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March 2017

Giving Up a Seat for a Soldier Makes Drexel Professor Want to ‘Vomit’ By Lukas Mikelionis

A radical Drexel University professor who once wished for “White Genocide” for Christmas and hoped to “Abolish the White Race” is under fire again. This time, he said he wants to “vomit or yell about Mosul” after someone gave their seat to a uniformed soldier.https://heatst.com/culture-wars/giving-up-a-seat-for-a-soldier-makes-pro-white-genocide-drexel-prof-want-to-vomit/?mod=sm_tw_post

Drexel professor George Ciccariello, currently a visiting researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, shocked his online followers after he complained about an act of appreciation for a soldier.

“Some guy gave up his first class seat for a uniformed soldier. People are thanking him. I’m trying not to vomit or yell about Mosul,” he tweeted.

Senior Townhall columnist Kurt Schlichter slammed Ciccariello, saying: “You tried not to vomit or yell? No, you just sat there quietly like a little bitch. Ignored, irrelevant, wishing you were a man.”

“Because you’re a douchebag?” tweeted prominent conservative Ben Shapiro.

This isn’t the first time the Drexel professor has been criticized. Last December, he tweeted how “All I want for Christmas is White Genocide.” Dexel investigated the issue and ended up releasing a statement claiming the professor’s tweets fall under the category of “protected speech” and that he wouldn’t lose his job.

Ciccariello, meanwhile, brushed off the backlash, insisting it was just a joke because “White isn’t a race” and blamed white supremacists for trying to make his tweets into an issue.

The professor has made a near-habit of posting inflammatory tweets on social media. He once tweeted “Abolish the White Race” and claimed that Charleston church shooter Dylann Roof “simply put into practice what many white Americans already think.”

He has also claimed that the murder of some 4,000 white people during the Haitian Revolution was a “good thing.”

Trump cuts show Paris treaty is a paper tiger: by Bjorn Lomborg

Bjorn Lomborg is director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, Cool It, and The Nobel Laureates’ Guide to the Smartest Targets for the World 2016-2030, and a visiting professor at Copenhagen Business School.
Climate approach rehashes a failed policy that wasted decades.

President Trump’s executive order eliminating President Obama’s standards for power plants guts the main U.S. measure to reduce harmful carbon emissions, and in doing so reveals the emptiness of the Paris climate treaty.

The science is clear-cut: Climate change is real and mostly caused by humanity. Obama committed America to major carbon cuts.

According to the International Energy Agency, the U.S. promised to cut more energy-related CO2 emissions than any country in the world from 2013 to 2025, under the Paris climate treaty.

The problem is that this promise never had much ground in reality.

The primary measure America offered to achieve the promised cuts was the Clean Power Plan, which required the U.S. power sector to reduce CO2 emissions.

Yet this plan, even if fully enacted, would have achieved just a third of the U.S. promises under the Paris Agreement. If it had remained in effect for the entire century, my peer-reviewed research using United Nations climate change models found that it would have reduced temperature rises by an absolutely trivial 0.023 Fahrenheit at the end of this century.

Without the Clean Power Plan, U.S. emissions will likely increase slightly.

Yet, despite eliminating the actual policy that it relied on to achieve its promises, America will remain party to the Paris treaty, which has been sold to the world as the ultimate deal to fix climate change.

ASK THE MUSLIM NATIONS OF THE UN ACCUSING ISRAEL OF APARTHEID: “WHERE ARE YOUR JEWS?” DANIEL GREENFIELD

Good question. And they’re in the same place, increasingly, as their other non-Muslims are. And that exposes the big lie of Muslim claims of persecution.

During a meeting of the UN Human Rights Council on Monday, several Middle Eastern countries took turns bashing Israel, saying that it has imposed apartheid and violence against Palestinians. A Palestinian representative was joined by Qatar, Sudan, Syria, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia in criticizing Israel.

Hillel Neuer was then recognized to respond to the accusations from the representatives, as well as those from a UN report.

“Everything we just heard, from the world’s worst abusers of human rights, of women’s rights, of freedom of religion, of the press, of assembly, of speech, is absolutely false and indeed Orwellian,” Neuer said.

“How many Jews live in your countries? How many Jews lived in Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco?” Neuer pointed out. “Once upon a time, the Middle East was full of Jews.”

Neuer went through a list of those countries asking, “Where are your Jews?” after stating how many Jews used to live there.

It’s devastating and there can be no response which is why it is never addressed. Islam ethnically cleansed Jews. That has been the Islamic mandate from Mohammed. The facts speak for themselves.

10 Toxic Terms Pro-Israel Aadvocates Must Fight :The phrases we must stop repeating. Lee Bender and Jerome Verlin *****

Mainstream Western media coverage of Israel is laced with expressions intentionally crafted to delegitimize the Jewish State. The good news is that these terms weren’t written in stone 3,300 years ago, but are post-Israel independence creations. By forfeiting this language, we forfeit our history. Here are 10 phrases we must stop repeating:

#1- “The West Bank” – No, it’s not. “Judea and Samaria” are not just “biblical names,” but the names the hill country of Israel was known by from ancient times, including in the U.N.’s 1947 partition resolution, until after Transjordan invaded in 1948 (and was ousted by Israel in 1967) and named it such to disassociate its inherent Jewish connection.

#2 – “East” or “traditionally Arab East” Jerusalem: Jerusalem has been the capital of three homeland states, all Jewish, in the past 3,000 years, and has had a renewed Jewish majority since 1800’s Ottoman rule. Palestinian Arabs have never ruled any part of Jerusalem. There was no such place as “East” Jerusalem until invading Jordan seized the historical heart of the city in 1948 and expelled its Jews; until then it had never been a divided city. The eastern section of the city is where the Old City, Jewish Quarter, Temple Mount, Mount of Olives cemetery, Christian Quarter and Church of the Holy Sepulcre are located. Jerusalem is Judaism’s holiest city; it is not holy to Muslims and is not mentioned once in the Qu’ran. Only since Israel reunified the city has there been equal rights and access to religious sites of all faiths. Say rather: Jerusalem, period

#3 – “The UN sought to create Jewish and Palestinian States:” It did not. Over and over in its 1947 partition resolution, the UN referenced “the Jewish State” and “the Arab” [not “Palestinian”] State. There are 22 independent Arab states.

#4– “Palestinian Refugees of the War that Followed Israel’s Creation,” or the “Palestinian Refugee Issue:” This suggests that an indigenous population of Arab “Palestinians” was unilaterally displaced by the 1948 five-Arab-state- army invasion for Israel’s destruction, which encouraged and ordered local Arabs to leave. Much forgotten is that more Jews were consequently expelled from vast Arab lands they had lived in for many centuries (850,000- 900,000) than Arabs left tiny Israel (500,000- 650,000).

#5 – Israel “Seized” Arab Lands in 1967: It did not. Israel captured these territories in a defensive war from Arabs who vowed to destroy her. Israel has greater historic legal claims and rights to these lands.

#6 – Israel’s “1967 Borders:” The 1949 Israel-Jordan Armistice Agreement expressly declared the “green line” it drew between the two sides’ ceasefire positions as a military ceasefire line only, and not a political border. The post-’67 war U.N. Resolution 242 pointedly does not demand Israel retreat from these lines.

#7 – “Israeli-Occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem:” No. The 1920 League of Nations Palestine Mandate recognized the Jewish people’s right to reconstitute its Jewish National Home in Palestine (including Judea and Samaria, and what ultimately became Jordan), and called for close settlement of the Jews on this land, where Jews have continuously lived, claiming it as their homeland, for three thousand years. At worst, the legal status is disputed, not “occupied” or “Palestinian” territories.

#8 – “Jewish Settlers and Settlements” vs. “Palestinian Residents of Neighborhoods and Villages:” Jews are not alien “settlers” implying “occupiers” in a Jerusalem that’s had a Jewish majority since mid-19th century or in the Judea-Samaria Jewish historical heartland. Israelis living there are residents who live in cities, towns and villages.

#9 – “Palestinians accept and Israel rejects a Two-State Solution:” Wrong on both counts. The U.S. and Israel define “Two States” as two states for two peoples – Jews and Arabs. Many Israelis, including Prime Minister Netanyahu, support that plan – conditioned on an end to Palestinian terror. The Arabs have rejected a Palestinian Arab state living side-by-side with a Jewish state five times since 1937, and continuously deny Israel’s right to exist no matter where its borders are drawn.

#10 – “The Palestinians:” During the Mandate, “Palestinian” typically referred to Palestine’s Jews. The UN’s 1947 partition resolution called Palestine’s Jews and its Arabs “the two Palestinian peoples.” Palestinian Arabs – ancestrally, culturally, linguistically and religiously are akin to neighboring regional Arabs – began claiming exclusive “Palestinian peoplehood” only in the 1960s. Post-1967 war UN resolution 242 does not mention “Palestinians.” Most Palestinian Arabs cannot trace their own lineage to the land back more than 4 generations.

Lee Bender is the co-President, and Jerome Verlin is the co-Vice Present of the Zionist Organization of America-Greater Philadelphia District, and they are the co-authors of the book “Pressing Israel: Media Bias Exposed From A-Z” (Pavilion Press and co-developers of the website and mobile app, www.factsonIsrael.com.

The New Jacobins Campus fascists have been using their Gestapo tactics against pro-Israel speakers for years. Richard L. Cravatts

When Chester Evans Finn, Jr., a former United States Assistant Secretary of Education, observed in 1989 that university campuses had become “islands of repression in a sea of freedom,” he was anticipating a troubling and prevalent trend now poisoning academia, namely, the suppression of free speech. With alarming regularity, speakers are shouted down, booed, jeered, and barraged with vitriol, all at the hands of groups who give lip service to the notion of academic free speech, and who demand it when their speech is at issue, but have no interest in listening to, or letting others listen to, ideas that contradict their own world view.

This is the tragic and inevitable result of a decades of grievance-based victimism by self-designated groups who frame their rights and demands on identity politics and who have been successful in weaponizing this victim status to stifle debate. In the space of the past two months, for example, tendentious and morally self-righteous progressive students, and some faculty, have displayed a shocking disregard for the university’s cardinal virtue of free expression, deciding themselves who may say what about whom on their respective campuses—and purging from campuses those ideas they have deemed too hateful, too unsafe, too incendiary to tolerate or to allow to be heard.

At Middlebury College, in one of the most astonishing examples, Charles Murray, political scientist, libertarian, and author of the controversial 1994 book, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, was verbally assaulted by a crazed audience of students intent on shutting down his planned speech—a crowd that eventually physically surrounded Murray and a Middlebury professor, Allison Stanger, and shoved them with sufficient force that she was hospitalized. “Your message is hatred, we cannot tolerate it,” the intellectual thugs screamed out.

At NYU, Gavin McInnes, co-founder of Vice Media and the host of The Gavin McInnes Show on Compound Media, was showered with pepper spray by agitated and raucous protesters before his scheduled February 3rd speech.

Ezra Levant, conservative political activist, writer, and broadcaster, had to endure a similar experience at Canada’s Ryerson University in March when protesters set off alarms, pounded on doors, and continuously interrupted his speech while chanting, “no Islamophobia, no white supremacy.”

Sanctuary Cities: Where Hypocrisy Rules NYC’s Mayor Bill DeBlasio blocks the deportation of criminal aliens by ICE. March 31, 2017 Michael Cutler

It should be commonsense that a nation’s security begins and ends at its borders.

The primary mission of the military is to keep America’s enemies as far from its shores as possible.

There is a stirring Navy commercial “America’s Navy – The Shield” in which numerous members of the United States Navy from a wide array of divisions appear on screen and a voice says, “To get to you they’d have to get past us.”

Indeed, the valiant members of our armed forces from all five branches routinely go in harm’s way to defend America and Americans.

However, as we saw all too clearly on September 11, 2001, in this era of asymmetrical warfare, America’s enemies are likely to not come to our country in a warship but on an airliner.

Indeed, on that horrific day more than 15 years ago, 19 men from the Middle East carried out the deadliest terror attack ever mounted on American soil. The casualties of 9/11 surpassed the number of casualties that the Japanese fleet inflicted on the United States at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

The 9/11 Commission was convened to determine the vulnerabilities that the terrorists successfully exploited to attack the United States. Among the most fundamental vulnerabilities were those that pertain to the various components of the immigration system.

Michael Mann Embarrasses Himself before Congress If the climate-change evangelist can’t be bothered to take a House hearing seriously, why should anyone take him seriously? By Julie Kelly

In his testimony to the House Science Committee on Wednesday, Michael Mann, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, told the story of Trofim Lysenko, a plant scientist who worked for Stalinist Russia:

Lysenko was a Russian agronomist and it became Leninist doctrine to impose his views about heredity, which were crackpot theories, completely at odds with the world’s scientists. Under Stalin, scientists were being jailed if they disagreed with his theories about agriculture. And Russian agriculture actually suffered, scientists were jailed, many died in their jail cells and potentially millions of people suffered from the disastrous agriculture policies that followed from that.

The gist of Mann’s anecdote was that scientists who challenge the ruling government’s diktat on any given scientific issue are demonized and punished while innocent bystanders suffer. In the here and now, this would seemingly apply to the minority of scientists brave enough to question the reigning dogma of climate science. After all, these are the folks who have been threatened by top law-enforcement officials, personally and professionally attacked by their peers, and even driven out of their academic positions due to the harassment.

But astonishingly, Mann was not talking about those scientists: He was talking about himself. In his alternative universe, he and other climate scientists are the martyrs, oppressed and silenced by the Politburo. Never mind that Mann — a tenured professor at one of the country’s top public universities — opened his testimony by reciting a prodigious list of awards he has won, books he has authored, scientific organizations he leads. He is celebrated by the media and environmental groups around the world, and yet in front of Congress he talked like a guy on his way to the Gulag. It takes a special blend of hubris, juvenility, and dishonesty to portray yourself as a victim when you are really the bully.

It was quite a spectacle. Mann was joined on the panel by Judith Curry, John Christy, and Roger Pielke, Jr. — three scientists who have actually endured the kind of political witch-hunts Mann referred to. Rather than present data or debate the science, Mann mostly engaged in the sophistry that has gradually undermined the credibility of climate science. He repeatedly referred to a bogus “97 percent consensus” about man-made climate change, and accused the Heartland Institute of being a “climate-change denying, Koch brothers–funded outlet.” He engaged in one ad hominem attack after another against his fellow panelists and the committee’s chairman, Representative Lamar Smith. He questioned whether Smith really understood the scientific method and read a nasty quote about Smith from a smear piece in Science magazine

Devin Nunes and Washington’s Riddle Wrapped in a Mystery inside an Enigma The beleaguered Intelligence Committee chairman is the latest target in a partisan smear campaign. He must not step down. By Victor Davis Hanson

Devin Nunes (R., Calif.) will not step down from the chairmanship of the House Intelligence Committee. He is the new target in an already long line of those targeted by the media for forced resignations — Stephen Bannon, the purported anti-Semite; Sebastian Gorka, the alleged closet Nazi; Jeff Sessions, the supposed Russian patsy; and now Devin Nunes, the purported partisan naïf.

Nor should he resign — especially given the wider and bewildering landscape of the politicization and corruption of the intelligence community over the last months and the dangerous state in which we all find ourselves vis-à-vis the intelligence agencies and the transition of presidential power.

Some salient points, all of which have been reported in the media, need to be reemphasized with two caveats: First, the central question remains who leaked what classified information for what reasons; second, since when is it improper or even unwise for an apprehensive intelligence official to bring information of some importance to the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee for external review — in a climate of endemic distrust of all intelligence agencies?

Sources

An unidentified intelligence official, possibly, it is now reported, attached in some role to the White House, apparently contacted Nunes. We have no idea whether the source did so because he did not completely trust high-ranking intelligence officials, or because he did not yet have confidence in the experience of the new Trump administration to digest such information, or because he was caught up in internal politics or wished himself to adjudicate the veracity of a prior Trump tweet. We do know that he did not in this case leak classified information to the press (as have higher-up officials). In any case, the source sought to have Nunes confirm the authenticity of his information — which purportedly suggestedimproperly handled intelligence-agency intercepts of the Trump transition team. Reporters several times have asked Nunes whether the information he’d read had anything to do with the investigation into possible connection between the Trump associates and Russia. Nunes several times said no, as he did most recently:

The information that I have seen has nothing to do with Russia or the Russian investigations. So bluntly put, everything that I was able to view did not involve Russia or any discussions with Russians or any Trump people or other Russians talking, or, so none of it has to do with Russia — that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, it just means we don’t have it.

Nunes also said that the surveillance shown to him “was essentially a lot of information on the President-elect and his transition team and what they were doing.” Further, he suggested that the surveillance may have involved high-level Obama officials. When a reporter at Nunes’s second March 22 press conference asked, “Can you rule out the possibility that senior Obama-administration officials were involved in this?” Nunes replied, “No, we cannot.”

Ipso facto these are startling disclosures of historical proportions — if true, of an anti-constitutional magnitude comparable to Watergate. Given the stakes, we should expect hysteria to follow, and it has followed.

No Transparency Goes Unpunished

Amid the current shouting, we nonetheless know that Nunes did not hide the fact that he had sought to adjudicate the validity of those explosive documents (with the original sources in the secure possession of the executive branch). And he did not hide the fact that he was going to notify the president of the United States of the extraordinary information about which he had knowledge. At his morning press conference, he said, “I will be going to the White House this afternoon to share what I know with the president and his team.”

Nunes quite transparently informed the press and the nation about exactly what he had done and also what he would do.

Such a bombshell disclosure redirected the dominant narrative away from one solely about Russian collusion (itself the theme of daily and unsubstantiated leaks) to the possibly illegal means of seeking to substantiate that rumor. But it also is not the sort of thing that a conservative politician wishes to do in the current media and political climate in Washington.

In other words, it would have been far easier — and probably politically safer — for Nunes to have adopted the usual D.C. modus operandi.

In cynical terms, as we have learned the last year, this mode goes something like the following:

In Defense of the Freedom Caucus It’s wrong for Trump to blame the conservatives. By The Editors

The demise of the American Health Care Act, House speaker Paul Ryan and the White House’s ill-fated effort to reform Obamacare, has prompted a cascade of finger-pointing as Republicans try to assign blame for their recent embarrassment. The White House and much of the Republican establishment have settled on a familiar scapegoat: the famously stubborn 30 or so members of the House Freedom Caucus. On Thursday morning, President Trump tweeted: “The Freedom Caucus will hurt the entire Republican agenda if they don’t get on the team, & fast. We must fight them, & Dems, in 2018!”

We have been not infrequent critics of the Freedom Caucus, who often seem oblivious to Ronald Reagan’s observation that “my 80 percent friend is not my 20 percent enemy.” There is no doubt that members of the caucus can be frustrating and prone to an unrealistic tactical maximalism.

Yet in this latest episode, the Freedom Caucus was mostly in the right (and it wasn’t just them — members from all corners of the House GOP found it impossible to back the bill). The American Health Care Act was a kludge of a health-care policy. Described as a way to simultaneously repeal key elements of the Affordable Care Act and replace them with market-oriented reforms, the bill in its final form managed to do little of either. Freedom Caucus members were particularly concerned about the willingness of House leaders to leave the vast majority of Obamacare’s regulations on the books — after Republicans spent seven years promising that the party would “repeal and replace Obamacare.” Even the rationale that the AHCA would be better than nothing was hard to justify; it probably would have further destabilized the individual market, while millions fewer would have been insured.

No wonder that strong-arming on behalf of the bill didn’t work. According to news reports, in the final hours, the White House sent adviser Steve Bannon to tell obstinate Freedom Caucus members that they “have no choice” but to vote for the bill. It’s hard to imagine a less effective pitch to a group that has long accused Republican leaders of trying to coerce conservatives into falling in line against their principles.

In any case, the now-or-never rhetoric around the bill has now been exposed as a convenient exaggeration. The House is exploring whether it can revive the repeal-and-replace effort, as it should. Some members of the Freedom Caucus are demanding an immediate, straight-up repeal of the Affordable Care Act, or at least of its taxes and spending, which is unrealistic. But for all their reputed rigidity, most of the Freedom Caucus had accepted the inclusion in the Ryan bill of tax credits for people without access to Medicare, Medicaid, or employer-provided insurance — a policy that they had previously tended to oppose.

That the president has decided to declare war, at least rhetorically, on this bloc of his own party’s congressional majority is a reminder of one of the other key elements of the AHCA collapse: For all of the praise heaped on the president’s negotiating acumen, he has yet to demonstrate it in his dealings with Congress. Trump’s tweet has all the hallmarks of ineffectually blowing off steam, since it’s hard to imagine the president and his supporters following through with the organizing and funding it would take to try to take out conservative members representing deep-red districts. If Trump wants to win over the Freedom Caucus — and all the other members — who opposed the health-care legislation, the first step should be obvious, if more difficult and less satisfying than popping off on Twitter: Get them a better bill.

Poisoned Russian Dissident: ‘Clash of Generations’ Driving ‘Turning Point’ Against Putin By Bridget Johnson

WASHINGTON — A Russian dissident recovering from his second poisoning in two years said this morning that massive protests in nearly 100 cities across Russia last Sunday signaled an unstoppable movement driven by the younger generation that has known no other Kremlin leader than Vladimir Putin.

Vladimir Kara-Murza, 35, a journalist who was a close associate of murdered Kremlin critic and opposition politician Boris Nemtsov, is vice chairman of the pro-democracy group Open Russia. Three months after Nemtsov was shot to death within view of the Kremlin in 2015, Kara-Murza suddenly suffered kidney failure and was in coma. It was determined he had been poisoned, and although he recovered the perpetrators were never caught.

On Feb. 2, a day after Kara-Murza posted a Facebook tribute to Nemtsov, it happened again. He was placed in a medically induced coma on life support, suffering from the same symptoms as the first time, and was released from the hospital more than two weeks later.

At an Atlantic Council event today with Senate Foreign Relations Committee Ranking Member Ben Cardin (D-Md.) and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Kara-Murza said doctors gave him about a 5 percent chance of recovery. “I look better than I feel,” he noted, adding doctors warned him of another poisoning that “if you have a third time, that’ll be the last one.”

He is determined to return to Russia after his rehabilitation and full recovery. “I do want to go back and I will go back… our work is important,” Kara-Murza said. “…There’s nothing more the Kremlin would like than for us to give up and we’re not going to give them that.”

Kara-Murza emphasized that the “vast majority of those who came out to the streets of Russia last Sunday were young people… these are the Putin generation who have never known any other political reality.”

This new generation, he said, are getting information from sources other than just state TV and “increasingly recognize” that the Kremlin is damaging their future.

“I have to admit I was surprised about the scale… but I was not surprised about the participation,” he added.

More than a thousand people were arrested during the protests, including key Putin opponent Alexei Navalny, whose Anti-Corruption Foundation estimated the total number of protesters to be around 150,000. “If you watched Russia state TV, you wouldn’t know who Alexei Navalny was,” Kara-Murza noted. CONTINUE AT SITE