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March 2016

POLITICS Comments turned off

Donald Trump Is Hillary Clinton’s Best Hope By Ian Tuttle

By on March 2nd, 2016

Trump supporters opposed to bailouts ought to think twice before casting their vote. They’re about to bail out the Democrats.

Barack Obama has presided over the veritable collapse of the institutional Democratic party. Start with the statistics: Republicans have their largest majority in the House of Representatives since 1931, and they have commanding control of the Senate. At the state level, Republicans control 68 of 98 partisan state legislative chambers, and 31 governor’s mansions. Twenty-four states boast a GOP trifecta, where both legislative chambers and the governor are Republicans. That is largely thanks to President Obama, whose health-care takeover, rammed through Congress, gave rise to the Tea Party, and whose constitutional end runs (now that he can’t ram things through Congress) solidified the Tea Party’s gains in subsequent elections.

But the agenda and tactics that prompted a leftward shift in his own party threaten Democrats this election season. Hillary Clinton was supposed to waltz to her nomination, every lane having been cleared for her. Instead, she’s likely to arrive at the Democratic convention black and blue, thanks to Bernie Sanders — a curmudgeonly socialist who managed to tie Clinton in Iowa and beat her in New Hampshire. There’s reason to believe that, if Sanders partisans can’t vote against Hillary, they’ll likely stay home. And in a national contest, low turnout helps Republicans.

This is all on top of Hillary’s baked-in problems. She’s unlikeable. She’s a lousy campaigner. The stench of her ambition is detectable miles downwind. Combining various polls, the Huffington Post finds that 54 percent of voters view her unfavorably (only 40 percent view her favorably), and Quinnipiac found in February that seven in ten voters believe her dishonest and untrustworthy. No wonder: She’s the subject of three federal investigations, and it’s not impossible that the FBI will recommend an indictment to the Justice Department sometime before November. Meanwhile, RealClearPolitics’ polling averages show that, in head-to-head matchups, Marco Rubio leads Hillary Clinton by five points, and Ted Cruz leads her by a point and a half.

The Republican party is poised to take the presidency and to hold both houses of Congress — and Republican voters are about to squander that opportunity on Donald J. Trump.

Trump supporters love polls, so perhaps they should note that polls show Trump with a higher unfavorable rating (58 percent) and lower favorable rating (37 percent) than Clinton. Neither Ted Cruz nor Marco Rubio has such lopsided numbers.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The globalist legal agenda by Andrew C. McCarthy On The Court and the World: American Law and the New Global Realities, by Stephen Breyer

By on March 2nd, 2016

Having annexed Crimea as well as swaths of eastern Ukraine and Georgia, Russian strongman Vladimir Putin casts a menacing eye at the Baltics. His new favorite ally, Iran, violated President Obama’s ballyhooed nuclear arms deal before the ink was dry, testing a new class of intermediate-range ballistic missiles designed to be tipped with the very nuclear warheads the mullahs deny coveting. Meanwhile, China flouts international law by constructing artificial islands to bolster its aggressive South China Sea territorial claims. In Europe, a Middle Eastern diaspora wreaks havoc on the continent, exploiting its generous laws on immigration and travel between countries while overrunning communities with Muslim settlers notoriously resistant to Western assimilation.

Rarely in modern history has the inadequacy of law to manage the jungle that is international relations been more starkly illustrated. Yet, according to the United States Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, it is precisely law, as divined by judges, that can tame our tempestuous times. That the judiciary is the institution least competent and least politically accountable for the task is evidently no more an obstacle than the impotence of law itself.

Appointed to the High Court by President Bill Clinton twenty-one years ago, Justice Breyer has been a stalwart liberal—which is to say, a political “progressive” on a court that is increasingly political. He is refreshing nonetheless, even for those of us who recoil from his ideological bent, for his willingness to depart from the Court’s custom of avoiding public debate. Like his colleague and philosophical counterpart Justice Antonin Scalia, Breyer is a frequent public speaker and occasional author on jurisprudential approaches to contemporary challenges. His newest book is The Court and the World: American Law and the New Global Realities.1

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The architect of the Reich by Michael J. Lewis On the architectural horror of Albert Speer.

By on March 2nd, 2016

It is one of history’s cheekier pranks that the first architect ever to appear on television was that thirty-year-old prodigy with the movie-star face, Albert Speer. Nazi Germany was the first country to introduce television broadcasting, just in time to cover the 1935 Nazi Party Rally in Nuremberg. If you search for it, you can watch a short clip as Speer drives his convertible into his newly enlarged rally grounds, banters with a reporter, and then speeds off with a jaunty Hitler salute.

Of course the world knows Speer from an entirely different media appearance. This was his testimony at the Nuremberg trials, where he dramatically accepted full personal responsibility for Nazi war crimes, the only one of the accused to do so. His subdued, humble demeanor could not have contrasted more with the evasiveness, self-justification, and unconcealed haughtiness of his co-defendants. It was literally the performance of his life, and it saved him from certain execution. Having stepped into the role of “the good Nazi,” Speer never relinquished it. Upon serving his twenty-year sentence, he published a series of fascinating though self-serving memoirs, beginning with Inside the Third Reich (1970). Through it all he played the part of the naïve and innocent artist, who was guilty of nothing more than letting his childlike eagerness to build overwhelm his good judgment and moral sensibility.

That pose is no longer tenable. Archival finds in Germany and elsewhere have shown that Speer could not have been ignorant of the Nazi extermination camps, as he claimed, but was involved in finicky detail with their construction and operation. Although these finds caused a sensation in Germany a decade ago, it is only now that we have a comprehensive treatment in English, Martin Kitchen’s Speer: Hitler’s Architect.1 As an architectural biography, it does not altogether satisfy. What is the relationship between Speer’s architecture and Nazi ideology? Is one permitted to speak about his work in aesthetic terms? If not, why not? Only in passing do these questions divert Kitchen, who is much more interested in Speer the war criminal than Speer the architect. And that he was a war criminal, right up to his elbows, there can be no doubt. Hitler’s Architect makes a persuasive case that Speer’s escape from the gallows at Nuremberg must count as one of the last great crimes of the war.

Albert Speer (1905–1981) was born in Mannheim, Germany, the son and grandson of architects. Pushed by his father to study architecture, he studied first in Karlsruhe, then Munich, but he only became serious after he transferred to Berlin. There he applied to study with Hans Poelzig, the brilliant expressionist architect of Weimar Germany, who rejected Speer as an inferior draftsman. Disappointed, he turned to the man who was Poelzig’s polar opposite, Heinrich Tessenow, a reform-minded architect with a love of simple, clear volumes and neoclassical clarity—the ultimate basis of Nazi architecture. Speer, who all his life knew how to ingratiate himself, sufficiently impressed Tessenow to become his teaching assistant.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Why are Palestinian Christians Fleeing? Robert Nicholson

By on March 2nd, 2016

Robert Nicholson is the executive director of The Philos Project, a nonprofit organization that seeks to promote positive Christian engagement in the Middle East. He holds a BA in Hebrew Studies from Binghamton University, and a JD and MA (Middle Eastern History) from Syracuse University. A formerly enlisted Marine and a 2012- 2013 Tikvah Fellow, Robert lives in New York City with his wife and two children.

The Jesuit magazine America recently reported that Arab Christians are fleeing in droves from Bethlehem, the hallowed city of Jesus Christ’s birth. In 1990, Christians made up a majority of the city’s residents; today they make up only about 15%. “With thousands more fleeing the city every year,” reports America’s correspondent Jeremy Zipple, “you can’t help but wonder, will there be any Christians left here…in the not too distant future?”

Zipple’s question is rhetorical. He clearly believes that Christianity in Bethlehem may be nearing its end.

But why? Why are Christians fleeing?

At first Zipple says “it’s complicated.” But he goes on to list one reason, and one reason only: “Since 2003 Bethlehem has been circumscribed by a 26-foot military grade wall.”

Zipple is, of course, referring to the separation barrier that was constructed by Israel during the Second Intifada to keep out suicide bombers who tried to cross from the West Bank into Israel. Although the vast majority of the barrier is a chain link fence, in Bethlehem and a few other metropolitan areas it becomes a tremendous gray wall. Since its construction, the barrier has become the international symbol of Palestinian resistance against Israel.

“[T]he separation wall…cuts family from each other. People get humiliated at checkpoints. People do not have many opportunities to improve their living standards. So, therefore, Christians who can afford to, are trying to leave this country,” says interviewee Hanan Nasrallah, a Palestinian employee of Catholic Relief Services.

Nasrallah’s calculation is simple: Israel built a wall; the wall makes life difficult; therefore, Palestinian Christians are leaving.

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Bombed, Burned, and Urinated On: Churches Under Islam Muslim Persecution of Christians, January 2015 by Raymond Ibrahim

By on March 2nd, 2016

When Col. Steve Warren, spokesman for U.S. military efforts against ISIS, was asked about the status of Christians in Iraq soon after the monastery’s destruction, he replied “We’ve seen no specific evidence of a specific targeting toward Christians.”

Kuwait lawmaker Ahmad Al-Azemi said that he and other MPs will reject an initially approved request to build churches because it “contradicts Islamic sharia laws.” He added that Islamic scholars are unanimous in banning the building of non-Muslim places of worship in the Arabian Peninsula.

“We have little hope left that there can be a future for us, Aramean Christians, to stay in the land of our forefathers.” — Fr. Yusuf, head the last Christian family to flee Diyarbakir, Turkey.

Yet another Christian girl in Pakistan was abducted by a group of Muslim men, forced to convert to Islam, and, at the age of 15, marry one of her kidnappers.

Iraq: The Islamic State blew up the country’s oldest Christian monastery, St. Elijah’s. The 27,000-square-foot building had stood near Mosul for 14 centuries. For several years, prior to 2009, U.S. soldiers protected and sometimes used the monastery as a chapel. “Our Christian history in Mosul is being barbarically leveled,” reported a Roman Catholic priest in Irbil. “We see it as an attempt to expel us from Iraq, [and] eliminating and finishing our existence in this land.” Yet, when Col. Steve Warren, spokesman for America’s military efforts against ISIS, was asked about the status of Christians in Iraq soon after the monastery’s destruction, he replied, “We’ve seen no specific evidence of a specific targeting toward Christians.”

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Progressive ‘Thought-Blockers’: Racism How the Left amasses and consolidates political power. Bruce Thornton

By on March 2nd, 2016

Rather than being a racial healer, Barack Obama has presided over and at times stoked more racial divisiveness than we have seen in a long while. Just in the last year we’ve had Black Lives Matter marches and verbal assaults of Democratic candidates, the Oscar protests over the absence of nominated black actors, Ivy League university students marching over “microagressions” no one else can see, and the still simmering protests and agitation over police shootings of black men. Driving it all is our duplicitous and malignant national racial discourse.

At the heart of it lies “racism,” a question-begging epithet and verbal aerosol sprayed over issues to avoid honestly confronting them. The idea of racism is peculiarly modern, and like most of progressive ideology it reflects the rise of pseudo-science in the wake of the scientific revolution. As such, racism was a consequence of the massive category error that tries to reduce human beings to mere material phenomena to be classified and understood and shaped with the methods of real science. In “scientific” racism, certain characteristics of physical appearance and behavior were stripped of historical and cultural context, and the “irreducible complexity” defining all humans reduced to this simplified, superficial description. Worse yet from the perspective of the West’s Judeo-Christian and Hellenic heritage, the unique individualism of people, with their God-given natural rights and spiritual freedom, was denied to fellow human beings.

Before modern racism, there were prejudice and bigotry, the leftover tribal instinct to distrust the stranger or those who look and live differently. Humans are naturally clannish and exclusionary, as a visit to any playground or school, or a perusal of multiculturalist dogma and curricula, will reveal. The idea of a universal human nature and the subsequent tolerance for difference was and still is a strange one, a learned behavior that culture has to teach and reinforce.

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Duke Prof: Feminist ‘Soft’ Jihad a Force for Peace The twisted fantasy world of Prof. Ellen McLarney. March 2, 2016 Andrew Harrod

By on March 2nd, 2016

Ellen McLarney, who teaches Asian and Middle Eastern studies at Duke, would have you believe that a “pacifist struggle for civil jihad” led by Islamic feminists offers a benign “alternative kind of jihad” to that practiced by Islamist terrorists worldwide.

She peddled her thesis to about twenty listeners (mostly graduate students) in a February 8 George Washington University lecture, reprising discussion of her recent book, Soft Force: Women in Egypt’s Islamic Awakening. McLarney’s lecture omitted the totalitarian jihadist ideology underlying what she described as a “protracted struggle with non-democratic regimes over matters of human rights.”

McLarney lauded the 1995 book (in Arabic) Women & Political Work: An Islamic Perspective, by Cairo University political science professor Heba Raouf Ezzat. Yet McLarney neglected to mention the book’s publisher, none other than the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT) in Herndon, Virginia, an entity founded by Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood (MB). She noted that Ezzat explicated her concept of feminine “soft force” Islamist subversion, itself derived from the late American political scientist Joseph Nye’s concept of “soft power.”

Beginning in the 1970s, McLarney explained nonchalantly, an Egyptian Islamic revival developed via a “passive revolution” to spark an “Islamic civil society that runs parallel to the more secular civil society in Egypt.” As foreshadowed by the 1960s Egyptian writer Nimat Sidqi—who according to McLarney’s slides wrote that “Raising Children is Jihad”—women “have a pivotal role to play in this struggle.” Borrowing from the American feminist slogan “the personal is political,” Ezzat and others developed the “Islamic family as a place for the cultivation of Islamic sensibilities”—the “very seat of politics.”

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Hamas Threatened to Bury Own Man in Concrete to Force Him to Confess to Being Gay March 1, 2016 Daniel Greenfield

By on March 2nd, 2016

According to gay activist Judith Butler, Hamas is a progressive organization and anyone who points out that Israel doesn’t have the death penalty for gays is just “pinkwashing”. But Hamas is not actually all that progressive on gay rights as we see with the case of Mahmoud Ishtiwi, a Hamas commander who was tortured into confessing to being gay and then killed.

A Hamas commander who was executed in February was tortured and then killed after at least one terrorist under his command admitted to having sex with him.

Relatives and other sources say he was tortured extensively during that period, including beatings, whippings, being suspended by his hands from the ceiling for hours on end, sleep deprivation and more.

So bad were his conditions that family members protested outside the home of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, in a rare show of dissent in authoritarian-ruled Gaza. Demonstrators were beaten by Hamas police and dispersed.

Here’s how Hamas progressively dealt with the whole gay thing.

In his next meeting with relatives, on March 1, Mr. Ishtiwi told his brother Hussam that he had been tortured since his fourth day in detention. Six weeks later, when his wives visited, they sneaked out a note, of which Human Rights Watch shared a photograph. “They nearly killed me,” it says. “I confessed to things I have never done in my life.”

By June 7, when Samia visited her brother at a Qassam base near Gaza City’s used car market, Mr. Ishtiwi “looked destroyed,” she recalled.

“I asked, ‘Why are you crying, brother?’ ” she said. “And he said, ‘I have been wronged, wronged.’ ”

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Republicans Choose Change on Super Tuesday Two parties, two very different choices. Daniel Greenfield

By on March 2nd, 2016

Super Tuesday was defined by change. The Democrats have had enough change. Solid majorities in key states said that they did not want a more liberal candidate than Obama. The one major exception was Vermont which went for Bernie Sanders. Sanders also won Oklahoma where around a third backed a turn even further left than Obama. But beyond them, there was no great appetite for outsiders.

“This campaign is not just about electing a president; it is about transforming America,” Bernie Sanders bleated back in Vermont. But the Democrats may be suffering from transformation fatigue.

Most Democrats have made it clear that they want another two terms of Obama. Exit polls from Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee and Virginia showed solid support for a continuation of Obama’s policies. The Sanders change agenda plays well with younger voters, particularly with white voters, but fails with a Democratic Party whose base is in thrall to Obama despite his legacy of economic misery and failure.

Hillary Clinton had initially hoped to run as a historic candidate while touting her own experience, but was instead forced to run as a proxy for Obama in order to preserve her minority firewall which saved her in South Carolina and other states with large black Democratic constituencies. It’s a humiliating comedown for Hillary to have to run as Obama’s shadow. But she’s willing to do that and abandon the dream of creating her own legacy beyond Obama for the opportunity to make it to the White House.

On the Republican side there was a great appetite for outsiders and for change. The two big winners, Trump and Ted Cruz, both ran as outsider candidates on platforms of change. In an extraordinary turn of events, Rubio, the establishment candidate, had the poorest performance of the top three candidates.

Democrats may no longer be interested in transforming America, but Republicans are. Hope and Change has lost its luster for the party that inflicted two terms of Obama on the country. But Change is running strong among Republicans, even if Hope has not always come along for the long ride of the primaries.

While the establishment lane prevailed for the Democrats, the anti-establishment lane dominated among Republicans. These two different snapshots of Super Tuesday from both parties also help explain the dramatic difference in voter turnout. Republican voter turnout quadrupled in Virginia and increased by hundreds of thousands in Tennessee, Texas, Georgia and Massachusetts. Democratic voter turnout was underwhelming. Voting for the safe establishment choice does not really rally primary voters.

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‘We’re All Muslims Deep Down,’ Says … Boston Police Commissioner- Robert Spencer

By on March 2nd, 2016

Politicians insisting that the latest Islamic jihad attack has nothing to do with Islam have become a familiar feature of the mainstream media landscape, but last Saturday, Boston Police Commissioner William B. Evans went them all one better.

Speaking at the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center, Evans declared:
We’re all Muslims deep down. We all yearn for peace.

Evans thus went farther than Barack Obama, John Kerry, David Cameron, and all the other Western politicians who insist that Islam is a religion of peace. For Evans, Islam is not just a religion of peace, but the religion of peace: to be a Jew, a Christian, a Hindu, a Buddhist, or an atheist would not make one yearn for peace.

This is taking pandering to dizzying new heights, and that wasn’t all: this wasn’t the police commissioner’s first visit to the Islamic Society of Boston. He went there last December — right after two Muslims murdered fourteen people at a Christmas party in San Bernardino. He made that visit in order to make sure that the local Muslims weren’t jittery after that attack:

I don’t think we can tolerate bigotry toward the Muslim population. They’re an important part of our city. I just want to reassure them that we’re here for them.

Muslims acting avowedly in the name of Islam and jihad committed mass murder of non-Muslims, and in the wake of that attack, the Boston police commissioner took it upon himself to reassure … Muslims. However he went about doing this reassuring, it is certain that he never asked members of the Islamic Society of Boston why so many Muslims don’t yearn for peace at all, but seem instead to relish war.

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