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July 2017

ISRAEL Comments turned off

If we aren’t indifferent to Hezbollah’s expansion of its capabilities, what are we planning to do about it? Caroline Glick

By on July 10th, 2017

Last month IDF Military Intelligence chief Maj.-Gen. Herzl Halevi made a stunning revelation. Hezbollah and Iran are transforming the terrorist group into a military force capable of independently producing its own precision weapons.

Speaking at the Herzliya Conference, Halevi reported, “We are seeing Hezbollah building a domestic military industry on Lebanese soil based on Iranian know-how. Hezbollah is producing weapons systems and transporting them to southern Lebanon.”

Halevi added, “Over the past year, Iran is working to establish infrastructure for the independent production of precision weapons in Lebanon and Yemen. We cannot be indifferent to this development. And we aren’t.”

Not only is Hezbollah building a missile industry. It is deploying its forces directly across the border with Israel – in material breach of UN Security Council Resolution 1701 from 2006, which set the terms of the cease-fire between Israel and Hezbollah at the end of the Second Lebanon War.

Under the terms of 1701, Hezbollah is prohibited from operating south of the Litani River. Only the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) and UNIFIL – the UN’s peacekeeping force – are supposed to be deployed in southern Lebanon.

According to Halevi, operating under the cover of a phony environmental NGO called “Green Without Borders,” Hezbollah has set up observation posts manned with its fighters along the border with Israel.

In Halevi’s words, with these posts, “Hezbollah is now able to operate a stone’s throw from the border.”

In a media briefing on Sunday, Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman discussed Halevi’s revelations. Liberman said that the security community “is absolutely aware [of the missile plants] and is taking the necessary action.”

“This is a significant phenomenon,” Liberman warned. “We must under no circumstances ignore it.”

Perhaps in a jab at his predecessor, Moshe Ya’alon, who years ago argued notoriously that Hezbollah’s missiles would “rust” in their storage facilities, perhaps in warning to Hezbollah, Liberman added, “The factories won’t rust and the missiles won’t rust.”

So if we aren’t indifferent to Hezbollah’s expansion of its capabilities, what are we planning to do about it?

Whatever answer the IDF decides upon, Israel is already taking diplomatic steps to prepare for the next round – whoever opens it.

Last month Israel filed a formal complaint with the UN Security Council against Hezbollah for setting up observation towers along the border and manning them with its fighters.

Not surprisingly, UNIFIL and the Security Council rejected Israel’s complaint. Ever since six UNIFIL soldiers were killed in a roadside bomb in 2007, UNIFIL has turned a blind eye to all of Hezbollah’s operations in southern Lebanon. As to the strike for which the complaint to the Security Council began setting the conditions, what purpose would it serve?

In a future war, Israel shouldn’t aspire, for instance, to destroy Hezbollah as a fighting force. The goal, in my opinion, should be to destroy or neutralize as much of Hezbollah’s missile arsenal and its missile assembly plants as possible. If possible, Israel should also seek to destroy Hezbollah’s tunnel infrastructure along its border.

The first question is whether the threat justifies action. The answer, in my opinion, is clear enough. Over the past 11 years, Hezbollah’s missile arsenal has become an unacceptable and ever-growing strategic threat to Israel. Whereas in 2006 Hezbollah’s missile arsenal numbered some 15,000 rockets, today it fields approximately 150,000.

In 2006, at the height of its missile offensive against Israel, Hezbollah lobbed some 120 missiles a day at Israeli territory. Today it can shoot some 1,000 to 1,200 missile a day at Israel.

And it isn’t only the quantity of missiles that make them an insufferable threat. It’s also their quality. Whereas in 2006 Hezbollah attacked Israel with imprecise projectiles with low payloads, today Hezbollah reportedly fields precision guided, long-range missiles like the Yakhont and Fatah-110.

The Yakhont missiles can imperil Israel’s interests in the Mediterranean, including its offshore natural gas installations. The Fatah-110s, with a range of some 300 kilometers, threaten metropolitan Tel Aviv and key military installations. Both missile types are capable of carrying payloads of hundreds of kilograms of explosives.

To be sure, in the 11 years since the Second Lebanon War Israel has also massively upgraded its military capabilities. Last week air force chief Maj.-Gen. Amir Eshel said the force today can inflict a level of damage on Hezbollah in two days that it took it weeks to inflict in 2006.

The question is not whether Israel has the ability to respond to a Hezbollah assault. Given the lethality of Hezbollah’s arsenal, it would be reckless to assume that Israel can easily absorb an opening volley of missiles.

But battle losses aren’t the only consideration Israel needs to take into account. For instance, there is the US. How would the US respond to a war?

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Trump Defends the West While critics display their embarrassing ignorance of history. Bruce Thornton

By on July 10th, 2017

President Trump’s ringing defense of Western civilization during his speech in Poland was a welcome answer to the phony cultural relativism, fashionable self-loathing, and smug hypocrisy of leftist Westerners who bash the West but wouldn’t live anywhere else. So it’s no surprise that the progressive establishment bashed the speech as “racial and religious paranoia,” as one screed in the Atlantic was titled.

That headline, and the essays’ claim that “the West is a racial and religious term” and a dog-whistle for alt-right racists, bespeak a profound ignorance about what defines the West. The core ideas of the West began in the city states of ancient Greece, then for centuries were further elaborated by the Romans before Christianity existed. Most important of these ideas was the notion of citizenship, the belief that the laws and customs comprising the political order were a collective possession of free and equal citizens, not of a king or elite defined by birth and lording over subjects. Power no longer belonged to men, to be used to further their personal status or wealth or ambitions. Power became abstract, embodied in the laws, offices, and electoral procedures used by citizens to make the decisions about who should use power, and for what power should be used.

The principle that power resides in laws, not men, was the foundation stone of our own Constitution and every subsequent political order that vests power in free citizens. And this order exists to ensure and protect political freedom and equality, ideas likewise born in ancient Greece and found only in the West or its imitators.

Thus the other uniquely Western goods that Trump touched on came into existence to protect that unprecedented invention of citizenship and consensual rule. Free speech, for example, the ability of citizens to discuss and deliberate openly without fear of retribution, arose among the ancient Greeks, who had two words for free speech. Search the ancient empires contemporary with the Greeks and you will not find anywhere the ideas of free speech, or constitutional government, or politics, or citizenship, or words expressing each. You will find only power: rule by coercion and force.

The other defining idea is critical consciousness: the freedom and inclination to question and examine everything, from the gods to nature to one’s own political-social order. Examining nature and trying to understand it apart from traditional myths, and by relying on reason and empirical evidence, sowed the seeds of modern science. An astonishing example of this new drive to know and understand without reliance only on tradition or religion can be found in the Hippocratic corpus of ancient writings on medicine. In a book on epilepsy, known in antiquity as the “sacred disease,” the author writes: “It is not, in my opinion, any more divine or more sacred than other diseases, but has a natural cause, and its supposed divine origin is due to men’s inexperience, and to their wonder at its peculiar character.” That sentence could be the motto of modern science and medicine alike.

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Daryl McCann Trump vs. Obama in the Middle East

By on July 10th, 2017

On climate change and other issues, Donald Trump has departed the G20 summit at odds with much of the world. That was to be expected, given his compliant predecessor is much missed by Merkel & Co. Nowhere are the two presidents’ differences greater than in the Middle East.

Both Barack Obama and Donald Trump began their presidencies with outreach to the Islamic world—and that, with one exception, is where the similarities between their respective Middle East doctrines begin and end. President Obama’s June 4, 2009, Cairo speech, delivered at Al-Azhar University, can be read as the manifesto for a post-America world. President Trump’s May 22, 2017, Riyadh speech, in startling contrast, was an unapologetic exposition of his America First creed.

The insinuation, in some quarters, remains that Barack Obama is secretly a Muslim and perhaps even a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, the activist Salafists who aim to destroy the West from within using the strategy of “civilisational jihad”. Key political Islamic organisations in the United States, including the Council of American-Islamic Relations, are impenitent affiliates of the transnational Muslim Brotherhood movement. Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, in the form of Mohamed Morsi’s Freedom and Justice Party, ruled the country from June 2012 to July 2013. Activist Salafism and Salafi jihadism (Al Qaeda, the Islamic State, Boko Haram, Jemaah Islamiyah, and so on) are not one and the same but they are first cousins. Embracing the views of Sayyid Qutb, the Muslim Brotherhood scholar who argued for the restitution of an Islamic state in Egypt and throughout Dar al-Islam, might not automatically turn a Muslim into a terrorist but it does encourage an apposite degree of contempt for the kafir (disbeliever).

Almost completely unreported at the time of the December 2, 2015, San Bernardino massacre was the fact that the husband-and-wife terrorists, Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik, were aficionados of the works of Sayyid Qutb. The homicidal duo posted on Facebook their allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s Islamic State before murdering fourteen Americans and wounding another twenty-two at a work-related Christmas luncheon. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton responded to the slaughter-fest by intoning against the laxity of America’s “gun safety laws”. Presidential candidate Donald Trump, on the other hand, made an explicit connection between a certain kind of modern-day Muslim and terrorism: “I would close up our borders to people until we figure out what’s going on … We don’t learn … The whole thing gets worse as time goes by.” President Obama, to be fair, upgraded his erstwhile depiction of Islamic terrorism from “workplace violence”—à la the 2014 Fort Hood Massacre—to “larger notions of violent jihad”. Whew! Barack Hussein Obama, the apotheosis of modern-day chic, was prepared, at last, to make a connection, however indirectly, between the “religion of peace” and the murder of the innocent.

But it was not always so. President Obama’s Cairo Address could almost have been written by a Muslim Brotherhood scribe, blaming as he did the anti-West “tensions” in the Muslim world on European colonialism and Cold War machinations that treated Muslim-majority countries as “proxies without regard to their own aspirations”. Additionally, American-style “modernity and globalisation” caused “many Muslims to view the West as hostile to the traditions of Islam”. The only thing omitted from his mea culpa was Christendom’s involvement in the Crusades. It was, naturally, Islam that paved the way “for Europe’s Renaissance and Enlightenment”. That said, Obama singled out the likes of Al Qaeda for censure, but even then he tacitly blamed 9/11 on the West itself for creating the “tensions” that “violent extremists” in the Muslim world were able to exploit.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Corruption of Biblical Studies Academic scrutiny of scripture, a discipline prey to intellectual fashion since its inception, is today pursued by many in the service of secular liberal positions. by Joshua Berman

By on July 10th, 2017

In the 2017 edition of The State of the Bible, its annual survey, the American Bible Society reports that more than half of all Americans who regularly read the Bible now search for related material on the Internet. This shift in how the faithful learn about scripture has resulted in unprecedented public exposure to one particular kind of Bible study—namely, the academic kind. Major websites now offer the latest that scholars have to say about the Bible—its authorship, its historical accuracy, its proper interpretation—and those websites attract hundreds of thousands of unique visitors each month. In an age when interest in the humanities is generally waning, the department of biblical studies is providing enrichment to what has become the most popular online branch of the liberal arts. https://mosaicmagazine.com/essay/2017/07/the-corruption-of-biblical-studies/

This is surely a blessed development. Men and women of good faith engage with these study materials in pursuit of that purest religious ideal: the truth. In doing so, moreover, they fully recognize that academic researchers ask important questions and often offer compelling answers by drawing on resources and insights unavailable through denominational venues. For many users, these answers and insights do not merely supplement but may also challenge the traditional Jewish and Christian teachings in which they have been brought up. So the interest in academic scholarship of the Bible increases—and with it the authority of the scholars purveying it. As a Jewish day-school teacher recently put it to me: “Often, I find that students might not be so well informed about the meaning of a scientific or archaeological claim­­; it’s enough that many academics holding respected titles have advanced a certain way of understanding something.” In today’s climate, the university biblicist, even before he or she speaks, enjoys a deep line of credit.

For Jews in particular, nothing in biblical studies draws so keen an interest as the issue of the origins of the Torah: the Five Books of Moses, or Pentateuch. The scholarly pursuit of the Torah’s putative sources and how they evolved into the text we have today is referred to in the academy as “source criticism”: the discipline’s oldest sub-field and still its largest. And source criticism of the Torah is also front-and-center in the Jewish public eye.

Over the past fifteen years alone, four major projects by Jewish scholars have showcased the methods and achievements of source criticism. I have in mind two books, How to Read the Bible by James Kugel and Richard Elliott Friedman’s The Bible with Sources Revealed; the section on the Pentateuch in the JPS Study Bible; and, most recently, the website www.TheTorah.com, which is explicitly devoted to “integrating the study of Torah with the disciplines and findings of academic biblical scholarship.”

How did source criticism arrive at this state? And why has the crisis engendered no change whatsoever in how its practitioners go about their work? In both cases, the answer has little to do with the individual personalities of the scholars involved. Rather, the fatal inability of the discipline to self-correct is rooted in the field’s origins, and is perpetuated by a species of denial.

To be sure, biblicists are not alone here. Similarly disorienting symptoms have afflicted other areas of scholarly inquiry, especially in fields with semi- or quasi-scientific pretensions. A recent example is the stunned reaction among economists in the wake of the 2008 financial implosion, a disaster that so many of them failed to see coming and got so wrong. One outspoken member of the guild, the Nobel laureate and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, suggested afterward that his fellow economists had been led astray by their professional “desire for an all-encompassing, intellectually elegant approach that also gave economists a chance to show off their mathematical prowess.” Thereby, to use Krugman’s own puffed-up terms, the profession “mistook beauty for truth.” If, he concluded, the guild of economists was ever to “redeem itself, . . . it will have to reconcile itself to a less alluring vision” and, above all, “learn to live with messiness.”

Of course, to admit that the economic world is messy is essentially to admit defeat in the long-fought battle to win for economics the status of a science with the power not only to study the past but, crucially, to predict economic performance in the future. And that offers another point of analogy with the predicament of biblical source-critics in their elusive search for the sources of the Pentateuch. In positing the date of a text and the stages of its composition, source critics strive to create an elegant narrative of its history and therefore of the evolution of religious ideas in ancient Israel. For many, this elegance has become a badge of their intellectual identity.

But biblicists, too, are prone to mistaking beauty for truth. The real, harder truth is that the enterprise of dating biblical texts and their stages of growth is messy, much messier than they would like to admit. And the larger truth is that we actually have limited access to the minds and hearts of the scribes of ancient Israel and cannot know the full range of motivations that drove them to compose the texts they did. What may look to our eyes as, for instance, an unresolved inconsistency between two passages may not have bothered the ancients at all.
Few biblical source critics have reached the necessary conclusion from the crisis in their field: that the precursors of the received text—their holy grail—simply may not be recoverable.

Consider historical inscriptions left us by Ramesses the Great, who ruled Egypt in the 13th century BCE. To commemorate his greatest achievement, a victory over his arch-enemies the Hittite Empire at the battle of Kadesh in 1274 BCE, Ramesses inscribed three mutually exclusive and contradictory reports, one right next to the other, each serving a distinct rhetorical purpose, on monumental sites all across Egypt. (The longest is full of internal contradictions as well.) This practice is wholly foreign to modern writers, and far from intuitive. Literary conventions are culture-specific.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

The Mennonites Divest The mask falls off “anti-Zionism.” Jonathan Marks

By on July 10th, 2017

The 75,000 strong Mennonite Church-USA has joined a few other church organizations in voting to divest from companies “profiting from the occupation.” They seem rather proud of themselves for having chosen a “third way.”https://www.commentarymagazine.com/anti-semitism/the-mennonites-divest/

What this means in the resolution’s terms is that the Mennonites will admit complicity in anti-Semitism and also admit complicity in Israel’s activities in the West Bank. They will form committees to navel-gaze concerning the first problem and single out Israel for economic punishment to deal with the second.

What’s shocking about this resolution, which Church leaders boast is the work of two years of study, is that it treats anti-Semitism and Israel’s presence in the West Bank as equivalent crimes. The Mennonites will resolve to avoid both! Although the drafters of the resolution acknowledged that “Palestinians have turned to violence,” they have evidently done so only to “achieve security” and “seek their freedom.” In spite of the resolution’s hand-wringing concerning anti-Semitism, there is not a word about Palestinian anti-Semitism and the role it has played in frustrating peace efforts in the region.

Nor are these peace efforts the subject of any reflection in the resolution. As far as the drafters are concerned, the Israelis marched into the West Bank in 1967—who can say why?—and have doggedly continued there, even though they could easily withdraw. The resolution recognizes that Israelis “feel threatened” but not that they actually are threatened. Indeed, that Israelis feel threatened is treated as evidence that security walls and other measures Israelis have taken for their security have been useless. It is hard to believe that intelligent and well-meaning people justify serious actions on so flimsy a basis, as if the ongoing need for security suggests that one ought to lay down one’s arms. But the Mennonite Church takes no risk, so they can afford to be frivolous about serious matters.

Apart from singling out the Jewish state for singular punishment, the Mennonites are studiously neutral. Somehow in their years of study, they missed that the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement endorsed in 2015 an “ongoing, youth-led Palestinian uprising” whose weapon of choice at that time was the knife. There can be no excuse for not knowing this and therefore no excuse for simply noting, concerning BDS that “there are vigorous critics of BDS who raise a range of concerns” as well as groups who “support BDS as a nonviolent alternative to violent liberation efforts.”

Of course, some of those critics point out that BDS has at best cheered on anti-Semitism. But the Mennonites, though they are in bed with BDS-supporting Jewish Voice for Peace, see no need to get to the bottom of it. Their affectation of neutrality here means that they simply don’t care about the consequences of working hand-in-glove with a movement that, while it claims to be nonviolent, iseffectively the propaganda wing of the violent “resistance.”

The Mennonites also studiously avoid taking a position on whether a majority Jewish state should exist at all. On the matter of a “two-state” or “one-state” solution—the latter of which means that Jews will be a minority everywhere in the world—that should be left up to “Israeli and Palestinian people.” Sure, the end of the Jewish state in the Middle East would leave Jews defenseless in a region teeming with anti-Semitism, but not to worry. The Mennonites have already “raised seed money and initiated plans for several conferences in the next biennium on topics including Mennonite involvement in the Holocaust and how we read scripture in light of the Holocaust.” They will make up for their blithe indifference to the fate of Jews today by conferencing, and maybe even shedding a few golden tears, about the fate of Jews last century.

The resolution has called “on Mennonites to cultivate relationships with Jewish representatives and bodies in the U.S.” I will leave it to knowers of the Torah to say whether we are required to associate with a small group of morally obtuse, self-righteous preeners. But if it were left up to me, I would tell them to go to hell.

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HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

FACT CHECK: 94 Percent of U.S. Terrorism Fatalities Are Caused by Islamic Terrorists By Patrick Poole

By on July 10th, 2017

Fake statistics die as hard as fake news.

This is especially true when statistics are used to reinforce entrenched positions during highly charged political debates.

One particular false statistic — even under the most charitable reading of the data, it’s highly misleading — is trotted out after virtually every major terrorist attack in order to claim that Islamic terrorism is a big nothingburger.

I’ve had to deal with various incarnations of this here before:

It goes something like this:

94% of all terror attacks are committed by non-Muslims

Another version:

Only 6% of terror attacks in the U.S. are by Muslims

And yet another (one that is flatly false, because the data cited is never broken out by sex or race) says:

94% of terror attacks are committed by white men

The data behind this statistic comes from the FBI’s Terrorism 2002-2005 report. You can find it on the FBI’s website here.

First thing to consider when you see this statistic bandied about: realize the data is more than a decade old.

Including the data from 2006-present will give very different results (results that purveyors of these claims may not like), but since this is the data set they choose to use, I will use their preferred source.

Second, note that this statistic is counting “incidents.” The data ends up being portrayed like this:The problem with using this standard of measure is that it is basically useless. An ecoterrorist mailbox bomb that doesn’t injure or kill anyone is given the exact same weight as the Oklahoma City bombing or the 9/11 attacks. So how does measuring terrorism in this way tell you anything important?

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Pope Francis Says U.S. Has a ‘Distorted View of the World’ By Rick Moran

By on July 10th, 2017

Pope Francis is one of the gabbiest popes in recent decades. The pontiff has not been shy about commenting on issues that he obviously knows little or nothing about — especially climate change, about which he gets his talking points directly from the far left.

So I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised when the pope calls in an Italian reporter on a whim to heavily criticize the U.S. for its immigration and refugee policies.

The Daily Wire reports:

“I worry about very dangerous alliances among powers that have a distorted vision of the world: America and Russia, China and North Korea, Putin and Assad in the war in Syria,” he said in an interview with the Italian newspaper La Repubblica.

Directing his comments toward world leaders gathered in Germany for the G20 summit, Francis said the meeting of the world’s top economies worries him.

“Our main and unfortunately growing problem in the world today is that of the poor, the weak, the excluded, which includes migrants,” said Francis, the first pope in 1,300 years to come from a nation outside Europe. “This is why the G20 worries me: It mainly hits immigrants.”

Francis told world leaders that Europe is the “richest continent in the whole world” and that leaders there should not close borders. Conflict across the Middle East and Africa have forced millions to flee their homes, making them refugees. But few problems were solved at the G20 — while leaders agreed to support free trade, there was no consensus on how to deal with the refugee problem.

I’ve said this before when the pope has criticized the refugee policies of other nations. Unless the Vatican flings open its gates and takes in a few thousand refugees itself, the pope has no standing whatsoever to criticize others. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Inside Chomsky-World By Daniel Bonevac

By on July 10th, 2017

Daniel Bonevac is professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin.https://amgreatness.com/2017/07/09/inside-chomsky-world/

Some 35 years ago I attended a party in honor of Noam Chomsky. A group of us stood around him, hearing his thoughts on the relevance of psychology to linguistic theory. Inevitably, conversation flagged—not least because he didn’t see much relevance in it—so I piped in. I had just seen an ad in Forbes featuring Chomsky, and I asked him how that had come about. What followed was an hour-long lecture on American Middle-East policy. The group dwindled as he went on. Soon I was the only one left listening. His account was multifaceted, intricate, and utterly brilliant. As far as I could tell, it touched on reality only lightly. But it was an intellectual tour de force of a sort.

That brings me to philosopher George Yancy’s interview with Chomsky the other day in the New York Times. To say that it touches on reality lightly would be far too kind.

So, why talk about it at all? Because some people are still listening. I have friends on the Left who think highly of this interview. They believe it captures something important. And I want to understand what they see in it. I’m interested in how people on the Left are thinking about our current political moment.

I used to understand liberals. We tended to share the same goals, though we might prioritize them differently. We disagreed about various empirical questions. But we could discuss them openly and rationally.

That rarely seems possible now. I no longer understand why many of my political opponents see the world as they do. Whatever they are, they aren’t liberals. I find it hard to find common ground. And that worries me.

Consider Yancy’s opening question: “Given our ‘post-truth’ political moment and the growing authoritarianism we are witnessing under President Trump . . . .”

Stop right there. What “growing authoritarianism”? Let’s see, it’s been five months. Has Trump sent stormtroopers to assault members of other parties? Has he jailed thousands of Democrats, including their political leaders, for thought crimes? Has he cajoled the Congress to grant all legislative power to his cabinet? Did he burn down the Capitol and blame it on the Democrats? Has he opened concentration camps for his political opponents? Have his followers roamed campuses burning books? No? Within five months of seizing power Hitler had done all that.

What are these people talking about?

Apparently, Chomsky’s answer reveals, climate change, “a truly existential threat to survival of organized human life.” That’s right. Climate change—and the North Carolina legislature and Trump administration declining to act on it.

If this seems out of proportion to authoritarianism rhetoric, that’s because it is.

It’s also an article of quasi-religious faith rather than a rational conclusion. Yancy and Chomsky assume that science shows us that we face an existential threat. Neither is trained in environmental science. Has either read the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report—not the political summary, but the whole thing? Do they read scientific journals on the topic? Are they familiar with the arguments of critics such as Richard Lindzen and Roger Pielke? Do they read blogs by critics such as Watts Up with That? Can they discuss the differences between satellite data sets? The differences between those, oceanic measurements, and surface records? Are they familiar with the variation among existing models? Can they explain why some ought to be preferred to others? If so, no sign of it here. The issue isn’t up for debate.

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Blinded vet blasts Canada’s $10m payout to Gitmo thug By Monica Showalter

By on July 10th, 2017

Ten million dollars is apparently nothing to a free spending socialist like Justin Trudeau, but it’s pretty clear his sneaky little payoff to a Guantanamo-jailed terrorist, Omar Khadr, isn’t going over well with the U.S. veteran he blinded.

According to the Daily Caller:

The wounded warrior who was blinded by Omar Khadr’s grenade attack that killed Sgt. Chris Speer says Canadian Prime Minster Justin Trudeau should be charged with treason.

In an interview with the Toronto Sun on Saturday, Layne Morris says Trudeau’s decision to reward the former al-Qaida terrorist with a formal apology and $10.5 million cash settlement feels “like a punch in the face.”

“I don’t see this as anything but treason,” said Morris. “It’s something a traitor would do. As far as I am concerned, Prime Minister Trudeau should be charged.”

Morris is also angry that Trudeau delivered the “compensation” money to Khadr in secret so that the settlement would be unknown to any U.S. court.

Paying anything to a sworn terrorist who killed our men and who will use his taxpayer winnings to kill us again, is a sign of pure insanity in the West. Was there a war on, or was there a legal dispute about terrorists’ rights to take down the Twin Towers in 2001? Why are any of these people getting money? The sneakiness of the maneuver defies the imagination showing that people of Trudeau’s ilk care so much about terrorists’ feelings they are willing to pay billions from other people’s money to succor them even as veterans go neglected. Yet they are just canny enough to know that the public won’t stomach it – the public they have such contempt for – and do it in secret.

It goes to show how far gone the left is when it comes to matters of war and peace. To them, there is no such thing as war, there are only lawsuits to be litigated. This explains why these people can never be trusted with the powers that go with war. They will just find a way to pay off the enemy.

It’s time to fix this problem from the stateside fast.

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Child labor in Iran By Hassan Mahmoudi

By on July 10th, 2017

Iran is currently one of the youngest countries in the world, 70% of the current population of 80,957,894 are under 35.

Despite having rich oil and gas fields, culture and civilization, the youth and especially children in Iran are still deprived of basic human rights.

Today in Iran, the common belief is that child labor is ‘normal’. Parents regard their children as additional sources of income. Some families attempt to combine school attendance with excessively long and heavy work.

At a very early age children often separate from their families, to earn a few cents per hour, and are consequently exposed to serious hazards and illnesses. You may find them on the streets of large cities like Tehran, Esfahan, and Tabriz, in large numbers. They simply do not have enough time to go to school and improve their future prospects.

Recently Iranian media published reports on seven million child laborers, as well as a significant number of children abused in the drug trade.

The state-run ISNA news agency quoted three officials of Iranian regime on June 2, 2017.

Sarah Rezaie, a member of the so-called Imam Ali population, reduced the dimension of this social problem by claiming that there are two million working children in Iran, but unofficial statistics show the number of child laborers is at seven million.

She announced that these children are between 10 to 15 years old and added: “There are some pieces of evidence that show even 5-years-old children and babies are also caught in forced labor.”

She described the situation of children working in some of the metropolitan areas of Iran as “disastrous… and this has become a kind of norm.”

Rezaei pointed to the existence of shops where adolescents, often addicted themselves, sell addictive substances such as nas, pan, glass, and crack, adding that “these children are used in other cities of Sistan and Baluchestan province.”

These children swallow these drugs and after they crossed the border they expel them. Many have died in the process.

Sousan Maziarfar speaks of the children who search in garbage dumps for food… said the average age of these children is 12 years. “41% of these children are illiterate and 37% of them have dropped out of the school in order to work,” she added.

Maziarfar revealed that many of these children not only face disease but also having their faces, fingers and toes chewed and wounded by rats.

Soraya Azizpanah, a member of the association for the protection of the rights of the Children, also quoted Iranian regime parliament’s research center, which according to ISNA news agency, indicates 3.2 million children have dropped out of school to work.

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