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October 2016

India and UNESCO: Historical View vs. Jihad View by Jagdish N. Singh

King Solomon built the First Temple here around 1000 BC. The Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar tore it down 400 years later. In the first century BC, King Herod refurbished a Second Temple. It is here that Jesus Christ lashed out against the money-changers. The Roman General Titus exacted revenge against Jewish rebels, sacking and burning the Temple in 70 AD.

UNESCO seeks to erase this history of faiths and replace it with a jihadi narrative that would deny both Christians and Jews their age-old access to the symbols of their faiths. If they are not stopped, the Islamist backers of the UNESCO resolution will be emboldened eventually to back Islamist elements in India to question its Hindu historical and religious sites.

After so many recent votes at UNESCO erasing Judeo-Christian history in favour of Islamist misrepresentation one thing is clear: the sooner democracies leave the UN, the better. Consider the UN’s oil-for-food scandal of 2004-2005 and its growing sex-for-food scandal that is still ongoing. Now, with the UN’s wholesale erasure of Biblical history, the only intelligent response is to head for the exits. The UN seems nothing more than a bloated, corrupt jobs program of champagne for diplomats. It does far more harm than good. Nothing worth having can come from such a degraded place.

One wonders what India’s Permanent Delegation to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) is doing in Paris today. India joined it way back on November 4, 1946. Given the potential of this cultural agency in spreading enlightenment derived from scientific education and fostering development throughout the world, New Delhi sent to the organization internationally acclaimed philosopher and future President, S. Radhakrishnan as a member. He rose to become its chairman during 1948-49. New Delhi’s abstention from voting on the October 18 resolution in UNESCO’s Executive Board, however, indicates the Indian delegation now in Paris is absolutely ineffective.

In a 24-6 vote, the Executive Board ratified a resolution that refers to Jerusalem’s Temple Mount and its adjoining Western Wall solely by their Muslim names of Al-Haram Al-Sharif and the “Buraq Wall.” The nations that voted for it included: Brazil, China, Dominican Republic, Egypt, Morocco, Mexico, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Oman, Russia, South Africa, and Vietnam.

The six countries that voted “no” were Estonia, Germany, Lithuania, Netherlands, United Kingdom and United States.

Those that abstained included: Albania, Argentina, Cameroon, El Salvador, France, Ghana, Greece, Guinea, Haiti, India, Italy, Ivory Coast, Japan, Kenya, Nepal, Paraguay, Saint Vincent and Nevis, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Togo, Trinidad and Tobago, Uganda and Ukraine.

Once the hope candidate, Obama in his final days faces a hopeless electorate By Greg Jaffe

LAS VEGAS — President Obama’s motorcade was still hurtling through Las Vegas traffic when the Rev. Anthony Harris took the microphone to deliver the opening prayer at a rally here for Hillary Clinton.

He looked out on the crowd of 3,000 in the high school gymnasium, waiting for the president to arrive. The feeling was different now than it had been eight years earlier, when Obama had just been elected and Harris led his congregation in prayer for the president. Then, there had been crying and cheering in his tiny storefront chapel and a sense that anything was possible.

Now, Harris, 47, took a deep breath. He hoped his words would rise above the anger and divisiveness of an election season unlike any in his lifetime.

“We pray that at the end of this political process we can learn to love each other, bless each other and trust each other,” he told the crowd, but that noble sentiment did not survive the rally’s first speaker.

Taking the microphone, Sen. Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) blasted Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump as a “liar,” a “racist” and a “fraud.” Lock him up! Lock him up!” the pro-Clinton crowd in the gym started to chant, echoing the anti-Clinton chants of “Lock her up!” that have become common at Trump rallies

“I know people are frustrated,” Harris recalled, thinking as he returned to his seat. “But what does ‘lock him up’ even mean?”

In the week leading up to Election Day, the president will crisscross the country in an effort to help Clinton win the White House and safeguard his legacy. If those events are anything like last week’s campaign stop in Las Vegas, Obama will be met by rowdy, cheering throngs eager to see him one last time before he leaves office.

For many, who will wait hours in line to hear him speak, Obama’s 2008 election represented one of the most hopeful moments in American politics in decades. He was not only the first African American president but a relative newcomer to national politics with a remarkable life story who promised to bridge the country’s historic divides. “If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer,” Obama said that election night in Chicago’s Grant Park.

The Election: What Happens Now? By Roger Kimball

Back in Precambrian times — that’s to say, in June 2016 — I noted that, while the primaries were over, there was nothing to suggest that the multifarious oddities of this exceedingly odd election season had run their course. On the contrary, there were plenty of reasons to believe that the oddities would continue. “There is a powerful tendency,” I noted in that column,

to believe that, whatever local disruptions we face in the course of life’s vicissitudes, “normality” will soon reassert itself and the status quo ante will reinstall itself in the driver’s seat … Whether you embrace or repudiate Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton doesn’t signify in the context of my contention: the oddity of this campaign season is not over. We are likely to see not just local disturbances like the sudden sacking of campaign managers, but spectacular changes, reversals, upsets, and dei ex machina.

I’d like to take a moment to thank FBI Director James Comey for illustrating my thesis.

This election has been hard on pundits espousing the conventional wisdom. They might turn out to be correct—anything not self-contradictory might turn out to be the case—but mere possibility is cheap.

What about the odds, the probabilities? To be frank, I suspect the polls are more aspirational than accurate. What does it mean that a “respected” poll by The Washington Post and ABC reported yesterday that Hillary Clinton’s supposed 12-point lead on Donald Trump had suddenly narrowed to 2 points? That poll, by the way, was conducted before the revelation that thousands of new State Department emails were discovered on a device used by Anthony Weiner when he wasn’t sexting 15-year-olds.

The Clinton campaign has been thrown into hysterical (by which I do not mean “funny”) disarray by the revelations, which undermine The Narrative in about 38 different ways. (Remember that Clinton’s chief aide, Huma Abedin, swore under oath that she had given up all devices containing State Department emails.) CONTINUE AT SITE

Democrat Doug Schoen Is Reconsidering His Support For Hillary Clinton Because Of FBI Investigation By Tim Hains

Hillary Clinton supporter, Fox News contributor, and former pollster Doug Schoen told FNC’s Harris Faulkner Sunday night that the newly renewed FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton is forcing him to “reassess” his support for the Democratic candidate.

DOUG SCHOEN: As you know, I have been a supporter of Secretary Clinton… But given that this investigation is going to go on for many months after the election… But if the Secretary of State wins, we will have a president under criminal investigation, with Huma Abedin under criminal investigation, with the Secretary of State, the president-elect, should she win under investigation.

Harris, under these circumstances, I am actively reassessing my support. I’m not a Trump —

HARRIS FAULKNER, FOX NEWS: Whoa, whoa, wait a minute. You are not going to vote for Hillary Clinton?

SCHOEN: Harris, I’m deeply concerned that we’ll have a constitutional crisis if she’s elected.

FAULKNER: Wow!

SCHOEN: I want to learn more this week. See what we see. But as of today, I am not a supporter of the Secretary of State for the nation’s highest office.

FAULKNER: How long have you known the clintons.

SCHOEN: I’ve known the clintons since ’94.

FAULKNER: Wow! But their friend here has said he’s reconsidering.

SCHOEN: I have to, because of the impact on the governance of the country and our international situation.

FAULKNER: So the news in that is are there other people, I would imagine, like Doug Schoen.

German Police Examine Islamic State Stabbing Claim Extremist group says it was responsible for a knife attack in Hamburg that left a teenager dead By William Boston

BERLIN—German authorities on Sunday were trying to determine the authenticity of a claim by Islamic State that the group was responsible for a knife attack in Hamburg two weeks ago that left a teenager dead and set off a manhunt for the unknown attacker.

The militant group’s Amaq news agency posted a statement on its website earlier in the day, saying the attack was carried out by a “soldier of the Islamic State.”

But Hamburg police said the statement doesn’t entirely match the evidence police have turned up since the attack on Oct. 16 and that police couldn’t confirm the attack was an act of terrorism.

A police spokeswoman said homicide detectives, who have been investigating since the attack, are sharing evidence with the city’s special antiterror investigators to determine the veracity of Islamic State’s claims.

“We are checking this to determine its authenticity, but the statement doesn’t match the results of our investigation. There are at least contradictions between our investigation and what they are saying,” a spokeswoman for the Hamburg police told The Wall Street Journal.

Police said two teenagers were sitting under the Kennedy Bridge near the shore of the Alster lake in downtown Hamburg on the evening of Oct. 16, when a tall, Middle Eastern looking man approached them and stabbed the 16-year-old boy and shoved the 15-year-old girl into the water. The girl escaped and called the police. The boy was taken to the hospital, where he died of his wounds later that night.

Police have had few clues to go on and haven’t been able to positively identify the alleged attacker.

Russia Welcomes Growing Wave of ‘Red Tourists’ From China Nostalgia for Communist past as well as capitalist bargain-hunting draw more Chinese visitorsBy Amie Ferris-Rotman

MOSCOW—To see how good relations are between Russia and China these days, check out Novodevichy Cemetery here.

Chinese tourists arrive by the busload each week to pay their respects to Wang Ming, a Chinese Communist leader buried here alongside some of Russia’s most prominent writers, composers and politicians.

“We’re learning about (Vladimir) Lenin and (Josef) Stalin, and how they created this country,” said 39-year-old Cheng Ling, an accountant in Shanghai, as she slid ruble coins along the side of the red granite plinth, a tradition ensuring the dead have money in the afterlife.

Russia’s relations with the West have deteriorated amid the conflicts in Ukraine and Syria and its economy has been battered by punitive sanctions and low oil prices. But the country is welcoming record numbers of Chinese visitors, who are taking advantage of a weak ruble, visa-free group travel, and the opportunity to retrace Communist history.

Red tourism—visiting sites relevant to the Communist Party of China—has flourished under President Xi Jinping, at home and abroad. In June 2015, Russia and China formally agreed on opening up red-tourism routes, a deal signed in Shaoshan, the birthplace of Mao Zedong.

“Travel to Russia is considered politically correct,” said Wolfgang Arlt, director of the China Outbound Tourism Research Institute, which is based in Beijing and Hamburg.

In addition, terror attacks in France and Belgium have unnerved many Chinese travelers, he said. “Russia is seen as a very safe option.”

More than 1.1 million Chinese tourists are expected to visit Russia this year, about 16% more than 2015, according to figures from market-research firm Euromonitor released in June. That puts Russia at No. 16 on the list of top destinations for Chinese tourists, behind the U.S. and France but ahead of the U.K. CONTINUE AT SITE

Branding Moderates as ‘Anti-Muslim’ The American left tries to stigmatize Muslim reformers.

As if facing down violent Islamist fanatics isn’t enough, Muslim reformers now have to dodge attacks from the American left. Consider the Southern Poverty Law Center’s decision last week to brand two such reformers, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Britain’s Maajid Nawaz, as “anti-Muslim extremists.”

Founded in 1971 by civil-rights activists, the Montgomery, Alabama-based law center says it’s committed to “fighting hate and bigotry and to seeking justice for the most vulnerable members of our society.” That apparently doesn’t include civil rights in the Muslim world or among Muslims living in the U.S.

Ms. Hirsi Ali, who sometimes writes for these pages, is a native of Somalia who later immigrated to the Netherlands and then the U.S. She has braved death threats from jihadists for criticizing female genital mutilation, blasphemy laws, and repression of women and minorities in the Muslim world.

The report attempts to cast doubt on her personal story. Ms. Hirsi Ali, the group sneers, “says she endured female genital mutilation.” It goes on to call her “toxic” for arguing that there is an ideological and theological dimension to what used to be called the war on terror. By that measure France’s Socialist Prime Minister Manuel Valls is also an extremist.

Mr. Nawaz is a British-Pakistani former Islamist who now campaigns against jihadist ideology. He has opposed Islamist movements in the U.K. as well as far-right parties such as the English Defence League. Among the law center’s evidence for its anti-Muslim claim: Mr. Nawaz once posted a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad on Twitter “despite the fact that many Muslims see it as blasphemous.” The Ayatollah Khomeini would agree.

The unstated premise of the report is that criticizing Islamist movements, ideologies and regimes, and Islam itself, is the same as hating Muslims. If the Western left believes this, then already-embattled reformers in the Muslim world will be even more isolated.

The FBI Director’s Unworthy Choice Comey acceded to the apparent wish of Obama that no charges be brought against Clinton. By Michael B. Mukasey

We need not worry unduly about the factual void at the center of the FBI director’s announcement on Friday that the bureau had found emails—perhaps thousands—“pertinent” in some unspecified way to its investigation into Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified emails while she was secretary of state.

True, we don’t know what is actually in the emails of Huma Abedin, Mrs. Clinton’s close aide, but we can nonetheless draw some conclusions about how FBI Director James Comey came to issue his Delphic notice to Congress, and what the near-term future course of this investigation will be. Regrettably, those conclusions do no credit to him, or to the leadership of the Justice Department, of which the FBI is a part.

Friday’s announcement had a history. Recall that Mr. Comey’s authority extends only to supervising the gathering of facts to be presented to Justice Department lawyers for their confidential determination of whether those facts justify a federal prosecution.
Nonetheless, in July he announced that “no reasonable prosecutor” would seek to charge her with a crime, although Mrs. Clinton had classified information on a private nonsecure server—at least a misdemeanor under one statute; and although she was “extremely careless” in her handling of classified information such that it was exposed to hacking by hostile foreign nations—a felony under another statute; and apparently had caused the destruction of emails—a felony under two other statutes. He then told Congress repeatedly that the investigation into her handling of emails was closed.

Those decisions were not his to make, nor were the reasons he offered for making them at all tenable: that prosecutions for anything but mishandling large amounts of classified information, accompanied by false statements to investigators, were unprecedented; and that criminal prosecutions for gross negligence were constitutionally suspect.

Members of the military have been imprisoned and dishonorably discharged for mishandling far less information, and prosecutions for criminal negligence are commonplace and entirely permissible. Yet the attorney general, whose decisions they were, and who had available to her enough legal voltage to vaporize Mr. Comey’s flimsy reasons for inaction, told Congress she would simply defer to the director.

That July announcement of Mr. Comey, and that testimony by Attorney General Loretta Lynch, also had a history.

When the FBI learned that two of the secretary’s staff members had classified information on their computers, rather than being handed grand-jury subpoenas demanding the surrender of those computers, the staff members received immunity in return for giving them up. In addition, they successfully insisted that the computers not be searched for any data following the date when Congress subpoenaed information relating to its own investigation, and that the computers be physically destroyed after relevant data within the stipulated period was extracted.

The technician who destroyed 30,000 of Mrs. Clinton’s emails after Congress directed that they be preserved lied to investigators even after receiving immunity. He then testified that Clinton aides requested before service of the subpoena that he destroy them, and that he destroyed them afterward on his own initiative.

Why would an FBI director, who at one time was an able and aggressive prosecutor, agree to such terms or accept such a fantastic story? CONTINUE AT SITE

Comey and Clinton Agonistes Hillary’s campaign tries to turn Saint James into Ken Starr.

“Donald Trump is reacting to this with his usual overkill, asserting without evidence that the new emails may be those missing 33,000. But the legal and political blundering at Justice and FBI feed his message that the executive branch needs to be swept clean to end a culture of corruption. Mr. Comey is no hero, but neither is he responsible for Mrs. Clinton’s potential legal jeopardy. She has built her own career monument of deception and public mistrust.”

All of a sudden Hillary Clinton and her presidential campaign have discovered the virtues of transparency. And all of a sudden FBI Director James Comey, formerly Eliot Ness in the eyes of Democrats and the press, is J. Edgar Hoover. Such are the miraculous political transformations caused by Mr. Comey’s announcement Friday that the FBI has found more emails that may be relevant to Mrs. Clinton’s mishandling of classified information.

“It’s not just strange. It’s unprecedented, and it is deeply troubling, because voters deserve to get full and complete facts,” Mrs. Clinton said Saturday about Mr. Comey’s letter to Congress. That wasn’t her line when she created her personal email server to hide her correspondence from public-records laws, or when she claimed not to have sent classified information or did as little as possible to cooperate with Congress and the FBI.

Mrs. Clinton could still help voters out by coughing up her 33,000 missing emails. Or she could let her aide Huma Abedin explain to the press what she may have sent to estranged husband Anthony Weiner, whose laptop contains the new-found emails. But that kind of genuine transparency might be hard to contain. And with eight days until Nov. 8 the Democrats need someone else to blame for all of their previous lack of political transparency.

That means Mr. Comey, who over the weekend became the latest stand-in for the vast right-wing conspiracy. “By providing selective information, he has allowed partisans to distort and exaggerate in order to inflict maximum political damage, and no one can separate what is true from what is not because Comey has not been forthcoming with the facts,” said a clearly agitated Clinton campaign chief John Podesta in a media call Saturday.

Look for more to come as Democrats attempt to mobilize their supporters to vote by turning Mr. Comey into Whitewater prosecutor Ken Starr. This won’t be easy since Mr. Comey was appointed by President Obama, and Democrats have spent so many years praising Mr. Comey as St. James of the Beltway.

Maybe they should have listened to our warnings about Mr. Comey when he let his buddy Patrick Fitzgerald prosecute Scooter Libby on dubious charges; when he overreached against financier Frank Quattrone; or when he threatened to resign if the Bush Administration didn’t follow his orders on surveillance. Democrats hailed those events.

Mr. Comey’s original sin in the Clinton investigation was not demanding that Justice empanel a grand jury. He compounded that with his July soliloquy to the media exonerating Mrs. Clinton when that is the job of Attorney General Loretta Lynch. Mr. Comey’s friends are leaking that he felt he had to go public then because Ms. Lynch had compromised her credibility by meeting only days earlier with Bill Clinton on an airport tarmac.

Mr. Comey’s public declaration undercut political accountability. And sure enough, Ms. Lynch responded by saying she would defer to Mr. Comey, essentially ducking her legal and political responsibility. Democrats and the media hailed Mr. Comey for his judgment.

Mr. Comey also told Congress at the time that the investigation was closed, and so he felt he was obliged to update the oversight committees when there was more information. No doubt he believed he had to do that before the election lest he be accused of participating in a cover-up if the new evidence later became public.

Ms. Lynch’s team is now leaking, and the Clinton campaign is amplifying, that Mr. Comey sent his Friday letter over the objections of Justice officials. But then why didn’t Ms. Lynch simply order him not to send the letter? The AG has clear line authority over the FBI director. Our guess is that she feared that Mr. Comey might then have resigned, which would have created an even bigger pre-election firestorm than an ambiguous letter. CONTINUE AT SITE