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November 2016

Qatar’s Shopping Spree to Buy and Displace the West? by Giulio Meotti

Qatar sits on the executive board of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the UN agency for culture and science has just deleted three thousand years of Jewish history in Jerusalem, and has set its sights on the main chair at Unesco: as the successor of Unesco’s secretary general, Irina Bokova.

Human rights organizations have already promoted a campaign to prevent Kawari from taking the UNESCO seat. Citing a vast amount of anti-Semitic material present at the Doha Literature fair, Kawari’s flagship, the Wiesenthal Center launched a campaign against his candidacy.

Qatar is the puppeteer of UNESCO’s anti-Semitic resolution on Jerusalem and a world center of Islamic extremism…. Qatar does not make any mystery of trying to submit Western culture to the Muslim crescent.

The Soviet Union, during the Cold War, invested in propaganda operations in the West to subvert capitalism and democracy. Communism found precious allies in the so-called “useful idiots” who facilitated Soviet work in academia, newspapers and publishing houses. Political Islam has been using the same convenient outlets and mechanisms to spread Islamic sharia law in the West.

The old role of Soviet propaganda has now been taken up by Islamic regimes. Qatar, for instance, is not only interested in buying large segments of Europe’s economy (Hochtief, Volkswagen, Porsche, Canary Wharf and Deutsche Bank), but also in playing a key role in Europe’s culture.

Qatar sits on the executive board of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the UN agency that has just erased 3000 years of Jewish history in Jerusalem, and has set its sights on the main chair at UNESCO: as the successor of UNESCO’s secretary general, Irina Bokova.

U. of Michigan Gives Students Play-Doh, Coloring Books to Cope With Trump By Tom Knighton

For the vast majority of Americans, November 9 only differed from the week preceding it in the lack of political ads permeating their media. For many, it was a welcome end to months upon months of hateful rhetoric and horrible slanders.

On many college campuses, however, it wasn’t the end of the campaign, but the beginning of Armaggedon or something.

At Yale University, supposedly one of the most elite institutions of higher learning in the country, an anonymous professor has decided to let students skip their midterms:

“I am getting many heartfelt notes from students who are in shock over the election returns,” the professor wrote in an email to his students, according to Yale Daily News Managing Editor Jon Victor tweeted.

“The ones I find most upsetting are those who fear, rightly or wrongly, for their own families. These students are requesting that the exam be postponed. On the other hand, I am sure that many students have sacrificed to prepare for the test …Therefore, I am making the exam optional.”

The professor told the class he would “calculate each student’s grade both with and without” the exam.

Remember when asking a professor to postpone an exam for anything short of a natural disaster was grounds to be laughed at? Ah, good times. Good times.

However, that professor’s decision was far from being the silliest example:

At Tufts University, arts and crafts were on offer. And the University of Kansas reminded students via social media of the therapy dogs available for comfort every other Wednesday.

Colleges nationwide scrambled to help students process Republican Donald Trump’s stunning election victory. They’re acknowledging that many students were up late watching results and so may not be at their sharpest in early-morning lectures. More so, they’re responding to a widespread sense of shock and despair on campuses to the victory of a candidate who offended Mexicans, Gold Star mothers, Muslims and the disabled during the course of the campaign.

[…]

“People are frustrated, people are just really sad and shocked,” said Trey Boynton, the director of multi-ethnic student affairs at the University of Michigan. “A lot of people are feeling like there has been a loss. We talked about grief today and about the loss of hope that this election would solidify the progress that was being made.”

There was a steady flow of students entering Ms. Boynton’s office Wednesday. They spent the day sprawled around the center, playing with Play-Doh and coloring in coloring books, as they sought comfort and distraction.

Play-Doh and coloring.

And they wonder why people don’t take them seriously.

In addition to the above examples, Cornell University hosted a “cry-in,” where staff provided distraught students with tissues and hot chocolate. CONTINUE AT SITE

Unsolicited Advice for the Trump Transition Team on National Security Intelligence By Andrew C. McCarthy

It was encouraging Wednesday to hear that President Obama intends to emulate President Bush, who generously provided Obama with a highly informative and smooth transition process.

Running the executive branch is a daunting task, so there is no aspect of the transition to a new administration that is unimportant. But obviously, the most crucial focus for New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who is heading up President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team, must be national security.

That transition is going to be more complicated than it should be, but there are things Gov. Christie can do – better to say, people he ought to consult — to make sure his team is getting accurate information.

The Bush National Security Council was very good about putting together briefing books so their successors could hit the ground running. The problem now, however, is the trustworthiness of what is in those books.

As PJ Media has reported, a highly disturbing report by a congressional task force this summer found that the Obama administration had politicized its intelligence product.

Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-KS), who has been stellar on national security issues and was among the leaders of the task force (comprised of the Intelligence, Armed Services, and Appropriations Committees), put it this way when the report was issued:

After months of investigation, this much is very clear: from the middle of 2014 to the middle of 2015, the United States Central Command’s most senior intelligence leaders manipulated the command’s intelligence products to downplay the threat from ISIS in Iraq.

The result: consumers of those intelligence products were provided a consistently “rosy” view of U.S. operational success against ISIS. That may well have resulted in putting American troops at risk as policymakers relied on this intelligence when formulating policy and allocating resources for the fight.

The intelligence manipulation became a controversy in 2015, when 50 intelligence-community whistleblowers complained that their reports on the Islamic State and al-Qaeda terror networks were being altered.

Out-Rigging the Vote Never Underestimate the inexplicable. By David Solway

There can be no doubt that the voting process was rigged against Donald Trump in more ways than one. According to reports, fiscal criminal and youthful Nazi collaborator George Soros’ vast fortune was in play to swing the election Hillary’s way, including fomenting violence at Trump’s rallies (for which Trump himself was blamed). Clinton cash, illegally gained, bankrolled a promotional campaign that blitzed the nation. Dead voters, multiple voters, illegal voters, and opportunely-pardoned felons, loyal Democrats all, were evident at the polls in considerable force, like the zombies swarming the last bastion of civilization in the 2016 film Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. “Today’s voter lists,” writes former into-tech management consultant Paul Murphy, “are generally thought to include something like 1.8 million dead voters, 6.4 million illegals, 1.8 million ineligible felons, and perhaps 2.7 million people registered to vote in more than one state.” And of course the polls were skewed in Hillary’s favor through selective sampling techniques in what is known as a psyops strategy to influence the behavior of voters, creating the impression that Clinton was gathering momentum.

And yet Trump won against the odds, prompting the question: Were there really enough votes in flyover country and leftover country to offset the oleaginous corruption greasing Hillary’s route to the White House and to discount the vote-rich conurbations and coastal corridors, the mentally vacant celebrity class, the entire left-liberal elite, the fraudulent pollsters, the lying media, the deceased, the duped, the traumatic feminists, the compromised academics, the blizzard of snowflake students blanketing the eduscape, the Muslim fifth column, the disaffected Libertarians voting for nonsense candidates, and the turncoat Republicans who may as well have registered as Democratic operatives? This seems a rather implausible assumption.

I have a theory, which I will share with bemused readers. I believe the key factor in producing so improbable an electoral outcome was, frankly speaking, Israel, not the country itself but the all-powerful Cosmocrator who rules the universe, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. For the Lord knew that the policies of Barack Obama’s administration had put Israel at critical risk in the most volatile region in the world, and that the leaders of Iran, taking a page from their ancestor Haman the Agagite, were plotting the wholesale destruction of the Jewish state. The Lord also knew that Hillary Clinton and the crime syndicate known as the Democratic Party would advance Iran’s genocidal project.

Neither did He forget the plight of the American people under a venal and iniquitous regime nor America’s covenantal vocation. Did not the Pilgrims see themselves as Israelites in the wilderness—“We shall find that the God of Israel is among us” John Winthrop preached in his 1630 sermon A Modell of Christian Charity—and did not the Declaration of Independence echo the Sinai covenant? Did not John Adams write in a letter to Thomas Jefferson “I will insist that the Hebrews have done more to civilize man than any other nation” and did not Lincoln at Independence Hall in Philadelphia quote from the imprecatory Psalm 137? Were not Jerusalem and the New Jerusalem bound together? CONTINUE AT SITE

The Unbearable Lightness of Anti-Trump Hysterics By Patricia McCarthy

Donald Trump’s victory on November 8 was a shock to liberals all over the country, all over the world. So confident of their own brilliance, superiority and their own rightness in all things, his win was a major shock to their tender but blinkered sensibilities. It had apparently not occurred to them that he could actually win. So out of touch with the American people outside of their personal space, they were completely taken by surprise by his electoral success.

Hillary and her inner circle were shocked as well. It never occurred to them that her many crimes, her foundation schemes to enrich herself, her lifetime of lying and her carelessness about national security would filter down to voters. They assumed regular people, those stupid people Jonathan Gruber counted on to accept the nonsense that is Obamacare, would not know about or read the thousands of leaked Podesta emails that expose the totally self-serving nature of the Clintons and their staff. The emails prove that they care nothing about the country, the shrinking middle class, ISIS, or Iran’s nuclear ambitions. They care only about winning, keeping power and staying rich. Liberals routinely and mistakenly view the American people as beneath them, as ignorant. To their great shock, the deplorables are more informed than Clinton and the DNC ever thought possible.

Van Jones on CNN of course blamed the defeat of HRC on racism. He called it a “whitelash.” Clever? Not so much. He is among the most racist pundits we have had to endure these past eight years. His hatred of white people oozes out of every pore. He has no clue about the country he is so in the habit of vilifying. He is an Al Sharpton, a typical race hustler, in a fancy suit and expensive glasses.

Cokie Roberts reliably blamed sexism. Hillary lost because she is a woman. Men just don’t want to see a woman in the White House! Nonsense. It curiously has not occurred to her that it might be Hillary’s record abent of any achievement, her criminal history, her pathological lying, or her abuse of victimized women in the furtherance of her husband’s career that turned voters against her.

The worst example of mind-numbed bias was Martha Raddatz, a long-time progressive who was inexplicably allowed to “moderate” one of the debates. Fighting back tears, not only did she describe Trump’s victory as a victory for racism, sexism, Islamophobia, homophobia — all the usual accusations that spill so easily off the tongues of liberals when describing conservatives — she claimed no military servicemen would be safe under a Trump administration because he so clearly knows nothing about the military or foreign policy.

Excuse me! Barack Obama has done such terrible damage to our men and women who serve that he should be in the brig. He tied the hands of his generals who stayed. He fired those, hundreds of them, who refused to do his anti-military bidding. Obama’s ridiculous rules of engagement have been the cause of hundreds, maybe even thousands of American deaths in Afghanistan. Our guys are hardly allowed to defend themselves. Trump will change that. Raddatz is sadly typical of the uninformed left. So oblivious to facts that do not fit with her own ideology, she has become as ignorant as she thinks Trump’s irredeemable voters are.

A Note to the boo-hoo crowd -Dry your tears, blow your noses, and grow up!! By Ruth King

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2016/11/a_note_to_the_boohoo_crowd.html

A friend whom I love told me yesterday that his teenaged daughter cried herself to sleep when Trump won and that in school (a private and tony school… natch) “counselors” comforted the students in their grief. This was repeated throughout the city in public as well as private schools and in colleges.

He was quite outraged at my scorn, having expected more empathy. When I asked how she felt about the senatorial and congressional election — after all, Congress can halt those dreadful actions that a Trump “dictatorship” would enact… it was clear that neither father nor daughter knew who ran and on what issues.

After that jarring conversation I reflected on those things that affected me at her age, although I generally don’t engage in smarmy nostalgia.

When I was a teenager the words “iron lung” terrified us as we saw schoolmates maimed and felled by a raging polio epidemic. We had to absorb a genocide that killed one of every three Jews in the world, including my grandparents and all my cousins, uncles, and aunts. We were affronted by racial laws that discriminated against Negroes in the South and denied hiring and educational opportunities throughout the rest of the country; signs that said “no dogs and no Jews”; poverty and joblessness that afflicted and rendered whole families homeless as their possessions were placed on the sidewalks following their evictions; and the banning of books, films, and music.

But we did have the freedom to engage in debate and to differ with one another and agree on protesting the foregoing policies that were inimical to a proper democracy. And we did pass around clandestine copies of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Tropic of Cancer — both banned for their explicit sex.

At the Bronx High School of Science, we argued over Eisenhower versus Stevenson, over the use of nuclear weapons to end the war in Japan, over the death penalty for the Rosenbergs, over the Korean War and the firing of General MacArthur, over the threat of Communism, over local and national policies and politics and foreign policy.

Our debates were loud but civilized. When Adlai Stevenson lost the election to General Dwight Eisenhower many students were in shock that the “intellectual” lost to a military man. The faculty, which was very liberal, offered no safe spaces and no counseling. We did not need them.

What has happened to these coddled and spoiled and illiberal young people today?

A European Migrant Reckoning Mainstream European leaders are beginning to think about real solutions to the crisis.

Europe’s migration crisis may have reached a turning point. With populist and far-right parties on the march across the Continent, mainstream European leaders are starting to listen to voters’ concerns about absorbing more than a million newcomers from the Middle East and Africa. It’s about time.

One sign came Sunday, when the German Interior Ministry called for aggressive interception of refugees attempting to cross the Mediterranean from North Africa. “The elimination of the prospect of reaching the European coast could convince migrants to avoid embarking on the life-threatening and costly journey,” an Interior Ministry official told the Welt am Sonntag newspaper.

The Mediterranean crossing from Libya to Italy is one of two major routes used by migrants to reach Europe, and it is by far the more perilous. With revenues down, smugglers are stuffing more would-be migrants aboard unseaworthy boats for a crossing on choppy waters that can take several hours. One in every 44 doesn’t make it.

Even so, some 164,000 crossed through the Libya-Italy route this year. The German proposal could dramatically reduce that number by rerouting intercepted migrants back to African countries such as Egypt and Tunisia. Currently, intercepted boats are towed to the Italian coast. Once rerouted, the migrants would be allowed to apply for asylum through legal channels.

This model, which we have long championed, has the benefit of imposing order on a chaotic situation. It also reduces the incentives for the smuggler business model, since the traffickers’ clients—the migrants—will understand that they are wasting their money and risking their lives in vain.

Which brings us to the second migrant route, from Turkey to the Balkans via the Greek islands. About 170,000 have arrived via the so-called Western Balkan Corridor so far this year, and here, too, there are signs that European officials are getting serious. To wit, Austrian Defense Minister Hans Peter Doskozil over the weekend warned that a Brussels deal with Ankara to intercept migrants may not last, and that European governments must be prepared to police EU borders on their own.

Trump Adviser: Israeli Settlement Building Not an Impediment to Peace Jason Greenblatt told Israeli radio the president-elect doesn’t see the settlement activity as problematic By Felicia Schwartz

A top policy adviser to Donald Trump during his campaign said the president-elect doesn’t view Israeli settlements built in disputed areas as an obstacle to peace, a position sharply at odds with Obama administration policy in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The Obama administration opposes Israel’s settlement building, and has ramped up criticism from previous administrations—both Republican and Democratic—of the activity.

Jason Greenblatt, who Mr. Trump named co-chair of an Israel policy committee during his campaign in July, on Thursday played down any risk from the building activity to peace prospects.

“Mr. Trump does not view the settlements as being an obstacle for peace,” Mr. Greenblatt told Israel’s Army Radio. “The two sides are going to have to decide how to deal with that region, but it’s certainly not Mr. Trump’s view that settlement activity should be condemned and that it is an obstacle to peace. It is not the obstacle to peace.”

Mr. Greenblatt is an executive vice president and chief legal officer of the Trump Organization. He said he would be honored to serve in a Trump administration and work on issues including the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but that it was too early to say whether he would.

President Barack Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry and other U.S. officials have said Israel’s construction of settlements is hindering the possibilities to reach a peace deal providing for side-by-side Jewish and Palestinian states, a U.S. goal since the 1980s.

White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said Thursday that Mr. Greenblatt’s comments contradict years of bipartisan U.S. policy.

“Trying to change facts on the ground only puts a negotiated settlement, a resolution of differences between the two parties, further away,” Mr. Earnest said at a press briefing. “So, the president views that kind of continued settlement expansion as counterproductive.”

Conservative Israeli lawmakers and Jewish settlers have welcomed the election of Mr. Trump as president, hoping he will move away from the decadeslong U.S. policy pursuing a two-state solution.

Mr. Trump in the past has been quoted approving of the Israeli settlements. On the campaign trail, he has promised to move the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The U.S. doesn’t recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital as it awaits a two-state solution.

Aaron David Miller, a former adviser to Republican and Democratic secretaries of State, said Mr. Greenblatt’s comments suggest that the Trump administration is unlikely to raise the issue of settlement building with Israel as a potential problem. Mr. Trump has made contradictory statements that make it hard to predict what he might do, Mr. Miller said. CONTINUE AT SITE

Trump’s Secret Weapon: Obama Not to take away from the GOP victory, but this was a rejection of Obama’s governing. By Kimberley A. Strassel

President-elect Donald Trump paid a visit to the White House Thursday, and by all accounts he was pleasant toward the current occupant. He should be, since Mr. Trump owes his victory to Barack Obama.

Hillary Clinton’s defeat has left the Democratic Party a smoldering heap, its leaders pointing fingers over who or what to blame: James Comey. Robby Mook. Voter suppression. WikiLeaks. Sexism. Barely a mention has been made of the man who presided over one of the most epic party meltdowns in the country’s history: Mr. Obama.

Deep Democratic fissures have been on display for years, with Mrs. Clinton’s rancorous primary against Bernie Sanders only the most recent example. But the media chose to ignore this and instead to obsess about largely superficial GOP divisions. All along this election has been portrayed as a referendum on Mr. Trump. Tuesday’s results are far better viewed as a thundering repudiation, at every level, of Mr. Obama’s governing and policies.

In 2009, the president’s first year in office, the Democrats held 257 House seats, a majority that was geographically and politically diverse. After Tuesday the figure stands at 193, and fully one-third of these Democrats hail from three blue states: New York, California and Massachusetts.

The story is equally grim for Democrats in the Senate. In 2009 they held the first filibuster-proof majority since the 1970s, which evaporated in the wake of ObamaCare. Tuesday’s vote was the best chance Democrats will have in years to retake the chamber, but they lost nearly every close race.

Trump and the Democrats The lesson: Progressive government can’t be imposed from the top.

Donald Trump’s victory is already inspiring reflection about the future of the Republican Party, and rightly so, but Democrats don’t seem to be undertaking any similar introspection. This is a mistake, because they wouldn’t have been ushered out of power up and down the ballot if the American public wasn’t rejecting the results and methods of the last eight years.

Liberals are attributing Hillary Clinton’s loss to FBI Director Jim Comey, while the more honest admit her email scandal and Clinton Foundation ethics were problems. Others note she was a less than inspiring campaigner. The left’s all-purpose answer seems to be that the same American people who elected President Obama twice have defaulted to their traditional sexism, racism and xenophobia.

Blaming “white-lash” is silly—of the roughly 700 U.S. counties that Mr. Obama won twice, about one-third broke this time for Mr. Trump—but these cultural rationalizations are lamentable and instructive. Too many liberals, and some conservatives, simply cannot imagine how great numbers of Americans think and perceive their own interests. Thus wrong opinions must be the result of cognitive limitations or character flaws. Mrs. Clinton called Trump supporters “deplorables,” “irredeemable” and “not America,” as if there could be no other explanation.

These failures of empathy are also a staple of Mr. Obama’s rhetoric, with his moral lectures about who we are as Americans and the arc of history always bending toward—well, his point of view. For the President, and most prominent Democrats these days, opponents who debate policies and principles never do so in good faith.

For eight long years Mr. Obama’s belief that he holds the mandate of heaven has guided how he has used and abused presidential power. He was elected in 2008 on a message of hope and centrist unity, but he was soon ramming through 40 years of pent-up progressive priorities. Recall his famous 2009 brush-off of Republican Eric Cantor, who had proposed some bipartisan ideas for the stimulus: “Eric, I won.”

Democrats imposed ObamaCare on a straight partisan majority, though the polls showed there was no political consensus about a new entitlement among the oft-invoked, rarely consulted American people. National health care is no more popular today and is now misfiring in all the ways the critics predicted. The GOP was frozen out of all major economic decisions in 2009-10, and one price was the weak recovery that persists to this day.

Democrats did have a historic supermajority, but that wasn’t a mandate to do whatever they could get away with, and they lost a record 63 House seats in the midterms as punishment. Mr. Obama then feinted toward a grand bargain with John Boehner, only to ambush the then Speaker with politically impossible tax-increase demands at the 11th hour.

The President won re-election in 2012 by converting a decent man like Mitt Romney into a monster who would prosecute a “war on women.” He also weaponized identity politics to polarize voters for his own purposes.