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Reading the Globe #018: Israel-UAE, Dark Money Dems, Maus, Quebec Vaxxing
Houthi rebels, Soros funding, Holocaust portrayals and Quebec heavy handedness
Many observers of Israel’s continuing efforts to strengthen ties with the region reacted with dismay to the news that Houthi rebels in Yemen had fired a missile in an apparent attempt to disrupt Israeli president Israel Herzog’s official visit to the United Arab Emirates.
According to a January 30 Politico report, the UAE intercepted the missile fired by the rebels and it does not appear to have claimed any lives or to have disrupted President Herzog’s meeting with the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi.
The same cannot be said of an attack by the rebels on a fuel station two weeks previously that killed three people and injured six people.
Practice What You Preach
A report by Kenneth P. Vogel and Shane Goldmacher that appeared in the New York Times on January 29 is entitled “Democrats Decried Dark Money. Then They Won With It in 2020.”
The article does an excellent job of laying bare the hypocrisy on display here. It mentions the left’s professed aversion to the role of corporations in politics in the Citizens United case. It acknowledges the increasing role, in the dark money sinkhole, of megadonors such as George Soros. But the article could perhaps have gone even a bit further and frankly acknowledged that the party that casts itself as the party of voting rights and economic populism, favoring the increased participation of the disadvantaged members of our society, has increasingly turned into the vehicle and tool of the most powerful and superrich elites.
Intellectual Freedom in Tennessee
On January 27, the website Book and Film Globe ran a piece by editor Neal Pollack entitled “The Maus That Roared: Tennessee school board bans Art Spiegelman’s book just in time for Holocaust Remembrance Day.” Maus, an account of the Holocaust making use of animals as its characters, is widely considered a powerful and revolutionary work of literature, one that brings home all the horror of the Holocaust in a wrenching manner, but the school board evidently felt that the profanity and depictions of violence in the graphic novel, including the murder of children, make Maus unsuitable for school libraries and curricula.
Punishing the Skeptics
It is one thing to believe in the wisdom of getting fully vaccinated against Covid-19. It is another matter to enact punitive measures against those who, for one reason or another, have not received vaccinations. The province of Quebec, as BBC News reported on January 11, has deemed the latter course of action to be necessary. Quebec’s premier, François Legault, has announced that Quebec will slap as-yet unspecified fines on the roughly 12.8% of the province’s population who are still unvaccinated.
The tough new measure, as stated above, makes Quebec an outlier among Canada’s provinces. On the one hand, you have to admire Quebec for going its own way and not receiving dictates from Ottawa about how to handle urgent public health matters. It is well for the province to asset its independence from a confederation that continually threatens to subsume its distinct cultural and linguistic identity.
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By Michael Washburn
4.8
66 ratings
Houthi rebels, Soros funding, Holocaust portrayals and Quebec heavy handedness
Many observers of Israel’s continuing efforts to strengthen ties with the region reacted with dismay to the news that Houthi rebels in Yemen had fired a missile in an apparent attempt to disrupt Israeli president Israel Herzog’s official visit to the United Arab Emirates.
According to a January 30 Politico report, the UAE intercepted the missile fired by the rebels and it does not appear to have claimed any lives or to have disrupted President Herzog’s meeting with the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi.
The same cannot be said of an attack by the rebels on a fuel station two weeks previously that killed three people and injured six people.
Practice What You Preach
A report by Kenneth P. Vogel and Shane Goldmacher that appeared in the New York Times on January 29 is entitled “Democrats Decried Dark Money. Then They Won With It in 2020.”
The article does an excellent job of laying bare the hypocrisy on display here. It mentions the left’s professed aversion to the role of corporations in politics in the Citizens United case. It acknowledges the increasing role, in the dark money sinkhole, of megadonors such as George Soros. But the article could perhaps have gone even a bit further and frankly acknowledged that the party that casts itself as the party of voting rights and economic populism, favoring the increased participation of the disadvantaged members of our society, has increasingly turned into the vehicle and tool of the most powerful and superrich elites.
Intellectual Freedom in Tennessee
On January 27, the website Book and Film Globe ran a piece by editor Neal Pollack entitled “The Maus That Roared: Tennessee school board bans Art Spiegelman’s book just in time for Holocaust Remembrance Day.” Maus, an account of the Holocaust making use of animals as its characters, is widely considered a powerful and revolutionary work of literature, one that brings home all the horror of the Holocaust in a wrenching manner, but the school board evidently felt that the profanity and depictions of violence in the graphic novel, including the murder of children, make Maus unsuitable for school libraries and curricula.
Punishing the Skeptics
It is one thing to believe in the wisdom of getting fully vaccinated against Covid-19. It is another matter to enact punitive measures against those who, for one reason or another, have not received vaccinations. The province of Quebec, as BBC News reported on January 11, has deemed the latter course of action to be necessary. Quebec’s premier, François Legault, has announced that Quebec will slap as-yet unspecified fines on the roughly 12.8% of the province’s population who are still unvaccinated.
The tough new measure, as stated above, makes Quebec an outlier among Canada’s provinces. On the one hand, you have to admire Quebec for going its own way and not receiving dictates from Ottawa about how to handle urgent public health matters. It is well for the province to asset its independence from a confederation that continually threatens to subsume its distinct cultural and linguistic identity.