Recent statement by Ben Shapiro worth considering

Some time ago, political commentator Ben Shapiro was interviewed by Piers Morgan, and had the following to say:

Ben Shapiro has said that if a child of his comes out as gay he would oppose it on religious grounds.

Speaking to TalkTV's Piers Morgan, the political commentator was asked: "What would you do if one of your kids turned out to be gay?"

"I would oppose that," Mr Shapiro replied. "When it comes to religious marriage, no I'm not in favour of my religion sanctifying same-sex couples. Specifically because my religion propagates the idea of man-woman-child as the model for families.

"What I'm objecting to is the idea that marriage as a term is equally applicable to relationships that are designed to produce the future generation."

Mr Shapiro said that if marriage is defined as "two people that love each other" rather than "man-woman-child" then "obviously it encompasses two men or two women."

"But I don't think the government has a fundamental role in propagating relationships other than ones that have externalities that benefit society... having children raised largely with their biological parents."

He could go further by making clear he'd want his child to learn how to best relate to the opposite sex, and make clear that nobody should be attacked in any way for arguing in favor of psychological counseling to help in this goal. For now, he's right to stand up for the sake of Judaism itself and what it supports. And if governments could try to separate children from Christian parents, Judaists are obviously also in jeopardy. Here's more:

Mr Shapiro also insisted the suggestion transwomen are women was "completely unsustainable."

It comes after Nicola Sturgeon resigned as Scotland's First Minister after an outcry over the decision to place double rapist Isla Bryson in a women's prison and refused to say whether Isla is a man or a woman.

"It exposes the ideology for what it is," he said, "I can't think of anything worse in terms of misinformation than the idea that a biological man is in fact a female."

While Sturgeon deserved the condemnation she got, the sad part is how the SNP exploited the incident for replacing her with a Muslim, Humza Yousaf, as Scotland's First Minister. With the worst part being whether the whole transsexual flap was planned in order to enable this. Well, they certainly made up their mind who else they'd support, and it certainly wasn't a Christian, or even a Judaist. Apparently, the choice for such woke ideologues is either a LGBT advocate, or a Muslim, no matter how opposed they are to LGBT ideology, even though the Religion of Peace doesn't oppose it for altruistic reasons. And as many surely realize, Islamists are unlikely to face the same problems with LGBT indoctrination that Judeo-Christians are.

DCU Holiday Bash #1 from 1997 featured a laughably stupid Green Lantern story about Hanuka

The 3rd volume of Green Lantern from 1990-2004 has long been notorious for plenty of reasons, from the stealth leftist politics and other smutty elements Gerard Jones injected, to the repellent fridge story Ron Marz wrote in 1994, but in addition to that, there was also a short story starring Kyle Rayner, Hal Jordan's tediously scripted and forced replacement circa Emerald Twilight, that was just as dreadful as what the flagship series turned out to be. The tale in question comes from DCU Holiday Bash, published in early 1997, 1st of 3 specials from the late 90s, and was written by Michael Jan Friedman, a book writer who'd worked on a few comics in the 90s (including The Darkstars, which became something like a refugee camp for former GLs and even a depowered Donna Troy in its latter half), and judging from how insulting to the intellect the tale was, Friedman was hardly an improvement over Jones and Marz. Here's 3 panels from the story in question, which wasn't much more than 10 pages. It chronicles Kyle going to retrieve an oil vessel used for the Hanuka holiday from some neo-nazis who'd stolen it from a synagogue. Let's begin with this scene:

So what we have here are a few people preparing for the Hanuka holiday, with the woman discussing how great it is, and the script hits a historical pothole when she's written telling how Judah the Maccabee fought against the "Roman overlord of Palestine". Say what?!? So Friedman was perpetuating the falsehood of using a name the Romans invented for delegitimizing Israel in ancient times (not that he actually acknowledges that, of course), and to add even more unintentional comedy to the mix, he never did any proper research to comprehend that the empire occupying Israel at the time was the Greek-descended Seleucid empire, led by Antiochus III. Why, if that's supposed to be Judah atop the horse there, I'm equally put off by how he's made to look like he's wearing an Arabic keffiyeh on his head, a depiction that's admittedly occurred in other 20th century depictions of ancient Israelites too, but doesn't offer an accurate portrayal. I thought it was bad enough Jones basically invalidated Israel by not bringing up the name in his writing, in an early effort to ramrod the whole false narrative of a palestinian Arab/Islamic people that's become a common falsehood for years, into mainstream comics. With this, it looks as though Friedman also comes from a monumentally cynical leftist background, and saw nothing wrong with injecting some of his own contempt into another GL story he'd written up. Now, here's the second panel:

Here, Kyle discovers the lady is a female rabbi, which in Hebrew/Yiddish could be pronounced rebbetzin, and it's made out to look like such a religious figure shouldn't be asked on a date any more than a Catholic nun. This also had me groaning, because unlike the setup the Roman Catholics go by, in practically all sects of Judaism, rabbis and rebbetzins can marry. Even in the Reform sect, which I assume is what the lady is meant as an allusion to. The only hurdle is whether the suitor can convert to Judaism.

Curious thing about this story is that it's a rare moment I know of where Kyle almost ended up dating a lady guest who wasn't an established DCU cast member, yet the writers and editors involved instantly back away from any such possibilities. Which, in all due honesty, is as pathetic as the rest of the Rayner era. That aside, I wonder if DC published this story as a shield against all the GL fans who took offense at the abuse they'd heaped upon Hal, no matter their personalities or conduct. Well if so, then let me just say that, as somebody living in the land where Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster's ancestry came from (Hal's co-creators John Broome and Gil Kane were also of Jewish descent), I find it most extremely objectionable they'd use anything to do with my ethnicity and/or country's founding religion as way to hide from criticism of bad directions. It's simply unacceptable, yet judging from what we've seen in more recent times, such tactics have become the norm in ways much more grimy than before. Criticize poor writing and direction involving a POC/LGBT practitioner introduced in a forced and contrived manner to check a diversity box, and the left wants to call even the most honest and law-abiding person who dares do so a racist/homophobe/transphobe/islamophobe. Not because they think it's true, but because they want that to be the case. It's utterly shameful. And here, if this 1997 story were anything similar, the worst thing about it is the inaccurate history and other details used in the process. Now, the third panel:

After capturing the neo-nazi thugs thanks to what must've been a holiday miracle of finding reserve energy in his power ring (it seemed to short out momentarily while he'd raided their lair), Kyle returns the valuable to the synagogue, where the female rabbi is then seen at the end doing prayer recital, and while it may not be visible in the front-based illustration, you can see from the back she's wearing a Judaist skullcap, which is accepted in the Reform sect, and some rebbetzin in their movement do wear skullcaps. Though why nobody working in comicdom on tales like this wants to acknowledge that is beyond my comprehension. And that's what makes this story all the more laughable, IMO. That there's only so much space an editor can provide in a book like this is no excuse.

Wow, I thought it was bad enough when Jones was in charge of the GL franchise at the time he was assigned, and if sales plummeted while he was writing, his flaccid scripting was the culprit. And Marz's work wasn't any better. But if this is any indication, Friedman also had some appalling approaches to writing sans any good research or sense of respectability for history. Looking back, it's amazing Hal Jordan never seemed to turn up directly in stories like these, and if not, that's actually a good thing. Sure, some could argue a story like this doesn't have anything that couldn't have been done with Hal, and it's not like he never appeared in stories with political allusions decades back, but seeing how shoddy these 90s tales truly were, that's why it's better if Hal didn't appear in them at all. If anything, such tales are symbolic of what went wrong in the 1990s, and how it affected future storytelling going forward into the current century.

MUSLIMS IN MALMO CELEBRATE JEWISH MASSACRE

Hat Tip: Tundra Tabloids

[Khaybar, Khaybar, O Jews, Muhammad's army will return]

It refers to an attack by Mohammad on a Jewish society in particular in the year 629, at the oasis of Khaybar, currently Saudi Arabia. The battle ended with the Mohammed's Army killing 93 Jews and sent a large number into exile. (Read entire article here)

THE JEWISH ANCESTRY OF THE IBERIANS

An interesting new discovery in the genetics field:

From the 15th century on, Spain's Jews were mostly expelled or forced to convert, but today some 20 percent of Spaniards have genes similar to Sephardic Jews, a study has found.

A report in the American Journal of Human Genetics says almost a fifth of Spaniards have genes similar to Sephardic Jews. With a population of more than 40 million, Spain may thus have 8 million citizens with "Jewish" genes.

"The genetic composition of the current population is the legacy of our diverse cultural and religious past," study author Francesco Calafell, on the evolutionary biology faculty at Barcelona's Pompeu Fabra University, said Friday. Along with researchers from Leicester University in England and the Wellcome Trust, the study compared DNA samples from 1,140 men in Spain, Portugal and the Balearic Islands with established data on Moroccans, Algerians, and Sephardic Jews in Istanbul and Israel.

"The work shows that religious conversions and subsequent marriages between people of different lines had a significant impact on modern populations both in the Balearic Islands and in Portugal," another author Elena Bosch said in a statement.

There's some more here. By the way, I think I remember reading years ago that a lot of Armenians are distantly related to the Israelis. This page may offer more insight on that.

SHARI'A LAW VS. JEWISH LAW

David Yerushalmi writes on Front Page Magazine about the differences between Islamic and Jewish law.

CHINA'S OLD JEWISH COMMUNITY

The Covenant website (via Daled Amos) writes about the Chinese Jews, the Kaifeng community, who'd been prominent many centuries ago.

Class Stratification

Commentary Magazine has an interesting article by Charles Murray discussing the origins of Jewish Genius.

Since its first issue in 1945, COMMENTARY has published hundreds of articles about Jews and Judaism. As one would expect, they cover just about every important aspect of the topic. But there is a lacuna, and not one involving some obscure bit of Judaica. COMMENTARY has never published a systematic discussion of one of the most obvious topics of all: the extravagant overrepresentation of Jews, relative to their numbers, in the top ranks of the arts, sciences, law, medicine, finance, entrepreneurship, and the media.

I have personal experience with the reluctance of Jews to talk about Jewish accomplishment—my co-author, the late Richard Herrnstein, gently resisted the paragraphs on Jewish IQ that I insisted on putting in The Bell Curve (1994). Both history and the contemporary revival of anti-Semitism in Europe make it easy to understand the reasons for that reluctance. But Jewish accomplishment constitutes a fascinating and important story. Recent scholarship is expanding our understanding of its origins.

And so this Scots-Irish Gentile from Iowa hereby undertakes to tell the story. I cover three topics: the timing and nature of Jewish accomplishment, focusing on the arts and sciences; elevated Jewish IQ as an explanation for that accomplishment; and current theories about how the Jews acquired their elevated IQ.

He doesn't come to any firm conclusions. He does ask a lot of interesting questions.

In the letters to the editor section of the magazine he gets asked a few questions. Here is one.

To the Editor:

Charles Murray’s consideration of the historical sources of higher-than-average Jewish intelligence and cultural achievement is the most informed and intelligent on the subject that I know of. That it is written by a non-Jew is, I believe, instructive for many of us who tend to take pride in Jewish achievements. We must always keep in mind that the overwhelming majority of great cultural creators of mankind have not been Jewish, and that achievement is by no means a Jewish monopoly.

We should also be aware that a number of factors—rising rates of intermarriage, the increasing insularity of some religious Jews—raise considerable questions about whether Jewish cultural and creative achievement will be as disproportionately great in the next 200 years as it has been in the previous 200.

Shalom Freedman
Jerusalem, Israel

Charles Murray replies:

Shalom Freedman’s first point is of course correct: Jews are disproportionately represented in the ranks of outstanding achievers but, in raw terms, non-Jews are in the great majority. I proudly join Eoghan Harris in noting that among them are Scots and Irish, and even the occasional Scot-Irish. Mr. Freedman’s worries about intermarriage are justified if the question is the survival of a robust Jewish culture, but less so with respect to IQ. On average, Jews do not marry randomly selected Gentiles, but ones they meet in college or workplace, which in turn means spouses whose own mean IQ is also considerably above the Gentile mean. Increasing cognitive stratification independent of ethnicity or social origins is the ignored story of today’s evolving class structure—the story that the late Richard Herrnstein and I tried to bring to public attention in The Bell Curve (1994).

I discuss The Bell Curve and other sources extensively in Inequality. What it comes down to is that these days the big advances in science, technology, and business tend to come from the smartest people. These kinds of advances make us all absolutely richer (the poor in America are fat - some call this a bug, I call it a feature) while it makes the poor relatively poorer (income inequality grows). Personally I think that giving these huge incentives to our brightest people is what makes America what it is. Murray thinks there should be some noblesse oblige provided through government and he is a libertarian. I tend to agree.

As my friend Jose Arias used to say: welfare is the price we pay to keep the lower classes from revolting. I think what we have done with welfare in terms of encouraging work is a good idea. If for no other reason that it provides some cultural cohesion. We all have our shoulders to the wheel. My friend Bob used to say that "Liberty is just equality in school". There is no way equality in school can be accomplished without destroying the effectiveness of our schools. I might add that Bob was a lot older when he first said that. He is younger than that now.

Cross Posted at Power and Control and at Classical Values