Displaying posts published in

May 2016

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Lack of American Commitment Makes This a Dangerous Time By Victor Davis Hanson —

By on May 19th, 2016

In 1939, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and French Prime Minister Édouard Daladier warned Adolf Hitler that if the Third Reich invaded Poland, a European war would follow.

Both leaders insisted that they meant it. But Hitler thought that after getting away with militarizing the Rhineland, annexing Austria, and dismantling Czechoslovakia, the Allied appeasers were once again just bluffing.

England and France declared war two days after Hitler entered Poland.

Once hard-won deterrence is lost, it is almost impossible to restore credibility without terrible costs and danger.

Last week, Russian officials warned the Obama administration about the installation of a new anti-ballistic missile system in Romania and talked of a possible nuclear confrontation that would reduce the host country to “smoking ruins” and “neutralize” any American-sponsored missile system.

Such apocalyptic rhetoric follows months of Russian bullying of nearby neutral Sweden, harassment of U.S. ships and planes, warnings to NATO nations in Europe, and constant threats to the Baltic states and former Soviet republics.

China just warned the U.S. to keep its ships and planes away from its new artificial island and military base in the Spratly archipelago — plopped down in the middle of the South China Sea to control international sea lanes.

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

DANIEL GREENFIELD ON TA NEHISI COATES-WHAT DO YOU DO WHEN YOU ARE NOT A BLACK”VICTIM”ANYMORE?

By on May 19th, 2016

The Victimhood of Black Millionaires
Fresh from the success of Between the World and Me, professional literary victim Ta-Nehisi Coates snapped up a luxurious landmarked brownstone for $2.1 million. The brownstone featured original Tiger Oak, Maple, and Mahogany wood floors, a chef’s kitchen, wedding cake moldings, a tin ceiling, terrace, garden, carved woodwork, a fireplace and all the other expected trimmings of the downtrodden.

When the purchase was exposed and Coates was mocked on Twitter for his gentrifying ways, he posted a whiny self-pitying screed claiming that he could no longer live there because “you can’t really be a black writer in this country, take certain positions, and not think about your personal safety.”

Prospect-Lefferts Gardens is still a majority black area. Whatever risks to his personal safety Coates might have faced in his $2 million brownstone would have come from nearby gangbangers, not stealthy white ninja assassins out to hunt down black writers who “take certain positions.” The last recorded crime as of this writing involved an armed robbery with a “black male” fleeing the scene.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is the guru of black fragility. Between the World and Me is a gushing stream of hatred and self-pity in which the National Book Award winner and MacArthur genius grant recipient moaned that the firefighters and police officers who died on September 11 “were not human to me. Black, white, or whatever, they were menaces of nature; they were the fire, the comet, the storm, which could — with no justification — shatter my body.”

Neurotic black fragility justifies dehumanizing white people. White people are just evil forces of nature who might at any moment shatter Coates’ body, even while they’re dying trying to rescue people of all races from the World Trade Center, or impinge on his $2.1 million brownstone hideaway. Occasionally, in their inscrutable way, they might bestow a genius grant or a book award on him. But that’s just another example of how they exploit “black bodies” by financing their brownstone purchases.

This is a good season for the prophets and profits of victimhood. Black fragility is especially very profitable. The Civil Rights movement began with the assertion of moral strength and then eventually physical strength. The current crybullying claims only weakness. It’s a civil rights movement of fragile crybullying nerds who whine even while they’re winning.

The Mizzou protests were kicked off by Jonathan Butler, the son of a millionaire, who went on a hunger strike based on utter ridiculous nonsense. Butler insisted to the media that he was a “dead man walking”. Then the football team joined the protest to see “what can we do to make sure that Jonathan Butler eats.” That was last year. He’s still walking and whining. Also he’s available for “speaking engagements, personal appearances and corporate events”. Possibly also wedding and bar mitzvahs.

Continue reading →
ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Hillary Clinton to Replay Obama’s Iran Strategy in North Korea Daniel Greenfield

By on May 19th, 2016

Technically speaking though, it’s her husband’s terrible North Korean strategy. Obama used it to help Iran get billions while letting it steam ahead to the bomb. Now Hillary will call it Obama’s strategy so no one remembers how badly her husband botched North Korea.

One of Hillary Clinton’s top priorities as president would be to use sanctions to pressure North Korea to negotiate limits on its nuclear program, according to Clinton’s top foreign policy adviser. The strategy would mimic the Obama administration’s approach to Iran.

Except North Korea already has nukes. Thanks to Bill Clinton. At least the Obamanoids can still claim that Iran won’t get the bomb because it hasn’t officially test donated. North Korea has.

Jake Sullivan, the head of the Clinton campaign’s foreign policy advisory team, was one of two officials who began secret negotiations with Iran in 2012 that eventually resulted in the nuclear agreement that Iran struck last summer with six world powers. He told an audience Monday evening at the Asia Society in New York that Clinton is planning a similar strategy to deal with North Korea’s nuclear program.

If you loved how well Hillary Clinton dealt with Russia and Iran, just wait till you see how she does with North Korea. I assume D.C. will be nuked during her reelection campaign.

Continue reading →
WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Ballet Jihad Restricting the world of ballet in the name of “tolerance”. Deborah Weiss

By on May 19th, 2016

A 14 year-old Muslim convert wants to change the world of ballet, all in the name of “tolerance”.

Stephanie Kutlow, age 14, from Sydney, Australia, has been dancing since she was two years old. She’s had the life-long goal of becoming a professional ballerina.

In 2010, when Stephanie was age 8, she, her two brothers and her Australian father all converted to Islam. It’s unclear if her Russian mother was already a Muslim or converted along with the family.

Upon Stephanie’s conversion, she quit dancing for awhile, claiming that no full-time ballet studio would accept her with her hijab. However, she missed her ballet practice, and feeling she shouldn’t have to sacrifice her hijab or her beliefs in order to pursue her dream of becoming a ballerina, she resumed her dancing.

Though there is no evidence that she is of professional caliber, she blames her lack of professional training on her hijab. One article stated that her hijab was the only thing that separated her from other ballerinas. Yet, anyone with a professional ballet background or familiarity with the professional world of ballet can see that Stephanie’s turn-out, feet and body type are all wrong for the competitive world of professional ballet. (Sorry!)

Never-the-less, inspired by Micheala DePrince and Misty Copeland, both top-notch ballet dancers of color, Stephanie was determined to be the world’s first hijabbed ballet dancer. She created a LaunchGood crowdfunding campaign to raise 10, 000 dollars to pay for the professional training and ballet tutoring she said she needed. Eventually, she wants to start a ballet school catering to those who are disengaged, or belong to religious and racial minorities.

Stephanie blames the ballet requirement to be hijab-free on “ignorance” and “Islamophobia”. She explains that people shouldn’t be ashamed of their differences, but proud of them. She wants people to know that Muslims have the same values of love and kindness that others have.

Continue reading →
BOOKS Comments turned off

The Party of Scientism, Not Science The gruesome history of left-wing scientific fakery. Bruce Thornton

By on May 19th, 2016

In a commencement speech at Rutgers, President Obama took an indirect shot at Donald Trump and the Republicans:

Facts, evidence, reason, logic, an understanding of science: These are good things. These are qualities you want in people making policy . . . We traditionally have valued those things, but if you’re listening to today’s political debate, you might wonder where this strain of anti-intellectualism came from.

Obama here indulges one of the hoariest progressive clichés: that they are the party of enlightenment, reason, and fact, while conservatives are ignorant obscurantists, “bitter clingers” to the superstitions of religion and tradition. This prejudice is false about both conservatives and progressives. Most of what many progressives think is science is, in fact, scientism: the application of the methods, techniques, and jargon of genuine science to subjects for which they are inappropriate.

Indeed, leftism was born in scientism. Karl Marx believed that his ideas about the historical development, economics, and human nature comprised “scientific socialism,” as true as the laws of natural science. As Friedrich Engels said at Marx’s funeral, “Just as Darwin had discovered the law of development of organic nature, so did Marx discover the laws of human history.” Of course Marxism is no such thing. It is a reductive view of human nature and action, based on selective evidence, unexamined assumptions, and jargon modeled on real science.

As we now know, Marxism is in fact a political religion based on faith more than reason. It identifies the good (the proletariat and the intellectual left) and the evil (capitalists and petty bourgeois); promises an earthly paradise (a society of equality and justice without private property); and provides a totalizing narrative that explains everything (historical progress driven by the struggle for control of the means of production). And despite its bloody failure, a Marxism dressed up as “democratic socialism” still attracts leftists like Bernie Sanders who fancy themselves thinkers of cool reason and empirical evidence.

Continue reading →
POLITICS Comments turned off

Bernie’s Thug Life Why Sanders is lying when he says he doesn’t approve of violence perpetrated on his behalf. May 19, 2016 Matthew Vadum

By on May 19th, 2016

The reason Bernie Sanders pointedly refuses to condemn his supporters for throwing chairs and making death threats against Democrat officials at and after the party’s Nevada convention is because he doesn’t actually object to their violent behavior.

Sanders blew off pressure from Democrat leaders to disavow ugly tactics by his supporters at the event Saturday evening, calling the complaints “nonsense” and arguing that his supporters were not treated with “fairness and respect.”

Remember that Sanders is seeking the presidential nomination from a party that officially endorsed the pro-cop-killing Black Lives Matter movement and whose leaders swooned over the even more violent Occupy Wall Street movement. As the unrest in Ferguson, Mo.. and Baltimore showed the nation, these people believe that rioting and looting are legitimate forms of political activism.

The pro-violence radicalism among Sanders supporters comes straight from the top. The Vermont senator vocally supports unrepentant Marxist terrorist Oscar López Rivera whom he describes as “one of the longest-serving political prisoners in history — 34 years, longer than Nelson Mandela.”

Sanders told a town hall meeting in Puerto Rico that if Obama doesn’t release López Rivera, “I will pardon him” if elected president.

Here is what the longtime prisoner did:

“López Rivera conspired to transport explosives with intent to destroy federal government property and committed other related crimes — or that the [Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional Puertorriqueña terrorist group] was deemed responsible for a reign of terror that killed six people and injured 130 others in at least 114 bombings. They includes the 1975 bombing of historic Fraunces Tavern in the city’s Financial District, which left four people dead and wounded more than 50 others, and a New Year’s Eve 1982 bombing at Police Headquarters that maimed three NYPD cops who tried to defuse the explosives.

Continue reading →
BOOKS Comments turned off

Egypt Now Teaching Schoolchildren: Israel Is (Sort of) a Legitimate Country David Hornick

By on May 19th, 2016

Ofir Winter, a researcher at Israel’s top-tier Institute for National Security Studies, reports on some unprecedentedly positive messages about Israel in a ninth-grade Egyptian textbook. (Winter’s article is included here in the May 2016 issue of Strategic Assessment.)

Israel and Egypt signed a peace treaty in 1979. Before that—specifically from 1948 to 1973—the two countries fought five wars (in three of them Egypt was joined by other Arab states). Since the peace treaty, with Egypt out of the picture, wars between Israel and Arab states have come to a stop, though Israel has had to cope with a great deal of terror.

The Israeli-Egyptian peace, however, has remained “cold.” While the treaty spoke of “foster[ing] mutual understanding and tolerance,” a 2011 Pew survey found 98% of Egyptians holding antisemitic sentiments. When Mohamed Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood regime took power in Egypt in 2012, it appeared to many that the peace had collapsed for good and war was imminent.

Morsi, though, was deposed a year later by his then defense minister, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. Under President el-Sisi’s government, Egypt has taken a notable turn toward moderation. Regarding Israel, that has meant tight cooperation in fighting ISIS in the Sinai Peninsula and Hamas in Gaza, the return of the Egyptian ambassador to Tel Aviv, and plans for Egypt to start importing Israeli natural gas.

As Ofir Winter notes, the textbook in question, which is called The Geography of the Arab World and the History of Modern Egypt,

blends old and new messages…. As in the older textbooks, Mandate-era [i.e., pre-statehood] Israel is cast historically and ethically as land that was stolen from the Arab residents of Palestine. Zionism is described as a threatening colonialist movement born in sin rather than as a movement expressing legitimate national aspirations.

So much for the old. But when it comes to the new, the textbook has features that reflect the moderating trend under el-Sisi and haven’t been seen so far in Egyptian education.

First, the new textbook is much more supportive of the peace with Israel than previous textbooks. It stresses the economic value of peace “as a necessary precondition for Egypt’s stability, development, and material prosperity.” At the end of the class discussion on the subject, pupils are asked to “memorize the ‘provisions of the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel,’ and enumerate the ‘advantages of peace for Egypt and the Arab states’”—no less. CONTINUE AT SITE

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Obama’s Great Bathroom Edict By James Lewis

By on May 19th, 2016

The Obama Administration is full of oddities — all ignored by the media. Obama’s bowing episodes, for example, with the international media video recording deep bows to the Saudi King and the Emperor of Japan. Then there is Obama’s personal contempt for certain foreign leaders, notably Benjamin Netanyahu and Vladimir Putin, but also 90-year-old Queen Elizabeth II (whose personal garden at Windsor Garden was ruined by three of Obama’s presidential helicopters in 2011).

Obama has constantly tried to meddle in the domestic affairs of our (former) allies, like Egypt and Israel, but also Britain. Obama publicly commanded Egypt’s President Mubarak to step down, a gross insult to a close ally. He tried to topple what was long considered to be the pillar of peace in the Middle East.

Then there is Obama’s much-resented advice to African countries like Kenya to allow freer homosexual behavior, when Africans are still dying from an HIV epidemic.

And now we have Obama’s Bathroom Gender Edict, telling local school districts to let boys and girls from six to sixteen decide whichever bathroom they “really” identify with, regardless of the rights of others. The President of the United States is coming to rescue you from gender-assignment tyranny, children!

Somehow the Founders forgot to include that as one of the enumerated powers of the President.

Troubling? Weird? Yes, you might think so.

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Pink Wig Brigade By Robert Knight

By on May 19th, 2016

President Obama’s bombshell transgender edict on bathroom and locker rooms last week to all American school districts did not come out of the blue.

Friday’s joint letter from the Departments of Education and Justice, plus Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s mind-bending comparison of separate sex bathroom policies to Jim Crow laws, was just the latest chapter in the assault on social norms begun in earnest by former Attorney General Eric H. Holder, Jr. as soon as he took office in 2009.

If the Trump campaign were wise, it would not blow kisses to the tiny, tiny percentage of the population that identifies as the other sex, and instead put Hillary Clinton in a vise — caught between her legions of LGBTQ supporters versus millions of average Americans shocked by the intrusion of the federal government into school restrooms. This issue is a visceral example of the dangers of overweening, centralized, establishment power without effective checks and balances. It’s made to order for the Trump insurgency.

But I digress. The main point is that this is not new. Here’s a case summarized in 2011 by American Civil Rights Union Policy Board member J. Christian Adams in his book Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department, which I offer with his permission:

Pink Wigs and Stiletto Heels

“Americans might be shocked to learn that the Obama DOJ thinks it is a federal civil right for boys to wear stiletto high heels and pink wigs to a public high school. In the Mohawk Central School District near Utica, New York, a 15-year-old male student wanted to come to class dressed as a flamboyant transvestite. Unsurprisingly, other students teased the boy, and the school attempted to enforce a reasonable dress code to maintain classroom order. But in the age of Eric Holder, this became a federal civil rights issue.

“The Civil Rights Division intervened in the affair to force the school to allow for child-transvestites. Where in the Constitution might this power be found? What could the legal theory possibly be? What federal right was at stake that could overcome the well-established power of schools to enforce order to facilitate learning? The answer, incredibly, is sex discrimination.

“’Gender non-conforming’ behavior has been elevated to a federal civil right under the Obama DOJ’s bizarre legal application of Title IX. This is not even within paddling distance of the mainstream. The law was intended to prevent discrimination against women, not against those who fantasize about having a different gender.

Continue reading →
MEDIA, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

How Terrorists and Dictators Silence Arab Journalists by Khaled Abu Toameh

By on May 19th, 2016

That is the sad state of journalism in the Arab world: “If you’re not with us, then you must be against us and that is why we need to shut your mouth.” A journalist who does not agree to serve as a governmental mouthpiece is denounced as a “traitor.”

Hamas shut the Gaza offices of Al-Arabiya in July 2013, under the pretext that the station broadcasted “incorrect news” about the situation in the Gaza Strip. The closure did not receive much attention from the international community and human rights organizations. Had the office been closed by Israel, there would have been an international outcry, with journalists screaming about Israeli “assaults on freedom of the media.”

Al-Arabiya, like many other Arab TV stations, has a bureau in Israel, and its reporters enjoy more freedom reporting out of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv than they do in the Arab world. Today, the only free and independent Arabic newspapers in the Middle East can be found inside Israel.

Thirty-five Arab journalists have been fired since the beginning of April as a result of a campaign of intimidation and terrorism waged against them by Hamas and Hezbollah.

The journalists were working for the Saudi-owned pan-Arab Al-Arabiya television news channel, based in Dubai Media City in the United Arab Emirates. The network was previously rated by the BBC among the top pan-Arab stations.

But life for Al-Arabiya reporters has never been easy. Like most Arab journalists covering the Arab and Islamic countries, they too have long faced threats from various parties and governments.

Continue reading →