A Day in May

DISUNION SQUARED I passed through Union Square on Wednesday. The park on the square happens to be the fallback point of Occupy Wall Street, but the OWS crowd was a little hard to spot. Oh there were a few vendors in the business of selling "radical" T-Shirts and pins, proceeds to either benefit the occupation or him, but the rest of the occupation was hard to find. The breakdancers working for tips weren't with OWS, but what about the clown with pink hair? The men playing chess for money obviously weren't, that was too capitalist an activity. The NYU students sitting around and drinking soda? The guy playing jazz on a sax? The Halal mafia vendor sending smoke and a burnt smell from his cart? The dogwalkers? The artists drawing cartoons of tourists? The vendors at the farmer's market unloading ostrich meat and gourmet goat cheese?

---

The signs reading GENERAL STRIKE MAY 1 and STOP EVERYTHING are still pasted to walls, but the first has come and gone and there was more of a showing in Moscow than in New York City. Some of the signs urged everyone not to come in to work or school or even do housework, but defying the housework strike I vacuumed my rug on the first. For now a giant inflatable rat hasn't shown up outside my window. Finally I encountered a grossly obese man in union gear with a white hard hat and a sign around his neck ranting about billionaire war criminals or something equally stupid. I was going to snap a photo, but then I realized that would justify him standing there. OWS is a media driven phenomenon. Ignore it and it goes away.

---

---

I passed him by as he argued feverishly with a man in a business suit about something or other. Near the curb the breakdancers were hitting their rhythm and Mexican illegal aliens were selling t-shirts with a picture of armed Indians and text reading, "Homeland Security" and something about repelling terrorists for hundreds of years. It's not the type of shirt you ever see a Mexican or actual Indian wearing, but some of the more radical white college kids probably love it. After September 11, the leftists occupied Union Square for a month or two. I saw them on that very day writing up peace signs and cautioning against vengeance. Most people paid them no attention. The weeks wore on and they scrawled peace signs on the statue of George Washington marking evacuation day and did the usual Occupy Wall Street antics, long before there was an OWS or anyone was paying to them. Eventually they got evicted and the statue cleaned up. Living in New York City you learn to deal with pests of all kinds, but the thing about pests is that they eventually go away. Sic Transit OWS. Take the A Train, hook up with Metro North and go home.

OCCUPY CAMERAS

... but in the meantime OWS is making friends and influencing people by attacking photographers who take their picture. Takeaway quote

"The protesters' argument is righteous, but is also silly," José Martín, a 30-year-old activist and Marxist who has been involved in militant actions for over a decade and attended the Wildcat march, says. "Still, there is some philosophical legitimacy to what these people are saying. We're not here to legitimize the state. If journalists are willing to incriminate those engaged in illegal actions, it's very difficult for me to suggest they shouldn't be angry with the photographer."

Read that last sentence again and you can grasp the incredible sense of entitlement on the left when it comes to the media. And the only people to blame for that are in the media.

THE 1 PERCENT

"When Mahmoud Abbas returned to the Palestinian territories [after the signing of the Oslo Accords], I gave him $25,000 at the request of the late President Yasser Arafat," Rashid claimed. "Today, he and his sons have palaces and property estimated at 15 million Jordanian Dinars [Approximately $21 million] in Palestine, Jordan, Tunisia and other places."

I buried the lead there. The lead is that the Palestinian Authority has been diverting millions to Israeli Arab political parties, which raises some interesting questions, and nullifies any claim that the PA isn't aspiring to take the whole country, not just Judea, Samaria and Gaza. For all the legitimate criticisms of past Israeli PM's that can be made, including on corruption issues, they don't seem to have managed to buy themselves palaces and 21 million dollars worth of property using American tax dollars. It's not because they aren't personally corrupt. Olmert certainly was, but because Israel is an actual functional country with checks and balances which limits the abuses of even the highest official. Arafat and Abbas had nearly unlimited power. They can all buy themselves mansions because there is no actual country there, just a bunch of militias and their leaders dividing up the pie.

THE DE-CHRISTIANIZATION OF BETHLEHEM

Muslims and their apologists keep raving on about the "Judaization of Jerusalem", but Guillo Meoti talks about the De-Christainization of Bethlehem.

After the 1948 war, Christian communities suffered most in the West Bank, not under “Israel’s occupation,” but because Muslim refugees were cynically settled in their midst by the Arab leadership. Ramallah was 90% Christian before the war, while Bethlehem was 80% Christian. By 1967, more than half of Bethlehem’s residents were Muslim, while Ramallah is a large Muslim city today. In a process of “Lebanonization,” Arafat changed Bethlehem’s demography by bringing in thousands of Muslims from refugee camps. Arafat then turned the city into a safe haven for suicide bombers and transformed the Greek Orthodox monastery, located next to the Church of Nativity, into his residence. Christian cemeteries and convents were desecrated and Christians became the PLO’s human shields. In the first year of the second Intifada, when Arafat’s terrorists ravaged Christian towns by gunfire and mortars, 1,640 Christians left Bethlehem and another 880 left Ramallah.

---