The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Brandeis Brownshirt Talia Lepson Hurls Crude Insults at Pro-Israel Student

Posted on | April 28, 2014 | 77 Comments

Talia Lepson (@tlepthechamp on Twitter) is a Brandeis University sophomore “majoring in Politics and minoring in Peace, Conflict, and Coexistence Studies” who describes herself as an “avid MSNBC viewer.” In case you forgot the recent campus controversy:

Understanding the radical climate at Brandeis — where a freedom fighter like Aayan Hirsi Ali is unwelcome — what sort of attitude would you expect a left-wing sophomore at this campus to exhibit?

A top J Street leader at Brandeis University harassed a pro-Israel student activist early Saturday morning, calling the student a “shit bag” and telling him that “Jews hate you,” according to those who witnessed the incident.
Daniel Mael was walking to his dorm room on the university’s campus late Friday night when he encountered Talia Lepson, a J Street U Brandeis board member, who purportedly referred to Mael as a “shit bag” and angrily told him “Jews hate you.”
“I don’t feel comfortable on campus knowing people will lob verbal insults at me simply because we disagree,” said Mael, who has filed an incident report with the Brandeis police over what he described at the “uncivil environment that is developing on campus and the attempts to isolate students with differing opinions.”
The incident is just one of several at Brandeis lately in which pro-Israel students have come under fire for their attempts to defend the Jewish state on campus from groups such as J Street.
Mael said that he and a friend were returning to their dorm rooms at around 12:45 a.m. on Saturday when he came across Lepson — who says she currently works as a political intern at the Democratic National Committee (DNC) — and a group of her friends.
“As they approached, Talia Lepson give me a really, really intense stare and then I turned to the students and said, ‘Shabbat shalom,’” said Mael, who is an observant Jew. “I was being serious. I thought that religion and politics are not necessarily intertwined. I thought you could still be nice.”
Lepson “responded by saying, ‘Jews hate you’,” Mael said. “As she continued to walk, she screamed, ‘You are a shit bag.’”

Daniel Mael (@DanielMael on Twitter) writes for Ben Shapiro’s Truth Revolt site, which reports how Talia Lepson boasted about her radical activism with the far-left group J Street:

Throughout this past academic year, I have served as Political Director of J Street U Brandeis. While serving as Political Director, I have led a delegation of Brandeis students to lobby Senators Warren and Markey against the Kirk-Menendez bill; have co-moderated a panel discussion with Lara Friedman, Director of Policy and Governmental Relations for Americans for Peace Now; and assisted in creating and leading a weekly meeting on AIPAC’s withdrawal of support for the Kirk-Menendez bill. In my spare time, I enjoy discussing politics and going on rants against the patriarchy.

Cultivating a climate of totalitarian terror on campus is the mission of the academic Left, and the shrieking hatefulness of Talia Lepson is evidence of how well they have succeeded in that mission.

 

Category: Education, Israel, Progressivism

Teen Killer ‘Just Wasn’t Right’

Posted on | April 27, 2014 | 38 Comments

Could this tragedy have been avoided?

The 16-year-old who allegedly hacked a fellow student to death at a suburban Connecticut high school after she refused to be his prom date is a ‘cutter’ who had previously attempted suicide and has a history of depression, his classmates have told MailOnline.
Chris Plaskon has been identified by parents and students as the teen arrested after Friday’s brutal attack on Maren Sanchez, the beloved junior prom queen. Friends say he battled ADHD and other mental issues that led to sometimes bizarre behavior in the classroom.
‘He just wasn’t right. I know his cousin. He didn’t act right,’ 16-year-old Seamus O’Reilly said Friday.
‘He had depression.’
Plaskon allegedly attacked Sanchez, whom he dated a few years earlier in middle school, in the stairwell at Jonathan Law High School in Milford, Connecticut, Friday morning — stabbing her in the throat and hacking her to death with a kitchen knife as she fought for her life.
He is currently being held in a mental health ward, charged with murder as a juvenile but prosecutors have said they are considering filing adult charges against him.
Tyler Curtin, 16 . . . said he believed Plaskon struggled with mental illness — including cutting himself. . . .
‘He had ADHD and took strong medicine for it and had other things, too,’ Curtin said. . . .
Classmates, even the ones who said they once knew Plaskon well, said nothing in his behavior had ever indicated he was capable of violence.
‘He was such a nice, sweet kid,’ Curtin said.

Yes, “such a nice, sweet kid” — until he stabbed a girl in the neck.

As Chris Rock famously asked, “Whatever happened to crazy?”

“What, you can’t be crazy no more? Did we eliminate ‘crazy’ from the dictionary? . . . When l was a kid, they used to separate the crazy kids from everybody. When l was a kid, the crazy kids went to school in a little-a** bus. They had a class at the end of the school . . . Just in case they went crazy, they would only hurt other crazy kids. And we was all safe.”

 

 

Category: Crime

Donald Waelde Wants to Be a Woman — and Also, Perform Oral Sex on a Horse

Posted on | April 27, 2014 | 89 Comments

The Craigslist ad (left) led to arrest of Donald Waelde (right).

Far be it from me to say that Donald Waelde’s alleged interest in horse sex is typical of Arizona’s LGBT community:

Once again, deputies from the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office have busted someone who went to Craigslist looking for sex with an animal.
This time, a 22-year-old Phoenix man went to the “Missed Connections” section of Craigslist seeking a male horse “on which to commit the act of fellatio,” according to the MCSO.
The ad on Craigslist . . . was listed on April 8, and states:

I am 22 years old and I want to play with a male Horse. simple as that. If you have access to a Male horse, and can allow me access to a male horse, then contact me please 😉 I will do something in return.

Detectives were able to identify the poster as 22-year-old Donald Waelde, according to MCSO. . . .
According to an MCSO spokesman, “In the undercover investigation, Sheriff’s deputies contacted the suspect and engaged Waelde in conversation where the suspect stated the sex act he wished to perform on the horse and agreed to meet the undercover detective on Tuesday.”
The detective actually went to the meeting place in Anthem with a horse, borrowing one from the MCSO’s Mounted Posse.
Waelde was immediately arrested after showing up to the meeting place, and the Sheriff’s Office says he admitted to placing the ad and “stated his intentions to consummate the act.”

Phoenix New Times made no mention of Waelde’s transgender interest, but WKAZ-TV did, and apparently this was sufficient cause for Huffington Post to declare Donald Waelde a woman:

An Arizona woman has been arrested on bestiality charges after allegedly trying to arrange sex with a horse via Craigslist.
The woman, who’s described as transgender and who the police report is legally known as Donald Waelde, 22, posted this ad on the Missed Connections section of Phoenix Craigslist on April 8 . . .
During the meeting, Waelde allegedly admitted to placing the ad and her sexual intentions with the animal.
She was arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit bestiality.

The radical feminist blog Gender Trender called attention to this linguistic transformation, noting how often crimes committed by transgenders are attributed to “women.” And there is certainly an element of deception involved in the appropriation of female pronouns — “she” and “her” — to describe a man with a penis named Donald.

Might as well call him a “filly,” I suppose.

 

Category: Arizona, Crime, Gays, Sex

Lies, Errors, and Tendentious Mischaracterizations of Facts

Posted on | April 27, 2014 | 37 Comments

“Vile Lie-Peddler @Karoli Kuns,” as I have sometimes called her, is one of the members of Team Kimberlin whose harassment of the perjuring bomber’s Enemies List is intermittent, rather than habitual and constant. It has been months since I paid any attention at all to her and, honestly, the whole Kimberlin drama has begun to bore me. The $1 million Maryland lawsuit Kimberlin v. Walker, et al., continues shuffling along in zombie fashion, while the $2 million federal lawsuit (Kimberlin v. the Universe, et al., as John Hoge calls it) seems to be approaching the point at which, as the lawyers say, it will be “ripe” for dismissal.

The fundamental dishonesty of Kimberlin’s litigation, however, is a self-evident fact with which my readers are so abundantly familiar by now that I don’t see much point in updating regularly — “Oh, look, another lie from the Pro Se Pipsqueak!” — and I’ve resolved personally to pay as little attention to it as a defendant must necessarily pay.

Maybe I should have included a “Trigger Alert” for those who have traumatic reactions to Bill Schamfeldt’s face. With a truly amazing persistence, Schmalfeldt has continued his obsessive fixation on John Hoge, who many months ago seems to have decided that stoic indifference was an insufficient response to Schmalfeldt’s sadistic harassment. Hoge has been quite active in seeking to hold Schmalfeldt legally accountable. Predictably, Schmalfeldt has turned this around in his demented mind, absurdly claiming that Hoge is harassing him, whereas the truth of the matter is, of course, the exact opposite of what Schmalfeldt says. It is now 10 months since a Carroll County judge granted Hoge’s peace order against Schmalfeldt. All that is required of Schmalfeldt is to cease his harassment of Hoge, but Schmalfeldt is like that old Led Zeppelin tune, “I Can’t Quit You Baby”: He’s hooked. He’s addicted. He’s got a monkey on his back. He’s got a harassment jones.

“He’s banned on Daily Kos. He’s banned at the Examiner. He gets angry about being ignored, and erupts in frothing rage. So then people pay Bill the only kind of attention he deserves — pointing out that he’s a brain-damaged troll — at which point he claims victimhood. Then the cycle begins again, and Bill makes new threats . . .”
— Robert Stacy McCain, Oct. 6, 2013

So the endless provocations continue — “How Many More Times,” another early Zeppelin classic — and when Hoge responds to Schmalfeldt’s provocations, this gives Schmalfeldt a new occasion to claim helpless victimhood. Bill’s existence has become a Mobius Loop of self-inflicted humiliation.

Schmalfeldt has a penchant for “monkey see, monkey do” mimicry, and anyone who has ever been in conflict with Bill quickly learns to recognize how he habitually imitates whatever rhetorical method his antagonist employs against him. Call attention to Schmalfeldt’s characteristic remorseless sadism, then start the clock to count the moments until he accuses you of sadism. And as often as we have remarked the obsessive nature of Schmalfeldt’s harassment of Hoge — this is an indisputable truth — yet we have now become accustomed to Bill claiming that he is the victim of harassment and that Hoge is obsessed with him. There’s an alternative universe inside Schmalfeldt’s mind, you see, where everything is the mirror reverse of reality, and his delusions would only be of interest as a clinical study in dementia, were it not for the fact that Schmalfeldt continues publicizing his perverse fantasies on the Internet.

Enter, now, Karoli Kuns . . .

What inspired the Vile Lie-Peddler to take an interest in Bill Schmalfeldt’s imaginary victimhood? I have no idea, but she evidently decided to recycle Schmalfeldt’s intentionally dishonest (or, perhaps, delusionally paranoid) version of events at Crooks & Liars:

How Maryland’s Domestic Violence
Laws Became A Right Wing Weapon
Of Personal Destruction

You can click the headline and read it — it’s nearly 3,000 words — but permit me to excerpt just a few choice selections:

Right-wingers have discovered that it is a relatively simple trick to turn a legal process intended to protect those at risk of domestic abuse into a weapon of personal destruction. All that’s needed is a friendly judge, obsessive-compulsive tendencies, a deep mean streak, and time. On one level, this is the story of one man’s experience with vicious right-wing online operatives. On another, it’s representative of the overall right-wing strategy of using scorched-earth tactics to discredit and destroy their opponents. . . .

(In her opening paragraph, Karoli uses “right-wing” three times, which functions to prejudice progressive readers who are willing to believe any evil thing anyone says about right-wingers.)

In 2012, a group of right-wing bloggers decided to go after Brett Kimberlin — a guy with a past ripe for exploitation. . . .

(Which is not what happened, actually. There was no “group” decision, despite the conspiracy theory Kimberlin offers in his federal lawsuit. What happened was that Aaron Walker published a lengthy account of his legal battles with Kimberlin, mentioning also the role of Kimberlin’s “associate” Neal Rauhauser. My previous familiarity with Rauhauser, a disgraced Democrat political operative, caused me to take an interest in the story. Four days after I began writing about this, Kimberlin contacted my wife’s employer, ranting feverishly and accusing me of “harassing” him. This resulted in a security alert at my wife’s place of employment, which led me to depart to the “Undisclosed Location” so that I could continue covering the story without endangering my family or my wife’s employer. This action drew widespread attention, and Lee Stranahan decided to declare the next Friday — May 25, 2012 — “Everybody Blog About Brett Kimberlin Day,” a declaration that resulted in the story gaining national attention. We now return to Karoli’s version of events . . .)

Schmalfeldt wrote stories in Kimberlin’s defense which took dead aim at the Breitbart cabal. In the process, Schmalfeldt became an easy proxy for their real target. Disabled and housebound, Schmalfeldt’s ability to write and speak was his outlet for activism, which he used liberally.
Schmalfeldt wasn’t gentle. In some cases, he stepped outside the boundaries of normal journalistic standards and climbed down in his opponents’ gutter. At other times, he hit them just a little too close to home for their comfort, exposing lies, funding sources and possible motives for their anti-Kimberlin campaign. . . .

OK, I’ll stop with the back-and-forth now. Anyone familiar with the trajectory of Schmalfeldt’s antics clearly recognizes that Karoli Kuns’ telling of the tale is a cloud cuckooland fantasy.

After July 5, 2012 — when a Maryland court lifted a previously imposed gag order on Aaron Walker — the Kimberlin story faded away and would have ceased to be a story at all, were it not for the fact that a discernible Enemies List (including Walker, Patterico, Ali Akbar, Lee Stranahan, Brandon Darby and others) continued to be targeted for a steady stream of harassing tactics. Mostly, this took the form of Twitter stalking, and most of it I suspected was incited or orchestrated by Neal Rauhauser. The question of Rauhauser’s motives, especially whether he was being paid by Kimberlin to mastermind this troll operation, has been much disputed. Nevertheless, Neal’s distinctive fingerprints were visible often enough (mainly because Rauhauser is such an inveterate braggart) that I inferred that the visible incidents were evidence of a vast iceberg of behind-the-scenes activity by Neal.

Such was the case when Barrett Brown began harassing me right before I left to cover the 2012 Democratic convention — provably the result of Rauhauser’s incitement — and, after Brown melted down and was arrested by the FBI, I noticed a steady escalation of harassment directed at me by Bill Schmalfeldt.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc? Well, I’ve never claimed that this was the case. Nevertheless, it is remarkable that after Rauhauser tried (and spectacularly failed) to use Barrett Brown as a weapon against me in September 2012, Bill Schmalfeldt became increasingly obsessed with me in October 2012. For a couple of weeks, I simply ignored Schmalfeldt’s trademark tactics — making lurid accusations and demanding that I respond — because I was busy covering the presidential campaign. But that last weekend before Election Day in Ohio, when Bill was sending me dozens of hostile messages daily, I finally took notice: “Monsters on the Internet: Sociopathic Sadism and Bill Schmalfeldt’s Madness.”

Implicit message: “Don’t mistake my silence for cowardice and don’t imagine that you are deceiving anyone about your motives.”

If Bill wanted to play games with me, he wasn’t going to be able to dictate the rules of the game and, predictably, my refusal to cooperate with his agenda enraged him to the point that, over Thanksgiving weekend 2012, Schmalfeldt sent me more than 200 hostile Twitter messages in the span of 48 hours. His motives were no secret.

Everybody saw what Bill Schmalfeldt was doing, and everybody knew why he was doing it, yet he continued escalating the harassment until, in February 2013, Lee Stranahan got fed up with it. Stranahan flew from Texas to Baltimore to swear out a peace order complaint against Schmalfeldt. John Hoge gave Stranahan a ride from the airport to the courthouse for the purpose, which is how “Destroy John Hoge” became Schmalfeldt’s Prime Directive. Hoge then decided to seek his own peace order against Schmalfeldt, which was granted in June 2013. This court order — in effect, a judicial declaration that Schmalfeldt is guilty of harassment — has been upheld on appeal, and in December 2013 the order was extended another six months.

So now, evidently hoping to generate sympathy for Schmalfeldt, Karoli Kuns has volunteered her, uh, creative abilities on his behalf. John Hoge refutes a few of her falsehoods here, and I noticed a commenter on the Crooks & Liars post employ the phrase “Hoge and McCain and ilk.” Being lumped into an “ilk” pissed me off, so I replied in a comment that I suspect C&L will delete, and which I therefore repeat here:

It is perhaps of no interest to you, but nonetheless relevant, that during this long ordeal that began (for me) nearly two years ago, I have never sued anyone, never sought a peace order against anyone, and never filed criminal charges against anyone.
The facts of this can be ascertained by anyone who cares to investigate. Likewise, any curious person can easily learn that the person who initiated this entire chain of extraordinary events — lawsuits, peace orders, criminal charges, et cetera — was Brett Kimberlin.
People can believe what they want to believe, but this does not change the facts which are, as John Adams said, stubborn things.

Their attempt to re-write history so as to transfer agency — to blame the consequences of their own actions on the innocent people they have wronged — is destined to fail. Nothing enrages the dishonest and evil so much as when honest people refuse to be intimidated. And they shriek as if they had suffered a fatal injury every time readers hit my tip jar.

Fuck you, Bill Schmalfeldt. And fuck you, Karoli Kuns.




 

 


Category: Bill Schmalfeldt, The Kimberlin Files

It’s 2014: Why Aren’t You Racist Yet?

Posted on | April 27, 2014 | 51 Comments

So, apparently, this was The Week When Everybody Became Officially Racist. First it was Cliven Bundy, and now L.A. Clippers owner Donald Sterling has been caught on audio saying racist — RAAAAACIST! — stuff to his hot young girlfriend, who just happens to be half-black and half-Mexican. Rich elderly white guy is OK with dating this exotic young hybrid, but he seems to perceive some kind of image issue with his girlfriend hanging out with black people.

Can this be explained? Maybe. But if you find yourself forced to explain a remark about race, face it — you’re Officially Racist.

Ditto Avril Lavigne. She made a weird music video about Hello Kitty and was denounced by Zack Beauchamp of Vox.com as having “hit some kind of Orientalist Japanese Stereotype trifecta.” Ann Althouse looked closely and saw nothing racist. Moe Lane looked closely and saw nothing racist. Ann Althouse looked again and still saw nothing racist.

And this proves what, boys and girls?

Exactly: Ann Althouse and Moe Lane are both racists — RAAAAACIST! — because they are not as sensitive and keen-eyed as Zack Beauchamp in detecting Orientalist Japanese Stereotypes.

Of course, Avril Lavigne is Canadian. And you know how those people are.

 

 

Category: Racism

Goldberg Misses His Own Punchline

Posted on | April 26, 2014 | 10 Comments

by Smitty

Goldberg goes for a fairly straightforward South Park play in discussing Obama’s foreign policy, “Obama’s foreign-policy plan B”, but misses the obvious gag: the whole thing is an extended Plan B Abortion pill.

Keith Koffler enumerates, by country, most of #OccupyResoluteDesk’s non-triumphs. He’s missing my personal favorite, and Obama’s first cock-up, which was Honduras.

David Haig, as Inspector Grim, speaks to Obama for all of us:

No, Barack’s foreign policy has never been other than a phoned-in, hashtagged abortion. In his defense, it’s just never easy. As tempting as an isolationism sounds, that’s not going to work. However, Obama’s superficial non-interventionism, backed by Spec Ops guys and drones in the night, is proving an expensive lesson in how not to do it, either.

While falling short of jumping on the neo-con bandwagon, I hope the GOP can craft a foreign policy featuring principle, simplicity and strength. Such would counterbalance Obama’s chaotic, Byzantine weakness.

If we can’t have John Bolton for POTUS, let’s at least have him for Secretary of State. After the last two buffoons, we need somebody to pick up the pieces.

Category: Barack Obama, Foreigners

Reading ‘Heterophobia’: Adrienne Rich and ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality’

Posted on | April 26, 2014 | 16 Comments

“[T]he failure to examine heterosexuality as an institution is like failing to admit that the economic system called capitalism or the caste system of racism is maintained by a variety of forces, including both physical violence and false consciousness. . . .
“Lesbians have historically been deprived of a political existence through ‘inclusion’ as female versions of male homosexuality. To equate lesbian existence with male homosexuality because each is stigmatized is to deny and erase female reality once again. To separate those women stigmatized as ‘homosexual’ or ‘gay’ from the complex continuum of female resistance to enslavement, and attach them to a male pattern, is to falsify our history.”
— Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” (1980)

In recent weeks, I have been re-reading Daphne Patai’s 1998 book Heterophobia: Sexual Harassment and the Future of Feminism, because it offers valuable insights into the ideology many readers first encountered in the ridiculous expression, “PIV is always rape, OK?”

Demonizing male sexuality, feminists have made hostility to heterosexual intercourse (PIV = penis in vagina) a persistent theme of their rhetoric for many years. When conservatives took notice of Radical Wind’s anti-PIV rant in January, many may have assumed that this was a new idea from the kook fringe of feminism, but it’s not. As I pointed out last year (“Taking Feminism Seriously”), Marxism and lesbianism are the twin pillars of feminist ideology, and have been since the 1960s. Most people don’t realize this, because feminism operates by a sort of duality: It has an exoteric rhetoric — a public discourse about “rights” and “equality” offered in mainstream venues — and an esoteric ideology, taught in advanced Women’s Studies classes and discussed in academic journals, where committed feminists are speaking to each other.

Daphne Patai, originally a literature professor, spent 10 years teaching Women’s Studies at the University of Massachusetts in the 1980s and ’90s, an experience that led to her 1994 book Professing Feminism (co-authored with Noretta Koertge). Her direct experience with academic feminism and extensive familiarity with feminist ideology informs Heterophobia, in which Professor Patai addresses the arguments and tactics of what she calls the Sexual Harassment Industry. Professor Patai’s experience enabled her to perceive how courts, legislators and academic theorists had incorporated into their discourse about sexual harassment many radical ideas that originated with feminist ideologues like Andrea Dworkin, Mary Daly and Catharine McKinnon.

Professor Patai  begins Chapter 6 of Heterophobia thus:

Something very strange happened toward the end of the twentieth century. Heterosexuality went from being the norm to being on the defensive. By calling this phenomenon “heterophobia,” I am not speaking abstractly. Rather, I am referring to a distinct current within feminism over the past thirty years [i.e., since the late 1960s, as Professor Patai wrote this in 1998], a current that has been “theorized” explicitly by feminist scholars and agitators alike as they attack men and heterosexuality.

Here, then, Professor Patai begins to deconstruct feminism’s esoteric ideology, exposing it in plain sight for critical examination.

‘Classes Taught by Doctrinaire Feminists’

It is remarkable that feminism’s fundamental hostility toward heterosexuality was never really a secret, at least among those who bothered to pay attention to its development from the late 1960s onward as a phenomenon of the radical New Left (see “Re-Reading Susan Brownmiller”) into a coherent ideology propagated in university Women’s Studies programs. But just as no one paid much attention to latter-day New Left disciple Barack Obama until he emerged as the Democrat nominee for president in 2008, few have bothered to examine the core beliefs of feminism’s esoteric ideology, which have gained further influence since Professor Patai examined them in 1998.

Continuing in Chapter 6 of Heterophobia (pp. 133-134 of the hardback edition), Professor Patai discusses how “the antiheterosexual tenor of much feminist discourse” plays a role “in alienating ‘ordinary’ women from feminism.” She talks about the explicitly anti-male message “being conveyed in women’s studies classes taught by doctrinaire feminists eager to teach their students all about ‘compulsory heterosexuality,’ as Adrienne Rich famously put it.”

Those who are not students of feminism may be puzzled by Professor Patai’s description of Adrienne Rich’s phrase as “famous.” And this reaction — “Who the hell is Adrienne Rich?” — serves to demonstrate the yawning gulf between public awareness of feminism and the esoteric doctrine taught in Women’s Studies programs.

Anticipating this puzzled reaction, Professor Patai includes a lengthy endnote, which we find on pp. 234-235 of Heterophobia:

Adrience Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 5, no. 4 (Summer 1980): 631-60. Rich’s essay is a key document that has had an enormous impact over the past two decades. It has been widely anthologized and is regularly taught in women’s studies courses. In her recent work, [University of California Berkeley Professor] Judith Butler refers to the presumably indisputable reality of compulsory heterosexuality without even citing Rich, so well known has the phrase become. . . .

Thus, in less than 20 years, the anti-heterosexual theme of Rich’s radical essay had become so deeply embedded in the feminist theory taught at universities that its “indisputable reality” was simply taken for granted by a leading Women’s Studies scholar.

Left: Adrienne Rich in 1980. Right: Judith Butler in 2013.

“If you consider sexual desire and romantic love between men and women to be natural and healthy, you are not a feminist. . . . There is nothing natural about sex, according to feminist ideology, no biological urge that causes women to be attracted to men.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, April 10

‘Suppressed Lesbian … Since Adolescence’

You can read Rich’s influential 1980 essay online, where University of Georgia Law Professor Dawn Bennett-Alexander calls it “a major intellectual force in the general feminist reorientation to sexual matters in recent years.” A brief excerpt:

The bias of compulsory heterosexuality, through which lesbian experience is perceived on a scale ranging from deviant to abhorrent, or simply rendered invisible, could be illustrated from many other texts than the two just preceding. The assumption made by [Alice] Rossi, that women are “innately sexually oriented” toward men, or by [Doris] Lessing, that the lesbian choice is simply an acting-out of bitterness toward men, are by no means theirs alone; they are widely current in literature and in the social sciences.
I am concerned here with two other matters as well: first, how and why women’s choice of women as passionate comrades, life partners, co-workers, lovers, tribe, has been crushed, invalidated, forced into hiding and disguise; and second, the virtual or total neglect of lesbian existence in a wide range of writings, including feminist scholarship. . . .
Any theory or cultural/political creation that treats lesbian existence as a marginal or less “natural” phenomenon, as mere “sexual preference,” or as the mirror image of either heterosexual or male homosexual relations is profoundly weakened thereby, whatever its other contributions. Feminist theory can no longer afford merely to voice a toleration of “lesbianism” as an “alternative life-style,” or make token allusion to lesbians. A feminist critique of compulsory heterosexual orientation for women is long overdue. . . .

Readers may wish to examine Adrienne Rich’s biography, because she was by no means a marginal “fringe” figure in feminist history. The daughter of a renowned Johns Hopkins University medical professor, Rich graduated from Radcliffe College in 1951 and two years later married a Harvard economics professor with whom she had three sons. Rich gained acclaim for her poetry and in the 1960s taught at Swarthmore College, Columbia University and City College of New York. She became involved in radical politics and in 1970 separated from her husband, who then committed suicide at age 46. By the mid-1970s, Rich was living openly as a lesbian, subsequently explaining: “The suppressed lesbian I had been carrying in me since adolescence began to stretch her limbs.” She later taught at Brandeis University, Bryn Mawr College, Rutgers University, Scripps College, San Jose State University, Stanford University and Cornell University.

If Rich’s “feminist critique of compulsory heterosexual orientation for women” was, as Professor Patai says, “widely anthologized and . . . regularly taught in women’s studies courses” in the 1990s, how much further has acceptance of this doctrine progressed since then?

Far enough that a state university in Spartanburg, South Carolina, hosted a performance of  Leigh Hendrix’s one-woman show, “How to Be a Lesbian in 10 Days or Less,” as part of a campus feminist conference. Far enough that celebrity feminist Lena Dunham feels obligated to publicly lament her heterosexuality as a “huge disappointment.” Far enough that a progressive sex educator finds her university Women’s Sexuality course denounced as “heteronormative,” and realizes that many of her students “have never thought about sex in terms of biology or reproduction.”

Readers who have followed developments in the Culture War in recent decades must ask themselves: “What’s next?”





 

 


Category: Feminism

Remember When @RaniaKhalek Played ‘Count the Jews at the Nation’?

Posted on | April 26, 2014 | 33 Comments

New York University student Laura Adkins exposed the intimidation tactics of the radical campus group Students for Justice in Palestine and, as you might expect, Adkins has been relentlessly harassed online the past two days by the usual suspects, including self-proclaimed “independent journalist” Rania Khalek.

The fact that SJP is linked to Hamas? The fact that SJP was kicked off campus at Northeastern University? The fact that SJP’s faculty adviser at Northeastern bragged “that anti-Israel activism on campus has made pro-Israel students afraid to speak out”? Khalek can’t be bothered with these facts, which expose the truth that SJP is a terrorist-supporting group that uses brownshirt tactics.

Khalek supports the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement, the goal of which is the elimination of the state of Israel. Last month, a blogger at the Jerusalem Post called attention to Khalek’s peculiar ethnic obsessions:

[A]n excellent article by Russell A. Berman in the Los Angeles Review of Books, which recently hosted a forum debating the BDS movement against Israel. Berman’s piece is one of several contributions opposing BDS, and towards the end of his extremely knowledgeable and well-argued critique, he points out that there is reason for concern that the antisemitism that “is part of the international context in which the debate about Israel rages on” is also affecting the debate in the US. As an example Berman cites an article by Khalek published in the The Electronic Intifada in late 2013, where she “criticized an allegedly pro-Israeli perspective at The Nation through the tried and true anti-Semitic tactic of counting the Jews among the staff writers and, not surprisingly, determining that there were too many to her taste.” According to Berman, the reaction to Khalek’s piece “from the progressive camp was closer to silence than outrage, indicating a willingness to give anti-Semitism a pass, as long as it has the correct political credentials.”
Khalek’s Electronic Intifada piece is entitled “Does The Nation have a problem with Palestinians?” She argues there — if this is what it can be called — that the Nation’s coverage of the BDS movement was dominated by the voices of Jewish writers. Dismissing the fact that “the majority of pieces in the latest debate were in favor of boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS),” Khalek goes on to complain that “when it comes to Israel and Palestine, The Nation habitually reinforces Israeli apartheid by privileging Jewish voices over Palestinian ones.” According to Khalek, it is also ridiculous to believe that “four Jews and one Palestinian” could provide a “diversity of views,” as the Nation’s editor and publisher had claimed.

There are too many Jews at The Nation, according to Rania Khalek. There are also too many Jews in Israel, according to Rania Khalek.

This raises the question: What is the appropriate number of Jews anywhere, according to Rania Khalek?

Perhaps . . . zero?

 

Category: Israel
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