Where Are Pro-Palestinian Protests Heading?

Mark Steyn knows something about this movement and provides his usual cutting analysis of what is going on.  The article at his blog is The Three Rs, well worth reading.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Does anyone still talk about the Three Rs in education? That would be reading, writing and racism …whoops, my mistake, ‘rithmetic.

It isn’t difficult. Every weekend, my inbox fills up with readers demanding to know what I think about this or that news story, but in the end all the news stories are the same. Just from the last couple of days:

~At McGill University in Montreal, cute young predominantly female students in masks and keffiyehs take over the campus to demand “intifada until victory”;

~At the University of Texas in Austin, a comedian attempts to point out to members of Trans 4 Palestine the internal contradictions of the rainbow coalition, and for his pains gets beaten up;

~At Châteauroux in central France, fifteen-year-old Mathis Marchais is stabbed to death by an Afghan “migrant” known to the gendarmes for two previous stabbings earlier this year but loosed on the public by an indulgent judge just last Monday;

~In Hamburg, over a thousand protesters march through the streets calling for an Islamic caliphate in Germany.

The Three Rs: Read the Writing on the wall – and do the ‘Rithmetic. Like I said, it’s not difficult – although it seems to be for some of the willing dupes who brought us the western world’s new reality.

They belong to the “Official Jews” for whom mass Muslim immigration is less of a threat than those awkward types who point out the obvious consequences of mass Muslim immigration. The “Official Jews” are not confined to Canada: America is awash with them, as is the United Kingdom. And unless, as Kathy Shaidle used to say, they’re “too stupid to be Jewish” what’s happening cannot have come as a surprise. Me a zillion years ago:

Young Muslims do not like Jews: that is a simple fact, and it’s a waste of everybody’s time denying it. Where Muslims predominate, Jews vanish – as in Molenbeek, across the canal from downtown Brussels. I remember from my childhood the main drag, the Chaussée de Gand (or Steenweg op Gent, if you’re Flemish, as my mum was), as a bustling strip with many Jewish businesses. But in the first decade of the 21st century they all disappeared, and their former owners chose to remain silent – because it was easier that way.

And thus the seeming paradox of the post-war era – that, as a certain “niche Canadian” has been saying for years, the principal beneficiary of western Holocaust guilt was Islam. The Canadian Islamic Congress and America’s ADL and their European equivalents did not choose merely “to remain silent”: they enthusiastically welcomed it, and did their best to crush those who disagreed.

This isn’t about Jews, except insofar as they are presently
at the sharp end of a convulsive cultural shift.

About six months after 9/11, I took a little trip to Western Europe and the Middle East and, waiting for a friend in Vienna, I noticed that everybody going in and out of the maternity shop across the street appeared to be Muslim. That’s just anecdote, as the bien pensants who dismissed my book as “alarmist” like to say. But two decades on it’s borne out by statistics. Back then, Muslims made up of four per cent of Austria’s population; now it’s over eight per cent. Me, again years ago, from the expanded e-book edition of Mark Steyn’s Passing Parade:

According to the Vienna Institute of Demography, by mid-century a majority of Austrians under fifteen will be Muslim. This is a country that not so long ago was ninety percent Catholic. But “not so long ago” is another country:

Salzburg, 1938, singing nuns, Julie Andrews — “How do you solve a problem like Maria?”

Salzburg, 2038: How do you solve a problem like sharia?

“Eight per cent” doesn’t sound like a lot. But, in western societies of elderly native populations, they skew young, and make up an ever larger percentage of your youth – close to a majority in certain European cities. Jews, on the other hand, are old. So, for those cutesy coeds, young Muslims are all around and young Jews are very thin on the ground.

The salient feature of the demonstrations roiling McGill, Columbia and
other western campuses is not that the pasty blonde trustiefundies are
“pro-Palestinian” but that they’re cool with being culturally Islamic.

Oh, to be sure, it’s mostly just keffiyehs and a few other fashion accessories; not yet full body bags and clitoridectomies. But why wouldn’t it have a purchase on them that Mr Housefather’s bleatings about how everyone should feel safe do not? The young want to belong, and what they most want to belong to is the future – and they grasp instinctively where the future’s headed.

They also get that these guys mean it. It is not coincidental that white upscale females are now among the most enthusiastic proponents of Hamas. For two generations, their menfolk have made the mistake of believing all that What Women Want bollocks, and the result is legions of “new males”, metrosexuals, soyboys – or, alternatively, depressive methheads chugging back Bud Light down in the man-cave. Me again: “We have made a world of men that women don’t want and women that men don’t want, and that doesn’t seem likely to end well.”

And suddenly there’s Ahmed and Shahid doing their Sheik of Araby Xtreme Sports routine:

At night when you’re asleep
Into your tent I’ll creep.

Whatever the respective charms of abortion or same-sex marriage, both are a biological dead-end. So, more obliquely, is the interminable prolongation of education and the impact of mass immigration on affordable housing. All four lead to later – and smaller – family formation. So men and women who would have been twenty-seven-year-old suburban dads and mums are now on the frontlines at McGill picking out their keffiyehs. Throw in open borders – and, as the icing on the cake, encourage your middle-school girls to prioritise “gender identity” and thereby render themselves infertile.

So the fertility-rate comeback that David Frum predicted almost two decades ago failed to materialise. Indeed, all that has happened since then is that America has joined Europe in the demographic death-spiral.

Two decades back, there was still time to change course. Instead, the governments of the west doubled down on the madness, and today averting the inevitable requires measures they have no stomach for.  Yet, even as their parents drone on with their multiculti bromides, our youth get the reality: Queers 4 Palestine may be a delusion, but not as insane a delusion as “diversity is our strength”.

It’s not difficult: Do the math.

Footnote:  Maybe We Get a Break from Climate Crisis Parades

The shift by activists could be a silver lining that pivots from the climate issue.  Will Jones writes at Daily Sceptic Have Left-Wing Protesters Moved On From Climate Change? Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Climate protests are so last year, it appears, as the same crowd now preoccupies itself with Gaza demonstrations. Is the truth that Left-wing protests are just fads chasing the latest issue du jour? The Telegraph‘s Ross Clark thinks so.

It’s hard not to notice a distinct switch in the targets of Lefty protesters over the past few months. They seem to have lost interest in protesting about climate change and have switched to Palestine and asylum-seekers instead.

The shift can be dated to last November during a protest held in Amsterdam, when Greta Thunberg suddenly seemed to decide that the planet was no longer worthy of her complete attention. She told the crowd that there “can be no climate justice on occupied land”, before blathering on about Palestine. It didn’t please one of her fans, who stormed the stage and seized her microphone, but as ever with Greta she seemed to manage to set a trend.

In the months since we have seen fewer and fewer climate protests as progressive mobs find other things to work themselves up about instead. Never mind that we are supposedly heading for climate Armageddon if we don’t abandon all oil and gas more or less instantly, a more urgent injustice seems to be that asylum seekers are being taken out of three star hotels and housed on a barge instead – a barge which, by the way, seemed to be perfectly adequate in its previous incarnation as accommodation for oil workers (although I guess in the minds of climate activists they needed to be punished).

“Like most Left-wing causes,” Ross suggests, climate change was “just a passing fad”. “The same crowd seems to have evolved seamlessly from anti-globalisation to the Occupy movement, to climate change and now to Palestine.”

Don’t forget BLM!

“If you want to be on trend with your protesting, better opportunities now lie elsewhere,” Ross concludes

New England Energy Inflation Self-Imposed

LNG tanker in Boston harbor. Pipelines from Pennsylvania would fix this. MEDIANEWS GROUP VIA GETTY IMAGES

Christopher Helman writes at Forbes  Why Is New England Paying The Equivalent Of $180 Oil For Natural Gas? Excerpts in italics with my  bolds and some added images.

Yesterday New Englanders had reason to feel a little more … European than usual. that’s because according to Department of Energy data they were paying a spot price of $30.5 per million British thermal units for natural gas.

This is an absurd price, in line with what Europeans, facing their worst energy crisis in a generation, have been suffering in recent months. To put it in context, $30.5 per mmBtu is the equivalent of paying $180 for a barrel of oil (double what it is today), or 20 cents per kilowatt-hour for electricity. In other words: nuts.

Project abandoned in 2017 after New York blocked planning and permit processes.

How much are Bostonians getting shafted on natural gas? By comparison, the spot price of gas on the Gulf Coast of Texas and Louisiana yesterday was $5.50 per mmBtu (the energy equivalent of about $33/bbl oil). This price spread is exceptionally wide, nearly unprecedented.

But it’s easily explained — by the perennially misguided energy policy in New England.

Just 200 miles to the south, beneath western Pennsylvania, lay the nation’s biggest gas field — the Marcellus shale. From practically nothing 15 years ago, the Marcellus now provides roughly a third of America’s gas supply, more than 30 billion cubic feet per day. America’s shale gas fracking boom is the primary reason why the nation has been able to dramatically switch away from dirtier coal, and cut overall carbon dioxide emissions by nearly 20% — more than any other leading economy.

Project abandoned in April 2016

But very little Marcellus gas flows to New England, because NIMBYs and their politicians have blocked construction of pipelines. Yet the region still relies on cleaner-burning gas to fuel power plants. Over the weekend, when New England was walloped by snow, its power grid was running 37% natural gas, 22% oil, 22% nuclear, 11% renewables, 6% hydro power, and less than 1% coal. (See current mix here.)

Electrical power resource mix from ISO-New England

And yet how does New England get its gas? Nearly all of it comes by ship, in giant insulated tankers carrying -260 degree condensed liquefied natural gas, most of which dock at the Everett LNG regasification terminal in Boston harbor, owned by Exelon Generation.

Where’s that gas come from? Despite more than $50 billion of recent investment into LNG liquefaction plants in Texas and Louisiana, you won’t find any American freedom gas being delivered into Boston. Instead, because of a law called the Jones Act (which requires ships carrying goods from one U.S. port to another to be U.S. owned and flagged), the gas that lands in Boston has historically been sourced from fields in Trinidad & Tobago, Norway, and Russia.

Which is why New England is now paying through the nose for gas. Or rather, they are paying the international price — in line with LNG spot prices in Tokyo, Shanghai, and Europe.

Is it reasonable that New England’s natural gas price depends on decisions made in Europe to shut down nuclear power plants, turn off the flows from giant fields like Holland’s Groningen, and rely on Gazprom to maintain flows from Russia? Of course not. But without more pipelines from the Marcellus (or solar panels and wind turbines covering every hillside), this is the reality, this is how New England ends up burning oil to generate a fifth of its wintertime electricity.

If you live in the northeast how can you personally arbitrage this market madness? Make sure you fill up heating oil tanks in the off-season, chop your own firewood, and buy shares in natural gas producers and exporters. 

See also Payback Upon Climate Grasshoppers