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May 2017

Linda Sarsour and the progressive zeitgeist : Caroline Glick

In US academic tradition, university administrators choose commencement speakers they believe embody the zeitgeist of their institutions and as such, will be able to inspire graduating students to take that spirit with them into the world outside.

In this context, it makes perfect sense that Ayman El-Mohandes, dean of the Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy at City University of New York (CUNY), invited Linda Sarsour to serve as commencement speaker at his faculty’s graduation ceremony.

Sarsour embodies Mohandes’s values.

Mohandes’s Twitter feed makes his values clear. His Twitter feed is filled with attacks against Israel.

Mohandes indirectly accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of wishing to commit genocide. Netanyahu, he intimated, wishes to “throw the Arabs in the sea.”

He has repeatedly libeled Israel as a repressive, racist, corrupt state.

Mohandes has effectively justified and legitimized Islamic terrorism and the Hamas terrorist regime in Gaza. The Islamic terrorist assault against Israel, led by Hamas from Gaza, is simply an act of “desperation,” he insists.

By Mohandes’s lights, Hamas terrorists are desperate not because they uphold values and beliefs that reject freedom, oppress women and aspire to the genocide of Jewry and the destruction of the West. No, they are desperate because Israel is evil and oppressive.

Who could Mohandes have chosen to serve as his commencement speaker other than Sarsour, given his positions? Sarsour, the rising star of the Democratic Party, not only shares Mohandes’s values and positions, she has taken those common values and positions and amplified them on the national stage.

WILL HE OR WON’T HE QUIT THE PARIS CLIMATE SCAM?

Scoop: Trump tells confidants U.S. will quit Paris climate deal.

Jonathan Swan
Amy Harder

President Trump has privately told multiple people, including EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, that he plans to leave the Paris agreement on climate change, according to three sources with direct knowledge.

Publicly, Trump’s position is that he has not made up his mind and when we asked the White House about these private comments, Director of Strategic Communications Hope Hicks said, “I think his tweet was clear. He will make a decision this week.”

Why this matters: Pulling out of Paris is the biggest thing Trump could to do unravel Obama’s climate policies. It also sends a stark and combative signal to the rest of the world that working with other nations on climate change isn’t a priority to the Trump administration. And pulling out threatens to unravel the ambition of the entire deal, given how integral former President Obama was in making it come together in the first place.
Keep reading 550 words

Caveat: Although Trump made it clear during the campaign and in multiple conversations before his overseas trip that he favored withdrawal, he has been known to abruptly change his mind — and often floats notions to gauge the reaction of friends and aides. On the trip, he spent many hours with Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, powerful advisers who back the deal.

Behind-the-scenes: The mood inside the EPA this week has been one of nervous optimism. In a senior staff meeting earlier this week, Pruitt told aides he wanted them to pump the brakes on publicly lobbying for withdrawal from Paris.

Instead, the EPA staff are quietly working with outside supporters to place op eds favoring withdrawal from Paris.
The White House has told Pruitt to lay off doing TV appearances until Trump announces his decision on Paris. (In past weeks, the EPA Administrator has gone on TV to say the U.S. needs to quit Paris, but Pruitt told aides he’ll be keeping a lower profile. He doesn’t want a Paris withdrawal to be seen as his victory. “It needs to be the President’s victory,” one source said, paraphrasing what Pruitt has told aides.)
Pruitt’s aides have told associates in recent days that they remain confident the President will withdraw from Paris but they’ve been worried about him being overseas and exposed to pressure from European leaders and the environmentalist views of his top aides like Ivanka and economic adviser Gary Cohn. Top EPA staff were relieved when Trump refused to join the other six nations of the G7 in reaffirming “strong commitment” to the Paris agreement.

Manchester attack: ‘Trainee pilot’ arrested as investigation spreads across Britain

A “trainee pilot” has been arrested as the investigation into the terror network behind Salman Abedi spreads across Britain. The 23-year-old, understood to be Libyan, was arrested at a property in Shoreham-by-Sea, Sussex, more than 260 miles from the Manchester Arena where Abedi detonated a suicide bomb a week ago killing 22 people. Neighbours said that they were shocked that the police activity had reached their doorstep. Violet Mainda, the Kenyan-born owner of Violet’s Hairdresser’s beneath the flat, said: “He was a young Libyan guy who was always very jovial and nice.

“He said he was training to be a pilot at Shoreham Airfield and he had just completed doing that. I am really, really shocked by this. I can’t believe he had been arrested.

“He had a few friends and a girlfriend and always seemed very nice. I don’t know if he worked, I think he just studied to be a pilot. He said he was studying to become a pilot at Shoreham.”Armed officers also swooped on sites across Manchester in a flurry of raids and arrests over the weekend as they worked to stamp out any lingering threat from co-conspirators to Monday’s massacre.

The Sussex arrest early on Monday morning brings the number of people in custody in relation to the the attack to 14.

With the intense series of police operations showing no signs of abating:

A 25-year-old man was held on suspicion of terror offences in the Old Trafford district.
Thousands of runners turned out defiantly for the Great Manchester Run, pounding the streets of the city amid a heightened security operation.
The NHS said 54 people injured in the attack were still being treated in eight hospitals with 19 receiving critical care.
Home Secretary Amber Rudd revealed temporary exclusion orders, banning suspected jihadis from returning to the UK, had been used for the first time.
CCTV stills of Abedi, bespectacled and casually clothed, were released by police in a plea for information about his movements between May 18 and the attack.
A vigil, attended by hundreds, was held for 29-year-old victim Martyn Hett in Stockport.

Merkel Warns: ‘U.S. No Longer a Reliable Ally for Europe’ By Michael van der Galien

As PJ Media’s own Michael Walsh reported earlier today, Angela Merkel has apparently had a falling out with U.S. President Donald Trump. On Sunday, she told a crowd at an election rally in Munich that Europe “must take its fate into its own hands” because it can no longer rely on the U.S. as a loyal ally.

The times in which we could completely depend on others are on the way out. I’ve experienced that in the last few days. We Europeans truly have to take our fate into our own hands.

To which she added that “we have to fight for our own destiny.”

My esteemed colleague comments in his own article about Merkel’s statements:

If it took Trump’s typical bluntness to finally get the message across that the Europeans are now responsible for the mess of their own making, good. Germany in particular has coasted under the American nuclear umbrella for decades, allowing it to a) concentrate entirely on rebuilding its domestic economy, infrastructure and social welfare state and b) thumb its nose at American warmongering imperialism. It’s one of the least attractive aspects of the German character; the gratitude that the immediate postwar generation felt for our having rescued them from Hitler and the love Germans felt for all things American have vanished. In their place has come a churlish, we-can-take-it-from-here mutter that does not become them.

All true, but there’s something that must be added to the above: Merkel can talk all she wants about Europe taking its destiny into her own hands, but everybody in Europe knows Merkel and her friends aren’t doing anything of the sort. Despite the threat Russia is supposed to pose to our safety and freedom, not one European “power” is willing to invest heavily in its military. Merkel, Emmanuel Macron, Mark Rutte (of the Netherlands), and all the other Western European leaders continue to rely on the U.S. for their security.

Merkel’s words don’t change reality: Europe cannot get by on its own. We are still dependent on the U.S. for our most basic need (security) and that’s not going to change anytime soon.

Instead of insulting the current occupant of the White House, Merkel would be wise to take a page from British Prime Minister Theresa May’s playbook. Unlike Merkel, May is determined to have a healthy and productive relationship with Trump’s America, which is extremely wise because Britain is nearly as dependent on the U.S. as the rest of Europe. What’s more, May’s efforts seem to be paying off with Trump choosing her side after American intel officers leaked sensitive information about the terror attack in Manchester. That’s what a smart European leader does. Sadly, “smart” appears to be above Merkel’s pay grade.

The Fourth Circuit Joins the ‘Resistance’ Taking a stand against Trump, the judges are also defying Supreme Court precedent. By David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey

Another court has weighed in against President Trump’s executive order temporarily limiting entry to the U.S. of aliens from six terrorist hotspot countries in Africa and the Middle East. In ruling against the order last week, the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals defied Supreme Court precedent and engaged the judicial branch in areas of policy that the Constitution plainly reserves to the president and Congress. The high court should reverse the decision.

In International Refugee Assistance Project v. Trump, the Fourth Circuit affirmed a Maryland district judge’s nationwide injunction halting enforcement of the president’s order. Chief Judge Roger Gregory, writing for the 10-3 majority, acknowledged that the “stated national security interest is, on its face, a valid reason” for the order. But he went on to conclude that the administration acted in bad faith based on, among other things, “then-candidate Trump’s numerous campaign statements expressing animus towards the Islamic faith.”

Whatever one may think of that conclusion as a political matter, as a legal matter the judges overstepped their bounds. The controlling case is Kleindienst v. Mandel (1972), in which the Supreme Court rejected a petition from American scholars seeking admission to the country on behalf of a foreign colleague who had been kept out because he advocated communism. The plaintiffs argued that the government’s refusal to admit their colleague on account of his views violated their First Amendment rights. The justices upheld his exclusion and made three things clear: first, aliens have no constitutional right to enter the U.S.; second, American citizens have no constitutional right to demand entry for aliens; and third, the decision to deny admission to an alien must be upheld if it is based on “a facially legitimate and bona fide reason.”

The high court has repeatedly reaffirmed and followed Mandel. Fiallo v. Bell (1977) rejected a challenge to immigration preferences that openly favored legitimate over illegitimate children and female U.S. nationals over male—distinctions that almost certainly would have been found unconstitutional in a domestic-policy context. In Kerry v. Din (2015), the justices upheld visa denial for the complainant’s husband, who had been a member of the Taliban. When the executive branch makes a decision “on the basis of a facially legitimate and bona fide reason,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote, quoting Mandel, the judiciary can “ ‘neither look behind the exercise of that discretion, nor test it by balancing its justification against’ the constitutional interests of the citizens the visa denial might implicate.”

In holding that Mr. Trump acted in bad faith, the Fourth Circuit fundamentally misconstrued Justice Kennedy’s opinion in Din, which nowhere suggested that, once the government had articulated a facially legitimate purpose, the courts could weigh whether there might have been an additional, improper purpose. As the Fourth Circuit dissenters explained, Mandel requires only a facially legitimate and facially bona fide reason.

Any other standard would constitute an invitation to the judiciary to direct the nation’s foreign and defense policies. Having misapplied Din, the Fourth Circuit went on to apply a standard domestic case-law analysis, under which the existence of a discriminatory purpose essentially dooms the exercise of governmental authority irrespective of other justifications. Under that approach, the government would have lost in Mandel, Fiallo and Din.

If the Fourth Circuit’s reasoning were to stand, it could cripple the president’s ability to defend the country. The judges claim Mr. Trump’s campaign statements, supposedly hostile to Islam rather than Islamist terror, transform his order into an “establishment” of religion in violation of the First Amendment. If the president is forbidden to impose temporary limitations on immigration from any Muslim-majority nations, it would follow that he is prohibited from taking any hostile or unfavorable actions, including the use of economic sanctions or military force, toward any Muslim-majority nation.CONTINUE AT SITE

Palestinians: Abbas Immediately Breaks Promises to Trump by Bassam Tawil

Less than 24 hours after the Abbas-Trump meeting in Bethlehem, in which Abbas promised Trump and his representative, Jason Greenblatt, to cease all forms of incitement against Israel, the Palestinian Authority (PA) government in Ramallah resumed its vicious rhetorical attacks on Israel.

The Palestinian denial of Jewish ties and history to the land also continues full blast, despite Abbas’s pledge to Trump that Palestinians are not in conflict with Jews or Judaism.

Hard on the heels of Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas’s assurances to US President Donald Trump that he is raising Palestinians on a “culture of peace,” he continues to glorify terrorists who have Jewish blood on their hands.

Abbas, who met with Trump in Bethlehem on May 23, told reporters that he was committed to working with the new US administration to achieve a “historic peace deal with Israel.” Abbas also announced his readiness to become a “partner in the war on terrorism in our region and the world.” He claimed that he and his Palestinian Authority have been promoting “tolerance and coexistence, and spreading a culture of peace and renouncing violence.”

US President Donald Trump talks with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas on May 23, 2017 in Bethlehem. (Photo by PPO via Getty Images)

Abbas’s sweet talk, however, did not last long. Just hours after Trump left the region, Abbas and his PA returned to their anti-Israel incitement. This stands in blinding contrast to what Abbas told Trump and his Middle East envoy, Jason Greenblatt, with whom Abbas met 48 hours after his get-together with Trump in Bethlehem.

At a meeting of Fatah leaders in Ramallah on May 25, Abbas described Palestinian prisoners held by Israel as “heroes.”

His remarks came in response to the hunger strike of more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners, many of whom are serving lengthy terms for murdering or wounding hundreds of Israelis. The hunger strike, which began on April 17, is led by Marwan Barghouti, a senior official with Abbas’s Fatah faction who is serving five life terms in prison for his role in a spate of terror attacks that killed five Israelis during the Second Intifada (2000-2005).

Referring to the convicted terrorists as “our heroes,” Abbas lashed out at the Israeli government for its refusal to surrender to the demands of the hunger strikers.

“We will stand with them and support them,” Abbas said, referring to the convicted terrorists. “We will emerge triumphant and we won’t allow [Israel] to defeat or humiliate the prisoners.”

Abbas’s powerful message flies in the face of his promise to Trump and his representative, Jason Greenblatt, to cease all forms of incitement against Israel.

By describing the convicted terrorists as “heroes,” Abbas is in fact sending a message to all Palestinians that murdering Jews is a noble and heroic act.

Such rhetoric prompts Palestinians to launch terror attacks against Israelis. It is a clear call by Abbas for Palestinians to follow in the footsteps of terrorists and murderers.

Is this Abbas’s way of promoting a “culture of peace” among his people? Is this his version of encouraging Palestinians to renounce violence?

The Alleged Kushner–Kislyak Meeting: Amateur Hour May Be Worse Than ‘Collusion’ If the anonymously sourced reports are true, the meeting was foolish and shows that the president’s closest adviser is out of his depth. By Andrew C. McCarthy

The Putin regime is hostile to the United States. Donald Trump’s infatuation with forging an alliance with Russia (much like his infatuation with crafting a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians whose objective is to destroy Israel) has always struck me as reckless, occasionally repugnant, and always hopelessly naïve. Similarly naïve, and obnoxious to the American tradition of resisting royalty, is President Trump’s reliance in major matters of policy on his son-in-law and daughter, two young people who have little if any experience in many of their swelling areas of responsibility.

Put another way, would Jared Kushner be a key senior policy adviser to any president of the United States other than his father-in-law?

The two streams of naïveté collided in December 2016.

Kushner, then 36 and the scion of a wealthy family, is well educated and acquainted with the hardball ways of the New York real-estate business and newspaper publishing. He has no national-security or diplomatic experience, however, but was nonetheless chosen to represent the then-president-elect at a Trump Tower meeting with Russia’s ambassador the United States. That would be Sergey Kislyak, a wily Soviet-apparatchik-turned-Putin-operative, who has been at the game of picking America’s pocket for longer than Kushner has been alive. Retired general Michael Flynn, who was slated to become Trump’s national-security adviser, was also at the meeting. On the agenda was the establishment of a back channel for Trump-administration dealings with the Kremlin. In particular, according to the New York Times, the Trump transition team wanted Flynn to have access to a Russian counterpart to discuss Syria and other issues of mutual interest.

In principle, as stressed by Trump national-security adviser H. R. McMaster, there is nothing wrong with the concept of back channels. All administrations use them. See, for instance, John Hinderaker’s report on President Obama’s establishment of a back channel with the Iranian regime in 2008, when it was already clear Obama would be the next president and when his pre-inauguration signaling to the mullahs undermined the Bush administration, just as the Obama administration no doubt felt undermined by Trump’s transition outreach to Putin. The United States and Russia are global competitors with large nuclear arsenals and some important mutual interests. It is often desirable for adversaries to maintain open lines for frank communication beneath all of their public posturing. Obama certainly seemed to think so when, in his infamous hot-mic mishap, he beseeched Putin factotum Dmitry Medvedev to let Vlad know he’d have “more flexibility” to accommodate Russia on missile defense after the 2012 election was over.

Until last fall, national-security conservatives were ridiculed for agitating about Russia. So it is with back channels, which the media-Democrat complex were not bothered by until a Republican was elected president. To be sure, the structure of the back channel that Kushner undertook to forge is troubling — if, that is, the reporting about it is accurate. That reporting, it must be noted,is based on anonymous Washington Post sources, whom the New York Times has said its own anonymous sources have not been able to corroborate.

Piling on Sheriff Clarke Plagiarism allegations the latest attack on the would-be DHS official. Matthew Vadum

Allegations of academic plagiarism are the latest weapon the left-wingers of the mainstream media are using in an effort to take down Milwaukee County, Wisc., Sheriff David Clarke.

The Left’s politics of personal destruction played no small role in the defeat at the polls last November of Maricopa County, Ariz., Sheriff Joe Arpaio (R). More recently, the Left played a role in the departure of top-rated Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, and now that they smell conservative blood in the water, the character assassins at the George Soros-funded Media Matters for America are stepping up their efforts to force Sean Hannity off the airwaves.

These people are going after Clarke, a high-profile conservative and outspoken champion of law and order, because they view him as a threat to Democratic Party interests. Democrats, of course, think they hold a monopoly on black support and are threatened by strong black conservatives, so they attack and smear them at every opportunity.

Hitting Clarke, a longtime supporter of President Trump, became especially urgent for the Left after he announced a little over a week ago that he would be taking a position at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in June. The position, assistant secretary of DHS for partnership and engagement, does not require confirmation by the Senate.

Clarke, a strong Second Amendment advocate, was one of three black speakers to appear at the Republican National Convention last summer. He is also eminently quotable. He has told Black Lives Matter activists to “stop trying to fix the police, fix the ghetto,” and described Ferguson protesters as “vultures on a roadside carcass.”

Days after Clarke made the DHS appointment public, a team of CNN researchers led by serial exaggerator Andrew Kaczynski conveniently accused him of plagiarism with respect to his 2013 master’s thesis on U.S. security studies for the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. (The thesis may be viewed here.)

SUMMER READING: CHECK OUT EDWARD CLINE’S BOOK PAGE

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Another great addition to the Cyrus Skeen series.

Product Details

Celebrity News: A Detective Novel of 1930 (The Cyrus Skeen Mysteries Book 26)
Mar 23, 2017
by Edward Cline

Sparrowhawk, Book Six: War
byEdward Cline
Brilliant, maybe provocative to some, this series of 6 books is a major achievement in historical fiction. With vivid, believable characters Cline envelopes the story of the American Revolution in an enlightening aura of intellectualism, fierce love and loyalty, and ultimate sacrifice for a cause even deeper than the birth of a country. And, yes, there are also despicable, hateful characters and plenty of others that are mere fodder for disdain. We all know that America prevailed in the end, but those that read this amazing book will also finally know the deeper roles and natures of Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson and the far greater intrigue of the Revolution that a mere dumping of tea. Long live Lady Liberty! Bravo, Mr. Cline!

Bruce Bawer’s Terrorism Thriller Tells the Truth About Islam in Europe An American in Amsterdam is swept up in a jihadist terrorist plot. Mark Tapson

The suicide bombing which slaughtered nearly two dozen concertgoers in Manchester last week demonstrates yet again that terrorism is indeed becoming “part and parcel,” as London’s Muslim mayor Sadiq Khan declared, of European life. And yet the continent’s elites continue to live in denial of the religious roots of that terrorism. Few are willing to tell the truth about Islam and its impact on Europe; even fewer have dared to tell that truth in the gripping way that only fiction can. Controversial French novelist Michel Houllebecq’s bestselling Submission, for example, recently struck a chord among readers with its chilling tale of Europe’s embrace of sharia. And then there is Bruce Bawer’s new novel The Alhambra.

Critic, essayist, and political journalist Bruce Bawer is the author of over a dozen books, most notably While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within (2006), Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom (2009), and The Victims’ Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind (2012). He is a native New Yorker who has lived in Europe since 1998, and who continues to report on the continent’s decline and fall from the front lines. Full disclosure: I am honored to say that Bawer is a friend of mine.

FrontPage Mag readers are surely familiar with regular contributor Bawer’s incisive work. But some may not know that Bawer has just released a self-published international thriller that takes on the verboten topic of Islam’s infiltration and subversion of Europe. The Alhambra is set in early 2001, while America and Europe still slept, as Bawer put it in another book, prior to the September 11 attacks. It is the story of an American living in Amsterdam who overhears jihadists planning an act of terrorism, and finds himself caught up in the deadly intrigue.

Why did he decide to self-publish? As Bawer told me in an email, “My agent liked the book but thought the combination of gay characters and vile Islamophobia made it hopeless to try to place it [with a publisher].” The “vile Islamophobia” alone, of course, is enough to scuttle a novel’s chances with any traditional publisher, and of course Hollywood is far from likely to touch it either. But Bawer didn’t let that deter him from telling a story that needs to be told.

The novel’s protagonist is Steve Disch, a gay filmmaker pushing forty who moves impulsively to Amsterdam after his once-promising Hollywood career stalls out. He immerses himself in the city’s Old World charm but increasingly finds himself crossing paths with the city’s dark, threatening subculture of Muslim immigrants:

Block by block, the neighborhood grew shabbier. There was graffiti, garbage on the street. There were storefronts with signs in Arabic… He passed a group of men who looked like Arabs or Turks or Persians and who were standing on the sidewalk holding a loud, angry-sounding conversation in some Middle Eastern tongue. As he walked by, they all turned, every one of them, and gave him unfriendly, suspicious looks. One of them said something to him. He didn’t understand the words, but he could guess at the sentiment. Further down the street, he passed a woman in an Islamic head covering who was pushing a baby carriage and was flanked by two toddlers. Half a block later, he passed another woman, also covered; this one was pregnant and pushing a child in a stroller.