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September 2016

Susan Jones:DHS Secretary Doesn’t Know How Many People Mistakenly Granted Citizenship Were From Iran, Syria, Libya

On Sept. 8, the Homeland Security Department’s inspector-general reported that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services mistakenly granted citizenship to at least 858 individuals who were under deportation or removal orders.

On Tuesday, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson told Congress the actual number is “somewhere around” 750. But Johnson could not say how many of them were from countries known to be havens for terrorists.

“Were any of them from special interest countries?” Sen. Ben Sasse, a member of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, asked Johnson.

“Not off hand,” Johnson replied. “I — I can’t — I can’t give you that breakdown offhand. It is a — I suspect it is a knowable fact, which we can provide you.”

Johnson said a process to “denaturalize” those people is now under way. “And we’re going to continue to do that.”

“Were any of them from Iran, Syria, or Libya?” Sasse asked Johnson.

“I’d have to check. I don’t know sitting here right now, sir,” the secretary responded.

“How — how would you not know that?” Sasse asked. “Why would that not be something that’s urgent to you to understand the categories under the 700–”

“Oh, yes. It’s a knowable fact,” Johnson repeated. “I can get you the information. Just sitting here right now, I don’t have the list in front of me. You know, I don’t want to be wrong.”

“Do you think any of them were terrorists?” Sasse asked.

JCC Harlem By Marilyn Penn

In a curious yet obvious decision, the JCC (Jewish Community Center) has announced the January opening of a new facility named JCC Harlem, on the upper west side in a neighborhood commonly known as Morningside Heights. Located on West 118th street, in proximity to Columbia, Barnard, the Jewish Theological Seminary, Bank Street College of Education, Teachers College and the Manhattan School of Music, this JCC is in a neighborhood with a majority white population of 46%, followed by 23% Hispanic and 13% African American (2010 census). Though it is technically within the geographic borders of Harlem, this neighborhood shares little to nothing with the majority black community commonly referred to by that Dutch name, an enclave we associate with the Apollo Theater and Sylvia’s restaurant, among other icons of black cultural references.
I said that this decision is an obvious one since according to Rabbi Joy Levitt, the executive director of JCC Manhattan, a)this neighborhood differs from the upper west side with its large Jewish population and b) the JCC Harlem intends to participate with other civic groups in joint social justice programs. (Jewish Week Sept 30)
I said curious because there is a 67% majority of whites on the upper west side followed by 15% Hispanic and 7% African American (all percentages are rounded out since fractions are meaningless for the purpose of this article) The demographic in both neighborhoods is that whites predominate while blacks are in the distinct minority. Considering the number of universities and other educational institutions, there is a significant Jewish presence in Morningside Heights that may exceed its residential population Also, many Jewish families have moved into the neighborhood because the cost of real estate is marginally lower than the extremely expensive neighborhood below 96th street, so it’s not clear how significantly this neighborhood differs from the upper west side.

As for joining with black social justice groups, the JCC must know that Black Lives Matter has deemed Israel an apartheid state that practices genocide and that Jewish groups that are pro-Israel are automatically excluded from joining in solidarity with BLM which stands together with Students for Justice in Palestine and supportive of the BDS movement against Israel. Of course there will always be Jews who will bow before their enemies and blame themselves or their brothers for this irrational anti-semitism. By identifying their group with a ‘black’ pedigree, the leadership of JCC hopes to curry favor much as the Jews who marched for civil rights expected to be appreciated for their front line solidarity with black leadership. Yet the lessons of black hatred of Jews were manifest in the platform of the Black Panthers, in the race riots of Crown Heights, in the sermons of the Reverend Wright and in current BLM policy and propaganda.

THE NEW MIDDLE EAST: CAROLINE GLICK

So Obama let Syria burn. He let Iran and Hezbollah transform the country into their colony. And he let Putin transform the Mediterranean into a Russian lake.A new Syria is emerging. And with it, a new Middle East and world are presenting themselves. Our new world is not a peaceful or stable one. It is a harsh place.

The new Syria is being born in the rubble of Aleppo.The eastern side of the city, which has been under the control of US-supported rebel groups since 2012, is being bombed into the Stone Age by Russian and Syrian aircraft.

All avenues of escape have been blocked. A UN aid convoy was bombed in violation of a fantasy cease-fire.

Medical facilities and personnel are being targeted by Russia and Syrian missiles and barrel bombs to make survival impossible.

It is hard to assess how long the siege of eastern Aleppo by Russia, its Iranian and Hezbollah partners and its Syrian regime puppet will last. But what is an all but foregone conclusion now is that eastern Aleppo will fall. And with its fall, the Russian-Iranian-Hezbollah-Assad axis will consolidate its control over all of western Syria.

For four years, the Iranians, Hezbollah and Bashar Assad played a cat and mouse game with the rebel militias.

Fighting a guerrilla war with the help of the Sunni population, the anti-regime militias were able to fight from and hide from within the civilian population. Consequently, they were all but impossible to defeat.

When Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed to join the fight, he and his generals soon recognized that this manner of fighting ensured perpetual war. So they changed tactics. The new strategy involves speeding up the depopulation and ethnic cleansing of rebel-held areas. The massive refugee flows from Syria over the past year are a testament to the success of the barbaric war plan. The idea is to defeat the rebel forces by to destroying the sheltering civilian populations.

Since the Syrian war began some five years ago, half of the pre-war population of 23 million has been displaced.

Sunnis, who before the war comprised 75% of the population, are being targeted for death and exile. More than 4 million predominantly Sunni Syrians are living in Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan. More than a million have entered Europe. Millions more have been internally displaced. Assad has made clear that they will never be coming home.

James Allan: The Creeping Reach of International Law

Just who asked top judges to inflate the role and authority of rights-related international law? Parliamentarians and those in favour of legislative last-word decision-making need to make clear their unease with this ever-broadening presumption to interpret, expand and impose.
If national democracy is to be maintained in any recognisable form within self-sustaining states, the power and claims of international rule-making will have to decline. —Harry Gelber, Quadrant, October 2015

… since the end of the Cold War the notion of global governance has emerged as an intellectual orthodoxy with powerful support in the academy, the media, the law, the foreign policy establishment, the corporate world, and the bureaucracies that serve international institutions and non-governmental associations.

Global governance is a reversal of our existing political arrangements. It aims to take power from democratically elected parliaments and vest it in courts, NGOs and transnational bodies. Voters would increasingly find their representatives beholden to international treaties, international legal conventions and precedents, transnational bureaucrats and lawyers. Government policy would be decided less by open debate in the national media and more in the comparatively closed world of international conferences, academic seminars, consultant reports, learned journals and legal judgments. —Keith Windschuttle, Quadrant, May 2012

The expanding reach of a fuzzy sort of rights-related international law is enervating democracy in long-established democracies such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. And the courts are playing a significant role in advancing this agenda of global governance, or creeping international legal rule. We should be more sceptical about international law when it deals with human rights, considerably more so than when it deals with more traditional subject matter (such as international trade law and the law of diplomatic immunity).

It is worth beginning by recalling just what the sources of international law are and how this sort of law is made. In a long-established democracy such as Australia or New Zealand or Britain it is also worth considering whether international law or domestic law is likely to be the one that gets things right and lays down the preferable course of action when the two conflict or are in some way inconsistent.

There are two sources or types of international law. The first is treaties (sometimes called conventions). This is what most people, including most lawyers, think of when one talks of international law. Now focus for a moment on rights-related treaties such as the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) or the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) or any of the various other rights-related treaties. All treaties are entered into under the prerogative power which is exercised by the executive branch of government. Accordingly, even with some newish modifications that give the legislature a tiny bit of say in some Westminster countries, the democratic input into treaties is far less than it is into statutes.

That is true of all treaties. But as we are focused on rights-related treaties, notice that these treaties are framed in vague and amorphous terms (just compare either of the above rights-related conventions to a trade-related treaty such as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). This makes sense in a world in which a Britain or a Canada is seeking to encourage a Sudan or a China or a Zimbabwe to enter into a treaty about standards of treatment for children or women or the disabled. There needs to be room to finesse disagreement between countries with such different histories and standards of treating their own citizens, and that is precisely what the language of these rights-related treaties and conventions delivers—scope not only for disagreement over meaning between countries that exist in such different moral galaxies but, as a result, also scope for reasonable disagreement between people living in a long-established democracy as to what the provisions mean and require.

If such rights-related treaties went into the sort of prescriptive detail one finds in, say, a trade-related treaty, then the chances of any rights-related treaty ever coming into existence would be slight. So room has been left in rights-related treaties for countries to manoeuvre around disagreements, and this is achieved through open-textured provisions that leave it to future interpreters to add detail and specifics at the point of application—at the further cost of democratic input and legitimacy when this interpreting is done. And if the interpretive approach adopted proves to be of an expansionist, “living tree” type, divorced from the original intentions of the drafters, then the problem of lack of democratic input will be further magnified—possibly substantially so. Put simply, if you believe that democratic input tends to make laws better, on average, over time, then you are likely to think that the domestic law of an Anglosphere country is better than any rights-related international treaty or convention when the two conflict or are inconsistent. (You can hold this belief while also believing that it will not be true as regards the world’s authoritarian regimes. In their cases, international law is better. And you can hold all of the above to be true and also accept that the world’s United Kingdoms and Australias care deeply about the content of rights-related treaties.)

Put bluntly, the domestic law of Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United States and other such long-established democracies is democratically better and in practice more rights-respecting than is rights-related international law, a claim that seems to me to be as patently true as it is unlikely to be heard in polite company. For me, democracy is to be understood in procedural terms. Count us all as equal and give everyone a more or less equal say over contested social issues, including rights-related ones. On that procedural understanding of democracy, the domestic laws of the world’s Britains and New Zealands and Australias clearly score higher than any rights-related international laws.

In Defense of Our National and Religious Traditions A society that honors and reveres nothing but individual freedom will become a society that honors and reveres nothing at all.Yoram Hazony

I am grateful to R.R. Reno, Walter Russell Mead, and Peter Berkowitz for their careful comments on my essay, “Nationalism and the Future of Western Freedom.” Here I offer some thoughts relating to their most salient points. http://mosaicmagazine.com/response/2016/09/in-defense-of-our-national-and-religious-traditions/

The fundamental question in political philosophy is the choice between an order of independent national states and one seeking to bring all nations under a single international regime. These are perhaps not the only options—the biblical book of Judges, for example, examines the possibility of a life without any central government at all, “each doing what is right in his own eyes.” But if we accept the biblical conclusion that, in large numbers, men cannot live without a government to rule them, then a choice must be made: either free nations or empire.

In his response to my essay, Walter Russell Mead emphasizes that neither order can be the answer to the human condition. “Both have important capacities. Both are subject to terrible temptations,” he writes. “The real task of politics and statecraft is to determine what—in a particular situation, in a particular circumstance, at a particular time—is the right blend.”

I agree with Mead that real-world circumstances are messy things, and that what may be desirable as a matter of general principle can prove ruinous in practice. For instance, one need only read Michael Doran’s excellent new book, Ike’s Gamble, for a detailed indictment of President Eisenhower’s misguided support for Arab nationalism and self-determination in the Middle East. This was a policy that helped to demolish the British empire and end Winston Churchill’s career, only to give rise to the pan-Arab dictatorship of Gamal Abdel Nasser—who repaid America’s kindness by taking Egypt into the Soviet imperial orbit. Examples of this sort make it clear that, in practice, a blind support of national self-determination against empire may be self-defeating.

This having been said, however, I cannot accept Mead’s conclusion that since both nationalism and empire have their flaws, we have no choice but to strike an ad-hoc balance between them. Monarchical and republican forms of government each have their characteristic flaws as well; nevertheless, we recognize that republican government is preferable in principle, and believe this remains the case even if circumstances force us to compromise and accept one-man rule in a given time and place.

Similarly, we must choose whether it is better to live in a world in which power is distributed among many different, competing nations than in one in which power is concentrated in the hands of a single international regime. There should be no doubt as to which better serves the cause of human freedom, which is truly possible only where power is distributed so that persons encumbered or persecuted under one government may seek relief and support from another. Nor is there any doubt that such an order of national states is as difficult to maintain internationally as is republican government domestically. Like republican government, it too must be vigilantly and constantly defended or else it will slip from our grasp.

On this point, I believe R. R. Reno and Peter Berkowitz are largely in agreement with me, even as each also raises important issues concerning the particulars of my case.

Berkowitz, for his part, questions my emphasis on the Protestant character of the order of national states, and my grounding of this order in an intellectual tradition built upon the teachings of the Hebrew Bible (or “Old Testament”). Without denying the biblical basis of modern nationalism, Berkowitz fears that for contemporary men and women the Bible will be controversial, lacking in authority, and theoretically insufficient to the task of defending the principles of a free national state. Better, he writes, to build a broad-tent conservative coalition around the liberal tradition descended from such modern philosophers as John Locke.

Before turning to questions of tactics, it is necessary to ask whether such a liberal interpretation of history accords with what actually happened The truth is that the modern world was overwhelmingly a construct of Protestant Christianity (albeit with important contributions, as Reno points out, from medieval Catholicism). “The American Constitution has many intellectual fathers,” Irving Kristol wrote, “but only one spiritual mother. That mother is Protestant religion. . . . The [American] Revolution . . . had been conceived out of the wedding of the Protestant ethos with American circumstances.”

Why should Kristol, a Jew, dwell on this point? Why not simply say that while Western freedoms were originally of Protestant and biblical provenance, the liberties we enjoy today have long since been detached from those parochial origins? One reason to remain alert to the Protestant character of modern freedom is this: for 400 years, the Western institution of the national state and many of its familiar rights and liberties flourished principally and reliably in Protestant nations: Britain, the Netherlands, the United States, and elsewhere. By contrast, non-Protestant countries like Mexico and Nigeria that attempted to import versions of the American constitution failed miserably.

FBI Warns of “Terrorist Diaspora” of ISIS Migrants to West Daniel Greenfield

He might want to talk to his boss about it. Because his boss is the one bringing them here to enrich us and become “part of our story”. Just like in New York, Boston and Orlando.

Intelligence and law enforcement agencies worry that a surge of violent extremists will eventually move from ISIS-controlled areas in Syria and Iraq into Western nations with the aim of committing terrorist attacks, FBI Director James Comey told Congress on Tuesday.

“The caliphate will be crushed,” but hundreds of people will remain and become part of a “terrorist diaspora” in the next two to five years. “When ISIS is reduced to an insurgency, those people will try to come to Western Europe and here,” Comey said in testimony before the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee.

They’re already coming here. And Obama has brought thousands into this country. We’ve already seen ISIS acts of terror on our soil due to our immigration policies.

Comey testified alongside Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson and Nicholas Rasmussen, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, at a hearing examining threats to national security 15 years after the 9/11 attacks. The hearing took place just over a week after bombings in New York and New Jersey and a separate stabbing attack at a Minnesota mall.

Rassmussen said the U.S. watchlisting system “allows us to have confidence that if we have an identity, we are very likely to prevent an individual from getting into the United States.”

Those Anti-Muslim Hate Crimes ‘Soaring to Their Highest Levels’ Since 2001 Debunking the media hype. Hugh Fitzgerald

The Sunday New York Times for September 18 carried a story by Eric Lichtblau about a “study” by “researchers” at the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at the San Bernardino campus of California State University, purporting to show that “hate crimes against US Muslims are not just “on the rise” but have “soared to their highest levels since the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.” While the FBI’s hate-crime statistics are not going to be released until November, data from this center, which is compiled from police reports, suggest that “hate crimes” against Muslims have risen 78% in one year. Some “scholars” of the subject believe that the anti-Muslim animus cannot be linked to the attacks all over the place, in Europe and America, by Muslim terrorists, nor to the attacks carried out in the Middle East – in Syria, Iraq, and Libya – by members of the Islamic State, nor to the aggressive, often criminal, behavior, of so many Muslim migrants in Europe, with the constant stream of news about gang rapes, mob violence, property crimes large and small. No, it’s all the fault of some remarks of Donald Trump about the need to keep out, or at least vet more thoroughly, Muslim migrants. It’s not what Muslims do, it’s not what anyone can read in the Qur’an and Hadith, it’s what people like Trump say that supposedly explains the rise in these “hate crimes” against Muslims.

The Times article never mentions the scandal surrounding reports of “hate crimes” against Muslims, which is that more than a few such reports have later turned out to be false. And even were we to accept at face value every one of those claimed to be an anti-Muslim “hate crime,” for 2015 it amounts to 260, that is, five a week, less than one a day, in a country with 325 million people. Does this really constitute a “soaring” rate? And the evidence suggests that we have a right to be doubtful about some of those counted as “hate crimes.”

Here are a few examples: a fire supposedly set at a Texas Islamic Center in February 2015 turned out to have been set near the mosque, by a homeless man, Quba Ferguson, just trying to keep warm. In New Jersey, a Muslim man, Kashif Parvaiz, exploited the willingness of people to believe that there is murderous and rampant Islamophobia, claiming that an anti-Muslim killer had shot his wife in front of their son, screaming “terrorist” as he did so. It turned out that the man’s mistress was the killer, put up to it by him so he could rid himself of his wife and marry her. Nothing “anti-Islamic” about it.

Qur’ans were burned at an Islamic Center, and the Center’s imam, calling for restrictions on “free speech” (meaning anti-Islam speech), was joined by the media, all in a frenzied state about this supposed “hate crime.” Eventually it turned out that the book-burner was one Ali Hassan Al-Assadi, a Muslim angry with people at the local mosques, who said he burned the Qur’ans in retribution.

Want more? There’s the University of Texas Muslimah who claimed that “a gunman followed her to the campus and threatened her.” She finally admitted to making up the whole story.

Or yet another story of mosque vandalism, this time in Fresno where, after CAIR went wild with claims of yet another “hate crimes,” it turned out to have been prompted by a private grievance by one Asiuf Mohammad Khan against a Muslim woman and her family.

Google away, and you’ll find many more examples of crimes first reported as anti-Muslim “hate crimes” that turn out to have been the work of Muslims, or of non-Muslims whose motive had nothing to do with Islam.

And sometimes the original false story of a “hate crime” refuses to die, and for many becomes the accepted version of what happened, even if the investigators long ago concluded otherwise.

Terrorists On Campus Jerusalem University’s “Crossing the Line 2” exposes the campus war on Israel and Jewish students. Frontpagemag.com

SEE THIS VIDEO http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/264342/terrorists-campus-frontpagemagcom

Editor’s note: The following documentary, “Crossing the Line 2: The New Face of Anti-Semitism on Campus,” exposes the growth of the anti-Israel movement on North American university campuses and the rise in violent anti-Semitism that has followed. The documentary was produced by Jerusalem University. For more information, visit StepUpForIsrael.com.

Trump vs. Clinton, Round One The modern political debate format and its disservice to voters. Bruce Thornton

If the first presidential debate was a boxing match, Hillary dropped her guard and stuck out her chin at least half a dozen times, Donald threw wild haymakers that landed maybe once or twice, and the referee Lester Holt obviously had laid a six-figure bet on Hillary. Ali vs. Frazier it wasn’t.

Whether this debate makes a difference in the election is unknowable. Romney cleaned Obama’s clock during their first debate in 2012, but that mattered less than the leaked “47%” sound bite. Remember, in 2008, from September 5 to 17, McCain and Obama were virtually tied in the polls. After Lehman Brothers collapsed on September 15, McCain never again led in a poll, and Obama won by seven points. In every election, candidates are vulnerable to the sort of “event” that terrified British PM Harold Nicolson. Right now in 2016 the dice are still rolling.

More interesting to me is how this spectacle illustrates just how debased our political culture has become. First, what we call a “debate” is not a debate. Rather than two people directly confronting and challenging each other, we have a “moderator” choosing the questions and attempting to manage the answers. Holt’s obvious bias for Hillary illustrates the problem of having a moderator drawn from the media, which are clearly in one camp or another and choose questions and interventions consistent with their ideology.

Thus Holt wasted time scourging Trump with the stale “birther” issue, his tax returns, his alleged misogyny, his bankruptcies, stop-and-frisk, and his support for the Iraq war. But nary a question for Hillary on the Clinton Foundation and the evidence for a conflict of interest during her tenure as Secretary of State, nary a one on her documented lies about her email server through which she passed classified information, nary a word on her responsibility for the debacle in Benghazi and the deaths of four Americans. And how about Hillary’s “basket of deplorables,” or her accusation that whites have an “implicit bias” against blacks, or her support for the Iraq war, or her public insult of General David Petraeus when in 2007 she said his true data on the success of the surge in Iraq “required a willing suspension of disbelief”? More telling, Holt asked Trump six follow-up questions, and Hillary not a single one. And he interrupted Trump more than he did Hillary.

The point, however, is not that we need a “good” moderator rather than a bad one. Nor do I think Holt’s bias is why Trump didn’t do as well as he could have. Trump had every opportunity to pound Hillary with the issues Holt ignored, or to brush off Holt’s “gotcha” fishing. The real point is why do we have a moderator at all? There was no moderator in 1858 during the seven Lincoln-Douglas debates, the perennial epitome of good political debates. Each candidate decided on the issue to address, posed questions to his opponent, or made a claim about him. Each candidate then responded and “fact-checked” his opponent’s assertions, as Lincoln did in the first debate when he responded to Douglas’ charge that he had conspired to “abolitionize” the Democrat and Whig parties. It was up to the some ten-thousand spectators to adjudicate between which candidate was truthful or which made the better argument, not some “moderator” with a partisan axe to grind.

Left-Wing AGs Are Playing Politics with the Law A perversion of rule of law By Jim Copland & Rafael A. Mangual

In at least a handful of blue states, a disturbing trend is emerging: Left-wing state attorneys general are acting less like legal representatives of their constituents and more like partisan political activists. Why is this disturbing? Because, unlike your run-of-the-mill community organizer, activist attorneys general have at their disposal broad legal powers (not to mention millions upon millions of tax dollars) that they can use to investigate, subpoena, sue, or prosecute the targets of their political party — and they’re doing just that.

In New York, Attorney General Eric Schneiderman announced this spring that he would be leading a battle on climate change by investigating fossil-fuel companies, such as ExxonMobil, for “[misleading] investors and the public on the impact of climate change on their businesses.” A thin legal theory, to be sure: Unlike cases in which a corporation has unique information about its own products and services, on the issue of climate change there is a vast public trove of articles and analysis for investors to examine. But Schneiderman was able to invoke broad subpoenas and threats of prosecution under the auspices of New York’s infamous Martin Act, an obscure 1921 statute revived by Schneiderman’s predecessor Eliot Spitzer as he assumed the mantle of the “Sheriff of Wall Street” before the financial crisis. And Schneiderman isn’t alone in this particular effort: Other state AGs lined up beside him. Claude Walker, the attorney general for the U.S. Virgin Islands, issued to the Competitive Enterprise Institute a sweeping subpoena that demanded it turn over all communications with nearly every free-market think tank (including the one that employs the authors of this piece) on issues relating to climate change. (This subpoena has since been withdrawn.)

Among Schneiderman’s fellow AGs who demanded documents and testimony from ExxonMobil was Massachusetts attorney general Maura Healey. Healey has recently shifted her attention to another ideological enemy: gun manufacturers, namely Glock Inc. and Remington Outdoor Co. Earlier this year, Healey unilaterally redefined a term in the state’s assault-weapons ban in order to broaden the scope of weapons covered without going through the legislative process. Healey also launched an investigation into Glock and Remington under a product-liability theory – a move that seems to contradict the Democratic presidential nominee’s statements about gun manufacturers’ being “totally free of liability.” Healey’s investigation is now the subject of ongoing litigation initiated by Glock, which has stated its belief that the “true purpose” of her investigation is “to harass an industry that the attorney general finds distasteful and to make political headlines by pursing members of the firearm industry.” The gun company might have a point, given that Glock pistols apparently cannot be sold to consumers in the state of Massachusetts because they do not comply with the state’s handgun safety regulations. This contributes to the impression that the investigation is merely a pretext for punishing a politically disfavored group.