualized culture and we run the risk of raising a generation of children for whom romance, reticence, politeness and respect for the opposite sex will disappear entirely as governing social attitudes, opening the door to the acceptance of prostitution, pornography and sexual license for children as societal norms. 

This was brought home to me a few weeks ago when a friend confided to me that he was extremely disturbed by what he had been seeing in the conversations on his son’s Facebook page. The 13 and 14-year- olds, all hailing from Orthodox Jewish high schools, regularly employed words such as ” Ho”  ” Bitches” and ” Sh-tface.”  Even the girls were getting in on the act, gleefully referring to themselves with the same pejoratives.  

Is it any wonder?   Look at some of the  “children’s” television offered on Network TV these days, including  The Secret Life  Life of the American Teenager, Roommates or The Hard Life of RJ Berger  – a recent NBC offering whose teenage hero’s claim to fame is the size of his penis.   Even shows as seemingly innocuous as The Suite Life of Zack and Cody or Hannah Montana present young children, not much older than those presented in The New Goodnight Kiss, who are given adult roles with adult responses to adult situations.  Sexual innuendo runs unfettered throughout most of these shows, even if  there is an attempt to render it subtle and hidden.

The collapse of the boundary between public and private life, intimacy and sex, romance and pornography – and its societal implications, has been a concern of mine for years and was highlighted in my Western Word Radio show with Diana West in March, 2009 and in my blog entry Four Bedrooms, One Bathroom, No Boundaries. Readers may want to also pick up a copy of Rochelle Gurstein’s The Repeal of Reticence (1999) where the author argues that there has been a death in the U.S. of a “reticent sensibility” valuing tact, discretion, good taste and politeness.  She points out  how our culture has become a  ”noisy, vulgar circus where privacy and modesty are flouted, and where so-called avant-garde artists invoke free-speech rights to justify violent, dehumanizing or pornographic works.”

That assessment could not be more accurate.  In the Davis household we have a word to descibe the moral demarcation between good taste and prurience.  That word is” inappropriate” and it is employed by my sons regularly to identify areas where they know they cannnot go.   This, of course, does not shield them from the images and influences with which they are bombarded every day and there cannot be a sensitive parent alive who is not worried, no matter how good they believe their children to be, about the content of the text messages their children receive from  friends, or the Facebook interactions they undertake each day.

Carol Shipman, the ABC News Anchor who broke the story on The New Goodnight Kiss,  wrote in her own news blog about this  parental dilemma:

“Firm family rules and values and limits are key. We were told this stuff is not about money–it happens in the “best” of families, with well-intentioned parents who are not neglecting their children. But who may simply be somewhat distracted–and not paying active attention to what is going on in their children’s lives.”

While I agree with that, I don’t agree with what she says next about resolving the problem:

“And talking early is critical. About sex, about feelings, about everything. Bring up all of the tough stuff when your kids will still talk to you–and you will ensure they will always talk to you. If they have a sex question at age 5 or 6 or 7–answer it. Make your family a safe place for those conversations.”

This is precisely the answer that Pat Gentile, the president for the Alliance for Family Entertainment gave when she was asked why programs such as Roommates and The Secret Life of the American Teenager were being produced as family fare.  She was quoted exactly a year ago in the L.A. Times:  

“I’d love for these shows to be ‘Little House on the Prairie,’ but that isn’t going to happen. Family programming is all about bringing families together to watch shows so that they can dialogue about these sensitive topics.”

Wrong, Pat. Dead wrong.  The idea that we need to be open with our children about adult passions and attractions seems ludicrous when we remember that children, who are largely blank slates, actually deserve a childhood.   They will  have plenty of  time to be adults and to deal with all the confusions and difficulties life throws at them.  They do not to be shouldered with mysteries of adult life at the age of six or seven, no matter what they are told at school or see on the Internet.   The fact that even people like Shipman, who was appalled by the content of the documentary she previewed, would feel the need to invoke ” the parent as  family therapist” model  is unsettling to say the least.

Do You Really Want Your MTV?

So just when you thought it was safe to let your children watch television again, MTV  has announced the release of  its latest scripted show  The Hard Times of RJ Berger, a new high school oriented  comedy.

Well none of us would be wrong in thinking that the premise of a prime time television show focused on high school students could  be  anything more than a modern re-packaging of  1960s situation high school comedies such as  The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis or Gidget .  And we are right except  for a twist.    This nerdy high school  kid attracts attention, not because he’s a looker,  is a jock, a top scholar or because he is rich.  No, this character’s claim to fame is the size of his penis.

No kidding.   The executives at MTV, in an attempt to raise lagging ratings, seem to believe that a situation comedy would attract greater attention among its largely teen audience if the focus was on the lead character’s anatomical wonder.

The focus on the size of the male member is of course not unknown on cable television.  Another example of such obsession is Hung, an HBO scripted series  in which a divorced  former high school sports legend falls on hard times and decides to exploit his best asset in a last-ditch attempt to change his fortunes.  He forms  a partnership with an out of work poet and  they set up shop as a prostitute and a pimp.   The glorification of this course of conduct seems to continue on the  website of the popular show, where contestants are challenged to ” Pimp Ray“  (the lead character) and win $10,000. Additionally,  visitors can view  The Diary of  A Pimp.

Want even more lubricious content focused on prostitutes and their handlers.  Well then tune in to Showtime’s  Secret Diary of a Call Girl, where you can find everything you want on how glamorous and fun it is to be a high class prostitute.

Sickened enough yet?

Well to add to your disgust you might try  The Secret Life of the American Teenager ( which in development was originally titled “The Sex Life of the American Teenager”) .    This show, Disney’s biggest hit, depicts such scenes as teens in bed with one another, underage drinking,  a father peppering his daughters with questions about their sex lives and a pregnant girl in hospital awaiting the birth of her child .  Not to be outdone is the ABC Family Network’s Roommates about four post high school graduates who ‘share’  “four bedrooms, one bathroom and no boundaries.”

I wrote about the overt  sexualization of  family television in my editorial  Four Bedrooms, One Bathroom, No Boundaries, back in March with the debut of  Roommates.

How does such prurient fare make it to prime time?   Well the producers of R.J. are quite candid.  Says  MTV General Manager Stephen Friedman,  “For me, [the show] speaks to where we need to go as a network,” he said. “It’s smart, refreshingly candid and really captures what our audience wants: a nuanced, multilayered portrayal of their lives.”

Back in March 2009, Anne Sweeney, President of Disney’s ABC affiliate, validated Friedman’s reality approach to family entertainment in this way: “The best way to resonate with your audience is to be authentic and you’re only authentic if you are holding up a mirror to your audience and saying, ‘I see you.’ “

How can we allow our kids to channel surf when almost every channel which labels its fare “family entertainment” is no more than a viaduct for soft porn?   Am I alone in believing that television is wildly out of control and that the people running  it have no more connection or allegiance  to traditional values than the pimps and prostitutes that they seem to want to glorify?

When I first arrived in the United States, 25 years ago, I could not stop watching MTV. The music station then was non stop action and fascinating.  Today I can’t bear to watch even a single video, so unashamedly sexualized, misogynistic and salacious has it become.    From the empathetic to the voyeuristic, we seem to have have lost something vital on our path from Dobie Gillis  to R J.   So now instead of offering me a source of information about the world, my television represents  something so dangerous and sordid so that I can rarely bring myself to even turn it on.

That might make me a prude.  But I doubt very much that I stand alone.

ROMAN POLANSKI: HUNTED AND DEFENDED

When is a law, not a law?    When you are a celebrity and have a body of work behind you which labels you a major world artist.

That is the divine word  that came down the pike this week after a petition, signed by some of the world’s most accomplished directors, actors and producers demanded that the director Roman Polanski be released from Swiss custody.  He is held after being apprehended in that country for the commission of a 32 -year -old crime  of statutory rape in the United States. 
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The petition is long on names of men and women from whom we might  have expected better. French intellectuals Claude Lanzmann and  Bernard Henri Levy, two men who have made names for themselves in defending victims of outrageous crimes, signed this petition.  So did  Pedro Almodovar  whose Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down caused an international  uproar with its trivialization of rape.  And so did Salman Rushdie, who actually committed no crime but was nonetheless on the run for years from an adversary vowed to his elimination.

Where, I wonder , were these same tribunes of morality  after the decapitation of Dutch documentary film maker Theo Van Gogh in Amsterdam five years ago by a knife wielding jihadist?  Were they as overwhelmed with indignation when that  filmmaker lost his life for no other reason than speaking his mind?  Unfortunately the majority of the same cognoscenti,(Rushdie apart),so vocal in support of a rapist and pedophile, could not bring themselves to mumble much of a response to this unfathomably serious crime.

Polanski certainly has many friends – not just in the film industry  but among the elites of Europe.  He is the ultimate cosmopolitan and a renowned charmer. That perhaps accounts for a great deal of his support.   It  would be difficult indeed to ignore the plight of  a member of your own circle – particularly a man whose work  you admire and whose freedom to produce more masterpieces should, you believe, be protected – the same as you would receive should you find yourself in a similar predicament.

But this should not cloak reality.   Polanski is  an international fugitive whose crime was not simply to ply his 13-year-old victim with drugs and alcohol before sexually assaulting her.  Nor was it just that he skipped bail and spent 32 years on the lam.  His true crime is that he never took responsibility for any of it.   He never apologized for the actions that might  have ruined the life of the young girl in question;  He has never acknowledged that he then consciously re-established his own  life of glamour and artistic success as an  effective bulwark against the reach of the U.S. justice system.

Instead he did quite the opposite.   In 1979, in an interview with the British author Martin Amis, published in Tatler Magazine,  he sought to exculpate his actions by declaring himself an everyman who merely did what  everyone else wants to do:   “If I had killed somebody, it wouldn’t have had so much appeal to the press, you see? But… f—ing, you see, and the young girls. Judges want to f— young girls. Juries want to f— young girls. Everyone wants to f— young girls!”

This implied Lolita Syndrome does not exactly have its feet firmly planted in hard empirical data and personally I can’t remember ever experiencing or harboring such a desire.  If it holds true at all, it is only in that rarefied world of celebrity where ennui and tedium encourages the pursuit of any new thrill.

Which brings us to the question that must be asked – not about the correctness of the man’s extradition, but about the nature of the crime itself.   What led a 44- year-old man, lionized as one of the great filmmakers of his era , who sported the reputation of being able to seduce almost any woman of his fancy, decide to prey on a minor who had no resources to protect herself  and only a thin understanding of what Polanski was demanding of her? 

The answer is that to a man like Polanski, who had personally witnessed the horrors of the Holocaust and experienced the murder of  his wife and her friends in one of the most gruesome crimes in American history, rules and  conventional modes of personal conduct represent meaningless restrictions on personal freedom.  To seduce a minor might have seemed to him the ultimate thrill – not because the experience itself would be so elevating, but because Polanski, like many  contemporary entertainment, sporting  and political personalities, is driven by his sense of personal power. For men such as Polanski, the ultimate challenge is not to seduce a particular girl or boy, but to defy convention – to add one more shattered barrier to their scorecard, as if it is proof of personal invincibility.

In some ways Polanski’s case bares a striking resemblance to another long term fugitive who similarly evaded justice.   Ronald Biggs was a part of the conspiracy that resulted in the largest train heist in British history known as The Great Train Robbery. While his co-conspirators were eventually apprehended, the wily Biggs fled the country, becoming a high profile (and much  sought after) fugitive in Rio de Janeiro where he spent forty years foiling kidnapping attempts, raising a new family and proving that the law enforcement arm of the United Kingdom was no match for his guile.

But late in life Biggs recognized that the glamorous life of an international fugitive carried unexpected burdens of conscience.    In 2001, nearly forty years after the commission of the crime, sick and beaten, he gave himself up to British authorities.  Many reasons have been offered for Biggs’ decision , among them  the  availability of free British health care, ensuing poverty and pure homesickness.  But Biggs’ case perhaps tends to prove that one might be able to run from the law indefinitely but one cannot run from his own sense of guilt.

One of the main reasons  fugitives such as Roman Polanski and Ronald Biggs remain fascinating is precisely because of their ability to evade the law.  Just as murderers, thieves and hatchet men such as Al Capone, Jesse James and the Australian bushranger Ned Kelly have had legends spun from their confrontations with the law, so too Polanski and Biggs only added to their notoriety by  successfully dodging  their pursuers.     Living lives of celebrity, continuing to brazenly seduce women and attracting an ever flowing audience of international visitors, their plights became the stuff of legend, their stature elevated to that of the heroic. They became poster boys for the ineffectiveness of Western law and the ease with which it can be flouted.

For that reason, the extradition of Roman Polanski is an important test case for the West.  Already four separate countries are involved in the tussle over Polanski’s fate. Both the French and the Polish governments (of which the filmmaker is a dual citizen) at first expressed outrage at the arrest but have since lowered the volume on their protests.  Perhaps they realize it is not just the U.S justice system which is being mocked, but also their own.

As for the potentates of political correctness, those petitioners who see the need to circle the wagons around one of their own, no matter his culpability for a crime, they too may come to understand exactly what is at stake.  A glimmer of this was seen when the Wall Street Journal this Friday quoted Kevin Smith , the writer-director of Chasing Amy and Clerks. “ Look, I dig  Rosemary’s Baby but rape’s rape. Do the crime, do the time.”  Actress Kirstie Alley wrote on Twitter “Just for the record….rape is rape…this is one Hollywood star who does not celebrate or  defend  Roman Polanski..His ART did not rape her.”

You can bet that there are thousands of other Hollywood mums and dads out there who are looking at their 13- year- old daughters and recognizing  exactly how they would have reacted if Samantha Geimer had been their own child.  No niceties about Polanski’s great service to mankind.  No refrences to the long passage of time nor the forgiveness doled out by the victim.  Polanski’s act was a crime against not one person but against American society and our commonly held Western values.  

And for that his punishment is long overdue.