View from Britain: Brexit Battle Hits High Seas
And you thought the US political campaign was weird? Michael Deacon in London’s Daily Telegraph describes “the most surreal day in British politics ever” as rival boats battled on the River Thames over next week’s referendum on whether to quit the European Union. Years from now, writes Deacon, he’ll tell his grandkids how he “went on a boozed-up boat trip down the Thames with [Independence Party leader] Nigel Farage while men from Ukip shouted ‘Get a job!’ at [songwriter-activist] Bob Geldof as he flicked V-signs at them from a pleasure cruiser and a load of Scottish fishermen squirted water at rival campaigners in a dinghy and Members of Parliament gazed in disbelief from the Commons terrace and 100 people on a bridge sang ‘Rule Britannia.’ ”
From the left: Working Families Party Fades
The once-powerful Working Families Party may be expanding nationwide, but it’s running out of steam in its home base of New York, writes Ross Barkan in the Village Voice. Even its longtime allies “are questioning its future as a preeminent player” here. That’s because the WFP’s major source of funds — organized labor — is disillusioned and has stopped writing checks. “It hasn’t successfully defended [Mayor] de Blasio, now drowning in scandals, from his critics, nor spearheaded recent legislation in the City Council,” writes Barkan. So pols have started asking: “Does this third party still matter?”
Ex-Islamist: Follow the Path of The Greatest
In The Daily Beast, Maajid Nawaz, himself once a radical Islamist, points to the late Muhammad Ali as an example of how once-extreme Muslims can eventually moderate their views. “Like his mentor Malcolm X before him,” writes Nawaz, “Ali too came to reject the divisive, racialized and religiously fueled nature of his earlier views.” One of his final statements, in fact, was an attack on “those Muslims who distort Islam through extremist ideology.” Ali, writes Nawaz, “was a Muslim counter-extremist, no matter how much the Islamists may detest it.”
From the right: College Diversity is a Mega-Business
College diversity centers are “supposed to promote tolerance and understanding among students,” write James Piereson and Naomi Schaefer Riley in The Weekly Standard, “but in reality they are a main source of turmoil at schools across the country.” Yet they keep growing and get tens of millions in funding to train hard-left political activists. Why? Because no diversity dean “is ever going to announce that a center’s goals . . . have been achieved and that it’s time to close up shop.” Instead, their goal is “to promote fears that racism, sexism and ‘white privilege’ are rampant.”