Displaying posts published in

May 2017

Police Tell Prof He’s in Danger for Not Participating in Campus ‘No Whites’ Day By Tom Knighton

Evergreen State College hosts an annual event called a “Day of Absence” where, traditionally, minority students and faculty step away from the campus for the day to show just how significant their impact is. Additionally, white students attend workshops on racism.

This year, the school apparently thought it would just be a hoot to change things up and just kick all the white folks off campus instead. Biology professor Bret Weinstein, however, took issue with the event.

Now, students are calling for his head:

Students at Evergreen State College in Olympia, who filmed their exploits and posted the videos on social media, have occupied and barricaded the library, shouting down anyone who disagrees with them or shows insufficient passion for racial justice.

Biology professor Bret Weinstein was berated by dozens of students outside of his classroom Tuesday morning for refusing to participate in an event in which white people were invited to leave campus for a day. Now, he says police have told him to hold his classes off campus due to safety concerns.

Things are “out of control at Evergreen,” he said.

“Police told me protesters stopped cars yesterday, demanding information about occupants,” Mr. Weinstein told The Washington Times. “They believe I was being sought. It appears that the campus has been under the effective control of protesters since 9:30 a.m. Tuesday. Police are on lockdown, hamstrung by the college administration. Students, staff and faculty are not safe.”

A student interviewed denies any knowledge of Weinstein being specifically sought.

Weinstein’s sin is simply thinking that asking white folks to leave the campus was very different than minorities choosing to remove themselves from campus. He has a point. It appears that the original intent of this event is to show just how important minorities are to the proper functioning of the school. So why will demanding 66.7 percent of the student body, as well as Lord only knows how many faculty and staff, accomplish that same purpose?

Weinstein took issue with the change in an email, which led to him being confronted by students who refused to listen to the professor:

When the professor tells the students he will listen to them if they listen to him, one student responds, “We don’t care what terms you want to speak on. This is not about you. We are not speaking on terms — on terms of white privilege. This is not a discussion. You have lost that one.”

Another protester asks the professor whether he believes “black students in sciences are targeted.”

After asking for a clarification, Mr. Weinstein says, “I do not believe that anybody on our faculty, with intent, specially targets students of color.”

That remark prompts shrieks of outrage.

Way to keep those lines of communication open, kids. Way to go.

Trump quietly doubling number of refugees entering U.S. By Ed Straker (Absolutely appalling!!!!!rsk)

President Trump has decided to double the number of refugees admitted every week, but hasn’t made a major announcement about it. Why not? Won’t that help make America great again?

Despite repeated efforts by President Trump to curtail refugee resettlements, the State Department this week quietly lifted the department’s restriction on the number of refugees allowed to enter the United States.

The result could be a near doubling of refugees entering the country, from about 830 people a week in the first three weeks of this month to well over 1,500 people per week by next month, according to refugee advocates. Tens of thousands of refugees are waiting to come to the United States.

The State Department’s decision was conveyed in an email on Thursday to the private agencies in countries around the world that help refugees manage the nearly two-year application process needed to enter the United States.

Although it came the same day as an appeals court ruling that rejected government efforts to limit travel to the United States from six predominantly Muslim nations, the move by the State Department had nothing to do with the court ruling.

Refugee groups now predict that entries into the United States could increase so rapidly that the total number of refugees admitted by Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year, could exceed 70,000. That is well below the 84,994 refugees admitted in fiscal year 2016, but not by nearly as much as many advocates had feared.

Refugee advocates were delighted by the State Department’s decision.

CNN =CERTAINLY NOT NEWS BY ROBIN DOLGYN

Newscaster Bob Schieffer unwittingly demonstrated the depths his colleagues will descend to disparage President Trump at CNN.

Schieffer broke from the standard CNN narrative to remark that the president “actually” sounded “dignified and even presidential,” during his momentous speech before more than 50 Arab and Muslim leaders delivered recently in Saudi Arabia. Apparently, Schieffer had gone too far in his faint praise of the president.

“You know, Bob,” said his on-air colleague John Berman, “There will be people who look at that last comment you made and say, you’re normalizing the president.” That was just the wind-up before landing the real punch: Berman mused aloud over making laudatory remarks about the president just “because he (Trump) met this admittedly very low bar for not sounding foolish.”

This time Berman wasn’t dealing the race card, but rather pulled out the character assassination card from the bottom of the deck. After all — you wouldn’t want to “normalize” a wife beater, or serial killer. Why would you think of “normalizing” the president? Liberal hysteria is now a national condition.

There is a glimmer of hope on the horizon. Schieffer wasn’t going to be shamed into marching back his remarks on President Trump: “I’m not trying to normalize him in any way,” Schieffer replied. “I’m trying to do what reporters do — report and try to emphasize what I think is important.”

Being an old-school journalist, Schieffer may be raising the bar for his colleagues at the Trump-bashing network. Sadly, in the end, Schieffer joined his colleagues at the cable channel in both condescending rhetoric and mean-spirited tone.

“He didn’t sound like the guy at the end of the bar popping off,” Schieffer added. “You may agree or disagree with what he said but he sounded like a president. This went over very well — mainly because he stayed on script. He sounded like someone who actually thought about what he was going to say before he said it. No tweets today.” Faint praise indeed.

Schieffer never veered too far off script himself: But, just for a moment, he actually sounded like he was a newscaster “trying to do what reporters do — report.”

Manchester, Murder & New York Politicians want to honor a terrorist on Puerto Rican Day. See note please

Where is there any indignation at the WSJ that our presidents have honored Mahmoud Abbas, a dyed in the wool terrorist whose finger prints are on atrocities committed against innocent civilians including babies swaddled in cribs in every corner of Israel? rsk
What’s the difference between last Monday’s suicide bomb attack at a pop concert in Manchester, England, and the 1975 Fraunces Tavern bombing in New York that also killed the innocent?

The answer is no difference save for the body counts and the causes for which the innocent were targeted. Which makes it all the more outrageous that the Speaker of the New York City Council and her allies on the board of the Puerto Rican Day Parade would honor a leader in a terror organization that was responsible for more than 120 bombings in the 1970s and 1980s.

The Speaker is Melissa Mark-Viverito, and the terrorist is Oscar López Rivera, a leader in the Armed Forces of National Liberation (FALN in Spanish) who was serving a 70-year prison term until President Obama commuted his sentence in January. Because Ms. Mark-Viverito supports Puerto Rican independence, and because the FALN committed its bombings on behalf of Puerto Rican independence, she supports her allies on the parade board who have honored López Rivera as a “National Freedom Hero” for this year’s June 11 parade.

This is incredibly insulting to the city’s law-abiding Puerto Rican residents—and they know it. Among the first to withdraw from the parade was the New York Police Department’s Hispanic Society. Others who have dropped out include Goya Foods, the New York Yankees and JetBlue Airways . Mayor Bill de Blasio is still a go, as he’s never seen a left-wing cause he couldn’t endorse. Governor Andrew Cuomo, after weeks of dithering, finally decided on Friday that he won’t run to the front of this parade.

Especially after the massacre in Manchester this week, these progressive politicians stand exposed for putting identity politics above the community values of public safety and respect for the law. As bad as Ms. Mark-Viverito’s judgment has been, López Rivera wouldn’t be able to attend any parade if Barack Obama hadn’t freed a man no morally different from the killers who plotted death in Manchester.

The Trump-Russia Story Starts Making Sense The Kremlin seems to have bet big on the willingness of U.S. intelligence agencies to leak. By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

The Trump -Russia business is finally coming into clearer, more rational focus. Former Obama CIA chief John Brennan, in testimony this week, offered no evidence of Trump campaign cooperation with Russian intelligence. Instead he spoke of CIA fears that Russia would try to recruit/blackmail/trick Trump colleagues into being witting or unwitting agents of influence.

This is a realistic fear of any incoming administration. It’s especially realistic in the case of an “outsider” campaign full of naive, inexperienced and unvetted individuals. But it’s quite different from “collusion.”

The other shoe was dropped by the Washington Post. Finally we have details of an alleged email exchange showing influential liberals trusting in then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch to corral an inquiry into Hillary Clinton’s email practices. According to the Post, this email appears not to exist. It was cited in a secret Russian intelligence document that inspired FBI chief James Comey to usurp the attorney general’s role and publicly clear Mrs. Clinton of intelligence mishandling. Allegedly, he feared the real email (which didn’t exist) would surface and discredit any Justice Department announcement clearing Mrs. Clinton.

Are you now thinking of the Trump dossier circulated by former British agent Christopher Steele, which also felt like a Russian plant? While the political circus in Washington has focused on purloined Democratic emails and fake news spread during the election by Russian bots, the more effective part of Moscow’s effort may have been planting fake leads to prod U.S. enforcement and intelligence agencies to intervene disruptively in the campaign.

This also should shed new light on today’s anti-Trump leakers in the intelligence agencies: They may be the real unwitting agents of Russian influence.

There are plenty of lessons to go around. Mr. Trump, if he ever really thought Vladimir Putin was his friend, probably has wised up by now. He should have wised up the moment the Steele document came into view, supposedly based on plumbing Mr. Steele’s peerless Russian intelligence contacts. It always appeared possible, even likely, that Mr. Steele was the semi-witting vehicle for Russian rumors designed expressly to undermine Mr. Trump just as Russia was also trying to undermine Mrs. Clinton.

Plenty of people in Washington could also afford to rethink how their partisan idiocy makes them soft touches for such Russian disruption efforts. That includes Rep. Adam Schiff, top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. It includes Mr. Trump too. Overdue is an inquiry into a possible Russian role in flogging the birther conspiracy and the 9/11 truther miasma. Mr. Trump, who loves a conspiracy theory, might consider how he and his ilk showed Russia a vulnerability in American political discourse that it could exploit.

Let’s remember that ex-FBI chief Robert Mueller’s mission is to investigate Russian influence in the election, not the narrow matter of Trump collusion. Whether Russia suborned or tried to suborn people like Paul Manafort, Carter Page and Michael Caputo is a necessary question. Whether Russia exploited Facebook to proliferate fake anti-Hillary news is a necessary question. But so is the provenance of the Steele document and the fake email purporting a Democratic coverup of Hillary Clinton’s server activity. If the FBI’s Mr. Comey allowed himself to be manipulated by Russian intelligence into intervening in the race, that’s something we need to know about. And we need to know about the leaks.

Mr. Brennan, the former CIA chief, has pointed out that these leaks are palpable, unambiguous crimes. Recall that Russia twice sent us detailed warnings about Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bomber. President Trump is entitled to share terrorism intelligence with Russia’s ambassador. The only criminal leak occurred when anonymous officials relayed the classified content of these briefings to the press. CONTINUE AT SITE

Egypt Launches Airstrikes in Libya in Retaliation for Deadly Attack on Christians Egypt’s military says it determined the attack that killed 28 Coptic Christians earlier Friday originated with militants trained in eastern Libya By Tamer El-Ghobashy

Egypt’s military launched six airstrikes in eastern Libya late Friday in response to an attack by unidentified gunmen who killed 28 Coptic Christians in an ambush south of Cairo earlier in the day, the military said in a video statement.

The Egyptian military said the strikes were conducted after it determined the attack on the Coptics originated with militants trained in Libya.

The strikes, the first Egypt has launched in Libya since 2015, came as President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi addressed the nation in a televised speech and vowed an aggressive response to the attack on a bus carrying Coptic pilgrims to a monastery in Minya, about 190 miles south of Cairo.

“As I address you now, a very strong airstrike has been carried out against those camps,” Mr. Sisi said, referencing camps where the unknown perpetrators of Friday’s attack allegedly trained. “Egypt will never hesitate to conduct airstrikes against terrorist camps anywhere, inside or outside Egypt.”

While Mr. Sisi didn’t mention Libya, security officials told the MENA state news agency that the airstrikes targeted militant sites near the Libyan city of Derna.

It was an unusually swift response to an incident that has so far not been claimed by any group and Egyptian authorities didn’t publicly identify any suspects.

Egypt last struck Derna in February 2015 after Islamic State militants released a video showing the execution and beheading of a group of Coptic Egyptian laborers on a beach in Libya. At the time, Islamic State had taken control of Derna, but the group has since been driven out.

Mandatory Minimums Don’t Deserve Your Ire Jeff Sessions’s policy won’t lock up harmless stoners, but it will help dismantle drug-trafficking networks. By Heather Mac Donald

Attorney General Jeff Sessions is being tarred as a racist—again—for bringing the law fully to bear on illegal drug traffickers. Mr. Sessions has instructed federal prosecutors to disclose in court the actual amount of drugs that trafficking defendants possessed at the time of arrest. That disclosure will trigger the mandatory penalties set by Congress for large-scale dealers.

Mr. Sessions’s order revokes a 2013 directive by former Attorney General Eric Holder telling prosecutors to conceal the size of traffickers’ drug stashes so as to avoid imposing the statutory penalties. Contrary to the claims of Mr. Sessions’s critics, this return to pre-2013 charging rules is neither racist nor an attack on addicts.

The impetus to eliminate open-air drug markets has historically come from law-abiding residents of minority neighborhoods, as books by both Michael Fortner and James Forman have documented. In 1973 a Harlem pastor named Oberia D. Dempsey called for mandatory life sentences for heroin and cocaine dealers, because the “pusher is cruel, inhuman and ungodly. . . . He knows that he’s committing genocide but he doesn’t care.” In 1986 Brooklyn Congressman Major Owens introduced a bill to increase federal crack penalties. “None of the press accounts really have exaggerated what is actually going on,” he said. In 1989 Atlanta Mayor Maynard Jackson pledged to make “the drug dealer’s teeth rattle” and proposed seizing dealers’ assets.

Today people living under the scourge of open-air drug dealing still face the constant threat of violence. Only months ago Chicago mourned 11-year-old Takiya Holmes, struck by a stray bullet fired by a 19-year-old marijuana dealer. Former FBI Director James Comey once described the aftermath of a raid in northwest Arkansas that busted 70 drug traffickers. “As our SWAT teams stood in the street following the arrests of the defendants,” he said in a 2015 speech, “they were met by applause, hugs and offers of food from the good people of that besieged community.” The town was predominantly black, and so were nearly all the drug dealers.

The argument that Mr. Sessions’s order penalizes addiction also falls flat. For a mandatory federal sentence to come into play, a dealer has to be caught with an amount of drugs that clearly reveals large-scale trafficking. To trigger a mandatory 10-year sentence, a heroin trafficker, for example, must be caught with a kilogram of the drug, a quantity that represents 10,000 doses and currently has a street value of at least $100,000.

No one who gets caught smoking a joint is going to be implicated by Mr. Sessions’s order. The number of federal convictions for simple possession is negligible: only 198 in 2015. Most of those were plea-bargained down from trafficking charges, usually of marijuana. Last year the median weight of marijuana possessed by those convicted of simple possession was 48.5 pounds. To trigger a mandatory penalty for marijuana trafficking, a dealer would need to be caught with more than 2,200 pounds of cannabis.

Trump Pushing Big White House Changes as Russia Crisis Grows Meetings are set for next week as the president returns from his overseas trip By Michael C. Bender and Peter Nicholas

WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump is actively discussing major changes in the White House, including having lawyers vet his tweets and shaking up his top staff, as he grapples with the fallout from probes into his campaign’s dealings with Russia, according to several senior administration officials and outside advisers.

Other revisions on the table include adding a roster of outside lawyers to help deal with the legal ramifications of the Russia investigation, officials and allies said. “Everything is in play,” one Trump adviser said.

Meetings devoted to White House operations are scheduled for next week, after the president returns from his overseas trip, officials said. The anticipated moves are the latest sign of how the probe into Russia’s interference in last year’s election, and the circumstances of the president’s firing of FBI Director James Comey, is defining the new administration.

“We have nothing to announce,” White House spokesman Sean Spicer said Friday.

Mr. Trump has previously queried advisers about major changes, only to stick by his current staff and leave in place internal processes. But as he prepares to return from the nine-day foreign trip this weekend, the situation at home is threatening to consume his administration, his allies said. Before he left, the Justice Department appointed former Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Robert Mueller as a special counsel to oversee the probe, which is focused on whether there was any collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia during the election and may also include looking into the firing of Mr. Comey earlier this month.

“He’s 100% focused on this,” said a White House official, noting that the president slept only two hours in Saudi Arabia the night before his widely anticipated speech on Islam that he spent little time rehearsing.

Mr. Trump has denied any collusion between his campaign and Russia and has said he fired Mr. Comey because he was doing a bad job. He also said he had been a “showboat.”

One major change under consideration would see the president’s social media posts vetted by a team of lawyers, who would decide if any needed to be adjusted or curtailed. The idea, said one of Mr. Trump’s advisers, is to create a system so that tweets “don’t go from the president’s mind out to the universe.” CONTINUE AT SITE

UK: Welcome Mat for Jihadists by Khadija Khan

The Sharia Council of Britain determines the fate of women by undermining the laws of the land.

British politicians seem have become intoxicated by the propaganda of those who prefer to term any action to limit Islamic extremism or terrorism “Islamophobia.”

These human rights abuses are linked to the Islamic ideology, the end product of which often shows itself as violence against homosexuals, non-Muslims and other marginalized communities. It appears that most of these jihadists were radicalized through local mosques and madrassas.

England, which once was a jewel of both East and West, today symbolizes the degeneration of Europe, the continent which has turned its back on the threat Islamist terrorists are posing. England has increased its terror threat level from “severe” to “critical”; counter-terror measures include employing the British army in key public locations as well as stepped-up counter-intelligence, and raids against suspected terrorists.

It seems, however, that British politicians have simply put the whole nation in a loop of feed, kill, repeat; meanwhile acting as if they haven’t a clue as to what has stricken the lovely country.

Prime Minister Theresa May, in her public statement after the blast, stated:

“We struggle to comprehend the warped and twisted mind that sees a room packed with young children not as a scene to cherish but as an opportunity for carnage…. But we can continue to resolve to thwart such attacks in future. To take on and defeat the ideology that often fuels this violence.”

May was careful to avoid naming the ideology.

Ironically, the terror spree caught the United Kingdom in the midst of its election season. Nonetheless, neither the Tories nor the Labour Party are offering any solid plans to counter the menace. It seems these politicians have decided to sleep on the issue, while leaving their poor citizens at the mercy of terrorists, protected only by the brave law enforcement personnel who are also targets.

British politicians seem have become intoxicated by the propaganda of those who prefer to term any action to limit Islamic extremism or terrorism “Islamophobia.” When the government decides to look the other way, it allows many malpractices to flourish under the skin of British Muslim communities, among whom any action to protect the country would be stigmatized by apologists as “Islamophobic.”

Caroline Glick: Netanyahu’s Challenge With Trump

On Thursday, less than 48 hours after US President Donald Trump completed his successful visit to Israel, his chief negotiator Jason Greenblatt was back in town.

On Wednesday, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson set the tone for Greenblatt’s mission when he told reporters aboard Air Force One that during his visit, Trump “was putting a lot of pressure” on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas “to get back to the table” and negotiate a peace deal.

Tillerson went on to explain why Trump is so keen to make a deal.

“We solve the Israeli-Palestinian peace dilemma, we start solving a lot of the peace throughout the Middle East region,” he said.

Trump apparently agrees with his secretary of state.

At his joint appearance with Abbas in Bethlehem on Tuesday, Trump said, “I firmly believe that if Israel and the Palestinians can make peace, it will begin a process of peace all throughout the Middle East.”

These statements, and Greenblatt’s swift return here indicate that as of now, on a substantive, strategic level, Trump is maintaining Obama’s policies on Israel and the Palestinians. And Obama’s policies on the issue, it bears noting, were substantively all but indistinguishable from those of George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush before him.

Like his predecessors, Trump is advancing a policy that assumes that the Palestinian conflict with Israel is the key issue that the US must grapple with in the Middle East. He is advancing the view that the US’s power in the region, and its ability to foster stability and security, are tied to what happens or does not happen in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, and to a degree, in Hamas-controlled Gaza. In short, like his predecessors, Trump believes that putting pressure on Israel to give land to the PLO is the key to resolving the conflicts of the Middle East.

This position stands incongruously next to the pledge that Trump made in his speech before Sunni leaders in Riyadh on Sunday. There, Trump explained the fundamental nature of his foreign policy as follows: “America,” he said, “is committed to adjusting our strategies to meet evolving threats and new facts. We will discard those strategies that have not worked — and will apply new approaches informed by experience and judgment. We are adopting a principled realism, rooted in common values and shared interests.”