Sunday, June 24, 2018
From Ian:
US freezes Palestinian aid budget
Brendan O’Neill: Trump’s critics have destroyed the memory of the Holocaust
US freezes Palestinian aid budget
The United States has quietly frozen its aid to the Palestinian Authority (PA) pending review, i24NEWS has learned. The move comes two months after Congress passed the Taylor Force Act, which aimed to force the PA to terminate its “pay-for-slay” policies of paying stipends to convicted terrorists in Israeli jails and to the families of dead terrorists.
The act orders that US assistance to the West Bank and Gaza “that directly benefits the PA” be suspended unless the Secretary of State certifies that the Palestinian Authority has met four conditions: terminating these payments to terrorists, revoking laws authorizing this compensation, taking “credible steps” to end Palestinian terrorism, and “publicly condemning” and investigating such acts of violence.
The Taylor Force Act was passed as part of an omnibus $1.3 trillion spending bill on 23 March 2018. It was named for the US army veteran who was murdered by a Palestinian terrorist in Jaffa in March 2016, in an attack that injured eleven people.
A Senate Foreign Relations Committee aide told i24NEWS, “Our understanding is that US funding to the West Bank and Gaza is on hold pending an administration review.”
Separately, i24NEWS understands that the West Bank and Gaza office of USAID -- the American international development agency -- has not received its budget for the upcoming fiscal year and therefore has not been able to put its projects out to tender.
Brendan O’Neill: Trump’s critics have destroyed the memory of the Holocaust
Comparing Trump’s policies to the Holocaust is a species of Holocaust denial.Students Try To Ban Ben Shapiro
This week, with the controversy over Trump’s separation of families arriving illegally from Mexico, has represented a turning point in their popularisation of the Hitler comparisons they once chided. They refer to the places in which the children of illegal migrants are being housed as ‘concentration camps’. The former director of the CIA, Michael Hayden, tweeted a photo of Auschwitz with the words, ‘Other governments have separated mothers and children’. Pre-empting the suspension of Godwin’s Law, a writer for the New Statesman said: ‘Stop talking about Godwin’s Law – real Nazis are back.’ Twitter buzzes with Trump-as-Hitler talk. ‘This is how the Holocaust started’, they all say.
This is how the Holocaust started. This is wrong in itself: the Holocaust started with racial laws forbidding Jewish and Gentile inter-marriage and severely restricting Jews’ rights to work, move and speak. Trump’s America has passed no law that bears the remotest resemblance to these hateful racial edicts. But perhaps this claim that Trump’s behaviour echoes the start of the Holocaust represents a tiny pang of conscience among those who are exploiting the horrors of the mid-20th-century to signal their disgust with Trump. Perhaps they know, at some level, that it is mad – not to mention immoral – to compare Trump’s policies to the Holocaust itself. To compare the temporary removal of children from their parents to the shoving of children into ovens. Actual ovens. The vast majority of children who were sent to Auschwitz were put in an oven and gassed to death and then their bodies were burnt, leading to their ashes raining down on their parents who had only been enslaved rather than gassed. They were gassed later.
That is what happened at Auschwitz. Does Michael Hayden know this? Do the thousands of people who retweeted his Auschwitz-Trump comparison know this? If they do, then their commentary on Trump’s child-migrant policy is more foul than the policy itself, because it renders Auschwitz mundane. It diminishes the horrors of that death camp through comparing them to some temporary, excessively harsh migrant controls at the Mexican border. To speak of the gassing to death of hundreds of thousands of Jewish children in the same breath as the temporary removal of scores of Mexican children from their parents insults those dead Jewish children. It relativises their suffering. It says it wasn’t that bad; it was merely on a spectrum with the largely ordinary stuff that happens in politics today.
Students at the University of British Columbia are trying to get conservative author Ben Shapiro banned from campus, according to The Ubyssey.
Fifth-year UBC arts student Reid Marcus wants the school to cancel the event, saying “Shapiro is neither a scholar nor an activist.” Ahhh so because Ben isn’t involved in either the production or distribution of BS indoctrination, his opinion is invalid. I see. Marcus cited Shapiro’s views on Islam, by which he probably means his refutation of what he calls the “myth of the tiny radical Muslim minority.” He also cites Ben’s views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and gender identity.
Angelo tells me his club has hosted Jordan Peterson 5 times with no protesters. “Yet the moment we invite a pro-Israel speaker like Ben Shapiro, it’s chaos. Jewish students feel completely silenced by the campus culture and this campaign to shut down the event is proof of this. The opposition is comprised [of] SJWs who hate any opinion that isn’t their own, and raging anti-Semites who openly talk about violence towards Israeli Jews.”
