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JERUSALEM The U.N. cultural organization declared an ancient shrine in the occupied West Bank a Palestinian heritage site on Friday, prompting Israel to further cut its funding to the United Nations.

UNESCO designated Hebron and the two adjoined shrines at its heart the Jewish Tomb of the Patriarchs and the Muslim Ibrahimi Mosque a Palestinian World Heritage Site in Danger.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called that another delusional UNESCO decision and ordered that $1 million be diverted from Israels U.N. funding to establish a museum and other projects covering Jewish heritage in Hebron.

The funding cut is Israels fourth in the past year, taking its U.N. contribution from $11 million to just $1.7 million, an Israeli official said. Each cut has come after various U.N. bodies voted to adopt decisions which Israel said discriminated against it.

Palestinian Foreign Minister, Reyad Al-Maliki, said the UNESCO vote, at a meeting in Krakow, Poland, was proof of the successful diplomatic battle Palestine has launched on all fronts in the face of Israeli and American pressure on (UNESCO) member countries.

Hebron is the largest Palestinian city in the occupied West Bank with a population of some 200,000. About 1,000 Israeli settlers live in the heart of the city and for years it has been a place of religious friction between Muslims and Jews.

Jews believe that the Cave of the Patriarchs is where Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and their wives, are buried. Muslims, who, like Christians, also revere Abraham, built the Ibrahimi mosque, also known as the Sanctuary of Abraham, in the 14th century.

The religious significance of the city has made it a focal point for settlers, who are determined to expand the Jewish presence there. Living in the heart of the city, they require intense security, with some 800 Israeli troops protecting them.

Even before Netanyahus budget announcement, Internal Security Minister Gilad Erdan signaled Israel would seek to further make its mark at the Hebron shrine, tweeting: UNESCO will continue to adopt delusional decisions but history cannot be erased we must continue to manifest our right by building immediately in the Cave of the Patriarchs.

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CULTURE WARS | Israel cuts funding as UNESCO declares Hebron shrine Palestinian - InterAksyon

The Liberty Conservative

Culture Wars Within the Heart of Texas | The Liberty Conservative The Liberty Conservative When I was growing up in probably the reddest of red states, Texas, it was as easy to spot someone from Austin as it was to spot an NRA member, whose ... and more »

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Culture Wars Within the Heart of Texas | The Liberty Conservative - The Liberty Conservative

Bay VIEW The Bay View Education Department will present a new lecture for this summer called Bridges: Crossing Cultural Divides.

The lecture, sponsored by Donald Loyd long-time friend and supporter of Bay View will discuss the areas of diversity and other cultural issues facing our society.

The event takes place at 7 p.m. on July 11 in Voorhies Hall in Bay View with the selected speaker, Dr. John Corvino, professor and chairman of the Philosophy Department at Wayne State University in Detroit.

Corvino, also an author/lecturer, is the recipient of several awards including the 2012 Professor of the Year Award from the Presidents Council of the State Universities of Michigan and a 2004 Spirit of Detroit Award.

Corvinos specific focus in the lecture is conversation stoppers and the culture wars.

Ill be talking about how the importance of dialogue and how the way the things we say sometimes hinder rather than help dialogue, Corvino said. My hope is to give people some tools for building bridges across moral and cultural divides.

Corvino graduated from Chaminade High School, an all-boys Catholic school, in 1987. He attended St Johns University in New York City, graduating with a bachelor of arts degree in 1990. He earned his Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin in 1998.

Corvinos writing has appeared at The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Advocate, the Huffington Post, The New Republic, and Commonweal Magazine, as well as in numerous academic anthologies and journals.

Known as The Gay Moralist, (his column appeared biweekly in Between The Lines (BTL) from 2002-2007) he has spoken at more than 200 campuses on issues of sexuality, ethics and marriage.

Corvino, who for years has been researching LGBT equality, said weve been seeing remarkable progress in terms of cultural acceptance.

Access to legal marriage is probably the most significant example, but there is also the less tangible but nonetheless crucial fact of greater visibility, Corvino said. At the same time, we are increasingly polarized politically and socially. And while homophobia, racism, sexism and other ideologies may be less prevalent and visible, they remain destructive where they do exist.

Corvino recently completed a point/counterpoint book, Debating Religious Liberty and Discrimination, published by Oxford University Press in June. Ryan T. Anderson and Sherif Girgis co-author the counterpoint.

In it, we explore some emerging conflicts, including those involving clerks who do not wish to authorize same-sex marriages; bakers, florists and other wedding providers who do not wish to sell goods for same-sex weddings; corporations that seek religious exemptions from legal regulations and so on, Corvino said.

I also have written some opinion pieces and released a new series of YouTube videos in conjunction with the book, Corvino added. My main concern is how claims of religious liberty are sometimes used to justify religious privilege and to harm vulnerable minorities.

Corvino also heavily studies metaethics, and based a dissertation on moral theory of the 18th Century Scottish philosopher David Hume.

I have long been interested in questions of how we justify our moral claims, both specific judgements such as moral evaluations of same-sex relationships and more general foundations, Corvino said. Hume was important in developing and defending a moral view that treated sentiments or emotions as crucial and has been receiving renewed attention in light of recent developments in moral psychology.

The July 11 program is open to the public and donations at the door are appreciated and are tax deductible.

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Renowned author/lecturer Corvino to visit Bay View July 11 - Petoskey News-Review

Among this loose coalition includes a hardcore white nationalist contingent, consisting of think tanks like the National Policy Institute and American Renaissance, as well as intellectual figureheads and movement leaders like Occidental Dissents Kevin MacDonald, AmRens Jared Taylor, Daniel Friberg of Arkos Media, and, of course, Spencer himself. While this big tent approach comes at the expense of ideological purity, many within the white nationalist old guard have admitted, reluctantly or otherwise, that this doddery coalition has benefited their cause tremendously. As Greg Johnson, editor-in-chief of the white supremacist publishing house Counter Currents, wrote shortly before Trumps inauguration, while white nationalists need to remain realistic about the fault lines that exist between them and so-called alt-light, they ought to treat this brief alliance as an opportunity. Even though the alt-light is driven by civic nationalism as opposed to racial nationalism, they ought to be looked upon as potential converts to white nationalism. For a movement plagued by websites that look they came from 1997, that is a hefty boost.

When it comes to online culture wars, few groups are as well-known or well-recognized as the channers. Racist, sexist imageboards on 4chan and 8chan have been both embraced and viewed with some skepticism by the alt-rights more overtly white nationalist contingent, but they helped usher the far-right into the broader public consciousness. What we call the alt-right today could never have had any connection to the mainstream and to a new generation of young people if it only came in the form of lengthy treatises on obscure blogs, Nagle explains. The memification of the alt-right, its transformation into rapidly reproduceable images and short phrases, was what allowed it to spread so contagiously. It was the political discussion board /pol/ (i.e., politically incorrect) on 4chan and 8chan, and the subreddit /r/The_Donald that gave the alt-right its youthful energy, with its transgression and hacker tactics. It was the channers, too, who facilitated the alt-rights move into mainstream internet culture, whether through raids (coordinated efforts to disrupt the content on a site, through, say, extended and vulgar comment threads), memes, or trolling. Memes like Pepe, (((echoes))), and Kekistanall of which are now commonly referenced by young white nationalist groups like Identity Evropa or the youth contingent of the National Policy Institutehave even become a staple at far-right protests throughout the country.

This tentative allyship between a wide variety of bigots and regressives flies in the face of the onetime consensus that the internet would usher in an information utopia. Instead of encouraging our best impulses, the internet has enhanced our worst ones, and the alt-right may be the clearest proof. As Nagle sees it, the cooption of 4chans more sinister racialist elements by a broader political movement is a natural outcome of the troll-happy culture that gave rise to, say, Anonymouss 2008 war against Scientology. The leaderless anonymous culture that once enchanted scholars such as Gabriella Coleman ended up becoming characterized by a particularly dark preoccupation with thwarted or failed white Western masculinity as a grand metaphor, says Nagle. This breed of internet trollwhich flourished on both the chans and Redditheld such a disdain for mainstream social norms that anything, no matter how noxious, that could be conceived as countercultural was welcome. Who cares? It is all ironic anyway!

As older conservatives fought out the 2016 election in the pages of the National Review and the Weekly Standard, a younger, more tech-savvy generation of neoreactionaries, white nationalists, ultra-conservatives, and traditionalists took to some of the darkest corners of the web to stake out their role in American political life. To do so, they embraced a transgressive and performative approachone that, Nagle writes, is more Fight Club than family values, more in line with Marquis de Sade than Edmund Burkeinspired not by the work of conservative ideologues but by the tactics of left-wing vanguards. Soon, those heeding the ideas of the left most closely . . . and applying them most strategically [were] the right. Rightist troll culture embraced the notion outlined by critical theorists such as Michel Foucault and the New Left thinkers like R.D. Laing that madness is a political and cultural rebellion, and in their hands this idea meant that a position of contrarianism and opposition to consensus values became an end unto itself. Indeed, Nagle explains, the libertinism, individualism, bourgeois bohemianism, postmodernism, irony, and ultimately the nihilism that the left was once accused of by the right has found fertile ground in segments of the new far-right.

The alt-right has also demonstrated a proclivity to steal and distort pieces of left-wing theory at will, all the while unironically harping on the dangers of so-called cultural Marxism. Much like one of its ideological forerunners, the French New Right, the alt-right has embraced a Gramscian approach to political change by focusing almost laser-like on what they view as left-wing cultural hegemony. The point is ultimately to redefine the conditions under which politics is conceived, Friberg explained in an excerpt from his book The Real Right Returns. Only by understanding this tool, countering its misuse, and turning it to serve our own ends, can we overcome the miserable situation that our continent is in. He is referring to Europe, but the same could easily be said of the United States, where the far-right is well aware it lost at least one stage of the culture wars. It is posed to turn its enemies tactics against them.

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What the Alt-Right Learned from the Left - New Republic

On much of the American left, a pernicious, conspiracy-minded view of the Civil War and its outcome has taken hold. The ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery, is in particular held in low esteem by many on the identitarian left today. This view, as put forward in the much-praised Netflix documentary 13th, holds that the amendment was phrased in such a way as to allow, sneakily, for the continued bondage of black Americans through penal servitude. This means slavery continued after the war, some argue. And of course, Confederate apologists likewise view the Unions abolition of slavery as a cynical ploy, as being more about the preservation of Northern power than expanding liberty.

While modern-day leftists may, rightfully, despise the Confederacy, they show little reverence for the Union and the men who ended slavery. The cause of defending the Republic is not something that animates many on the anti-Confederate left today. They do not see the promise of the Declaration of Independence, which was reiterated by Lincoln at the battlefield of Gettysburg, as, an uncashed cheque, in Martin Luther Kings memorable phrase; they are more likely to see it as an outright lie.

As should be clear from the absence of pro-Republic sentiment, this phoney Civil War re-enactment isnt about the Civil War at all. Indeed, many of the Confederate apologists at Gettysburg seemed all too happy to fly the Star-Spangled Banner the flag their supposed heroes took up arms against. On the other side, antifa and other leftists, supposed opponents of the Confederacy, are far more likely to burn it. The Civil War has been turned into yet another battleground for Americas interminable culture wars. Attitudes towards the Civil War are really a proxy for something else entirely.

Its virtue-signalling on old battlefields. Showing a favourable attitude towards the Confederacy, or at least being comfortable with its symbols, is now a way of sticking up two fingers to the liberal establishment in the big cities. This is clear from how popular it has become to fly Confederate flags in rural areas of states as far north as Oregon and Michigan. Likewise, letting the world know you find the Confederate flag offensive is a way to show you oppose racism, and more importantly that you are Good even if you dont actually admire what the Union and Lincoln did and said. Lost in all of this is any appreciation for the ideals that fuelled the Union and its defeat of the Southern rebellion: the ideals of liberty and self-government.

Tom Bailey is a spiked columnist. Follow him on Twitter: @tBaileyBailey

Picture by: Getty

For permission to republish spiked articles, please contact Viv Regan.

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The culture war over the Civil War | USA | spiked - Spiked