Displaying posts published in

July 2017

NeverTrump Nostalgia for a Hillary That Never Was What difference would President Hillary make anyway? Daniel Greenfield

What difference does it make?

Bad ideas work their way back to worse premises. The ‘worse premise’ of the bad idea of NeverTrump was that it didn’t really matter if Hillary won. It was an echo of Hillary’s infamous Benghazi testimony.

What difference does it make anyway if the woman behind the Arab Spring were running our foreign policy and if the Clinton Foundation’s gallery of rogue donors were running everything else?

It sure as hell didn’t make a difference to NeverTrumpers who were too busy grading Trump on table manners and finding implausible reasons to believe that President Hillary Clinton wouldn’t be so bad. NeverNeverTrumpland became its own echo chamber with no one to call out its crazy delusions.

Trump won, Hillary lost and NeverTrumpers clings to its “What difference does it make” premise.

At the New York Post, John Podhoretz insists that, “Hillary’s White House would be no different from Trump’s.”

Bad idea meet worse premise.

“The astonishing answer, if you really think it through, is: not all that different when it comes to policy,” he claims.

Only in NeverNeverTrumpland could anyone come up with an “astonishing answer” like that.

It’s an astonishingly astonishing answer since Hillary’s platform called for ending deportations of illegal aliens and allowing them access to ObamaCare. That’s slightly different from building a wall, a 33% increase in illegal alien arrests and a 67% decline in illegal immigration under President Trump.

But a lot of NeverTrumpers seem closer to Hillary’s position there anyway.

Hillary’s platform also called for expanding ObamaCare, killing coal and fracking, automatic voter registration at 18, undermining the Second Amendment, a job-killing minimum wage hike and free college. That’s a long way from repealing ObamaCare, a coal and fracking boom, the restoration of law and order, fixing college abuses and conducting voter fraud investigations.

But what difference does it make in NeverNeverTrumpland where policy doesn’t matter anyway?

On foreign policy, the President of the United States has an even freer hand. And the free hand would have belonged to the woman who handed entire countries over to the Muslim Brotherhood, Al Qaeda and ISIS.

Podhoretz claims that a Republican congress would have blocked Hillary from getting anything done. The Obama years suggest that putting our faith in the obstructive powers of a GOP Congress ought to come with a free limited edition of the Brooklyn Bridge. And Hillary had made a point of asserting that many of her policy proposals would bypass Congress.

“Trump has gotten very little done. The same would have been true if Hillary had won,” he writes.

Hillary Clinton had promised to bypass Congress on gun control, energy restrictions and immigration. Both Trump and Clinton pledged to roll out a big batch of executive orders. Hers would have been very different than his.

If Congress won’t act, became a theme of hers during the campaign. Would she have done it?

Is Turkey Becoming Another Iran? by Uzay Bulut

Evolution will no longer be taught in Turkish secondary schools, after being described as a “controversial subject” by the government.

So, the question naturally arises what exactly will Turkish schoolchildren be taught instead. The answer is “jihad.” Turkey is in the process of including the concept of jihad in compulsory school curricula. In eighth grade, jihad will also be taught under the title “Struggling on the Path to Allah: Jihad,” under a chapter called “Worshipping Allah.”

The Ministry of National Education has also increased class hours for the mandatory course in “religion, culture and morality,” and decreased art and philosophy classes to one hour per week.

Turkey has recently been in the news for various developments that include, among other matters, its record number of jailed journalists, the destruction of Kurdish towns and forced displacement of thousands of Kurds, the dismissal or suspension of thousands of government employees for political reasons, the arrest of thousands of citizens for allegedly “organizing” last year’s failed coup, the creeping conversion of the Hagia Sophia Basilica-museum into a mosque, and the seizure of Assyrian Christian lands, churches and cemeteries by the government.

One additional trend begging the media’s attention is the determined Islamization of the Turkish educational system.

Here is a short list of some of the latest developments in Turkish schools and their curricula:

Turkey to stop teaching evolution in secondary schools as part of new national curriculum

Evolution will no longer be taught in Turkish secondary schools after being described as a “controversial subject” by the government. The head of the education ministry’s curriculum board, Alpaslan Durmuş, said a section on Darwinism would be cut from biology classes from 2019.

“We have excluded controversial subjects for students at an age unable yet to understand the issues’ scientific background,” he told a seminar in Ankara, according to Hurriyet Daily News.

“Jihad” in compulsory school curricula

So the question naturally arises what exactly will Turkish schoolchildren be taught instead. The answer is “jihad.” Turkey is in the process of including the concept of jihad in compulsory school curricula. According to a statement issued in January by the Turkish Ministry of National Education, Turkish textbooks will be teaching “jihad” as a “value” in classes at Imam Hatip middle schools (schools that offer an Islamic curriculum to pupils).

At a press conference, Ismet Yilmaz, the minister of national education, explained the details of the new curricula to the press. According to the newspaper Cumhuriyet, jihad will be taught in seventh grade while pupils study the fundamentals of “tawhid” (oneness of God) and wahdat (Islamic unity) civilization.”

In eighth grade, jihad will also be taught under the title “Struggling on the Path to Allah: Jihad” under the chapter called “Worshipping Allah.”

The Worst Ideological Enemy of the US is Now Europe by Drieu Godefridi

The vast majority of these European courts — whether the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) or the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) — in their attempt to be moral and just, have dismissed the sovereign laws of Italy as irrelevant, and trampled the rights of the Italian state and ordinary Italians to approve who enters their country.

In Europe, Amnesty International and the like are, it seems, a new source of law.

Those who gave the Statue of Liberty to America in 1886 “to commemorate the perseverance of freedom and democracy in the United States” are willingly trampling their own people’s liberties today through courts of appointed, unelected, unaccountable ideologues. The danger is that, with the help of many doubtless well-intentioned, international NGOs, the EU will not stop at its shores.

Europe is the worst enemy of the US? You cannot be serious. Islamism, Russia, illegal immigrants… whatever, but surely not Europe! Are we not still together in NATO? Do we not conduct huge amounts of trade every day? Do we not share the same cultural roots, the same civilization, the same vision of the future? Did France not give the US her famous Statue of Liberty – “Liberty Enlightening the World?”

Not anymore. In a sense, Europe looks like a continent where American Democrats have been in power for 30 years, not only in the European states, but also at the level of the European Union.

In the US, the political spectrum still spans a vast range of views between Democrats and Republicans, globalists and nationalists, pro-lifers and pro-choicers, pro-government control and pro-individuals’ control, and pro-whatever. Even today with a president and a Supreme Court clearly on the political “Right” these divisions, and the all-important separation of powers, allow for and encourage vigorous debate. By contrast, in Europe, at the “official” level, such a spectrum of views no longer exists.

In Western Europe, politically speaking, in the press and in universities, either you are on the “Left,” or you are a pariah. If you are a pariah, you are most likely to be prosecuted for “Islamophobia”, “racism”, discrimination or some other “trumped up” charge.

There are several reasons for this imbalance. One is the difference in political maturity between Europeans and Americans. Whereas “ordinary” American voters (not just the “elites”) understand that their Supreme Court is key to ensuring that fundamental constitutional freedoms are maintained for all, the Europeans have done the opposite. In the US, the constitutional right to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” is derived from the people — “from the consent of the governed.”

Consequently, when Justice Antonin Scalia of the US Supreme Court died, the US press wrote about him for weeks. “Ordinary citizens” in the US are deeply aware of judicial roles and their effect on judgements and legal precedents.

By contrast, in Europe, we now have two Supreme Courts: the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg, and the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in Luxembourg, in addition to national courts. There is, however, not one citizen in a million who can name a single judge of either the ECHR or the CJEU. The reason is that the nomination of those judges is mostly opaque, purely governmental and, in the instance of the ECHR, with no public debate. With the CJEU, appointments are also essentially governmental, with the sanction of the European Parliament, which is ideologically dominated by the Left.

Trump Set to Combat ‘Regulatory Dark Matter’ Like Obama Transgender Bathroom ‘Guidance’ By Tyler O’Neil

On Thursday, the Trump administration’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) will release its semi-annual “Unified Agenda,” a master plan for all significant federal regulation which agencies intend to issue in the coming months. According to one conservative leader, this agenda will provide a blueprint for how the administration will cut down on all kinds of regulation — not just official rules, but also “regulatory dark matter.”

“If you go outside and look at the stars tonight, you’re not seeing much of the universe. The bulk of it is dark matter,” explained Clyde Wayne Crews, vice president for policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), on a call with reporters. Similarly, while Congress passes a few laws and administrative agencies issue a few official regulations, “there are thousands and thousands of other notices,” bulletins, letters, and so on, issued by agencies every year.

This “regulatory dark matter” is hard to track, because it isn’t even collected or examined. Rather, an agency will set forth specific dictates and companies, organizations, or individuals will follow them, without the intermediate step of an official law or regulation.

The best example of this came last May, when the Obama Department of Justice (DOJ) sent a letter to North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory insisting that House Bill 2, the state’s law restricting public, multiple-stall restrooms on the basis of biological sex, violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by institutionalizing sex discrimination.

In one sweeping move, the DOJ had redefined the Civil Rights Act of 1964, extending its protection against discrimination on the basis of sex to transgender people, something foreign to the law itself and with which the law’s authors clearly would have disagreed.

This letter was not an official law passed by Congress and signed by the president. Nor was it an official regulation, submitted in the Federal Register. No, it was an administrative fiat which threatened hefty penalties — the revocation of North Carolina’s $4.5 billion in federal funding for the 2016-2017 school year.

But this infamous transgender mandate — reversed by a Trump administration directive this past February — is just the tip of the iceberg, Crews said.

“It’s long been the case that there are more regulations than laws, and if we’re missing regulations, we’re missing government’s biggest effect on the economy,” the CEI vice president argued. He expanded the astral metaphor adding, “Lately, Washington has gone supernova.” CONTINUE AT SITE

Supreme Court Delivers Compromise in Latest Ruling on Trump Travel Ban Justices allow travel by extended family members, but block loosening of ban for refugees By Brent Kendall

WASHINGTON—The Supreme Court reinstated the Trump administration’s plans to keep many refugees from entering the U.S., but blocked the White House from sweeping travel restrictions on extended families of American residents, a second compromise action by the justices in the hot-button case.

The court, in a one-page order Wednesday, prohibited the Trump administration from banning travel by people from six Muslim-majority countries who are grandparents, grandchildren, aunts, uncles and other extended family members of U.S. residents. That part of the order was a setback for President Donald Trump and signaled administration officials might have adopted too narrow a reading of the high court’s ruling on the issue last month.

But in a partial victory for the president, justices said his administration could move ahead for now to ban a broad group of refugees with no U.S. family ties.

The White House didn’t respond to requests for comment. The Justice Department said it looked forward to making its arguments for the ban in additional court proceedings.

The court’s move marked the second time in recent weeks the justices have given Mr. Trump temporary leeway to impose travel restrictions on at least some people. In addition to suspending U.S. entry by refugees, the president has sought to bar travelers from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.

Mr. Trump has said the ban, which he signed in a March executive order, is needed to help protect the U.S. from terrorist threats.

The justices on June 26 allowed the president to temporarily bar travel to the U.S. by people from the countries if they had no connection to the U.S., but it said travelers with close connections to people or organizations in the U.S. couldn’t be barred while the court considers the case more fully. CONTINUE AT SITE

Terror at the Temple Mount Puts the Lie to Palestinian Rage Fatah and Hamas say Israel is the threat to a sacred Muslim mosque, yet Arab gunmen defiled it.Eli Lake

For years, the most delicate dispute in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been the status of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The Al Aqsa Mosque sits on the spot from which Muslims believe Mohammed ascended to heaven. At its base are the remains of the outer wall of the second Jewish Temple.

This is why Friday’s terror attack on this sacred ground is so important.

It’s hard to think of a worse debasement of a holy place than for armed gunmen in the middle of a shooting spree to flee to it for sanctuary. Add to this the fact the Jerusalem police now say there were guns hidden in the Temple Mount complex at the time.

All of this challenges a prevailing Palestinian narrative about the Al Aqsa Mosque: that Jews are a threat to its preservation. You hear it in the speeches of Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, in which he falsely claims Jewish settlers are building tunnels underneath the Temple Mount. He complains of “dirty feet” stepping on this holy ground.

When former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon visited the Temple Mount in 2000, Palestinians were so angered that it sparked the second intifada. Later that year, Yasser Arafat formed a militia called Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade to kill Jews at random in the name of reclaiming the holy site.

Now it should be said that Al Aqsa Mosque, believed to be built in 690, has endured the crusades, British colonization and Israeli statehood. In the 1980s, a group of Jewish terrorists plotted to blow it up, but they never followed through. When Israel won the land that includes the Temple Mount in the 1967 Six-Day War, it decided to allow a religious trust called the Jordanian Waqf to remain the administrators of the site.

Now we have an atrocity that threatened the mosque’s worshippers. The real threat to the Mosque on Friday did not come from Jewish settlers, but from Israeli Arabs. So it’s important to examine the response from Palestinian leaders.

Let’s start with Abbas. He was forceful in his condemnation of the act, noting that there is no room for violence in such a holy place. Other members of his party, Fatah, were also quick to denounce. And Ayman Odeh, the head of Israel’s largest Arab political party, condemned all armed struggle from Israeli Arabs against Israel in the wake of the attack.

That’s pretty good. But by Monday the old patterns emerged. Fatah called this week for a “day of rage.” Was this to protest the gunmen who entered the noble sanctuary or those mourning their deaths? No. This protest is aimed at Israel for erecting metal detectors at the entrance of the Temple Mount compound after the shootings.

The most telling response, however, came from Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated group that rules Gaza. A spokesman for the group, Sami Abu Zuhi, said on Friday the attack “was a natural response to Israeli terrorism and their defilement of the Al Aqsa mosque.”

Now there are many things one can say about Hamas. They are killers, of course. They are also fanatics. Hamas favors the imposition of Islamic law on the people of Gaza. The group was responsible for changing the tenor of the Palestinian national liberation movement in the 1980s and 1990s, from largely an anti-colonialist struggle to a kind of holy war to reclaim Jerusalem.