BackChannels has been enjoying — appreciating, actually — the NBC News videos on YouTube featuring each of the notables speaking at Arizona Senator John McCain’s funeral service at the National Cathedral this day in Washington, D.C. More remembrance, the service even at its most personal heights — see the previous post featuring Meghan McCain’s reflections on her father’s death — has been an extraordinary reflection on the American spirit and the principles and values that inform the nation.
After God Bless America, may God bless Town & Country for the transcriptions.
From the above delivery by former President Barrack Obama:
In captivity John learned in ways that few of us ever will the meaning of those words, how each moment, each day, each choice is a test. And John McCain passed that test again and again and again. And that’s why when John spoke of virtues like service and valor they weren’t just words to him, it was a truth that he had lived and for which he was prepared to die. And it forced even the most cynical to consider what were we doing for our country? What might we risk everything for?
Related Videos
Scroll down. The live links for the list have been placed at the bottom of this post.
The Iranians, with their crashing rial economy, have been offering Beirut even more cash – from where, exactly, we don’t know – than the Americans, along with guns, agricultural and industrial assistance.
I’d assign the delusional surrealism to the narcissism involved in most politics middle east but may also note that the transnational narcotics and other smuggling businesses may be doing well for Hezbollah and whatever else Iran has going “behind the curtains” and “under the table”. The main player in pressuring up illicit funds from all sources has to be Moscow — and Moscow loves frozen conflicts as well as unsettled and weak governments. It doesn’t seem to know how to create much good, but it sure knows how to gin up a lot of cash ready for the laundry.
Iran has the industry; the west has the addicts and coke heads — and there may be the cash for the arms. I do wonder how that might actually look in numbers.
I have asked Secretary of State @SecPompeo to closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large scale killing of farmers. “South African Government is now seizing land from white farmers.” @TuckerCarlson@FoxNews
During this year the department of rural development and land reform released results of a land audit to establish land ownership patterns. Among other insights forthcoming from the land audit, it emerged that:
Individuals, companies and trusts own 90 per cent of land in SA, and the state 10 per cent
Of this 90%, individuals own 39%, trusts 31%, companies 25% and community-based organisations 4%, with co-ownership at 1%.
In terms of farms and agricultural holdings, 97% of the total agricultural holdings are owned by 7% of landowners
Agricultural land ownership by race: 72% of farms and agricultural holdings are owned by whites, 15% by coloured citizens, 5% by Indians, and 4% by Africans
For decades, the country’s assets — its land, its minerals, its human resources, its enterprises — have been owned, controlled and managed in a way that has prevented the extraction of their full value.
And you have to use a rhetorical approach to do it.
Here’s a piece from Foreign Affairs titled to reflect the dissenting Arab attitude: “Israel’s Second-Class Citizens”. The reading, however, tells a different story. If within Israel, one is an enemy of the state by way of action or speech, one may expect the state to defend its interests internally. On your basis, one might argue that France is not a democracy either as it defends its heavily Catholic culture as well as its laws in the humanist tradition.
The author of the summer 2016 piece, As’ad Ghanem, actually titled it with his own Palestinian agenda and here by inference is what he has said about himself in self-revelation:
The various strains of Arab political thought were brought together in December 2006, when a group of Arab activists and intellectuals published a declaration, The Future Vision of the Palestinian Arabs in Israel, that sought to define Arabs’ relationship with the state and their hopes for the country’s future. The document, which I co-authored, called on the Israeli government to recognize its responsibility for the expulsion of Palestinians around the time of Israeli independence and to consider paying reparations to the descendants of the displaced; to grant Arab citizens greater autonomy in managing their cultural, religious, and educational affairs; to enshrine Arabs’ rights to full equality; and, perhaps most striking, to legally define Israel as a homeland for both Arabs and Jews—a direct challenge to the historically Jewish character of the state.
As much appears similar to the Black Panthers / New Black Panthers demanding from the United States reparations for slavery that ended officially in 1865 and which results by 1965 had produced a slew of racial equality programs that remain in force today in the form of Affirmative Action, Equal Opportunity, Federal set asides for minority-owned businesses, etc. And yet that demand lays emphasis on racial resentment with the intent for getting something out it.
How is the Palestinian cause within Israel both different and less marginal?
Does the displacement and disempowerment of Israel’s Jewish majority in character remain of primary interest to the whole of Israel’s Arab constituency or just some part of it?
The New Black Panther Party (NBPP) is a black separatist group that believes black Americans should have their own nation. In the NBPP’s “10 Point Platform,” which is taken from the original Black Panther Party, the NBPP demands that black people be given a country or state of their own within which they can make their own laws. They demand that all black prisoners in the United States be released to “the lawful authorities of the Black Nation.” They claim to be entitled to reparations for slavery from the United States, all European countries and “the Jews.”
Stimulus: a Facebook-based accusation to the effect that Ocasio-Cortez will come to resemble Castro and other socialist dictators.
Baloney.
The event in question appears to have been designed for partisan listening and not for open public discourse:
—— She said the journalist ban “was designed to protect + invite vulnerable populations to PUBLIC discourse: immigrants, victims of domestic abuse, and so on.”
“We indicated previously that the event would be closed to press,” she said. “Future ones are open.” ——
I think all political organizations have the prerogative to determine their meeting doors open or closed to facilitate policy planning and research. To amplify the decision to avoid the media circus and actually listen to the underserved or, in some ways, people with problems that are nonetheless a part of our communities seems to me execrable — but if that’s the way Fox wants to operate, well that says a lot about Fox News.
Additionally, with this town hall non-story: it was designed to protect + invite vulnerable populations to PUBLIC discourse: immigrants, victims of domestic abuse, and so on.
We indicated previously that the event would be closed to press. Future ones are open.
Dictators, not “isms”, have killed millions, and therefore having a look at the psychology of dictatorship — and the nature of disingenuous news personalities, lol, may be more helpful than the demonizing of a young American politician.
A large part of the world remains feudal and no more so than in communist and fascist circles. The truth is modern South Africa has managed to embarrass from office a kleptocrat in the communist style, Jacob Zuma, and have in place very much a successful capitalist and modern personality, Cyril Ramaphosa.
In some quarters, the political habits and ideas of the past persist in a changed world. We have some here in the U.S. even for whom the white right south is meant to rise again. Apparently, some portion of the black population within the ANC has settled into a bad case of Mugabeitis, an illness too well known in neighboring Zimbabwe and only recently, perhaps, brought under control by a junta plenty tired of the old despot.
My concern: that white and blacks choose not to mirror the worst glimpses of one another and consider forming to fight political regress together.
Despite my idealism and hopes, I know the situation is bad for white property owners and certainly crazy for the criminals marauding them.
The other argument proposed for why black people can’t be racist, namely that they have no power, is wearing very thin 24 years into our democracy. For one, there are many black people with a lot of power in every sense of the word and a good number of whites with virtually no power of any description.
But as happens often, we’re still borrowing this argument from American political culture where black people are still in the minority.
I have never witnessed a black person cursing white people because he/she believes being black is superior, even where the words used would sometimes suggest that.
“Reverse racism” is thus not racism in the real sense of the word, but it could be described as intolerance, hatred or vengefulness based on race.
LONDON — If Vicki Momberg had only unleashed a high-volume tirade at the South African police officers, video of it would have been of mere passing interest. But her repeated use of a racial slur — unfamiliar to most Americans, but explosive in South Africa — made her notorious, and led to demands to make her an example.
For years, we’ve watched and seen white South Africa’s false solidarity with black people and absence from involvement on issues affecting blacks. White South Africans expect black people to join movements when the issue in question affects white communities yet remain silent, retreating to leafy or non-impoverished suburbs, when blacks face prejudice, lack of economic access or service delivery. In January 2018, residents from the Thembelihle informal settlement, south of Johannesburg, took to the streets in a service delivery protest demanding housing.
The 1994 ideology of “sameness” that was introduced post-apartheid to bring peace to a much-wounded nation has begun to show cracks, a clear indication that this was, for the most part, a one-sided concord dependent on whose privilege matters most.
He is popularly known as the author of two sayings: (1) “If I am not for myself who is for me? And being for my own self, what am ‘I’? And if not now, when?”[4] and (2) the expression of the ethic of reciprocity, or “Golden Rule“: “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation; go and learn.”[5]
The Palestinians may end the occupation any day by ceding Israel to Israel and establishing peace between themselves in the Preoccupied Territories. Decency in governance would follow and the recognition of an authentic Palestinian state would follow on that.
What and who are holding up the Palestinians?
There’s no cliffhanger left in the above question.
BackChannels 