Category Archives: Hollywood

Mel's 'Malady,' Foxman's Fetish

Anti-Semitism, Free Speech, Hollywood, Judaism & Jews, Media

[Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League] “had more to say about Gibson than he had about Seattle’s jihadist du jour, Naveed Afzal Haq. Last week, Haq murdered a Jewish woman and critically injured five other women at the downtown Jewish Federation building…
As a representative of the Jewish community, albeit self-appointed, Foxman needs lessons in etiquette. It’s bad form to coerce or manipulate people into liking, hiring, renting, or apologizing to you. So long as haters keep their mitts to themselves, insulted parties should, if anything, rise above the fray, act gracious—even turn the other cheek. Subjecting people who don’t like you to reeducation programs smacks of busybody social engineering. Gibson may be uncouth, but Foxman is equally grubby…”

The complete column, “Mel’s ‘Malady,’ Foxman’s Fetish,” is here. In it, I also take a good long swipe at the “The Delphic oracles of the disease theory of delinquency,” vis-Ã -vis Mel Gibson’s so-called disease.

Griffin The Great

Celebrity, Hollywood, Media, Political Correctness, Pop-Culture, The Zeitgeist

While not very many smart people are genuinely kind, very many kind people are truly smart. As Oscar Wilde reminded us, “kindliness requires imagination and intellect.” In Kathy Griffin, my favorite comedian, imagination and intellect have combined to yield a great deal of kindness. Her visit to Iraq to cheer the troops lay bare just how kind—and perceptive—she really is.

Griffin’s interactions with the broken Sgt. Adkins—he had just survived a mortar attack that took the life of his fiance and best friend—were achingly sensitive. (She did, of course, ask him if they were giving him any good drugs.)

About the unnecessary war, she said: “The more I’m in an actual war zone, the more it’s just ugly. It’s not cool, it’s not a Toby Keith song; it’s not opening up a can of whoop-ass. It’s just horrible. I don’t know. Is it really worth losing so many of our own?”

Griffin’s account of the Iraq tour on her Bravo Blog is entitled, “I Came. I Saw. Iraq.” But just in case you get the wrong idea, she quickly clarifies parenthetically: “(Which is different than “I saw Iraq. I came.” Which did not happen. Because, like I said—that place is a s**t-hole.)”

I love her to bits.

A South African Tells it Like It Is

Africa, Hollywood, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Race, South-Africa

[Angelina Jolie, Stan actually endures the daily realities of Africa. He has a few poignant words for Jolie and her ilk. Thanks for writing, Stan; we appreciate your perspective.—ILANA]

In The White Man’s Burden, William Easterly quotes a figure of aid given to Africa of half a trillion dollars. So, give or take a couple of hundred million either way, at which point exactly will governments, aid Agencies , politicians and the liberal left wake up to the fact that they might as well have flushed most of this money down the good old toilet for the amount of real aid this money purchased. Zimbabwe is now flat broke. People are starving and a once-thriving agricultural economy is all but non existent. As one travels north from SA the picture just repeats itself. The only real improvements seem to be to the residences, holiday homes , motor vehicle fleets, and weapon stashes of Africa’s numerous dictators and their goons. Starving people be damned.

South African society is becoming more corrupt by the hour, and our national past time is now violent crime (including rape and child rape) and corruption. Apartheid’s fault , right Angelina?
Your article “Angelina’s color coded kids is, unfortunately, spot on the button. Until the Jolies , Bonos and their ilk wake up to the real causes of Africa’s problems, you might as well get ready to watch another couple of trillion dollars being flushed down the same hole ,while poverty, death and disease continue to escalate. Reminds me of the words from Pete Seegers song ” Where have all the flowers gone.

When will we ever learn?
When will we ever learn?
—Stan
Johannesburg
South Africa

Angelina's Color-Coded Kids & Other Contrivances

Hollywood

“When speaking about crime and culpability (punishment is not an option), left-liberals like Jolie use the passive voice. Crimes are caused, not committed. Why, then, do Africans butcher, mutilate and rape their compatriots with clockwork predictability? Why do grown, Sierra Leonenean men hack off the arms of little Sierra Leonenean girls and rape them to shreds? Why is this repeated in Uganda, Sudan, the Congo, Rwanda, Somalia – you name them?
Jolie offers a tautology: It’s ‘from the violence’ – ‘they had their limbs cut off from the violence.’ Or if you find this redundancy meaningless, she whips another bunny from her hat: blame ‘drugs, perhaps.’
…When it comes to Western inaction or American stinginess (which Jolie codifies as ‘the broader picture’), our iconic brainiac is quick to recognize both evil and linear causality: “We have – we colonized them,” she stammers…”

The excerpt is from my new column, “Angelina’s Color-Coded Kids & Other Contrivances.”