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December 2016

MY SAY: IMAGINE THE CHUTZPAH OF DONALD TRUMP

The Diplos, the pundits, the headlines, the “calumnists”are all so upset. Imagine the gall of Donald Trump to appoint an ambassador to Israel who actually likes the country!

The title of the posting is actually amusing: Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary

How about that? “extraordinary ” and “plenipotentiary”…..

A note to those who “console” themselves by claiming that David Friedman’s policies will be completely subject to the will of Donald Trump:

definition of plenipotentiary –

a person, especially a diplomat, invested with the full power of independent action on behalf of their government, typically in a foreign country.
2.having full power to take independent action.

They would obviously prefer plenipotentates like Martin Indyk who served as U.S. ambassador to Israel from 1995 to 1997 and again from 2000 to 2001,who were strident critics of Israel and would use harsh threats to force Israeli concessions to every and all Palarab demands. In his own words : he boasted to the Washington Post (2-24-97) that he saw his job in Israel as similar to “a circus master” who “cracks the whip” in order to “get [the animals] to move around in an orderly fashion.”
That animus is truly extraordinary!
Hooray for Donald Trump!

Time to Get Rid of the EPA? Scott Pruitt May Be Just the Guy to Do It Trump’s nominee for the EPA Administrator could — and should — abolish the agency. By Henry I. Miller

Several commentators have characterized the selection of Oklahoma attorney general Scott Pruitt to become the next EPA Administrator as a sharp stick in the eye to the agency and its employees. They’re right — and seldom has any herd of federal bureaucrats been more deserving of it. For decades, in administrations Democratic and Republican alike, the EPA has been relentlessly ideological, politicized, corrupt, and incompetent.

When I joined the Food and Drug Administration in 1979, I was essentially apolitical and knew next to nothing about federal regulation. I was a science nerd who had spent the previous 16 years in college, graduate school, medical school, and postdoctoral training. It didn’t take long until I learned about the jungle of government bureaucracies, and one of the harshest lessons concerned the perfidy and incompetence of one of the FDA’s siblings, the EPA.

I found the EPA to be relentlessly anti-science, anti-technology, and anti-industry. The only thing it seemed to be for was the Europeans’ innovation-busting “precautionary principle,” the view that until a product or activity has been definitively proven safe, it should be banned or at least smothered with regulation. In fact, during international discussions and negotiations over the harmonization of biotechnology regulations in which I participated, the EPA often seemed allied with the European Union and committed to working against U.S. interests.

To my astonishment, I found that there were entire groups within the EPA whose function it was to lie to the Office of Management and Budget and to Congress about the rationale for and impacts of their proposed regulations. And over the years, I discovered that there is a kind of underground railway by which the most incompetent, disaffected, and anti-industry employees from other regulatory agencies find their way to the EPA, creating a miasma of dysfunctional governance.

During the two decades since I left government service, I’ve continued to watch the EPA’s shenanigans with a mixture of awe and vexation. Policy by policy and decision by decision, the EPA has decimated the nation’s competitiveness, ability to innovate, and capacity to create wealth. Its policies and decisions have single-handedly killed off entire once-promising sectors of biotechnology, including bioremediation (the use of microorganisms to clean up toxic wastes, including oil spills) and microorganisms that when sprayed on plants could prevent frost damage.

The EPA’s expansive and ever-expanding regulations impose huge costs on American businesses and, ultimately, on consumers. An analysis by the Competitive Enterprise Institute estimated that the annual cost of compliance with EPA regulations alone is more than a third of a trillion dollars. Ideology is one thing, but corruption and abuse are quite another. A scheme was exposed some years ago that would have diverted EPA “research” funds to pay outside public-relations consultants. This payola scheme is similar to the agency’s longstanding practice of buying influence by doling out hundreds of millions of dollars each year to certain favored nonprofit organizations — money that, according to the inspector general and Government Accountability Office, is dispersed with no public notice, competition, or accountability. The GAO investigators documented systematic malfeasance by regulators, including: 1) making grants to grantees who were unable to fulfill the terms of the grants; 2) favoring an exclusive clique of grantees without opening the grants to competition; 3) funding “environmental” grants for activities that lack any apparent environmental benefit; and 4) failing to ensure that grantees performed the objectives identified in the grants.

The Animal Cunning and Instinct of Donald Trump He grasped that what voters cared about were the very issues politicos were disdainfully ignoring. By Victor Davis Hanson

The American middle classes, the Chinese, and Vladimir Putin have never been convinced that Ivy League degrees, vast Washington experience, and cultural sophistication necessarily translate into national wisdom. Trump instead relies more on instinct and operates from cunning — and we will soon see whether we should redefine “wisdom.”

But for now, for example, we have never heard a presidential candidate say such a thing as “We love our miners” — not “we like” miners, but “we love” them. And not just any miners, but “our” miners, as if, like “our vets,” the working people of our moribund economic regions were unique and exceptional people, neither clingers nor irredeemables. In Trump’s gut formulation, miners certainly did not deserve “to be put out of business” by Hillary Clinton, as if they were little more than the necessary casualties of the war against global warming. For Trump, miners were not the human equivalent of the 4,200 bald eagles that the Obama administration recently assured the wind turbine industry can be shredded for the greater good of alternate energy and green profiteering.

In other words, Trump instinctively saw the miners of West Virginia — and by extension the working-class populations of states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Ohio — as emblematic of the forgotten man, in a way few of his Republican rivals, much less Hilary Clinton, grasped.

No other candidate talked as constantly about jobs, “fair” trade, illegal immigration, and political correctness — dead issues to most other pollsters and politicos. Rivals, Democratic and Republican alike, had bought into the electoral matrix of Barack Obama: slicing the electorate into identity-politics groups and arousing them to register and vote in record numbers against “them” — a fossilized, supposedly crude, illiberal, and soon-to-be-displaced white working class.

For Democrats that meant transferring intact Obama’s record numbers of minority voters to a 68-year-old multimillionaire white woman; for Republicans, it meant pandering with a kinder, softer but still divisive identity-politics message. Trump instinctively saw a different demographic. And even among minority groups, he detected a rising distaste for being patronized, especially by white, nasal-droning, elite pajama-boy nerds whose loud progressivism did not disguise their grating condescension.

Broward Deputy Sheriff Leads Banquets Featuring Terror Associates CAIR’s Nezar Hamze shares stage with man convicted of support for Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Joe Kaufman

We expect members of law enforcement to protect us from harm, not have involvement with those who look to do us harm. We cannot expect that from Nezar Hamze, because, while he is a Deputy at the Broward County Sheriff’s Office, he is also the head of the Florida chapter of CAIR, a group with extensive ties to terrorism. This past month, Hamze led two banquets where groups in the hallway and people on the stage and in the audience also had well documented associations with terror.

CAIR or the Council on American-Islamic Relations was created in June 1994 as part of an umbrella group led by then-global head of Hamas, Mousa Abu Marzook. CAIR has been named by the US government a co-conspirator for two federal trials dealing with the financing of millions of dollars to Hamas. In November 2014, CAIR, itself, was designated a terrorist organization by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) government. Many CAIR representatives have served prison time and/or have been deported from the US for terrorist-related activity.

CAIR-Florida reflects the same violent extremism of its parent organization. In July 2014, CAIR-Florida co-sponsored a pro-Hamas rally in Downtown Miami, where rally goers shouted, “We are Hamas,” “Let’s go Hamas,” and “Hamas kicked your ass.” Following the rally, the event organizer, Sofian Abdelaziz Zakkout, wrote in Arabic, “Thank God, every day we conquer the American Jews like our conquests over the Jews of Israel!”

CAIR-Florida Executive Director Hassan Shibly has referred to Hezbollah as “basically a resistance movement” and “absolutely not a terrorist organization” and, in August 2014, tweeted, “Israel and its supporters are enemies of God…” In December 2010, CAIR-Florida CEO and Statewide Regional Operations Director Nezar Hamze repeatedly refused to denounce Hamas, when given numerous chances to do so, stating “I’m not denouncing anybody. I’m not getting involved in the politics.”

Today, apart from his full-time roles with CAIR, Hamze is a full-time Deputy at the Broward Sheriff’s Office (BSO). He was referred for the job by Scott Israel, the current Sheriff, who calls Hamze his “friend.” Israel hired Hamze against the advice of all three BSO Majors who had evaluated Hamze during the hiring process. In May 2013, they unanimously signed a form stating, “At this time, I do not recommend Officer Hamze for employment…” Hamze was found to be lying on his polygraph exam about “use of illegal drugs” and about “buying illegal drugs.”

Those facts pale in contrast to the security issues involved. What should have stopped Sheriff Israel from hiring Hamze, before anything, was Hamze’s ongoing involvement in a designated terrorist group. However, Sheriff Israel has demonstrated that he cares little about Hamze’s terror-related background, as he has allowed Hamze the ability to exploit his position in the Sheriff’s Office to provide gun training to various radical mosques. The Sheriff, himself, has used Hamze to personally introduce him at these dangerous venues.

In July 2015, the Hamze/Israel Show made an appearance at the Darul Uloom mosque, located in Pembroke Pines, Florida. Each gave impassioned speeches, as they donned their full BSO uniforms, with guns and badges on display.

Many al-Qaeda terrorists have passed through Darul Uloom. “Dirty Bomber” Jose Padilla was a student of the mosque’s founder and present imam, Maulana Shafayat Mohamed. Now-dead al-Qaeda Global Operations Chief, Adnan el-Shukrijumah, was a prayer leader at Darul Uloom. And Darul Uloom Arabic teacher Imran Mandhai, along with mosque goers Hakki Aksoy and Shueyb Mossa Jokhan, hatched a plot at the mosque to blow up different South Florida structures, including area power stations, Jewish businesses, and a National Guard armory.

The United States Of Crybabies The change from a tragic view of human life to a therapeutic one. Bruce Thornton

Reprinted from Hoover.org.

The hyper-emotional reactions to Donald Trump’s election occasioned much commentary about the state of America’s millennials. On college campuses across the country there were “cry-ins,” group “primal screams,” and designated “healing spaces.” The general mood was captured in a tweet from the student body president at American University: “For those who viewed [the election outcome] as unfavorable, anger, sadness, grief, and frustration were brought to the fore. It’s important to note that those feelings are valid and justified. People are scared and people are worried about their futures and their lives.”

Critics derided these displays as the childish outbursts of pampered “snowflakes.” But such traumatized responses to the outcome of an election reflect a much larger cultural shift that has happened over many decades: the change from a tragic view of human life to a therapeutic one. This shift has troubling implications for our political and economic order.

Until the nineteenth century, the tragic understanding of existence was dominant. The ancient Greeks invented a literary genre to express this belief. Like the flawed heroes of Greek tragedy, humans are defined by the permanent, unchanging conditions of life. They are hostages to time, sickness, want, and death; to unforeseen changes and disasters; to a capricious, harsh natural world; and, most importantly, to their own destructive impulses and passions that their minds can only sporadically control.

A classic expression of the tragic vision can be found in Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. Describing the horrors of the revolutions the war sparked throughout the Greek world, he writes, “The sufferings which revolution entailed upon the cities were many and terrible, such as have occurred and always will occur as long as the nature of mankind remains the same,” for war confronts people with “imperious necessities” and “so proves a rough master that brings most men’s characters to a level with their fortunes.”

Similarly, Christianity put a flawed humanity at the center of its theology. Because of the Fall, we are all born prone to sin, incapable on our own of renewing our lost spiritual connection to God. As the most influential theologian of eighteenth-century America, Jonathan Edwards, put it, “the innate sinful depravity of the heart” and the “state of man’s nature, that disposition of the mind, is to be looked upon as evil and pernicious” and “tends to extremely pernicious consequences.” Only salvation through Christ can create true happiness, that of the soul reunited with God. In the fallen world, however, the same tragic conditions of existence will continue until the second coming of Christ and the final judgment.

This belief began to weaken with the rise of science and the spectacular improvements of human life it occasioned, beginning in the nineteenth century. Advances in medicine, transportation, sanitation, and the production of food lessened and in some cases eliminated the perennial physical miseries of human existence like disease and malnutrition. This encouraged a belief that new knowledge and technologies could likewise be discovered to improve minds and social institutions as well. Human misery was now believed to spring not from our flawed human nature and choices, but from harmful beliefs embedded in religion, tradition, and unjust social and political orders.

Thus the therapeutic view was born, nurtured by the “human sciences” such as psychology and sociology, and confident that progress would eventually eliminate even our private psychic traumas and subjective discontents, the causes of which lay in the social environment and could there be uprooted. The philosopher and Social Darwinist Herbert Spencer articulated this optimism at the end of the nineteenth century: “Progress is not an accident, but a necessity. Surely must evil and immorality disappear; surely must men become perfect.”

In contrast, however, our political order as enshrined in the Constitution was built on the older tragic understanding of human nature. The Founders particularly feared how power might further corrupt an already flawed human nature. John Adams, in his influential 1787 study Defense of the Constitutions, acknowledged the possibility of generosity and kindness in men, “yet every moral theorist will admit the selfish passions in the generality of men to be the strongest. There are few who love the public better than themselves . . . Self-interest, private avidity, ambition, and avarice will exist in every state of society, and under every form of government.”

Nor could man’s depraved nature be permanently improved. Driven by their flaws, people will always form what James Madison in Federalist 10 called “factions” based on mutual “passions and interests,” and thus will always strive to acquire more power at the expense of other factions. This tendency to aggrandize power, Madison says, is “sown in the nature of man,” never to be eliminated, but only controlled and limited by dividing, checking, and balancing the three branches of the federal government. In this way the freedom of the citizens­­ could be preserved and tyranny avoided, the Founders’ most important goal.

Our free-market capitalist economic order likewise is grounded in a tragic view of life. Economist Joseph Schumpeter said the “essential fact” of capitalism was “creative destruction.” Economist historians W. Michael Cox and Richard Alm describe this process and its costs: “lost jobs, ruined companies, and vanishing industries are inherent parts of the growth system.” However, “A society cannot reap the rewards of creative destruction,” they continue, “without accepting that some individuals might be worse off, not just in the short term, but perhaps forever . . . Capitalism’s gain and pain are inextricably linked.” As Cox and Alm point out, the improvements in transportation sparked by the internal-combustion engine, for example, destroyed whole industries such as carriage and harness manufacturers and blacksmiths.

Capitalism, then, reveals how inequalities in talent, brains, virtue, and luck lead to economic winners and losers. But a dynamic capitalism gives people the freedom and opportunity to rise as far as their abilities can take them, rather than being stymied by static castes, guilds, and classes.

In contrast, the rise of progressivism and collectivist economies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries reflected the therapeutic vision of a world free of the tragic constants acknowledged by the Founders and free-market economies. In the late nineteenth century, the creation of human sciences persuaded the first progressives that human nature could be improved. In 1914, the progressive journalist Walter Lippmann discarded the idea that human nature is fixed. Rather, we must “devise its social organizations, alter its tools, formulate its method, educate and control it.” Such progress is now possible, Lippmann continues, because of “the great triumph of modern psychology and its growing capacity for penetrating to the desires that govern human thought.” The influential progressive theorist Herbert Croly likewise asserted that a “better future would derive from the beneficent activities of expert social engineers who would bring to the service of social ideals all the technical resources which research could discover.”

The practical means for achieving this transformation were set out by Woodrow Wilson, who felt the Constitution’s balance of powers was made obsolete by this new knowledge. Government must now follow the “Darwinian principle,” he wrote, of organic development guided by the rationally organized improvement of people and society. This requires a more powerful executive branch overseeing a centralized network of bureaus and agencies “of skilled, economical administration” comprising the “hundreds who are wise” who will guide the thousands who are “selfish, ignorant, timid, stubborn, or foolish,” wrote Wilson. Technocrats will replace the diverse people and the sovereign states as the primary determiners of public policy and action. Discarded was the Founders’ distrust of concentrated power whether wielded by the majority or by an elite no less vulnerable to the “encroaching nature” of power that necessarily diminishes political freedom.

Similarly, the idea that all problems can be solved by knowledge and technology would not accept as inevitable the necessary costs of capitalism’s “creative destruction.” In Marxist, socialist, and progressive economic theories, equality of opportunity was inadequate. Now equality of outcome was demanded, for no one should be left to feel inadequate or inferior to those of greater talent or luck who unfairly monopolize wealth. Government began to interfere in the market, attempting to control its workings through laws and regulations in order to create more egalitarian outcomes and eliminate the “various and unequal distribution of property,” as Madison described what we call “income inequality.” But our complaints about income inequality spring not from the tragic reality that some people are not as smart, hard-working, or lucky as others, but from unjust economic and social structures. These need to be corrected by the technocratic elite through coercive federal agencies and their rules.

A Year of Slaughter & Mayhem in Germany Berlin Christmas massacre follows a long list of attacks. Ari Lieberman

At least 12 people were killed and 48 more injured when a lorry driven by an unnamed assailant plowed his 18-wheeler truck into a crowd at a Christmas market in Berlin. According to witnesses, the vehicle was traveling at high speed and traveled the entire length of the market before coming to a halt.

Berlin police have reportedly arrested the driver and believe that the act was intentional. The man’s identity has not been released, but German media is reporting he was an asylum seeker from Pakistan or Afghanistan who arrived in February. A dead passenger was found in the cab of the truck. The circumstances of his death have not been revealed.

The attack bore the hallmarks of Islamic terrorism and was eerily reminiscent of an attack carried out by a Muslim terrorist on July 14 in the French city of Nice. That horrific truck attack left 84 dead and more than 300 injured.

The Express reports that German officials had been warned by various intelligence agencies that terrorists would attempt to carry out an attack during the holiday season. The British Foreign Office warned its citizens traveling to Germany to “remain vigilant.”

On November 26, a 12-year-old Iraqi boy attempted to place a bomb in the Christmas market near the Ludwigshafen municipality. The bomb failed to detonate. He tried to execute his plan again on December 5, but alert passersby noticed the suspicious bag and notified authorities who neutralized the bomb. The boy, who under German law cannot be prosecuted because of his age, told authorities that he was working on behalf of ISIS and plans to join the terror group. Absurdly, the boy is currently in the custody child welfare.

Germany has been wracked by a spate of Islamist violence directly linked to irresponsible migrant policies pursued by Chancellor Angela Merkel. Under Merkel’s stewardship, more than 1 million mostly male, Muslim migrants have been allowed entry into Germany and the result has been catastrophic for Germany.

On July 18, 2016 a Muslim immigrant of Afghan nationality boarded a train in Wuerzburg and attacked passengers with an axe, seriously injuring five.

On July 22, 2016, an Iranian shot and killed nine people in a Munich shopping mall.

On July 24, 2016, A Syrian refugee attacked a pregnant woman with a machete in the German city of Reutlingen, murdering her and wounding three others.

On July 24, 2016, A Syrian refugee detonated a bomb at an open-air music festival in the southern city of Ansbach, wounding 12.

On October 16, 2016, a 19-year old medical student and part-time volunteer at a refugee center was raped and murdered by a 17-year-old Afghan refugee. Her corpse was found in a river in Freiburg, Germany.

The Phoenix and the Swan Song by Cynthia Ayers

“No poorest in thy borders but may now Lift to the juster skies a man’s enfranchised brow Oh Beautiful! My Country! Ours once more!”

James Russel Lowell, Harvard University, 1865

Lowell’s speech (above), given within a post-civil war commemoration service, was later described within The Growth of the American Republic (1937):

“Lowell was, in fact, delivering the swan song of the New England intellectuals and reformers. In the generation to come that region would no longer furnish the nation with reformers and men of letters, but with a mongrel breed of politicians, sired by abolition out of profiteering.”

Like a mythical phoenix, a reformer has arisen from the ash heap that was “politics as usual” (rife with obvious profiteering by pretentious mongrels) to form an unusual force to be reckoned with – a mix of grassroots support and “big money” borne of inheritance, intelligence, strength, and hard work. It may be unsettling for some; but those who form the backbone of the country seem to believe that it’s long past time for corrupt electioneering, “big-government” policies, and crony capitalism to flame out. This phoenix, who knows through personal experience how “the game” has been played, and rejects any attempt to control his thought and actions by way of campaign contributions, now has the opportunity – in fact, the mandate — to fly!

And fly, he must – there is much to be accomplished. Of all the things that must be done soon, the delivery of a “swan song” in the form of a proposal for complete bureaucratic transformation should be among the top of the list. The institutions that make up our government could be enormously effective and efficient – but not as they currently are, and not with the ideologically-skewed population that is currently employed within. If the new administration stands a chance of enacting and sustaining substantive change, the bureaucracies must undergo metamorphosis (or in the words of the President-Elect, the swamp must be drained). The extent to whether that is possible depends on how radical our new leadership is willing to be.

Practices that include “burrowing in” (the transfer of political appointees into permanent positions) have increased bias at the senior levels, while programs to facilitate the hiring of college graduates continually add liberal partisanship to the workforce at the entry levels. Although research is lacking, it stands to reason that hiring freezes coupled with increased attrition tend to sap the bureaucracies of those who do not conform to what has become “the ideological norm,” thereby exacerbating the problem.

The Hatch Act supposedly ensures a non-partisan, apolitical federal workplace, but the Act is rarely stamped into the consciousness of employees as it once was (especially among those who began their careers as political appointees). Political bias has become overt, pervasive, and pernicious as evidenced by recent scandals. If political contributions can be seen as an indication of bias, the bureaucracies are probably on par with the universities, courts, and media. Ninety-five percent of contributions to presidential campaigns (averaged across federal organizations) during the 2016 election were to the Democrat candidate, vice 5 percent for the Republican candidate.

Bias on the scale that we have seen over the past few years can only be ejected by an infusion of radical transformative action – a complete reconsideration of missions, followed by terminations of unconstitutional or unnecessary tasks, and perhaps entire organizations. Within those that remain or begin anew, the Hatch Act must be enforced – indeed, reinforced – as political appointees from new administrations and fresh college graduates find footholds into each and every segment of federal civil service.

In fact, given that liberal bias has become even more ensconced in the universities and colleges across the country, campus reform must be driven by similarly radical efforts to end liberal indoctrination and open discrimination against conservative students, as well as (whatever remains of) conservative faculty. But altering the highly partisan dynamics of liberal academia could perhaps be a bigger challenge than winning the Presidency.

Dr. Robin McFee:Putin… Hillary’s lame excuse for losing

To be blunt, it is idiotic to think Putin would prefer Trump over Hillary as the 45th President of the United States…. Especially since Americans didn’t even want Hillary as POTUS, ever the contrarian, he would have likely wanted her to win.

Putin is an opportunist, and agent provocateur, not an ally or proponent of a strong America. Consider Putin’s track record….

Aligned and armed our adversaries
Blackmails Europe bartering heat for compliance
Invader of sovereign nations (Georgia [Bush presidency], Ukraine [Obama])
Grabbing much of the Arctic, including Santa’s Village
Challenger to NATO

Putin is many things – and as I’ve warned over the last 8 years, mostly dangerous, especially to US interests. Putin has made no secret in lamenting (and thus trying to reverse) the fall of the Soviet Union. He will kill, invade, negotiate, intimidate and manipulate to reach his objectives. He has made no secret that Russian interests and global petroleum are interrelated and on his radar screen; no drop of oil, or puff of gas, or LNG ship or pipeline, or transit hub escape his interests or appetite. He has made no secret Russia will be a force to be reckoned with. Remilitarizing and rebuilding alliances, especially with unsavory folks who counter our interests have been part of his efforts for nearly a decade, and without significant pushback from this Administration. The rise of Russia is real, their internal problems, questionable human rights issues, and economic roller coaster notwithstanding. Russia is the agent provocateur in the Middle East, with a growing presence in the Med, and strong ties with Iran and Syria. Russian influence is tenuous but growing in Turkey, and Tel Aviv has not ignored Moscow, nor has Putin ignored Netanyahu.

Then consider how Putin has achieved these under our national noses…President Obama as leader of the US has made it very, very, very easy for the Russian president to forward an aggressive and aggressor agenda. Given Hillary Clinton was part of the Obama Administration – the Secretary of State and titular leader of our foreign policy – a policy that left an international leadership void Putin could exploit. Clinton, as Secretary of State on her first major interaction with Russia, besides the sophomoric stunt of bringing a toy to the meeting, couldn’t even inspire her team to translate “Reset” in Russian correctly. Clinton couldn’t come up with a significant foreign policy win for our great nation. Her record was uninspiring.

National Geographic Puts a 9-Year-Old Transgender Girl on the Cover By Tyler O’Neil (huh????!!!!)

National Geographic magazine announced last week that it will feature its first transgender model on the cover in January, a 9-year-old “girl.”

“She has lived as an openly transgender girl since age 5, and she captured the complexity of the conversation around gender,” wrote National Geographic editor Susan Goldberg in a letter announcing the issue. “Today, we’re not only talking about gender roles for boys and girls — we’re talking about our evolving understanding of people on the gender spectrum.”

Avery Jackson, the 9-year-old transgender from Kansas City, Kansas, will appear on the cover wearing hot pink cheetah-print pants. Confident, laid back, and poised with pink-dyed stripes through shoulder-length hair, she does indeed look like a girl, but is 9 — or 5! for that matter — an old enough age to determine one’s own gender? Especially if it is opposite her biological sex?

The magazine’s issue focuses on the “Gender Revolution,” pointing out 80 different 9-year-olds in eight different countries. It hits shelves on December 27, and is guaranteed to stir up controversy.
Sponsored

Indeed, shortly after the announcement, a Twitter user named Mark Romano declared, “I used to love National Geographic. Unfortunately, it has become nothing but a cesspool of Left-wing insanity.”

Beneath Avery Jackson’s picture stands the single quote, “The best thing about being a girl is, now I don’t have to pretend to be a boy.”

Leftists Ally with Jihadis in Our Public Schools By Karin McQuillan

After being subjected to jihadi propaganda by a Palestinian on an illegal visa in their third grade public school class, 8-9 year old American kids were led by their teacher to attack Israel. Watch the video.

It’s like a Maoist Red Guard indoctrination session. The children’s African-American teacher, Brooke Barnett, tells the children that Israel is hiding what’s really going from the world, but that the video they are about to see “is true, we can see what’s happening.”

After the program the third-graders were encouraged to share their reactions. The first child says, “Israel is wrong to think that Palestine could be theirs, because they already have a lot of land and they shouldn’t just take more thinking they own the world.”

“They (Israelis) should be peaceful but they’re not…they should not kill other people.”

“It’s not fair that people (jailed jihadis) will not see get to see their families.”

One child says, “When I grow up I’m going to go to Palestine and protest.’ “Welcome, welcome,” replies the speaker, “We need you to come to make struggle.” Another voice is heard saying, “Thank you.”

In the video, Code Pink leftist Ariel Gold, invited by the school to put on the program, reminds the children, “You guys are studying the Universal Declaration of the Rights of the Child, from the United Nations…so the United Nations makes laws around what people can do, what countries can do, and many times Israel violates those laws, and that is what we are working for, for international law.”

Did you know that United Nations law is taught in our elementary schools? Yes, so-called Human Rights, not the U.S. Bill of Rights, is a standard topic in third grade social studies.

Student: “If somebody is attacking…you say Inshallah, so God can help us stop it.” “That’s beautiful,” breathes their teacher. Inshallah, beautiful, God Bless America, forbidden.

Burnett helps the next child, who mumbles something about not being able to protect yourself, “She’s saying it’s not fair they (Israelis) are more powerful. They (the Arabs) should be able to defend themselves but they (the Israelis) are more powerful because they have guns.”

In an unplanned moment of humor, an Arabic-speaking child is confused into thinking that Israeli terrorists are attacking Palestinians, and suggests the Palestinians on the West Bank build their own wall to protect themselves. “If they attack you …build your own wall…use their resources (bricks) against them, if you’re scared, how is that going to help.” A wall is not the answer out leftist teacher Brooke Burnett wants to hear; she asks Bassem Tamimi to comment. He tells the class, “Our children is our resources…our children who will fight….”

Another adult voice, “And the TRUTH, the TRUTH is the resource…if everybody was building walls, then we’d all be separated by walls, that’s not how human beings want to live, we want to be together, like in this classroom.” “Then how are you going to stop Israel,” asks the Arabic-speaking boy. Tamimi: “We would like to protect ourselves with your solidarity…you are all to defend us…to be freedom fighters for Palestine.”

The principal of the elementary school, Susan Eschbach, defended the event (full text here). She falsely claimed:

There were many adults present in the class and at no time was there an anti-Israel, anti-Palestine, anti-Jewish, or anti-Muslim stance. The children took away from this experience several messages. …“ You can make friends across borders and that is a good thing.” “Love will make peace, not hate.”

Ithaca (NY) third grade event shows how anti-Israel indoctrination has moved into elementary schools.

The School District, under pressure from irate parents, later wrote that the program was politically skewed and inflammatory, and apologized.

The Superintendent of schools falsely claimed Tamimi was not an invited guest, and that the lesson was on universal human rights, but admitted to The Blaze:

The suffering of Jewish children was not discussed with the third grade children; nor was the issue of Tamimi’s relative Ahlam Tamimi (Sbarro Pizza suicide bomber) raised. …Nor were the children told that Israel’s security barrier (which Palestinian activists usually call a “wall”) was erected in order to keep suicide bombers out of Israel and that since then suicide attacks have virtually ended, saving scores of children’s lives.

Asked if any pro-Israel voices were invited to the classroom, Brown said, “No other speakers have been into this classroom to talk about human rights at this time.”

The Superintendent has done nothing to drain the swamp. The children have not been debriefed and told they were subjected to jihadi propaganda. The teacher who instigated and presided over this radical hate teaching suffered no consequences and is still in her classroom. The school principal, who enlisted openly anti-Israeli groups to design her school’s curriculum on human rights (and boasts that she wants a designation from them as a “Human Rights School” whatever leftist claptrap that is), is still in place.

William Jacobson, a Cornell law professor and blogger at legalinsurrection.com appeared on Mark Levin’s show to discuss breaking this story and posting the video. It took Jacobsen a year of litigation under the NY Freedom of Information Law to get a partial video of the event.

There were other teachers there, there were staff there, nobody said a word about it, and they tried to cover it up. This is really a microcosm of what’s happening to our educational system. We are allowing these activists … into high schools and elementary schools, and you rarely get video of it, because most people can’t just walk into an elementary school and just start shooting video….

Who was it that the leftist school teacher invited to brainwash her students? Bassem Tamimi is a Palestinian jihadi who uses his own son and daughter attack Israeli soldiers in order to film them to incite jihadi violence. The Alegmeiner:

As the website Legal Insurrection reported in October, Tamimi used his Facebook page to promote an antisemitic blood libel that Israel arrests Palestinian children “To STEAL THEIR ORGANS.” The claim Tamimi reposted included a picture of a person’s torso with a long wound stitched up along the side.

Tamimi uses children as tools to instigate confrontations with Israelis, including having his daughter, dubbed “Shirley Temper,” scream at soldiers in hopes of provoking images that portray them as cruel or brutal.

Tamimi lied about his arrest record in order to get a U.S. visa from the Obama administration and embark on a speaking tour across America in favor of the anti-Semitic BDS movement. He boasted of his broader aim – to create an intifada in America, starting with our children.

“When we are able to get a video like this, we can use it to great effect,” he said. “When enough people here see these videos and hear our stories, it can start a kind of intifada [popular Palestinian uprising] against Israel in the United States.”

Jacobsen explains:

Tamimi’s son, Mohammad, was the subject of a recent media frenzy after he threw rocks at Israeli soldiers and when they moved to arrest him, a soldier was set upon by local women and children, all as the video rolled. Rock throwing has become a serious problem, with numerous motorists killed and injured as a result, yet it is an activity Tamimi encourages (for which he has been arrested).

Yet while Tammi showed videos in Ithaca and led the American children in an anti-Israeli, pro-jihadi discussion in the Ithaca classroom, the teachers and staff in the room noticed nothing wrong.