Crews worked hard to paint over a gigantic image of penis that a Swedish artist working with a local street art organization created on Christmas Eve.

The picture of a massive erect male member drew the attention of passersby as well as quickly became an object of no small amount of controversy considering that children would be exposed to what is for all intents and purposes, pornography.

The work was the masterpiece of Swedish artist Carolina Falkholt who also was responsible for another vulgar image – a giant vagina – that adorned another building not far from the Broome Street apartment building. The bizarre abstract nature of the female reproductive organs is less easily discernable than the four-story schlong which left little to the imagination.

Crews quickly painted over the enormous blood sausage, but it has gotten plenty of buzz since.

Penis Mural On Side Of LES Building Draws Curiosity, Outrage https://t.co/z2HOaN5knE

— CBS New York (@CBSNewYork) December 27, 2017

Via New York City CBS affiliate CBS-2 “Penis Mural On Side Of LES Building Draws Curiosity, Outrage”:

A colorful mural on the Lower East Side has drawn curious looks, and some outrage.

A penis was painted on the side of the building – but it wasn’t there too long.

As CBS2’s Lisa Rozner reported, the sight at the building on Broome Street between Forsyth and Eldridge streets was so striking that many stopped to take a selfie.

“It’s great, it’s fantastic,” one passerby said.

“Oh my God, it’s crazy,” another said.

“It’s a little risqué, but it’s New York,” said Wendy Seminski. “I guess like they say, anything goes here.”

But others who live and work near the pink and red painted penis were not pleased.

“It’s awful,” said Wing Ho, who works next door.

The mural was painted Sunday, Christmas Eve morning. Since then, many complained to the local community board.

Crews splattered gray over the mural Wednesday afternoon.

“There’s two schools within the zone around here, so kids have to walk past this,” said Staci Crosbi.

“So I don’t think that part is appropriate for kids.”

The painting was commissioned by the nonprofit foundation The New Allen and was created by Swedish artist Carolina Falkholt.

In a statement that included many vulgar terms for both male and female genitalia, Falkholt explained that her goal is to make it so people are not ashamed of their bodies.

“Many of my murals, including these, are about not feeling ashamed of your body and who you are as a sexual being. You can be a woman with a (penis) and a man with a (vagina) at the same time. Or something else—whatever you want to be. It is all up to yourself, and not society, to decide what gender you are,” Falkholt wrote.

Ms. Falkholt spoke in more graphic terms to the UK Guardian:

Falkholt told the Guardian her work was often about “not feeling ashamed of your body and who you are as a sexual being”.

“I usually paint giant vaginas, pussies and c*nts,” she said, “and since I had just finished one on the side of a five-storey building, I felt like a dick was needed. The wall space on Broome was a perfect fit for it. To paraphrase [the artist] Judith Bernstein, if a dick can go into a woman, it can go up on a wall.”

In a society that has become increasingly overrun by liberal freaks one never knows what’s going to pop up.

TEL AVIV — A significant portion of the projected costs for President Donald Trump’s proposed border barrier with Mexico could be covered with the money saved if the U.S. stopped funding the scandalous U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which ministers to so-called Palestinian refugees.

The U.S. is UNRWA’s single largest donor, providing about $300 million annually. Defunding UNRWA would save the U.S. upwards of $3 billion over the next ten years.

Estimates for Trump’s barrier differ greatly, with Trump himself saying in 2015 the wall would cost $6 to $7 billion, and this past April stating, “I’ll do it for $10 billion or less.”

The news website Quartz documented other varied estimates:

• In a widely quoted analyst note, Bernstein Research put it at $15 billion to $25 billion.
• January 2017—Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell said it would cost between $12 billion to $15 billion.
• February 2017—A leaked report from the Department of Homeland Security put it much higher, at $21.6 billion.

Regardless of the final costs, halting funding to UNRWA could go a long way to bolstering our national security if the U.S. instead channeled those funds to Trump’s wall.

There are many reasons the U.S. should immediately stop funding UNRWA, which perpetuates the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and instead take the approach recommended by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has called for the dismantlement of the UN’s Palestinian “refugee” agency.

The very existence of UNRWA is unnecessary. The international body has another agency, the UNHRC, which ministers to the world’s refugees other than Palestinians. Only Palestinian “refugees” have a separate agency, UNRWA.

The Palestinians and Arab states know that the so-called Palestinian refugee problem could only be sustained through a separate agency since Palestinian “refugees” do not meet the UN’s criteria for the very definition of refugees.

In fact, many readers may be surprised to learn the UN agency defines a Palestinian “refugee” in a manner that is different from all other refugees worldwide, and does so in a way that sustains the “refugee” crisis instead of solving the problem by finding solutions for the so-called Palestinian refugees.

The UNHRC, which again deals with all other refugees outside the Palestinian arena, has a fairly sensible definition of what a refugee is: “A refugee is someone who has been forced to flee his or her country because of persecution, war or violence. A refugee has a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group.”

In other words, the UNHRC defines a refugee as someone who was forced to flee his or her home and cannot return for fear of persecution.

UNRWA, however, defines a Palestinian “refugee” entirely differently. A Palestinian “refugee” is any person whose “normal place of residence was Palestine during the period 1 June 1946 to 15 May 1948 and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict.” So UNRWA counts as “refugees” any local Arab who lived in Palestine for as little as two years, knowing that scores of Arabs immigrated to the area during those years in search of employment amid talks of creating a future Jewish state.

Amazingly, UNRWA states that “Palestine refugees are persons who fulfill the above definition and descendants of fathers fulfilling the definition.”

This means that even if original Palestinian “refugees” long ago immigrated to another country and became citizens of that country, they and their descendants are still considered “refugees” according to UNRWA. The definition flies in the face of what a refugee is supposed to be. It is also in direct contrast to the Convention on Refugees, which dictates that a person who “has acquired a new nationality, and enjoys the protection of the country of his new nationality” is exempted from the status of refugee.

UNRWA’s definition of a “refugee” doesn’t mention UNHCR’s “well-founded fear of being persecuted.” Indeed, the Palestinians have no fear of being persecuted by Israel, and would not be considered a “refugee” under ordinary international criteria.

In defining a refugee as it does, UNRWA has ensured that the Palestinian “refugee” problem has only grown throughout the years.

The actual number of Palestinian “refugees” is in question.

The Jewish Virtual Library notes:

Many Arabs claim that 800,000 to 1,000,000 Palestinians became refugees in 1947­-49. The last census was taken in 1945. It found only 756,000 permanent Arab residents in Israel. On November 30, 1947, the date the UN voted for partition, the total was 809,100. A 1949 Government of Israel census counted 160,000 Arabs living in the country after the war. This meant no more than 650,000 Palestinian Arabs could have become refugees. A report by the UN Mediator on Palestine arrived at an even lower figure — 472,000.

The Library notes that at the same time that Arabs were left stranded, about the same number of Jews were forced to leave their homes in Arab countries:

The number of Jews fleeing Arab countries for Israel in the years following Israel’s independence was roughly equal to the number of Arabs leaving Palestine. Many Jews were allowed to take little more than the shirts on their backs. These refugees had no desire to be repatriated. Little is heard about them because they did not remain refugees for long. Of the 820,000 Jewish refugees, 586,000 were resettled in Israel at great expense and without any offer of compensation from the Arab governments who confiscated their possessions.

There is evidence that scores of Arabs joined the local inhabitants and became “refugees” attended to by UNRWA when the agency began operations in May 1950 to help the Arabs impacted by the 1948 war.

That year, UNRWA’s director admitted, “a large group of indigent people totaling over 100,000 … could not be called refugees, but … have lost their means of livelihood because of the war. … The Agency felt their need … even more acute than that of the refugees.”

UNRWA’s Annual Report of the Director from July 1951-June 1952 acknowledges it was difficult to separate “ordinary nomadic Bedouins and … unemployed or indigent local residents” from genuine refugees, and that “it cannot be doubted that in many cases individuals who could not qualify as being bona fide refugees are in fact on the relief rolls.”

Last week, Haaretz reported that Lebanon’s census data puts the Palestinian “refugee” population at about the third of the numbers reported by UNRWA. If accurate, this could mean UNRWA has been taking in funding for a wildly inflated number of so-called Palestinian refugees.

Haaretz reported:

Around 175,000 Palestinian refugees live in Lebanon, 45 percent of them in 12 refugee camps and 55 percent in 156 population centers throughout the country, according to a census conducted by Lebanon’s Central Administration of Statistics in partnership with the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics.

The total is much lower than the official figure of 500,000, cited by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. It has been known for years that the UN figure was inaccurate, since many Palestinian refugees have emigrated from Lebanon. But the census finding was also below other estimates, such as that of the American University of Beirut in 2015, which put the figure at between 260,000 and 280,000.

The census was approved by Lebanon’s government in August 2015, and in October 2015 a memorandum of understanding was signed with the Palestinian Authority.

The Palestinian “refugee” issue is one of the most potent weapons utilized by the PA against Israel. The Palestinians use their “refugee” status to threaten Israel’s existence by demanding the so-called right of return, meaning flooding Israel with millions of Palestinian and foreign Arabs considered Palestinian “refugees,” thus threatening the very nature of the Jewish state. If the “refugee” problem is ever solved, the Palestinian Authority’s main trump card against Israel will be taken away and they know it.

As I wrote in my book, The Late Great State of Israel:

When UNRWA began operations, it was assumed that the refugee problem would be resolved and that the agency would function only temporarily. It was not anticipated that the Arab states, which were directly shaping the mandate of this new organization, had another idea: the refugees would be kept in camps for as long as it took, and the burden of political responsibility for them was to be placed permanently upon Israel.

As one PLO document on the refugees explains: “In order to keep the refugee issue alive and prevent Israel from evading responsibility for their plight, Arab countries—with the notable exception of Jordan—have usually sought to preserve a Palestinian identity by maintaining the Palestinians’ status as refugees.”

Arlene Kushner, an Israel-based researcher on UNRWA, explains: “In other words, as a matter of deliberate policy, most Arab nations have deliberately declined to absorb the refugees or give them citizenship, and have instead focused on their right to ‘return’ to Israel.”

The Palestinians and Arab nations, meanwhile, have distorted the history of “Palestinian refugees” to manipulate the international community.

The Palestinian narrative is simple: When the Jewish state was founded, Israel largely kicked the Palestinians (who, by the way, did not exist at the time under the name “Palestinians,” but were local Arab inhabitants who lived in a region also inhabited by Jews) out of their homes, thus causing hundreds of thousands to become refugees. The Palestinians refer to Israel’s creation as the “Nakba,” or catastrophe when Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled from their homes.

The reality is quite different. After Israel was founded in 1948, a military coalition of Arab nations immediately formed to wage war on the new Jewish state. Some local Arabs, who did not yet go by the name of Palestinians, left the area in anticipation of the war, others directly responded to the dictates of Arab states to stay out of the way so that invading armies could conquer Israel, and still others fled once the war started so that they were not caught up in the fighting.

Arab states waged the war after refusing to accept UN Resolution 181, which called for the partition of the British Mandate of Palestine into Arab and Jewish states. The Jews immediately accepted the resolution, but the Arabs forthrightly rejected the plan, launching a war to destroy the Jewish state.

It should be noted that Israel’s Declaration of Independence called on the local Arab population to remain in place:

In the midst of wanton aggression, we yet call upon the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve the ways of peace and play their part in the development of the State, on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its bodies and institutions.

It is true that some Jewish groups, including the Haganah, encouraged local Arabs to flee, however those few documented cases are the exception and not the rule.

The Economist, for example, reported that the Arab residents of Haifa left their homes in large part because of Arab army warnings:

Of the 62,000 Arabs who formerly lived in Haifa not more than 5,000 or 6,000 remained. Various factors influenced their decision to seek safety in flight. There is but little doubt that the most potent of the factors were the announcements made over the air by the Higher Arab Executive, urging the Arabs to quit. … It was clearly intimated that those Arabs who remained in Haifa and accepted Jewish protection would be regarded as renegades.

“Arab officers ordered the complete evacuation of specific villages in certain areas, lest their inhabitants ‘treacherously’ acquiesce in Israeli rule or hamper Arab military deployments,” wrote historian Benny Morris.

The time has come for the U.S. to take stock of the UNRWA “fake news” narrative of Palestinian “refugees” and act accordingly.

Aaron Klein is Breitbart’s Jerusalem bureau chief and senior investigative reporter. He is a New York Times bestselling author and hosts the popular weekend talk radio program, “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio.” Follow him on Twitter @AaronKleinShow. Follow him on Facebook.

George Ciccariello-Maher has resigned from his post at Drexel University, claiming he was the target of a year-long harassment campaign over several of his controversial tweets.

Ciccariello-Maher, known best for his “All I want for Christmas is White Genocide” tweet, which he claimed was an attempt to poke fun at the paranoid fantasy that the left wants to decrease the amount of white Americans, has stepped down from his position at Drexel University. Most recently, Ciccariello-Maher was relegated to teaching online courses, as the university was concerned for his safety when he was on campus.

In the wake of the tragedy, Ciccariello-Maher baselessly blamed the Las Vegas concert massacre on “white supremacist patriarchy” in October this year.

“White people and men are told that they are entitled to everything. This is what happens when they don’t get what they want,” he tweeted.

In November, he blamed the Texas church shooting on “whiteness,” claiming “whiteness is a structure of privilege and it’s a structure of power, and a structure that, when it feels threatened, you know, lashes out.”

Ciccariello-Maher announced his resignation this week via social media. He blamed “a year of harassment by right-wing, white supremacist media outlets, and Internet mobs” in addition to supposed death threats against him and his family.

“This is not a decision I take lightly; however, after nearly a year of harassment by right-wing, white supremacist media outlets and Internet mobs, after death threats and threats of violence directed against me and my family, my situation has become unsustainable,” Ciccariello-Maher wrote. “Staying at Drexel in the eye of this storm has become detrimental to my own writing, speaking, and organizing.”

“Guy came to me a couple of years ago begging me to help him find money,” said Breitbart News’s Executive Chairman Stephen K. Bannon of National Review’s former publisher Jack Fowler.

Bannon’s comments came during Friday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily in conversation with co-host Alex Marlow.

Describing the National Review as “pathetic,” Breitbart News’s Executive Chairman Stephen K. Bannon recalled how the ostensibly conservative news media outlet’s former publisher Jack Fowler begged him for fundraising help several years ago:

The National Review publisher, this is how pathetic they are. Guy came to me a couple of years ago begging me to help him find money. They’re not a for-profit thing, they lose money. It’s just a cash drain, their donors aren’t coming out… Begging with his tin cup out. “Hey, introduce me to some donors. We need money. We’re broke.”

National Review’s financial difficulties, said Bannon, were related to its management’s lack of understanding of the “new media” landscape. He contrasted National Review’s ineptitude in this dimension with Andrew Breitbart’s aptitude: “Here’s the thing they never got that [Andrew Breitbart] got: Andrew understood new media.”

“These guys are just a magazine nobody reads with a website nobody goes to,” surmised Bannon. “Nobody read them, anymore. Nobody pays attention. They have no influence.”

The wife of National Review Online’s (NRO) David French previously sought to monetize a relationship with former Governor Sarah Palin (R-AK), said Bannon:

I think his wife was trying to suck up to the Palin family. They were sucking up to Palin family years ago. Another disaster. They were trying to do one of the girls’ biographies, or something, and that’s what these kind of people do, right? Hey kinda go from thing to thing to thing to try to pay the rent. How do you take a guy like that seriously?

Despite broadly staking out a “Never Trump” editorial position (with some dissent) and seeking to subvert then-presidential candidate Donald Trump’s campaign, National Review markets itself as a “conservative” news media outlet.

Breitbart News is about “the voice of the people,” said Marlow, “that’s why we’re populists.” This news media outlet is displacing the previously held influence of ostensibly conservative news media outlets, added its Editor-in-Chief: “That’s what this is about, that’s this year’s been about, and it’s about the diminishing voice of the pundits.”

The ostensibly conservative “Never Trump” commentariat, added Marlow, had damaged its political bona fides among grassroots conservatives:

Never Trump had the toughest year [in 2017]. It’s gotta be these guys who tried to help Hillary Clinton to win an election because Trump wasn’t a true conservative. But what have we gotten? We’ve gotten an across-the-board conservative president. We’ve gotten a guy who’s deconstructing the administrative state, gotten us incredible judges, passed a tax cut that was championed by basically all Republicans.

Donald Trump’s presidency amounts to an “unbelievable moment for conservatives,” added Marlow, noting that “Never Trump fought against the man that got all that done.”

Ostensibly “Never Trump” conservatives, said Bannon, had lost their political credibility by offering de facto support to an existential threat to America manifested in the Clintons; framing them as beyond political redemption: “So a lot of these guys are saying now, “oh, my gosh. He actually may be a conservative.” Guess what? Too late. You don’t get to redo it. Too late. You wanted Hillary Clinton. You wanted the total destruction of this country… We don’t care what you have to say.”

 

LISTEN:

Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter @rkraychik.