Monthly Archives: February 2022

Thursday, Feb 10, 2022 Devynn Case : Contact

Through a Native American Land Acknowledgement statement, The University of Texas at Arlington is formally recognizing its campus historic ties to Indigenous peoples.

The statement, developed by a UTA task force comprising faculty members, staff and studentsmany with Native American ancestryis a public recognition of UTAs ties to Native American lands and history. It reads:

UT Arlington respectfully acknowledges the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes upon whose historical homelands this University is located. Their ancestors resided here for generations before being forcibly displaced by U.S. settlers and soldiers in the mid-1800s. We recognize the historical presence of the Caddo Nation and other Tribal Nations in the region; the ongoing presence and achievements of many people who moved to the area due to the Indian Relocation program of the 1950s and 1960s; and the vital presence and accomplishments of our Native students, faculty, and staff.

Task force member Les Riding In, assistant dean in the College of Liberal Arts, said the land acknowledgement statement is a call to action.

We aim to continue to embark on more related efforts, including adopting a Native American oversight council, transforming an area on campus for individual and institutional reflection and a Native American student scholarship endowed with a gift, Riding In said.

Groups associated with the Caddo nation, including the Keechiwho are now enrolled in Wichita and Affiliated Tribeshad built a village in the area of what is now Arlington by the early 1840s, Conrad said.

Kenneth Roemer, professor emeritus of English and a member of the task force, said other land acknowledgement statements have the unintended consequence of suggesting that Native peoples are of the past. The UTA statement took care to emphasize the present contributions of Indigenous peoples.

This statement is a living document and takes care to highlight the continued presence of Native Americans in Arlington and North Texas in the present, he said.

UT Arlingtons support of the Native American community has earned recognition nationally. For five years in a row, UTA has been listed among the nations best universities for Native American, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian students by Winds of Change, a publication of the American Indian Science and Engineering Society. The magazine evaluates and ranks the top 200 universities with strong Native American communities and academic support systems in place for student success.

In addition, UTAs Native American Student Association is the longest continuously running student group in Texas that supports Native American interests.

Im proud our students have been involved in the process, said Sampson Dewey, task force member and president of the student association. With the help of all the faculty and staff who have been involved, this statement is a huge show of support to the Native American community, and thats what our student organization is all about.

Task force members

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'A call to action' - News Center - The University of Texas at Arlington - uta.edu

Many people have argued almost since inauguration day that President Biden is not the one running America on a daily basis or making many of the decisions. The normal guessing game about who is running the show focuses on Bidens chief of staff, close advisors like the secretary of state and national security advisor, the Vice President, and the First Lady, among others.

But forget the palace intrigue at The White House for a moment. Who is calling the shots as to what you, I, or anyone, especially public figures, can think or say on television, in print, or on social media?

That there is a liberal media mob in America is not new or even news, though the elites that own the major networks and their top anchors still fail to see or acknowledge this mob. Its the equivalent of pointing out the surroundings to a school of swimming fish. What water? the fish would retort.

One need only look to yesterday for the latest example of someone who stepped on a liberal land mine. Former Democrat presidential candidateAndrew Yangdefended Joe Rogan, on whose show he appeared in 2019, in a tweet that noted Rogan is not racist. I dont think Joe Rogan is a racist the man interacts with and works with black people literally all of the time. Yang added, Do I know black friends of Joes who wouldswear by him? Yes, I do.

The Twitter Universe lit up. The social media backlash was swift and fierce.

We often hear terms and phrases like that. But what or who exactly is the Twitter Universe? Its not an easy question to answer. But it seems clearthere is a cabal of liberal elite activists who monitor speech in America, especially that of political figures and the Hollywood crowd. Straying from the progressive playbook risks public punishment. Of course, its not always known ahead of time what can be said, or what will be tolerated by the cabal. After all, the playbook isnt an actual, physical book.

So, what is the definition of a cabal? Oxford Languages says, a secret political clique or faction. Merriam Webster says, the contrived schemes of a group of persons secretly united in a plot.

People essentially have two choices when the cabal comes for you. You can either repent or double down on what you said or think. Choose the former, and you might continue to be relevant, perhaps able to appear again on radio or television or be able to run for office again. Choose the latter, and you risk being marginalized, pilloried, or ultimately canceled.

Back to Andrew Yang. He repented within 24 hours. I deleted the tweet because it was wrong-headed. It also hurt people, which is never my intent. Im sorry. Im learning and appreciate those who reached out to express their feelings. Yang will likely survive.

Who dares double down? J.K. Rowling did. Were familiar with the Harry Potter authors war with leftist cabals over her initial tweet that only women menstruate. She continued to stand with biology. She explained being an ally of the LGBTQ and trans community when it came to discrimination. No matter. She has essentially been canceled.

Remember actor John Cena calling Taiwan, which is a free and capitalist bastion, a country? That offended Chinas communist party. Cena was quick to apologize to the communists.

Why should we care about leftist cabals? Because no one is safe. Freedom of speech and/or expressing ones opinion is becoming dangerous. The losers are all of us, as more speech has always been considered healthy in a free and enlightened society.

Leftist cabals have even had a chilling effect on comedy. If there was one group that has historically been allowed to criticize, make fun of, or say whatever they wanted, it has been comedians. Comedians now fear the cabals in practicing their craft. Everything and everyone used to be on the table. No person or political party was safe. That was the point of comedy. We wanted to laugh. No more.

Look at the flack that comedian Bill Maher, a staunch liberal, has been getting for a year. Whos angry at him? MAGA supporters? GOP Congressmen? Right-wing media? No. Its leftist cabals. What is Mahers crime? Maher has been outing the cancel crowd and progressives for being so far outside the mainstream that even liberals like him dont recognize what it is to be a Democrat anymore.

We need free speech and more of it. We need the Joe Rogans of the world to question those in authority of all stripes. We need the contrarians, like Dr. Scott Atlas, to take on groupthink. Remember when he said in June 2020 that kids belong in school for in-person learning? Atlas was called things unfit to print here, yet the American Society of Pediatrics concurred with him just one month later.

The point is this. One need not agree with, like, believe, or even care what Andrew Yang, Joe Rogan, Bill Maher, or Dr. Scott Atlas thinks or says. But surely society as a whole is better off hearing from many voices across the political spectrum, and the names in this essay are indeed that. The alternative is to allow a cabal of nameless, leftist elites from academia, Hollywood, and the media mob to narrow what we hear and, worse, what we can say or think.

Jeff Szymanski works in political communications for AMAC, a senior benefits organization with nearly 2.4 million members. He previously taught high school economics for 15 years.

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Leftist Cabals Are Calling the Shots in America - AMAC

Exodus is the account of the newly freed children of Abraham leaving the slavery of Egypt behind. This narrative has inspired and continues to inspire countless people.Every year, millions observe the Passover and recount the inspiring story of deliverance, freedom and of the long march to the land of promise. Abolitionists found hope and inspiration in the biblical account.Escaped slave Harriet Tubman came to be known as "Moses" as she made 13 missionary trips to rescue approximately 70 slaves.Civil rights leaders, many of whom were clergymen, made liberal use of the Exodus account. Martin Luther King, Jr., borrowing from the experience of Moses, declared that he had "been to the mountaintop" and that he had "seen the promised land."In the fullness of time, God sent his son, a prophet, like Moses, Jesus. On the night that he was betrayed, Jesus instituted the Lord's Supper at the Passover.That night, he predicted a deliverance of a different kind deliverance from sin and sin's consequences. Soon, Christ, the perfect Passover lamb, would be slain. By his blood, many would be saved and the sins of the world would be removed.After his resurrection, Jesus would be proclaimed by Peter in Jerusalem and 3,000 would put their faith in their deliverer, Jesus. They would repent and turn their backs on the "Egypt" of sin and be baptized into Christ as Israel had been baptized into Moses in the cloud and the sea.Set free, the 3,000 would begin their long march to the Promised Land and a new Jesus would lead them home. On the way, he would provide the "Bread of Life" and the "Living Water" as God had provided manna and water from the Rock, Jesus.Yes, Jesus still leads those willing to follow him to the Father's house. He is "the Way and the Truth and the Life." No one comes to the father except through him.

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Faith & Insight: John 14:6: Have you experienced the Exodus? - Nevada Appeal

On January 23, voters went to the polls in the city of Nago, located in northern Okinawa, Japan. The incumbent, Toguchi Taketoyo, supported by the ruling conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), defeated his challenger Kishimoto Yohei by 57.5 to 42.5 percent. The outcome reflected a mood of powerlessness in Okinawa that the Japanese state has cultivated through decades of obduracy and high-handed policies.

About an hours drive from the Okinawan capital, Naha, and with a population of sixty-one thousand, Nago may not be an especially large or important Japanese city. However, this election took on particular importance because the city contains the site of a major military base that the Japanese authorities are building for the US Marine Corps. The contradictions of the Japanese state and its relations with the US are most evident in a peripheral space like Nago.

Okinawa, which is closer to Shanghai than Tokyo, was only incorporated directly into the Japanese state in the late nineteenth century as Okinawa Prefecture, annulling the long-established Ryukyu Kingdom. The island was the scene of some of the bloodiest fighting between Japan and the United States in the Pacific War. Its geographical location and role as a US military hub mean that it would be in the front line of any China-US confrontation.

The danger of being embroiled in conflict, combined with the land-grabbing of foreign military bases and the many abuses committed by US soldiers, have stoked passionate opposition to the US presence. However, the authorities in Tokyo have repeatedly thwarted efforts to close and return the bases, committed as they are to a role as Washingtons client state in the region.

Marine Corps Air Station Futenma is one of about eight hundred US bases around the world. A cluster of those bases have occupied about a quarter of the prefectures land on the island of Okinawa since 1945. Futenma sits on 480 hectares of prime land in the middle of the township of Ginowan, close to Naha.

The Japanese state covers most of the cost of maintaining bases like Futenma, so it is cheaper for the United States to station its forces there than it would be to maintain them on US domestic soil. Washington has deployed units based in Okinawa at will everywhere from Korea and Vietnam in the 1950s and 60s to Iraq in recent decades.

In 1995, the abduction and rape of an Okinawan schoolgirl by three US servicemen put the whole base arrangement on the island in jeopardy. A 1996 article for the Brookings Institution described the situation at the time:

Japans smallest and poorest prefecture, Okinawa houses about three-fourths of the US military facilities and two-thirds of the 45,000 American troops in Japan. Roughly 20,000 of the 29,000 troops on Okinawa are Marines. Artillery firings, low-flying aircraft, and other military exercises disrupt Okinawans daily lives, as do the thousands of crimes committed by US soldiers since 1972, when Okinawa was formally returned to Japan by the United States after 27 years of occupation.

It seemed essential for the US and Japanese governments to promise the return of some base land in order to defuse the wave of anger across the island and maintain US hegemony in the long run.

In April 1996, Japanese prime minister Hashimoto Ryutaro and US ambassador Walter Mondale announced that the Futenma base would return to Japanese control within five to seven years. I well recall my astonishment on hearing this news at the time. It seemed too good to be true, as indeed it proved to be.

The reversion hinged on the construction of a substitute facility. That facility would have to be in Okinawa, at a place called Henoko, on Oura Bay, which happened to be within the boundaries of Nago City.

Initial plans coyly described the new base as a heliport, but its dimensions grew and grew, with a monstrous 1,800-meter dual runway structure, protruding ten meters above the surrounding sea, now slowly beginning to take shape. Henoko would also possess a deep-sea port and ordnance storage facility, making it much grander and more multifunctional than the troublesome Futenma base it was supposed to replace.

The insistence of the Japanese government on constructing such a facility, against strong Okinawan opposition to it at prefectural, city, and village levels, has been a recurrent flashpoint in Japanese politics. The only occasion on which elected officials in Nago City ever consented to the bases construction was in 1999. The mayor at the time, Kishimoto Tateo, whose son Kishimoto Yohei was the unsuccessful candidate this year, agreed to a highly restricted formula for a joint US-Japan facility, not a solely US base, with a limited life span of fifteen years, and governed by the strictest environmental regulations.

The Japanese authorities never drew up any such plan, let alone put it into effect. The only prefectural governor to give his consent, Nakaima Hirokazu in December 2013, reversed his own electoral pledge to do so. He made it clear his understanding was that Futenma should revert to Japanese control within fifteen years in other words, by 2028.

The national government never took that time limit seriously either. Today, Futenma remains in operation, and the latest estimated date for its reversion and the opening of Henoko is circa 2040, a full thirty-five years after the five to seven years that were promised in 1998, or twelve after the date agreed to in 2013.

When Okinawans, especially residents of Nago City, have had the opportunity to express their views, they have made their opposition to any new base clear, from the 1997 Nago plebiscite (54 percent opposition) to the prefectural opinion survey of 2019 (70 percent opposition) to the polls taken on the eve of the 2022 election (62 percent opposition). Just before the 2022 poll, despite decades of determined government insistence that the works would proceed, the Asahi Shimbun newspaper only found 24 percent of Nago people in favor of construction.

We cannot consider the 2022 election as a statement of Nago sentiment on the Henoko project because it pitted one candidate, Kishimoto, who took a resolutely anti-base stance, against another, Toguchi, who refused to express any view on the matter. Toguchis two election victories in 2018 and 2022 were the culmination of decades of national government cajolery, intimidation, and deception.

In 2022, Toguchi declared that the base was solely a matter for the national and prefectural governments, and confined his campaign to the carrots on offer from Tokyo by way of better services for the city, such as free childcare, school lunches, and medical care for children. He never acknowledged that these were the states quid for the citys quo of silent cooperation on the base.

From the start, the national government did not take seriously the various agreements on reversion, from the 1996 Mondale-Hashimoto announcement to the Nakaima pledge of 2013. Both set time limits that have long passed. Okinawans have learned that their national government is not to be trusted. Their experience is of a Japan that routinely denies democracy and the human rights of Okinawans.

What the national government strives to cultivate in Nago is not democratic citizenship and sovereignty but a mood of akirame, or hopelessness. Why bother to vote when you know the government will pay no attention? The 68 percent voting rate in 2022 was the lowest on record, 8.6 percent below the 2018 figure. We can understand this, at least in part, as an expression of that hopelessness.

Anti-base activists understand this mood of hopelessness not as related to base construction per se, but rather as a sense of despair with the idea of ever persuading the government to change course through the ballot box. The most Nagos citizens can hope to gain from elections is financial benefit, not the cancellation of the base. Their voting for conservative candidates thus made some sense in the undemocratic and heavily weighted system.

The LDP government in Tokyo greeted Toguchis victory as a green light for base reclamation and construction. However, it remains far from clear whether the base will, or can, ever be built. The site is especially ill-suited to any large construction because of the mayonnaise-like soft ocean floor and the dual fault lines crossing the bay in its vicinity.

Moreover, despite the election result, the Okinawan opposition has declared its intention to persist in on-site protest and court actions. In 2021, when the national government asked prefectural governor Tamaki Denny to agree to a major redrawing of the reclamation and construction design, Tamaki bluntly refused to give his consent. Okinawa, he said, would not cooperate.

Fifty years after Okinawas supposed reversion from US to Japanese control, much of it, including Futenma, remains in US hands, increasingly subject to Washingtons agenda of preparation for a new war against China. If the Henoko base is built, opening around 2040, it will lock Japan into subordination to the US on its eastern flank and hostility to its giant and indispensable neighbor to the west for decades to come.

Such a Japan might become the worlds third-greatest military power if the government presses ahead with current plans to double military spending. Yet that is unlikely to deliver peace or security for the Japanese people.

As the Nago election campaign approached its climax, a huge US-Japanese armada of ten warships, including two US aircraft carriers (the Carl Vinson and the Abraham Lincoln) and the Japanese helicopter destroyer Hyuga, maneuvered threateningly in the waters of the East China Sea, between Okinawa and Taiwan. The prospect of a Taiwan yuji (contingency) becomes ever more plausible. If that prospect were to materialize, Okinawa could anticipate devastation akin to what it suffered in 1945.

For roughly five hundred years between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries, Okinawa, as the Ryukyu Kingdom, enjoyed close, more or less friendly relations with mainland Japan, China itself, and the kingdoms of Southeast Asia. Demilitarized, it threatened no one and faced no threats. Today, too, the islands security would be much better served by pursuing the agenda of regional disarmament and cooperation rather than that of US and Japanese militarism.

The rest is here:

Japanese Militarism Has Put the People of Okinawa on the Firing Line - Jacobin magazine

Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove of the Park Avenue synagogue said last week he didnt want to respond from the pulpit to the Amnesty International report charging Israel with apartheid and instead let his congregants go to Israel lobby groups AIPAC and the ADL and J Street to read their disavowals of Amnesty but he couldnt help himself because hes committed his synagogue to supporting Israel. So Cosgrove spent 15 minutes trashing a report he admits he hasnt read, because thats what you do when a family member is attacked from the outside.

I reviewed the Conservative rabbis sermon closely because: Cosgrove is forthright about his commitment to Zionism in a religious setting, as so many rabbis are. So This Is What It Means to Be Jewish for the Jewish Establishment; rabbinical umbrella groups have called on rabbis to denounce the report from their pulpits. Yet Cosgrove is out of step with the only Jewish future. Fully a quarter of American Jews disagree with him; they think Israel is practicing apartheid. Among young Jews, that portion is nearly 40 percent. Jewish intellectuals call for Separation from the thug nation.

Cosgrove admits that he has only read the executive summary of the report, but sees that it is the latest in a decades long drumbeat of anti-Israel sentiment emanating from the halls of the UN and a handful of other human rights NGOs.

He says hes thought long and hard about whether to speak about the report, which has been out for five days, and doesnt want to turn the pulpit into political theater. But he overcame his reluctance, because hes a Zionist. This is an honest ideological confession:

I do so because for me Israel is part and parcel to my Jewish identity, its central to my vision of the rabbinate, and as long as Im the rabbi of Park Avenue, it will remain central to the mission of this synagogue. I want you, your children, your grandchildren to keep kosher to create Jewish families to live proudly as Zionists. None of us chose to live in this miraculous era of a sovereign Jewish state where after thousands of years of exile Jews have the right to national self-determination For me to be Jewish today means to be actively engaged with Israel. Regardless of whether the claims of Amnesty are new, to fail to address those claims strikes me as an abdication of my role as a Jewish educator.

So after 1000s of years of exile documented in the bible, people gain political rights to a land from which they ethnically cleanse the indigenous people, and its a miracle. (This is called Koolaid.)

Cosgrove hammers the point of the Jewish peoples claim to the land and says Amnestys questioning of that claim betrays a bias that colors every other claim it makes. After all if the Jews have no right to the land, then Israel is a national project conceived in sin, its very creation an act of dispossession.

Cosgrove says hes also speaking as a father, with children on campus. We must provide the tools to contend with the Amnesty report and the like For Zions sake, I must not stay silent. Imho, telling your kids that Jews were exiled from the land 1000s of years ago and thats why they have special political rights now is not going to be a good tool on campus.

The rabbi is defensive about the new climate of delegitimization of Israel. Apartheid is clickbait for the feeding frenzy of Israels detractors. The singling out of Israel is antisemitic. The report serves as a respectable hook for people who hate Jews.

And heres the family bit. For Israels defenders, this report has shifted everyone into a defensive posture and thus excuse any of Israels actual misdeeds. I have all sorts of criticisms of Israel, its systematic and ongoing restrictions of Palestinian rights, its repeated actions impeding Palestinian sovereignty, most recently the illegal outpost on Evyatar, Israels inability to house liberal expressions of Jewish life, most recently the collapse of the Kotel deal. But today Im not giving full voice to any of those criticisms because well, when a family member is attacked from the outside, thats not what one does.

Cosgrove concludes by saying that the Amnesty report will make peace harder because both sides will just dig in. This is the old argument that Israelis must be hugged to change. But when you hug them, they just evict more Palestinians and dance outside their homes. The news is not good for Zionist rabbis.

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Slamming Amnesty's 'Israeli apartheid' report as 'attack on a family member from outside,' leading rabbi locks out the Jewish future - Mondoweiss