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February 2017

Fading U.S. Influence In Asia By Herbert London President, London Center for Policy Research

If one requires any evidence that the United States is a fading power, the recent events in the South China Sea offer ample evidence. Two Chinese fighter jets intercepted U.S. military reconnaissance aircraft and, to add to the humiliation rebuked the Obama administration for any surveillance near China. The incident took place in international airspace on what has been described as a “routine U.S. patrol.” This latest encounter comes on the heels of another interception in which Chinese jets mimicked an all-out attack on a U.S. naval vessel that sailed close to a disputed reef. These are merely two recent war like actions by the Chinese in a series of interception since 2014.

China now claims most of the South China Sea through which $5 trillion in ship-borne trade passes each year. The Philippines, Vietnam, Japan, Malaysia, Taiwan and Brunei all have claims of one kind or another in the Chinese created perimeter and all of these nations depend on the U.S. to enforce those claims. Washington has accused Beijing of militarizing the region, but China responds with a shrug suggesting that there are diplomatic channels available for the resolution of disputes.

The weakness of U.S. naval forces in the Pacific and the China Sea is apparent. New naval vessels – desperately needed to relieve the demands on the existing force – are not in production and with sequestration, are not likely to be in production. There are an insufficient number of Aegis equipped ships to provide an acceptable level of sea-based protection. And after several incidents in which there hasn’t been a military response, Chinese officials believe the U.S. has acquiesced in their regional domination.

Moreover, and quite tellingly, the nations that have claims on islands in the South China Sea, have either dropped their protests or softened their language. There is the growing realization the U.S. is not prepared to protect island claims or even protect freedom of the seas.

The president elect of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, explained, “America would never die for us. If America cared, if would have sent its aircraft carriers and missile frigates the moment China started reclaiming land in contested territory, but no such thing happened… America is afraid to go to war. We’re better off making friends with China.” This is a sentiment resonating throughout the continent.

Chinese sorties against the U.S. are not a casus belli, even as they have increased regional tension and have exposed the U.S. as an ill-prepared protector of Asian allies. Having eviscerated national naval strength, there isn’t much the U.S. can do except express our dismay at the U.N. and in bilateral talks.

The Chinese installation of DF-21 “carrier killer” surface to ship missile, and its current iteration, has a range of 2500 miles. Of significant concern is the Russian air defense, the S-500 anti-aircraft and anti-missile systems that are likely to neutralize the effectiveness of the F-35 stealth fighter before it becomes operational, which the Chinese claim to have acquired. These technical breakthroughs give the U.S. Navy pause; while not dispositive they are factors that militate against activism.

EDWARD CLINE: DRUNKEN SAILORS

What will we do with a drunken sailor? (Irish Rovers, with lyrics)

There are two sets of drunken sailors who are the subjects here: Angela Merkel and her cronies and her soused immigration policies that are destroying Europe; and the Democratic National Committee (DNC), which not only is seriously considering appointing a rabid, recalcitrant Muslim as its next chairman, but has also pledged as a party to scuttle or block President Trump’s whole agenda and his cabinet nominees.

Both sets presume to lead their countries to an era of peace and “tolerance” and multicultural “harmony.”

There is a third set of drunken sailors, with which Merkel and the DNC have collaborated in their inebriated binges, the Mainstream Media (MSM).

Merkel is determined to continue her nation-destroying open-immigration policies which have saturated Germany with Muslim welfare parasites, criminals, and jihadis posing as “refugees,” and faces stiff opposition from newly invigorated “right wing” parties. Even her immigration allies are having second thoughts about the practical political consequences. The Democratic National Committee, on the other hand, is still reeling drunkenly over Trump’s election and its having lost the 2016 presidential contest, which, if it had managed to get Hillary Clinton elected, would have foisted on the country an America hater arguably worse than Barack Obama. Looking favorably at Keith Ellison, this is a desperate attempt to elevate the DNC to a position of influence, to become “relevant.”

Shave their bellies with a rusty razor? Put them in bed with the captain’s daughter (the cat o’ nine tails)? Put them in an asylum seeker’s longboat until they’re sober, or drowned? Way hay and up she rises!

The DNC and Merkel: Binge partners.

The MSM has an open bar.

Merkel has put her foot down. She is not back-pedaling on her destructive immigration policy. Germans be damned. They’ve just got to get used to the rapes, the spiraling crime rate, and shouldering additional welfare state burdens. It’s their altruist duty, don’t you know? Breitbart London reported on February 29th:
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has refused to back down over her open borders migration policy, saying in a televised interview that there is “no point in believing that I can solve the problem through the unilateral closure of borders.”

“I have no plan B,” she added.

GANGSTER ISLAM: THE PROBLEM EUROPE IGNORES BY TIMON DIAS

The Dutch-Moroccan rapper Ismo stating: “I believe nothing blindly except the Quran” “I hate the Jews even more than the Nazis” and “I won’t shake hands with faggots” / screenshot YT

For over a decade, Europe’s struggle to successfully integrate its Muslim population has been evident. But throughout the years a new and distinctly European phenomenon arose, which is as significant as it is underreported: Gangster Islam. It entails the conflation of the seemingly a-religious street culture of youths from a Muslim background on the one hand, and elements of the Islamic religion on the other.

The German publication Der Spiegel once very briefly touched on the matter, a Danish documentary highlighted Islamic extremists recruiting gang members from a Muslim background, and a Dutch terrorism expert pointed out how Syrian returnees were more likely to live a life of crime in order to finance the jihad, than to actually commit a terror attack.

One would think that after having spent millions of euros on interreligious dialogues, cultural sensitivity trainings and moral diversity classes, Europe’s social scientists would have punctured the surface by now. But a fundamental discussion on how and why street culture and religion conflate, and what the implications of this new hybrid culture are, seems thus far to have been shied away from.

The analyses that have been made conclude gang members and jihadist mostly resemble one another in their tendency towards and fascination for violence. However, the resemblances between seemingly a-religious street youths from a Muslim background and Islamists, are actually more numerous and more fundamental. Their main parallels are:

1- Both harbour subversive intentions toward their European host societies

2- Both primarily identify themselves as Muslim

3- Both are vocal in their hatred for Jews

4- Both glorify violence

In the exploration of these parallels, “street youth from a Muslim background” will henceforth be referred to simply as “youths“.

– Subversive intentions –

Islamists have a historic and highly detailed system of beliefs dictating not to integrate into host societies, and when possible to subvert that social fabric by missionary work (Dawah) and/or violence.

The French Inquisition France’s New Dreyfus Trial, a Jihad against the Truth by Yves Mamou

“It is a shame to deny this taboo, namely that in the Arab families in France, and everyone knows it but nobody wants to say it, anti-Semitism is sucked with mother’s milk.” — George Bensoussan, historian of Moroccan heritage, on trial for saying that.

“When parents shout at their children, when they want to reprimand them, they call them Jews. Yes. All Arab families know this. It is monumental hypocrisy not to see that this anti-Semitism begins as a domestic one. ” — Smaïn Laacher, French-Algerian professor of sociology.

This witch-hunt against Bensoussan is symptomatic of the state of free speech today in France. Intellectual intimidation is the rule. Complaints are filed against everyone not saying that Muslims are the main victim of racism in France.

In December 2016, Pascal Bruckner, a writer and philosopher, was also brought to court for saying: “We need to make the record of collaborators of Charlie Hebdo’s murderers.” He named the people in France who had instilled a climate of hatred against Charlie.

Muslims, especially young Muslims, as the new revolutionary labor class. It did not matter that most of them were not working: they were “victims”.

“Anti-racist vigilance became a gag rule… Anti-racist organizations are in the denial of ‘Muslim racism.'” — Alain Finkielkraut, philosopher and academic.

An important red line in France has just been crossed. In true dhimmi fashion, in a move reminiscent of both the Inquisition and the Dreyfus Trial, all of France’s so-called “anti-racist” organizations have joined a jihad against free speech and against truth.

On January 25, 2017, France’s “anti-racist” organizations — all of them, even the Jewish LICRA (International League against Racism and anti-Semitism) — joined the Islamist CCIF (Collective against Islamophobia) in court against Georges Bensoussan, a highly regarded Jewish historian of Moroccan extraction, and an expert on the history of Jews in Arab countries.

Quebec: The Crisis of the West by Giulio Meotti

Quebec, like the entire West, is facing an existential demographic and religious crisis.

Quebec’s death spiral is explicitly linked with the calls for increased immigration. Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who put an end to the military campaign against the Islamic State, just called on Muslim migrants to come to his country.

Resistance to Quebec’s dramatic collapse of Christianity does not necessarily require a new embrace of an old Catholicism, but it certainly does need a sane rediscovery of what a Western democracy should be. That includes an appreciation of Western identity and Judeo-Christian values — everything Trudeau’s government and much of Europe apparently refuse to accept.

Welcome to Quebec, with its flavor of an old French province, with its beautiful landscapes, where streets are named after Catholic saints, and where a gunman just murdered six people in a local mosque.

Violence can be the consequence of societal convulsions, as in the 2011 massacre on Norway’s island of Utoya, in a country that prided itself of being ultra-secularized, and part of the global “good society”. Quebec, also, like the entire West, is facing an existential demographic and religious crisis.

George Weigel, writing in the American publication, First Things recently called Quebec “Catholicism’s Empty Quarter”. “There is no more religiously arid place,” he wrote, “between the North Pole and Tierra del Fuego; there may be no more religiously arid place on the planet”.

Sandro Magister, one of Italy’s most prominent journalists on Catholic affairs, wrote, “while Rome talks, Quebec has already been lost”.

Quebec’s Catholic buildings are empty; the clergy is aging. Today, inside the Church of Saint-Jude in Montreal, personal fitness trainers take the place of Catholic priests. The Théatre Paradoxe in Montreal now sits where the church of Notre-Dame-du-Perpétuel-Secours was before it shut. The former Christian nave is now used for concerts and conferences, while Christian hymns on Sundays are replaced by disco shows.

The Choices Palestinians Make by Dexter Van Zile

The notion that the Israeli pilot is the only one who has any responsibility for the child’s death is simply false. A lot of bad choices were made — by Palestinians — prior to the death of the young child and Atef Abu Saif knows it; he just can’t — or will not — address these choices, at least not in this text.

The reality that Saif will not confront in his book [The Drone Eats With Me] is that Hamas, the terrorist organization that controls the Gaza Strip, bears a huge measure of responsibility for the suffering he documents. Hamas has repeatedly started wars that it cannot win against a country that cannot afford to lose.

During these conflicts, it has launched rockets from schoolyards and has used hospitals as command centers for its leaders, putting civilians on both sides of the conflict at risk. When children are killed by Israeli strikes in Gaza, Hamas puts their bodies on display to demonize Israel, and writers such as Saif assist in this tactic.

During the war in 2008–2009, Hamas… used cement and other building materials allowed into the Gaza Strip—ostensibly for the benefit of Palestinian civilians—in order to construct tunnels that could penetrate Israel and serve as a means to kidnap Israeli soldiers and civilians.

During its 2012 fight with Israel, Hamas leaders declared that killing Jews is a religious obligation. Hamas promotes a genocidal organization that seeks Israel’s destruction and yet Saif does not speak a word about this lethal ideology or actions before or during the 2014 war.

Honesty requires that the deaths of these Palestinian children serve to drive — not obstruct — the conversation toward Palestinian abilities and responsibility.

On and on he goes in an emotionally powerful but intellectually dishonest lament. Saif simply cannot come to grips with the responsibility Palestinian leaders have for the suffering in the areas they govern.

This is exactly what Saif’s condescending patrons and boosters in the West are looking for — narratives that allow them to embrace and broadcast baseless hatred for the Jewish state in the name of human rights.

Westerners who feast on this narrative do not help the Palestinians, but hurt them, by responding to the misdeeds of Palestinian elites with condescending pats on the head instead of the rebukes they warrant.

After returning from an awful weekend trip with a Christian youth group, I told my mother I wanted to stop going to church in the next town over and worship where we lived. “Nobody likes me over there,” I said. Her response was direct and brutal: “Maybe they are not the problem. Maybe it is you.”

It was a shock. Mothers are not supposed to talk that way to their 11-year-old sons (so I thought). In the years since, I have tried, with varying degrees of success, when in a difficult position, to look at the role I played in creating the circumstances I find myself in.

France: Le Pen Launches Presidential Campaign “This election is a choice of civilization.” by Soeren Kern

“The question is simple and cruel: will our children live in a free, independent, democratic country?” — Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s National Front party.

“Economic globalization, which rejects any limits, has weakened the immune system of the nation by dispossessing it of its constituent elements: borders, national currency, the authority of its laws in conducting economic affairs, and thus allowing another world to be born and grow: Islamic fundamentalism.” — Marine Le Pen.

“Islamic fundamentalism instrumentalizes the principle of religious freedom in an attempt to impose patterns of thought that are clearly the opposite of ours. We do not want to live under the yoke or threat of Islamic fundamentalism.” — Marine Le Pen.

“Globalism is based, as we see, on the negation of the values ​​on which France was built and on the principles in which the immense majority of French people still recognize themselves: the pre-eminence of the person and therefore its sacred character, individual freedom and therefore individual consent, national feeling and therefore national solidarity, equality of persons and therefore the refusal of situations of submission.” — Marine Le Pen.

“Those who come to France are to accept France, not to transform it to the image of their country of origin. If they want to live at home, they should have stayed at home.” — Marine Le Pen.

“In terms of terrorism, we do not intend to ask the French to get used to living with this horror. We will eradicate it here and abroad.” — Marine Le Pen.

“Everyone agrees that the European Union is a failure. It did not deliver on any of its promises, particularly on prosperity and security…. That is why, if elected, I will announce a referendum within six months on remaining or exiting the European Union…” — Marine Le Pen.

“The old left-right debates have outlived their usefulness…. This divide is no longer between the left and the right, but between patriots and globalists.” — Marine Le Pen.

Marine Le Pen, the leader of the anti-establishment National Front party, has officially launched her campaign to become the next president of France.

Speaking at a rally attended by thousands of her supporters in Lyon on February 5, Le Pen launched a two-pronged attack on globalization and radical Islam. She promised French voters a referendum on remaining in the European Union, and also to deport Muslims who are deemed a security risk to France.

RECAPPED: THE NEWS FROM THE NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF SCHOLARS

This week we’ve seen the fallout from Trump’s immigration order, violence at U.C. Berkeley, and a contentious nomination process for Secretary of Education candidate Betsy DeVos. Here are this week’s stories and a few of our favorite articles:

1. Mayhem at Berkeley Hardens New Battle Lines on Free Speech Beth McMurtrie, Chronicle of Higher Education.
2. How State Lawmakers Can Restore Freedom on Campus Peter Berkowitz, Wall Street Journal.
3. What Trump’s Supreme Court Choice Might Mean for Higher Ed Eric Hoover, Chronicle of Higher Education.
4. On the Fence About DeVos Andrew Kreighbaum, Inside Higher Ed.
5. How Trump’s Immigration Order Is Affecting Higher Education Emily Deruy, The Atlantic.
6. A Call for ‘Confident Pluralism’ on Campuses Doug Lederman, Inside Higher Ed.
7. In Hillsdale College, a ‘Shining City on a Hill’ for ConservativesEric Eckholm, New York Times
8. Swastikas and Safety Pins: The Grim Heritage of Identity Politics R.J. Snell, Public Discourse.
9. Diversity for the Sake of Democracy Carrie Pritt, Quillette
10. Active Citizenship Should Be Learned out of School David Randall,Education Week.

The Anti-Trump Media’s Attack on Monica Crowley The nation loses a skilled national security analyst over a CNN hit job. Andrew C. McCarthy

My friend Monica Crowley was the subject of a major hit job by CNN a few weeks back. She is a serious scholar, but she was portrayed as a serial plagiarist who never had an original idea in her head. The emotional toll of the uproar caused her to withdraw from her appointment by President Trump to be the senior director of communications at the National Security Council.

It is the country’s loss. Over the last two decades, Monica has been one of the most effective commentators on the national scene regarding the geopolitical challenges confronting the United States, and in particular the phenomenon of jihadist terror catalyzed by sharia-supremacist ideology — radical Islam. As much as anyone I’ve encountered, she has been invaluable: communicating the threats, debating them, and defending sensible national-security measures.

All writers make mistakes. But Monica’s have been blown wildly out of proportion, to the point of smear. The well-regarded copyright attorney Lynn Chu has done a careful study of the plagiarism allegations and posted her findings on Facebook. Two things leap out.

The first is context. Readers were presented with a series of passages in which Monica is shown to have relied on the work of other writers (including yours truly) in two of her most notable written works: a bestselling 2012 book called What the (Bleep) Just Happened?: The Happy Warrior’s Guide to the Great American Comeback, and her 17-year-old Columbia University Ph.D. dissertation, “Clearer than Truth”: Determining and Preserving Grand Strategy. The Evolution of American Policy Toward the People’s Republic of China Under Truman and Nixon. What was not well explained to readers is that the cited passages constitute a bare fraction of what Ms. Chu correctly describes as “long, heavily researched, synthetic work[s]” — 361 pages in the case of the book, 461 pages in the dissertation, both heavily footnoted.

Secondly, about those footnotes: According to Ms. Chu, CNN itemized 37 passages out of the 461 dissertation pages as improperly mined from the work of others without sourcing; but 26 of these items were “straightforwardly false” because, in order to make Monica look like a plagiarist, CNN omitted her footnotes. As Chu writes:

Ms. Crowley’s paraphrases were correctly sourced in her footnotes. But in most of these 26, CNN had omitted her footnote references. CNN hid from readers that her footnotes gave proper credit to the source. Readers were disabled from being allowed to see or infer that sources were in footnotes. It seemed to selectively delete footnote references (though some were left in) — perhaps so that readers would assume no visible reference mark meant no footnote existed.

If this happened, it is shameful.

With respect to the book, of the 61 passages mined out of the 361 pages, Chu found 57 of them to be “unwarranted accusations” of plagiarism, stacked to make matters look much worse than was actually the case. She elaborates:

The match often seemed computer-generated from shared proper names and generic phrases, or news and anecdotes repeated by aggregators and editorialists. This type of material is generally considered fair use and/or public domain. As a result, this CNN list was misleadingly long, possibly a calculated attempt to condemn her with manufactured, but false, bulk.

To be sure, Chu found passages that should have been sourced. From a legal standpoint, these were woefully insufficient — both in number and scope — to support an allegation of plagiarism. Of course, writers understandably want credit for their ideas, and for their words even if the ideas they are expressing are not unique; thus, they tend hold other writers to a higher standard than the law does — which is as it should be.

The Seditious Left Prosecute the Berkeley rioters by enforcing federal law. Matthew Vadum

The violent uprising at UC Berkeley last week, sparked by Milo Yiannopoulos’s Freedom Center-sponsored speech on “sanctuary campuses,” could have been put down by authorities by enforcing existing federal law, but they didn’t act.

They let Berkeley burn.

Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguin (D) seemed to green-light the riots, employing the twisted leftist logic of the radicals who turned the campus into a war zone.

“Using speech to silence marginalized communities and promote bigotry is unacceptable,” he tweeted, in a reference to Yiannopoulos. “Hate speech isn’t welcome in our community.”

Hours into the rioting Wednesday no arrests had been made by the police. In all, only three arrests were made.

The Daily Californian, the Berkeley student newspaper, along with much of the media, downplayed the politically motivated violence. Of the three arrests, reporter Chantelle Lee wrote, “UCPD has arrested one suspect at the Milo Yiannopoulos protests Wednesday night and two suspects in an unrelated incident Thursday morning.”

She wrote that 19-year-old Edward Thomas Kuo, “who is not affiliated with the campus, was arrested Wednesday night on suspicion of remaining ‘in the place of a riot,’” according to a UCPD spokeswoman. “We had given a dispersal order,” the spokeswoman said. “He remained in the area and was blocking the path of the police, who were trying to move a skirmish line along.”

The “unrelated incident Thursday” Lee writes of wasn’t unrelated at all. Officers arrested Oakland resident Devonte Gaskin, 28, and San Francisco resident Sean Seuss, 27, when they were observed “assaulting two (individuals who) self-identified as Berkeley College Republicans, who were giving interviews to the media on Sproul Plaza.”

And whatever may the campus Republicans have been talking to the media about? Take a guess.

The rioting was all too predictable. Berkeley campus police gave the rioters permission to run amok by following a no-arrest policy, Yiannopoulos’s tour security coordinator Tej Gill told Breitbart News Daily on SiriusXM satellite radio. “The police effectively did nothing, nothing while we were there,” he said.

Gill, a U.S. Navy SEAL, continued:

It just fuels the fire, the no arrest thing, hands off policy, every time they do this and they do it successfully with no arrest, no trouble, there’s no consequences and if there’s no consequences why stop? Each time they’re gonna get stronger and stronger.

Preventing riots isn’t hard, according to Gill.

It’s simple, enforce the law. That’s it. Just enforce the law. When we go to the conservative campuses the police departments there are amazing, the shows go off without a hitch, they’re orderly, they give the protesters room to protest and they give the Milo supporters room to support Milo then they keep everybody separated. Liberal campuses have effectively emasculated the police forces there. They’ve totally been politicized, they don’t let them do their job, they actually have a hands off and no arrests policy, one of the guys at Berkeley told me this.

Police are not powerless in the face of left-wing protesters hell-bent on destruction, but their political masters refuse to let them do their jobs.