WHEN TWO PROPHETS BUILT AN ALLIANCE BETWEEN BLACKS AND JEWS:

“When People Criticize Zionists They Mean Jews, You Are Talking Antisemitism” Martin Luther King Jr, A proud unapologetic Zionist.

More exact words were never said. They were told by the great civil rights leader, The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., the American hero whose life and dream of please and equality America celebrates on Monday, January 16trh.Dr. King was a strong supporter of Jewish Issues. He fought for the freedom to observe all faiths, was a proud unapologetic Zionist and fought to release the Jews trapped in the Soviet Union.

One of his closest allies and friends was Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, a Polish-born American Conservative rabbi considered one of the leading Jewish theologians and philosophers of the 20th century. He was a leader of the civil rights movement. In many pictures of 1960s civil rights protests, including the famous one in Selma, the Reverend and Rabbi marched close together in the front line. The two great men of faith forged a close alliance between the  African American and the American Jewish Leadership. Each one called the other a prophet.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marched with Martin Luther King Jr. on the road to civil rights. Reverend Dr. King marched with the Jews on the way to a secure Israel.

“At the first conference on religion and race, the main participants were Pharaoh and Moses. The outcome of that summit meeting has not come to an end. Pharaoh is not ready to capitulate. The Exodus began but is far from having been completed.”

Those were the words with which Heschel opened his address at the 1963 National Conference on Race and Religion in Chicago. At that conference, Rabbi Heschel first met the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the keynote speaker at this national gathering.

Much more like this please, versus: O Ye of Little Faith: The Anti-Semitism of Kanye West.

Now, as then, anti-Semitism has a function: It translates traditional and retrograde attitudes into a political interpretation with potential for radical social action.

So it was in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, where local preachers laid the groundwork and served as apologists for the deadly 1991 riots. For three days, black rioters proclaiming themselves the second coming of Hitler beat up any Jew they could find. In this magazine in November 1979, Dorothy Rabinowitz foresaw the violence, noting that in Crown Heights, “public expression of anti-Semitic sentiment, as a means of conveying political antagonism, seems now to have become normal.” When I spoke to one of the rabble-rousing black reverends in 2021, he still justified his actions with all kinds of grievances, comparing Chabad to the Ku Klux Klan and substantiating his claims with minutiae about political maneuvering and access to government funding. Decades from now, I expect to hear similar figures use the New York Times’ latest distortion—that Hasidic schools steal funds from poor black children—as a justification for some future attack.

Even after a Jew had been murdered in Crown Heights, with dozens beaten and thousands forced into hiding, “civil-rights leaders” such as Al Sharpton continued to fan the flames and suggest that the Lubavitchers had deserved the pogrom they got. Only days before the riot, Sharpton had said, “If the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house.” He said it in defense of Leonard Jeffries, then the chairman of black studies at City College, who was under fire for blaming Jews for the slave trade, among other wild theories. The black New York radio station WLIB and the Amsterdam News and City Sun papers also rallied to Jeffries’s defense. Not one black lawmaker in Albany signed the condemnation of Jeffries.

In reporting on the 30th anniversary of the Crown Heights riots last year for the Wall Street Journal, I spoke to Brooklyn’s Laurie Cumbo, then majority leader of the New York City Council. Cumbo called the riots “the Crown Heights Uprising,” because “‘riots’ give the impression of [having] no basis.”

So I hope you’ll forgive my cynicism about the response to Kanye West. If West hadn’t first raised the ire of black leaders with his friendly treatment of Donald Trump, we would hear now that he’s speaking from a place of pain. We’d hear that anti-Semitism “is for some black folks a defense against antiblack racism on the part of Jews,” as bell hooks, the pioneering black feminist scholar, wrote in 1992. Adapting James Baldwin, apologists would explain that when West said “Jew,” he really meant “white.” But, as Earl Raab pointed out in COMMENTARY in January 1969, “that is an exact and acute description of political anti-Semitism. ‘The enemy’ becomes the Jew, ‘the man’ becomes the Jew,… who stands symbolically for generic evil.”

Exit quote: “Anti-Semitism from above, in speeches and tracts, has always proceeded in a dialectic with anti-Semitism from below, with rocks and bricks. Kanye West is nuts, and so is the guy who sucker punches a Hasid in Brooklyn. They hear the same noise—and each other.”

BIDEN VOTERS POSTING THEIR L’S ONLINE: Abbott explains using the words ‘enemy combatants’ for migrants after Dallas Morning News criticism.

Apparently, for the DMN editorial board, it all boils down to tone. It accuses Abbott of antagonizing the president. The board also falls in line with Abbott’s critics as it describes the governor’s actions as political moves. The solution is to play nice with Biden and maybe something can be worked out. That’s some pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking, if you ask me, given how Texas has been expected to go it alone against the constant flood of illegal immigrants crossing the southern border. Texas taxpayers are paying a big price, and Joe Biden doesn’t seem to be concerned about that injustice. Immigration is a federal responsibility.

The DMN editorial board wished that Abbott had met with Biden with the attitude expressed by El Paso County Judge Ricardo Samaniego, a Democrat. He told the DMN board, “I’m not going to be nice, and I’m not going to be rude, either.” My take is that Abbott acted in the same way. He went and welcomed Biden on the tarmac when he landed in Texas. He presented him with a letter. After a very brief time, the meet-up concluded and Abbott left, uninvited to continue on with Biden’s visit to Texas. President Unity excluded the governor and all other Republicans from his visit. Does that decision scream cooperation to you? Abbott responds to how he is treated.

Better dead than rude, to coin a phrase.

IT’S A MAN’S MAN’S MAN’S M&M WORLD: With All The Female M&M’s Off In Their Own Bag, Male M&M’s Finally Enjoying Some Peace And Quiet, America’s Newspaper of Record reports.

‘IN IT FOR HERSELF:’ Former Katie Porter Staffer Says California Dem’s Senate Run Motivated by ‘Fame’ and ‘Power.’

A former staff member for California congresswoman Katie Porter says that she believes the Democratic darling, who announced a 2024 run for Senate this week, is increasingly driven not by a desire to serve her constituents but by a desire to grow her own fame and power.

Sasha Georgiades, a Navy veteran who worked for two years as a Wounded Warrior fellow in Porter’s office, started calling out her former boss in late December, accusing Porter in media interviews and on social media of lashing out at her for her Covid-19 diagnosis and of running a toxic office where staff members are regularly screamed at and belittled.

In an interview with National Review after Porter announced her Senate run on Tuesday, Georgiades doubled down on her accusations and questioned Porter’s motives. She said she doesn’t believe Porter is “in it for the people anymore,” and is instead “in it for herself.”

“I think she likes the attention. I think she likes being a well-known name, and being a Democratic sweetheart,” Georgiades said. “I think the fame and the power, with anybody, can turn somebody in a direction that they may not have been before. I think it’s becoming less and less about her actually helping, and more and more about her ego.”

Georgiades has it all wrong. For Porter, it’s all about rounding up the Joker, and returning him to Arkham Asylum.

ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: What happens when you land on the wrong aircraft carrier?

NEW YORK DEMOCRATS INTRODUCE SANTOS ACT WITH PENALTIES FOR CANDIDATES WHO LIE ABOUT QUALIFICATIONS.

Who knew that New York Democrats were so interested in shrinking government?

● Biden’s lies, outright fabrications repeatedly dismissed, downplayed and softened by media.

● Busted: NYT Says Connecticut AG And Senate Candidate Blumenthal Lied About Vietnam Service.

● NYT: Covering The Elites, Or Covering For The Elites? (With John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Brian Williams, Rachel Dolezal, “Also Gary Hart, nee Hartpence, and of course Bill de Blasio, nee Warren Wilhelm.”)

● Jim Treacher: Why does Donald Trump keep saying Obama was born in Kenya, when even Obama has stopped claiming that?

● Article Cites Elizabeth Warren As First Woman of Color Hired by Harvard Law School.

● FBI Investigating Whether Ilhan Omar Married Her Brother.

HOW IT STARTED: Guam Elects First Republican House Delegate Since 1993.

How it’s going: Hank Johnson: I think someone planted those classified documents on Biden too.

THE TWITTER FILES, PART 14: How Democrat “Congressional Trolls” and the Corrupt Propaganda Media Invented a “Russian Bot” Scare to Explain Why Normal Americans Were Calling for the Release of the Devon Nunes Memo Debunking RussiaGate.

VDH: What Caused the Political Hysteria?

The Left has gone mad over former President Donald J. Trump — past, present, and future.

The current Democratic Party and NeverTrump “conservatives” assumed that Trump was and remains so obviously toxic that they do not have to define exactly what his evil entails.

Accordingly, they believe that any means necessary are justified to stop him. And furthermore, these zealots, when out of power, insist such extraordinary measures should not be emulated and institutionalized by their opponents, much less ever boomeranged back upon their creators.

In this context, the Republicans retaking control of the House of Representatives once again raises the question of whether they should reply in kind.

Given the current investigation following the Mar-a-Lago raid, should there also be a mirror-image special prosecutor to examine President Joe Biden’s lost stash of classified documents in his insecure office following his vice presidency?

Can House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., ever be considered too inflammatory, given that his predecessor, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., tore up the president’s State of the Union address on national television?

Sure he can — as with global warming countdowns have long since expired, Democratic party operatives with bylines have a total sense of amnesia when it comes to gaffes and inflammatory rhetoric emanating from their bosses in DC.

HERE’S HOW THE FAA’S FAILURE DELAYED THOUSANDS OF FLIGHTS.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Beware Hollywood A-listers bearing NDAs.

THAT TIME IN 1968 WHEN JIMMY PAGE AND THE YARDBIRDS PLAYED AT A CINCINNATI HIGH SCHOOL PROM: “Some say the plan was hatched by a fearless junior named Rip Pelley, with an almost inexplicable connection to music industry insiders. Some say the rock band idea was a proverbial olive branch offered by Father Smith, who’d requested the combination prom in an effort to save money, or because he’d done it that way at his previous school. Either way, what came next is the stuff of legend: The Yardbirds ended up playing the 1968 St. Xavier High School Junior-Senior prom. Lead guitarist? Rolling Stone magazine’s third-greatest guitarist of all time, Jimmy Page.”

PAKISTANI MOVIE STAR COMPLAINS: HOLLYWOOD ONLY WANTS WHITE VILLAINS.

In a recent interview with Esquire UK, Pakistani-American actor Kumail Ali Nanjiani explains Tinseltown’s racial politics.

You may know Kumail from his work on Silicon Valley, The Meltdown with Jonah and Kumail, or Marvel’s Eternals. In 2017, he received a Best Original Screenplay Oscar nomination for romantic comedy hit The Big Sick.

* * * * * * * *

“I think that Hollywood now — even though they’re trying to be more diverse — is still weird,” the actor says. The problem, [Kumail] wagers, is that good intentions can sometimes lead to misguided solutions: If the bad guy is a brown guy, what message is that sending? “And that’s just as limiting as anything else.”

He calls to a Marvel colleague: Pale pretender Sebastian Stan (The Falcon and the Winter Soldier) can play a superhero, then turn around and be a cannibal in horror flick Fresh.

For Kumail, it’s not the same:

“I was told that’s going to be hard because people don’t want to cast nonwhite people as bad guys.”

And that’s a shame:

“I want to play more bad guys.”

Given Hollywood’s propensity for social messaging, it’s not difficult to believe Kumail is right.

No it isn’t. As The Free Press recently noted in article headlined: Hollywood’s New Rules.

Movies and shows that were once widely acclaimed but are now verboten, writers and directors said, included “Blazing Saddles,” even though it was co-written by Richard Pryor; “The Bad News Bears,” even though it featured a multiracial cast; “Tootsie,” because transgender activists; and “Rocky” (“bad guy CANNOT be black,” a director explained in an email).

Fortunately, James Earl Jones is safe as Darth Vader: The destruction of Alderaan was completely justified.

MY HOVERCRAFT IS FULL OF EELS: We Now Know Where Biden Kept the Second Batch of Classified Documents.

DOOCY: “Classified materials, next to your Corvette? What were you thinking?”

BIDEN: “My Corvette’s in a locked garage, okay? So it’s not like they’re sitting out on the street.”

As always, life in the 21^st century imitates Monty Python.

UPDATE: The London Daily Mail in 2015: Biden home security system failed so often last year the Secret Service switched it off.

ROGER SIMON: Can ‘The Magnificent 20’ Remake the Republican Party for the Better?

Even at those lower levels—down to the selection of textbooks, local candidates for seemingly minor positions, and, it should go without saying, voting methods themselves—political power has become a royal road to riches. At the higher level, it has become a royal road to spectacular riches with Big Tech and Big Pharma, not to mention China, providing virtually limitless wherewithal.

To put an end to this and to honor the courage of “The Magnificent 20,” the Republican Party needs what communists used to call a rectification program. That’s becoming evident from those Republicans who are suddenly rising in resistance to the House Rules package with the bogus excuse that it was negotiated behind closed doors, as if it could have been done otherwise, given the current state of our country.

But there’s good news, optimistic news, with excellent ramifications for the future, including and especially the announcement that Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) will chair the select committee on the “Weaponization of Government.” Nothing could possibly be more urgent for the survival of our republic.

So let’s cheer on the work of “The Magnificent 20” and their comrades-in-arms, such as Jordan and the others who supported them in their quiet, let’s hope now-public, ways.

And if you’ll excuse this onetime Hollywood screenwriter (special advice: avoid the acclaimed but über-pretentious and boring “Tár” at all costs), I would like to explain my reference to “Seven Samurai,” which was directed by Kurosawa, possibly the greatest filmmaker of all time.

Douglas Laman describes the film this way at “The 11 Best Akira Kurosawa Movies, Ranked:” “The entire landscape of global cinema has been shaped by this film about seven men who must train a village to fight back against a horde of bandits.”

Can the entire landscape of American politics be changed by 20 men and women? There’s no question that what they’re fighting is a “horde of bandits,” almost in a global sense. But can they “train a village” (i.e., us) “to fight back”?

In the not-too-distant future, we’re going to find out.

In the meantime, expect plenty of kabuki from a very weak GOP House which will have plenty of its bills die in the Senate: Stop Letting Republicans Lie to You.

BLOOMBERG BRIEFING: Key Strategist Contends ‘We’re Back in a Bull Market.’

The day after the World Bank sounded the alarm about the global economy’s prospects for 2023, Edward Yardeni, the strategist who saw resilience in the US economy last year when almost everyone else was predicting recession, remains sanguine about where global financial assets including US stocks are headed. “The outlook for the world economy is actually improving,” the president and founder of Yardeni Research said Wednesday. US equities “made a low on Oct. 12. That was the end of the bear market and we’re back in a bull market.” Since closing at 3,577.03 that day, the S&P 500 has risen almost 10%, so maybe there’s something to that.

Not everybody has gotten the memo, however:

● Corporate Carnage Commences: Goldman Sachs Will Lay Off 3200 Employees.

● Alphabet to cut staff of health sciences unit Verily by 15%.

● Parler’s parent company has laid off a majority of its staff.

THE 21st CENTURY ISN’T TURNING OUT AS I HAD HOPED: Michigan’s Muslim-majority city council approves animal sacrifice for religious purposes.

Could human sacrifice be next? Dogs and cats living together? (I’d say after the last three years, the mass hysteria portion of the scenario is well established.)

EVERGREEN HEADLINE: Gavin Newsom is Delusional.

California is the fifth largest economy on the planet. It is blessed with one of the world’s most amiable climates, vast stores of human capital, and abundant natural resources. It is also plagued by a crippling inferiority complex—a condition best exemplified by the state’s governor. Gavin Newsom has developed an unhealthy obsession with Republican-led states like Texas and Florida, and he cannot help but define his state’s identity almost solely in opposition to how other states do business.

So Newsom is a reactionary, as are most leftists, something Roger Simon has been pointing out for years now.

BUTTIGIEG CAN’T FAIL; HE CAN ONLY BE FAILED: Axios: Historic transportation crises haunt Buttigieg.

AND AGAIN: Biden aides find second batch of classified documents at new location.

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., reacted on social media minutes after the NBC News report on the new documents, tweeting out the words, “Special counsel.”

Faster, please.

RIP TO AN ELECTRIC GUITAR MASTER: Rock icon Jeff Beck dead at 78 after bout with meningitis.

More at Variety: Jeff Beck, One of the Guitar Masters of the Rock Era, Dies at 78.

Beck recently completed a tour supporting his collaborative album with Johnny Depp, “18.” He received seven Grammys for instrumental performances, and an eighth for his 2009 work on Herbie Hancock’s “The Imagine Project.”

A fleet, imaginative soloist, Beck brought formidable instrumental firepower to British band the Yardbirds, which he joined in 1965 as a replacement for Eric Clapton. Entirely at home with the group’s blues roots, he burnished their pop hits with an adventurous and virtually unprecedented use of feedback, sustain and fuzz.

After a precipitous exit from the Yardbirds — where he had been joined by another future guitar star, Jimmy Page — he established his own band, the Jeff Beck Group, which was fronted by vocalist Rod Stewart, soon to become a solo star. The unit proved as unstable as it was powerful, and lasted for just two albums.

During the ’70s, Beck assembled a second, more R&B-oriented edition of his group, and briefly formed a short-lived power trio with bassist Tim Bogert and drummer Carmine Appice of Vanilla Fudge and Cactus.

He reached the probable apex of both his critical and commercial success with a pair of mid-’70s all-instrumental albums, “Blow by Blow” and “Wired,” that found him moving into jazz-fusion terrain. The latter LP was recorded with keyboardist Jan Hammer, formerly of the top fusion act the Mahavishnu Orchestra.

From the early ’80s onward, the temperamental Beck — a notorious perfectionist in the studio and a prickly band mate — would sporadically reappear, retrench, retire and reappear again. His latter-day work ranged from an homage to rockabilly singer Gene Vincent to instrumental sets reflecting the influence of techno, electronica and ambient music.

Nobody outside of Ravi Shankar on the sitar could find more tiny microtones between the conventional music scale when bending notes than Beck. Absolute legend.

BURYING THE LEDE: In “The boring journey of Matt Yglesias,” the WaPo waits 10 paragraphs to note how popular Yglesias is with the Biden administration:

“I don’t always agree with Matt, but he always makes you think with his unique and sharp insights,” says Ron Klain, the White House chief of staff, via email. Klain has liked and shared multiple Yglesias tweets, usually ones that praise White House actions in defiance of wailing liberals or henpecking conservatives. Yglesias, Klain adds, “offers ‘unconventional wisdom:’ He’s not afraid to break with others and put his views out there — a perspective that is hard to find in a dialogue dominated by conventional wisdom.”

* * * * * * * *

But enough serious people take Yglesias seriously to negate the many people who don’t. His Substack was tied for most-followed newsletter by members of the Biden transition team, according to digital strategist Rob Blackie, and Yglesias himself was No. 4 on the list of most-followed journalists. Some of Yglesias’s posts on policy — particularly one on Build Back Better negotiations in February — have reportedly circulated among White House staff.

“There’s a broad sense that he’s a public intellectual, and they take his ideas like they’ll take other ideas,” says a White House official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss outside influences on the administration. “He’s not super influential, but he’s a prominent normie liberal, just like Joe Biden is a normie liberal.”

Prominent normie liberalism on display:

And:

Don’t bother looking for those tweets: The Ultimate vox.com Workplace Accident? Vox co-founder Matt Ygelsias has deleted several thousand tweets:

Including this classic:

MAYOR PETE’S PLANES, TRAINS AND AUTOMOBILES:

Almost a year ago, the Federal Aviation Authority, under the helm of transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg, announced that the aviation briefing known as NOTAM, or Notice to Airmen, would undergo a name change. NOTAMs are unclassified notices distributed from an aviation authority to all pilots that contain essential information regarding conditions, hazards, system concerns, or other flight operations. NOTAM, Mayor Pete’s Department of Transportation declared, wasn’t gender inclusive and, as of December 2, 2021, it should henceforth be referred to Notice to Air Missions, not Airmen.

While Mayor Pete preoccupied his department with scrubbing the bigotry out of an acronym, it never occurred to the Biden administration’s Chief Diversity Hire that the system itself might need some tending-to. That was until this morning when an outage caused the NOTAM system to fail and all flights in the US were grounded for several hours, something that hasn’t happened since 9/11.

Today’s FAA system failure came just weeks after Southwest Airlines ruined Christmas when its outdated computer system led to thousands of canceled flights — something that the transportation secretary brazenly mocked, seemingly unaware that the Biden administration had given billions of dollars in handouts to Southwest, with no oversight. As he wagged his finger at the airline, Mayor Pete was oblivious that his own computers might need a tune-up.

It’s a textbook example of what Victor Davis Hanson once dubbed “The Bloomberg Syndrome.” As VDH wrote in early 2011 when then-New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg failed to adequately remove a foot and half or so of global warming from his city streets:

It is a human trait to focus on cheap and lofty rhetoric rather than costly, earthy reality. It is a bureaucratic characteristic to rail against the trifling misdemeanor rather than address the often-dangerous felony. And it is political habit to mask one’s own failures by lecturing others on their supposed shortcomings. Ambitious elected officials often manage to do all three.

The result in these hard times is that our elected sheriffs, mayors, and governors are loudly weighing in on national and global challenges that are quite often out of their own jurisdiction, while ignoring or failing to solve the very problems that they were elected to address.

Quite simply, the next time your elected local or state official [or presidential cabinet official] holds a press conference about global warming, the Middle East, or the national political climate*, expect to experience poor county law enforcement, bad municipal services, or regional insolvency.

* And racist roads and bridges. Don’t forget the racist roads and bridges.

UPDATE:

JOANNE JACOBS: Teaching with AI: Can the bot be a useful tool?

THE CREEPY CULT SURROUNDING THE GAS STOVE PANIC GETS EXPOSED:

Good luck finding much support for Scott Wiener and Max Kennedy’s claims that gas stoves are “toxic” and cause asthma. Yes, a search will produce a random study or two, but there’s been no landmark research regarding gas stoves proving they are a major health risk, much less is there anything that begins to justify federal government intervention.

What makes this even dumber is that all the Democrats currently pushing for a ban on gas stoves apparently have them. If they are so dangerous, why didn’t Elizabeth Warren, Jill Biden, Kamala Harris, and others get rid of their gas stoves years ago? Could it be because this entire discussion is completely manufactured?

Fortunately, for now, it appears to be a ban too far, even for this White House: Consumer Safety Commission Walks Back Gas-Stove Threat amid Backlash.