|
|
FPM BLOG
|
|
|
|
| |
Click here to read David Horowitz Replies to Critics
Click here to read David Horowitz Debates with the Left
|
|
|
 |
 |
| |
Liberate Gaza
After years of pussy-footing and paralysis in dealing with the terrorist state on its doorstep in Gaza, Israel has finally struck back. A bombing raid against actual Palestinian targets is a good beginning, but only a beginning. Hamas, the totalitarian government in Gaza, is part of an international murder incorporated, otherwise known as radical Islam. The Hamas murderers are ideological and military brothers of the monsters of Mombai and the Islamic terrorists of Hizbollah, and are proteges of the terrorist states Syria and Iran. There can be no peace in the Middle East until the rulers of Syria and Iran are removed and Hizbollah and Hamas are destroyed. Therefore, Israel must now invade the aggressor state in Gaza and root out its Hamas oppressors. If it fails to do this, it will pay a blood price later.
Click here to read David Horowitz Replies to Critics
Click here to read David Horowitz Debates with the Left
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
Mixed Bag
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/20/world/middleeast/20burg.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=avrum%20burg&st=cse
I always wondered why Vanity Fair's nastiness-in-residence, James Wolcott, was such a vituperative and witless hater. Now Pamela Geller of Atlas Shrugs has made it clear to me by posting his ugly mug on the occasion of his latest Jew-hating rant. Why does the Madoff scandal touch me as a Jew, except in the minds of toads like this?
The Hamas Nazis are at it again, shelling Jewish cities across the border from their terrorist state. What other state in the world besides Israel would allow its citizens to be targets like this? It's time for the Israeli government to declare Gaza a free fire zone and pound them mercilessly until these murderers cease and desist. And why hasn't the Bush Administration imposed sanctions on the safe harbor for which provides military headquarters for Hamas in Damascus?
How Rice and Bush have fallen from those noble declarations of post-9/11! Why is anyone but Holocaust promoters suggesting that Israel surrender more land for terror? Isn't Gaza an undebatable argument against another inch being given to genocidal Palestinians who by all the norms of international law have through sixty years of aggressions surrendered the right to any territory in the Middle East? And why is the Bush administration promoting negotiations with terrorists -- whether Abbas or Hamas -- or any entity that will not first accept the right of the Jewish state and the Jewish people to exist?
The NY Times, which as everyone knows or should know abetted the Nazi Holocaust by prolonged and studied silences is now promoting Avrum Burg, an apostate who thinks Jews should forget about the first Holocaust and close their eyes to the second. Of course this is exactly what the Arabs who are planning the next Holocaust want. Why should we have to suffer these Jewish pigs in our midst because of what Europeans did to them? Actually, the Arab states and particularly the Arabs of the Palestine Mandate did everything they could to aid Hitler during the Thirties and Forties and to this day proclaim to anyone who wants to listen that he didn't finish the job.
Here's another Bush disgrace, courtesy Diana West:
Dec 24
Written by: Diana West
Wednesday, December 24, 2008 5:24 AM
The Pardonner-in-Chief is coasting into Christmas having pardoned 19 Americans--not including Sgt. Evan Vela, Border Agents Ramos and Campeon, or Jonathan Pollard--who, by the way, has entered his 24th year of a life sentence for one count of passing classified information to an ally--Israel, in this case. This is a crime, Pollard's website points out, for which the median sentence is 2 to 4 years.
Instead, President Bush saw fit to bestow mercy on a group including a convicted methamphetamine dealer, a cocaine distributor, two marijuana suppliers, a deceased man, and--in mid subprime mortgage meltdown --Isaac Toussie, a genuine "predatory lender."
The New York Daily News reports:
President George W. Bush pardoned a Brooklyn real estate developer accused of scamming hundreds of poor, minority homebuyers - and whose father donated $28,500 to the Republican Party this year.
Hmmm. The story goes on to note that the White House did not explain why the president believed Toussie, who admitted falsifying finances of prospective homebuyers seeking HUD mortgages, deserved a pardon, but it's obvious: In Bushland, Toussie wasn't a crook--he was punished for trying to close the poor, minority home-ownership gap.
The NYDN reports:
A federal suit against [Toussie] also charges the Toussies, father and son, lured "inexperienced and low income inner city minority first-time buyers into purchasing homes that they could not afford." The homes were overpriced by up to 50% and often defective, and the cost of mortgage payments was hidden, the suit said.
"The Toussies also fraudulently advertised sponsorship by the NAACP, alleged praise from black celebrities such as Maya Angelou, Whoopi Goldberg and former Mayor David Dinkins...none of whom made any such endorsements,'" the suit alleges. Toussie's lawyers denied the allegations and said "many plaintiffs were complicit" in the fraud.
This gets a pardon. I don't get Bush.
Click here to read David Horowitz Replies to Critics
Click here to read David Horowitz Debates with the Left
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
Obama's Poet Laureate...Is (Let's Face It), Dreadful, Embarassing, a Zero
I will get nothing but grief for making negative comments about Barack Obama's pick of a poet laureate, so let me say at the outset that the president-elect can hardly be faulted for making such a lousy choice, since Elizabeth Alexander has been lauded from one end of the academic literary culture to the other. Showered in honors by the current standard-makers of the high culture, there is no literary voice that I have been able to detect that has the artistic intelligence or alternatively the cojones to protest her selection. She is a professor of poetry at Yale, and has accumulated innumerable literary awards and earned a place on the short-list for the Pulitzer Prize. It is precisely this discordance between the high place she has been accorded as a writer and the incredibly bad writing she has actually produced that makes this a cultural moment that should not pass without notice.
I had never heard of Elizabeth Alexander before she received this appointment, and out of sheer curiosity went up to her website and read the poems she apparently is most proud of. I am still finding it hard to believe what I found there. Her writing is tone deaf, bad prose -- let alone bad poetry -- and teeth grindingly banal. "Poetry I shouted, Poetry/I screamed, Poetry/changes none of that [i.e, history]/by what it says/or how it says, none./But a poem is a living thing...and as life/it is all that can stand/up to violence."
There are three ideas here. The first, that poetry changes nothing, is a rip-off of one of the most famous lines in modern English poetry -- W.H. Auden's "poetry makes nothing happen" is thus banal. The others -- that a poem is a living thing and "as life" is the only thing that "can stand up to violence" are either meaningless or idiotic or both. If Elizabeth Alexander is a poet, then I have missed a career as a power forward for the Los Angeles Lakers.
Here is a so-called poem about the Watts Towers, three spires built by an Italian immigrant namd Simon Rodia who bejewelled them with the bottoms of coke bottles and other urban detritus creating one of the most inspiring monuments America has:
Stravinsky in L.A.
In white pleated trousers, peering through green
sunshades, looking for the way the sun is red
noise, how locusts hiss to replicate the sun.
What is the visual equivalent
of syncopation? Rows of seared palms wrinkle
in the heat waves through green glass. Sprinklers
tick, tick, tick. The Watts Towers aim to split
the sky into chroma, spires tiled with rubble
nothing less than aspiration. I've left
minarets for sun and syncopation,
sixty-seven shades of green which I have
counted, beginning: palm leaves, front and back,
luncheon pickle, bottle glass, etcetera.
One day I will comprehend the different
grades of red. On that day I will comprehend
these people, rhythms, jazz, Simon Rodia,
Watts, Los Angeles, aspiration. "Red noise"? maybe. "locusts hiss to replicate the sun." No way. But this is the line that really stopped me: "The Watts Towers aim to split the sky into chroma, spires tiled with rubble nothing less than aspiration." That second clause is the banality: "tiled rubble" -- yah, that's what the Towers actually are -- well, not exactly. Rubble is the tile that Rodia used to ornament his cement and wrought iron spires. But then there are the spires themselves. The "spires....aspire." Genius.
But what the heck is chroma? I looked the word up to make sure. It's the Greek word for "color" and also is the name for a "queer literary magazine" (Wikipedia). The English meaning of the word, however, is not color but "purity of color," or in something called the Munsell color system, is used to designate the distance of a color from white or gray. Ok, so the Watts Towers aim to split the sky into what? Queer literary magazines? Purity of color? It's not as if the term could mean split the sky into colors, which is what the poet evidently intends. (Although I'm not sure what that would mean if it actually could mean what she wants it to mean. A stained glass window might do that, but not cement towers embedded with bottle and can bottoms.)
The poem conveys no coherent image -- the writer seems to forget that she is peering through green sunshades when she perceives the sun as a noise and seeks the grade of red and tells us that she sees 67 shades of green etcetera and looks towards the day, when she will through (or not through) the green sunshade, comprehend the "grades of red" and also "these people" -- which people exactly? -- whom she aspires to comprehend along with "aspiration."
This is not poetry. It is gobbledygook, and the high honors accorded to Elizabeth Alexander are simply multiple ways of announcing that the academic philistines have prevailed and poetry in America is dead.
Because I have been away from academic literary studies for a long while, I checked these impressions with a friend who is a professor of literature. This is what he wrote back:
"Just read a couple of her poems, David. Drivel, but it hits all the right pieties in the academic culture. Yes, American poetry is in a dead state. Their only audience is one another. And it's an institutional thing. All poets now want jobs in the university, and one of the amazing trends in recent years is the explosion of Creative Writing majors and MFA programs. In fact, I would say that the only thing keeping English from slipping into the status of Classics is freshman comp and Creative Writing majors, most of which require enrollment in 4 or 5 literary studies classes.
And the creative writing teachers have an advantage. They actually have some conviction and enthusiasm about literature. For them, literary study isn't all about race, gender, class, and sexuality, and unmasking ideology in novels. It's about enjoyment and inspiration and instruction as well, which is why students flock there (apart from all of them wanting to be Sylvia Plath and Kerouac)."
And yes, although I didn't mention it, Elizabeth is -- to the point of banality -- one hundred percent politically correct.
Click here to read David Horowitz Replies to Critics
Click here to read David Horowitz Debates with the Left
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
The Freedom Center Needs Your Help To Defend Our Country
The wolves of the left, sensing a new opening with a new administration, are circling. Dangerous organizations like ACORN and MoveOn.org feel that Obama's victory is theirs as well. Poisonous figures like George Soros, Louis Farrakhan, and Bill Ayers who have spent their lives trying to tear America down feel newly empowered by the election results. Anti-Semites of the jihad are licking their chops. Like their bloodthirsty comrades abroad, Islamo-Fascists here at home are ready to step up the stealth jihad they are waging against our universities and other domestic institutions.
We at the Freedom Center will not stand by and watch the left advance deeper into government, popular culture, and higher education without a ferocious fight. But we can't do it without your help. That is why I ask you now to make your tax-deductible contribution online.
When you support the Freedom Center, you are supporting:
Frontpagemag.com,
JihadWatch.org,
TerrorismAwareness.org,
StudentsforAcademicFreedom.org and
DiscovertheNetworks.org -- which is the only comprehensive encyclopedia of the left on the web, a map of the forces organizing to sabotage this nation and its good works.
You are also supporting the Islamo-Fascism Awareness Campaign which has staged teach-ins on more than 100 college campuses this year, educating students and university communities in the threats our nation faces both at home and abroad. Working with determined students, we confronted the campus left's unholy alliance with radical Islamists. We challenged all students and faculty to repudiate the genocidal aims of groups such as Hizbollah and Hamas and genocidal dictators such as Iran's Ahmadinejad.
What we accomplished this past year changed the paradigm of campus politics in America. Our Islamo-Fascism Awareness Weeks were the largest campus demonstrations ever staged by students defending this nation and its constitution.
So what does your contribution to the Freedom Center buy? It buys an aggressive campaign in our nation's universities to stop the apologists for Islamo-Fascism who try to undermine our democratic institutions. It buys an armada of websites which are guides to the war against America's enemies and it buys the daily work we do at the Freedom Center -- publishing books and pamphlets and videos, and holding public events designed to fight the war at home and abroad.
This coming year, as the left tries to use the recent election to insinuate itself and its policies into power, will be a decisive one. All crystal balls are cloudy when it comes to predicting exactly what problems this country will face and how it will handle them. But this much I can promise: The Freedom Center will be there, defending this country with all its resourcefulness and commitment, through its publications and web sites, through its confrontations with the left on our campuses and elsewhere in our society.
So, please make an online year-end contribution to the Freedom Center to help us complete the mission we have undertaken. Now more than ever, we need a vote of confidence from our supporters. America's future is in the balance.
Click here to read David Horowitz Replies to Critics
Click here to read David Horowitz Debates with the Left
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|