Some links from far and wide for y’all. Some are serious, some are fun.
Lionel Shriver continues to be awesome.
Man who lived 1,300 years ago had amazing teeth.
Snowball the Parrot loves to dance.
Holocaust survivor buys hospital bed for oldest Righteous Among Nations.
Apparently, there is a grave threat to the banana crop. This makes me anxious, as I love bananas. I love them so much I wrote a poem about them.
I’ve bookmarked and accumulated a lot of links in the past few weeks. I will not post them all, but here are a few of interest. I do want to add that I’ve had readers write me and say “hey Rondi, why don’t you comment on x/y/z?” Rest assured that as with everything that comes from me, there is no method to my madness. I do not ignore certain stories for political reasons or because I don’t care about them – as some have suggested – but merely for reasons of time allotment and forgetfulness. Of course, I am interested in some issues more than others, as most of us are.
So let us begin:
The Impossible Future of Christians in the Middle East.
When Turkey Destroyed its Christians. (This piece pains me enormously – I have such fondness for Turkey and Turks, in general.)
Fighting for the Soul of Islam in Sri Lanka, written by the novelist Ameena Hussein, after the horrific Easter bombings.
Rabbi present during the attack on the Poway Synagogue – and whose hands were injured – helps his surgeon don tefillin. Incredibly moving!
Sir Roger Scruton on the silencing and demonising of conservative thinkers.
Really interesting piece about Richard Holbrooke and American foreign policy.
The Mossad agent who captured Eichmann passed away. May Rafi Eitan’s memory be a blessing.
Article (in French) about why circuses that use animals are increasingly spurned by the public.
Queen Victoria as you’ve never seen her before – a rare film clip of her (and she’s wearing hipster sunglasses!).
That’s all for today, dear readers. I like ending with the Queen Victoria link – it is cute and fun.
Delighted to read about the (unexpected) results of the Australian election. Theory and media favoured the Left, but reality did not. Here are a few links: The Aussie Revolt Against Social Justice, from Spiked; …the Left’s Empathy Deficit Came Home to Roost, from Quillette’s Aussie founder; and A Climate-Change Drubbing in Australia, from the WSJ. (The latter might have a subscriber wall.)
Such as: pro-life and pro-choice advocates calmly discuss abortion. One could be forgiven for thinking this would never happen, especially given reaction to Alabama’s new abortion law, a law that will surely be overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court. One thing I keep reading and hearing from pro-choicers is that men shouldn’t decide laws about women’s reproductive rights – and yet it was an all-male Supreme Court that ruled in Roe v. Wade. And plenty of women are pro-life.
People just need to remain sane here, right? Fat chance.
This week marks the 71st anniversary of Israeli independence and so, predictably, Hamas has to try to ruin the party. What was also predictable, sadly, was the reaction of so many in the West. Melanie Phillips has written a long blog post about it. Choice quote:
The Jews are often referred to as “the canaries in the mine.” With Western civilization in existential free-fall, the symbiotically linked contagions of Israel-bashing and antisemitism are both the cause and effect of this crisis.
Subscribing to the Arabs’ murderous falsehoods about Israel has destroyed the West’s moral compass – leaving it open to the murderous falsehoods about the people who gave it that moral compass in the first place and further blinding it to the forces threatening its own continued survival.
Read the whole thing here.
Written eight years ago – still accurate.
You did not have to listen for too long to Julian Assange’s half-educated condemnations of the American “military-industrial complex” to know that he was aching to betray better and braver people than he could ever be.
As soon as WikiLeaks received the State Department cables, Assange announced that the opponents of dictatorial regimes and movements were fair game. That the targets of the Taliban, for instance, were fighting a clerical-fascist force, which threatened every good liberal value, did not concern him. They had spoken to US diplomats. They had collaborated with the great Satan. Their safety was not his concern.
Cannot believe anyone would be sophomoric or morally bankrupt enough to support the guy, and yet, so many do.
Old columns never die…they just lie in the archives until the same debate rears its head again. In regards the funding of libraries (pronounced “libaries”) here is something I wrote in 2011. I think private funding is a great idea.
So glad this creep has finally been arrested. Hope he spends a long time in prison. He is not a hero of free speech (nor is Snowden or Manning); he is nothing more than an anti-Western, anti-Semitic friend to tyrants, a narcissist, a liar and a self-aggrandizer. And don’t even get me started on how he treated his cat (though I would dearly love to know for sure that poor kitty is ok).