More Hollywood Racism, and Other Tales of the Absurd

[Valin]

Power Line:

 

Steven Hayward

4/4/13

 

I’m having to pinch myself today to make sure I’m not living in my own special Groundhog Day hell where every day is April 1.

 

 

How else to take the story that Lego is discontinuing a Jabba the Hutt palace set because the Turkish Cultural Association of Austria (!!) complained that the Lego set is raaaccciist. The Turkish Cultural Association of Austria?? Okay, I know the Turks rolled briefly through Vienna a few hundred years ago, leaving behind mostly coffee grounds, but if the TCAA really exists, wouldn’t a complaint that decaf is racist degradation make more sense? From the story:

 

(*Valins notes that a LARGE glass of whiskey would come in handy right about now.)

 

(Snip)

 

But wait, there’s more! Smith College, the tony womens’ wymyn’s college in Massachusetts, has been outed as a bastion of backsliding sexism and chauvinism because it has rejected the application of a transgendered high school student:

 

Calliope Wong, 17, a Connecticut senior who was born a male but has identified as female since adolescence, says Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, twice opted not to read her application and returned it in the mail.

 

Calliope? I’m not even going to make the obvious jokes about steam pipe noise-makers here. That’s just another job this American won’t do. Naturally this good sense by the Smith admissions office has “prompted outcry.”

 

(* See previous advise)

 

So pinch me again. It is still April Fools Day, right?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Valin]

Groundhog Day in the Middle East

John Hinderaker

4/4/13

 

Steve wrote earlier today that he feels like he is living in a personal Groundhog Day, where it is perpetually April 1. I have that feeling too, never more so than with regard to the Middle East. The phrase “deja vu” doesn’t begin to do it justice. Today we got this report from the Associated Press: “Thousands of Palestinians protest in West Bank.” Stop me if you’ve heard this story before:

 

Thousands of outraged Palestinians took to the streets of the West Bank on Thursday, joining funeral processions and demonstrations after two protesters were killed by Israeli troops and a Palestinian prisoner died of cancer in Israeli custody.

 

(Snip)

 

Of course, seasoned observers of the region–or, one might say, those who are not pathologically stupid–will have some obvious questions. Like, why did Israeli troops kill two “protesters,” and why is the fact that a Palestinian inmate died of cancer a ground for political complaint? You can discern the answers to these questions from the AP’s account, but it takes a little effort. The AP gives us Mahmous Abbas’s take on today’s events:

 

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said Israel was responsible for the violence, claiming it was trying to divert attention from a four-year standstill in peace efforts.

(Snip)

 

(Snip)

 

All of this makes my head hurt. It is Groundhog Day X 100: we have seen the same fatuous reporting on the same dance of death more times than any of us can remember. Some months ago, I wrote that Israel should give up on the Palestinians and annex the West Bank. The West Bank has no rightful owner under international law, and no one has a better claim to Judea and Samaria than Israel. A half million Israelis now live on the West Bank, and others, including Caroline Glick, have since joined the call for annexation. Recently some Israelis floated a proposal to pay Palestinian families a substantial amount of money to vacate Judea and Samaria and go somewhere else, like Gaza, or Jordan or Syria or Egypt, or Europe, where they are ostensibly so popular. These are all good ideas, in my view. And they would allow us to wake up from Groundhog Day to the prospect of real change in a small but long-troubled corner of the world.