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July 2017

President Trump Reverses Obama’s Anti-Christian Refugee Policy Christian refugee admissions increase during the first five months of Trump presidency. Joseph Klein

After declaring that Christians have “been horribly treated” by the refugee program under former President Barack Obama, President Donald Trump has reversed the Obama administration’s disgraceful discrimination against Christian refugees.

According to a Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. State Department refugee data, during the period from January 21, 2017 – President Trump’s first full day in office – through June 30, “9,598 Christian refugees arrived in the U.S., compared with 7,250 Muslim refugees. Christians made up 50% of all refugee arrivals in this period, compared with 38% who are Muslim.”

From April through June 2017, Iraq was “the only Muslim-majority nation among the top six origin countries.” The number of Syrian refugees admitted to the U.S. from January 21, 2017 through June 30, 2017 was 1779. Comparing the number of refugee admissions from Syria for the entire month of January with the entire month of February 2017, the number dropped by nearly half. By June 2017, the number of refugees admitted from Syria was about 26 percent of the already low number of 673 admitted in February.

By contrast, Pew Research Center reported that in fiscal year 2016 – Barack Obama’s last full fiscal year as president – “the U.S. admitted the highest number of Muslim refugees of any year since data on self-reported religious affiliations first became publicly available in 2002.” Overall, the number of Muslims admitted as refugees exceeded the number of Christians who were admitted.

Of the 12,486 refugees from Syria admitted to the United States during that same fiscal year by the Obama administration, about 99 percent were Muslim and less than 1 percent were Christian. Estimates of the Christians’ proportion of the total population of Syria have ranged from 5 to 10 percent since the onset of the Syrian civil war. Muslims made up 87% of Syria’s total population.

Former Secretary of State John Kerry declared in March of last year that the Islamic State had been committing genocide against Christians, Yazidis and other minorities in the Middle East. Nevertheless, the Obama administration decided that Christians and other refugees belonging to minority religious faiths did not deserve any priority for admission to the U.S. In fact, the Obama administration discriminated against Christians. It admitted proportionately less Christians relative to the total number of refugees from Syria than even the lower end of Christians’ estimated proportion of the total population of Syria. Incredibly, since the beginning of the Syrian conflict, approximately 96% of the Syrian refugees admitted to the United States by the Obama administration were Sunni Muslims even though ISIS and al Qaeda jihadists are themselves Sunni Muslims. The ideology of Wahhabism fueling the jihadists’ reign of terror, exported by Saudi Arabia, is of Sunni Muslim origin.

Improving Muslim Integration: Sending in the Clowns The surreal world of Sweden’s new migration policy. Bruce Bawer

If some of the things that are being done in Sweden today weren’t demonstrably true, they’d be unbelievable. If they weren’t so idiotically tragic, they’d be brilliantly funny.

What follows is not a joke. Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Löfven and his crew have come up with a great new way to improve integration.

One word: clowns.

A quick reminder: thanks to the astronomical cost of feeding, housing, and clothing immigrants who prefer not to support themselves, and the equally formidable expense of policing those multiculturally enriched, high-crime areas that the authorities haven’t already given up on policing, Sweden is bleeding cash – big time. Among the results: major cutbacks in outlays for schooling, health care, and benefits for the elderly.

Nonetheless, the Swedish Migration Board has managed to find an unspecified number of kronor – apparently in the millions – to spend on the services of an organization called Clowner utan Gränser. Translation: Clowns without Borders (hereafter CWB). According to an article in the invaluable Friatider website, CWB plans to “’play’ its way to better integration.”

The Migration Board specifies that the clowns will be used to integrate non-EU immigrants – which in Sweden, of course, mostly means Muslims.

After reading Friatider’s story, I naturally went straight to CWB’s website. Front and center is detailed information about how to contribute money to this thing: “Become a donor and spread laughter every month!”

Click on “about us” and you’ll find out that CWB was founded in 1996 and operates in a dozen countries, sending clowns into refugee camps and youth prisons. CWB’s declared mission is “to meet children in pleasure, play, and joy.” It seeks to create “hope, humanity, and the will to live.” Its vision is “a world filled with play, laughter, and dreams, where all people have the opportunity to develop, express themselves freely, and feel hope even in vulnerable situations.” All its work “is done in our belief that it creates a better world.”

Of course it would be terribly cynical to call B.S. on all this. I’m sure it’s totally on the level and every bit as wondrous and magical as it sounds – and worth every kronor.

Just speaking for myself, however, the last thing I can imagine wanting to see if I were a little kid in a Third World refugee camp or youth prison would be a bunch of guys in clown outfits climbing out of a tiny car, juggling bowling pins, riding unicycles, making balloon animals, and sweeping up spotlights. Not to put too fine a point on it, but is any child ever really entertained by the antics of clowns? I’ve always had my doubts. All I know is that for as long as I can remember, clowns struck me me as witless, depressing, and vaguely creepy. Their costumes look as if they must be sweaty and smelly. A painted-on smile seems the very opposite of cheery. But hey, maybe that’s just me.

UNESCO is an Immoral, Anti-Semitic Organization Decent Countries Should Leave by Guy Millière

Although Europe claims to respect human rights and the rights of peoples, it has been a party to violating the most essential right of the Jewish people: the recognition of its existence for more than 3,000 years, and the anchoring of this existence to its sacred monuments. Worse, Europe does so in the name of a people fictitiously invented less than 50 years ago. No serious scholar can find any trace of a “Palestinian people” before the 1960s. Europe has apparently been all too happy to accept lies.

While claiming to fight terrorism, Europe complies with the demands of a terrorist movement that does not even bother to hide its terrorist nature. When Mahmoud Abbas speaks Arabic, he continually incites the murder of Jews. He recently repeated that he would not stop paying tried, convicted and imprisoned murderers of Jews, and still calls these murderers heroic “martyrs”. On all maps used by the Palestinian Authority and in Palestinian textbooks, Israel does not exist; it is called Palestine.

Europeans, imbued with a generic sense of guilt, began attributing all that is wrong in the world to Western civilization. Because they had colonized parts of the Muslim world, they failed to note that Muslim culture had, in fact, colonized Persia, the Byzantine Empire, the Middle East, Greece, Cyprus, the Balkans, North Africa, Southern Spain, and, more recently, northern Cyprus.

On July 7, UNESCO voted for a resolution defining the Old City of Hebron and the Cave of the Patriarchs as Palestinian heritage sites. Before that, in 2016, two resolutions making the same type of counterfactual assertions concerning the Old City of Jerusalem, the Temple Mount and the Western Wall were adopted. And the year before that, in 2015, UNESCO again upended history to rename two ancient biblical sites, Rachel’s Tomb and the Cave of the Patriarchs, Islamic holy sites — even though Islam did not even exist at that time.

Three days before this month’s Hebron resolution, still another resolution, reaffirming the Jerusalem resolutions, was passed.

The Israeli government reacted with indignation. It decided to stop cooperating with UNESCO. US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley said she was shocked and that the decision would not be without consequences.

The rest of the world has remained silent. How come?

The July 7 resolution received the support of a large majority of the countries participating in the deliberations. Six countries abstained. Only three countries voted against the text. The resolutions concerning Jerusalem were adopted with equally significant majorities. The voting, tellingly, took place by secret ballot.

The purpose of UNESCO is supposedly to:

“contribute to peace and security by promoting collaboration among the nations through education, science and culture in order to further universal respect for justice, for the rule of law and for the human rights and fundamental freedoms which are affirmed for the peoples of the world, without distinction of race, sex, language or religion, by the Charter of the United Nations.”

Sadly, UNESCO has become simply an anti-Semitic fraud, governed by fabrications rather than by facts. It betrays its mission, falsifies history, and wages a campaign of raw racism against the Jewish people and Judaism — and the world accepts that. UNESCO acts as an instrument for propaganda seeking to annihilate the legitimacy of the existence of Israel — and the world supports this behavior.

Can Trump Lead the Way to Regime Change in Iran? by Hassan Mahmoudi

What is needed now is a push for regime change, a watering of the seeds of popular resistance that are again budding — after Obama abandoned the Iranian people in 2009, when they took to the streets to protest the stranglehold of the ayatollahs.

American leadership expert John C. Maxwell defines a leader as “one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way.” During his two terms in the highest office in the world, former U.S. President Barack Obama failed at all three, with disastrous consequences.

There is no realm in which Obama’s lack of leadership was more glaring than that of foreign policy, particularly in relation to the Middle East. His combination of action and inaction — pushing through the nuclear deal with Iran at all costs, while simultaneously adopting a stance of “patience” with and indifference to Tehran’s sponsorship of global terrorism and foothold in Syria — served no purpose other than to destabilize the region and weaken America’s position.

While hotly pursuing the nuclear accord — the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), signed between Iran and U.S.-led world powers in July 2015 — Obama enabled the regime in Tehran to assist Syrian President Bashar Assad in starving and slaughtering his people (with chemical weapons, among others) into submission. Meanwhile, thanks to Obama’s passivity, and the $1.7 billion his administration transferred to Tehran upon the inking of the JCPOA, the Islamic Republic was able to dispatch its Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) to recruit and train Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon and Syria, as well as militias in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen and Pakistan.

Today, two years after the signing of the JCPOA, and six months into the presidency of Donald Trump, there is a growing rift between America and Europe over implementation of the deal, which officially went into effect in January 2016. Since taking office in January 2017, Trump has been wavering on whether to remain committed to the deal, which his administration and members of Congress claim has been violated repeatedly by Iran. The U.S. also has maintained certain sanctions, over Iran’s ballistic-missile tests, human-rights abuses and sponsorship of global terrorism.

European countries, however, have taken a very different approach, pointing to International Atomic Energy Organization reports confirming Iran’s compliance, and rushing to do business in and with Tehran.

At a ceremony on July 14, 2017 to mark the anniversary of the deal, European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini called the JCPOA a “success for multilateral diplomacy that has proven to work and deliver,” adding, “This deal belongs to the international community, having been endorsed by the United Nations Security Council, that expects all sides to keep the commitments they took two years ago”

Meanwhile, when reports emerged about Trump being “likely” to confirm on July 17 that Iran has been complying with the deal — and because the law requires that both the president and secretary of state re-certify the deal every three months — four Republican senators sent a letter to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, with a copy to Trump, urging him not to do so.

Jim Campbell :Tolerating the Intolerant Grows Harder

It is only a personal observation but it seems to me that the sympathy and sums governments are spending on deradicalisation programmes, Muslim sports and outreach campaigns just aren’t working. Indeed, the more indulgences granted, the more pronounced that separatism becomes

I love Australia. I’ve lived here all my life. But in the past decade a few things have had a negative impact on my enjoyment of this beautiful place. Let me list just a few.

People being stabbed in the name of a religion.
People being held hostage – same motivation.
Plans laid to blow people up.
Fortunes spent each year by governments to keep a lid on zealotry.
‘Experts’ telling us people who do these things are mentally unstable, marginalised or poorly educated, even when that is clearly not the case.
Needing to be ‘alert’ but not ‘alarmed’ to potentially catastrophic threats.
People who refuse to stand in court.
Special treatment and dedicated religious amenities for some at public facilities.
Women shrouded in garments testifying to their status as mere possessions.
Being called upon to know the difference between a burqa and a niqab, when each is equally offensive.
Watching a publicly funded broadcaster accept and implicitly endorse arranged and consanguineous marriages.
Being distressed by bollards sprouting in public places.
Having to pay extra for everyday food because manufacturers are held to ransom.
My taxes being given to a specific community to encourage participation in a sport.
Having my bag and person searched at public events.
‘Honour’ killings.
The unlawful practice of female genital mutilation.
A welfare system that indulges the practice of polygamy.
Witnessing the subjugation of women and a veritable Stockholm Syndrome among oppression’s defenders.
Watching my government fete a minority community, but only one minority community.
Taxi drivers who decline to carry guide dogs for religious reasons.
People seeking to advance the secular authority of their religious laws, rather than accepting the law of the land.
Being told that Islam is basically the same as Christianity when it is the diametric opposite.
Being told by ‘experts’, especially those seeking further grants, that deradicalisation works when it obviously does not.

I don’t want to accept these things. I don’t want to accept that a small, noisy, discordant minority is changing the way I live, and changing it for the worse. And I particularly will not accept that a concern for women’s rights and being appalled by clerics who call for the death of homosexuals makes me “intolerant” or consumed by bigotry.

Woman in Short Skirt Sparks Debate, and Arrest, in Saudi Arabia Video of the woman walking around a historic town went viral in the conservative kingdom By Margherita Stancati

Saudi Arabia’s police detained a woman for appearing in public wearing a short skirt and a cropped top, a violation of the country’s strict dress code, state media said on Tuesday.

A video of the woman walking around the historic town of Ushayqir, which first surfaced on Snapchat, went viral on Saudi social media over the weekend, sparking a fierce debate in the kingdom, with some speaking out in her defense and others calling for her swift punishment.

The woman, who hasn’t been officially named, was detained by police in Riyadh for wearing “immodest clothing” and the case was referred to the public prosecutor, state television said.

Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam and a key U.S. ally in the battle against religious extremism, enforces one of the world’s strictest interpretations of the religion, largely the product of the ruling monarchy’s longstanding alliance with the powerful Sunni Muslim clerical establishment.

Women must wear loose, head-to-toe gowns known as abayas in public, though exceptions are made for foreign officials and their spouses. Most women wear all-black abayas and choose to wear face-covering veils known as niqabs.

Translation: “Had she been a foreigner, they would’ve raved over the beauty of her waistline and the attractiveness of her eyes. But because she’s Saudi, they’re after her prosecution.”

“The law must apply to her,” said a tweet from the account of Aisha Al Otaibi, ahead of the woman’s detention. “Europe forces women to remove their veils. In our country law is based on Islamic Shariah, and it must be respected. She insulted it and must be punished to teach a lesson.” The Twitter user’s profile said she is based in Jeddah.

There is no written penal code in Saudi Arabia, where judges issue verdicts based on interpretations of Islamic law, or Shariah.

The reaction to the video reflects internal tensions over the future of the kingdom, with those who are pushing for change pitted against those resisting it.

“A woman wanders in the heritage town of Ushayqir. The world has not come to an end—it’s a pleasant sight. There is no insult in it. She’s a human, she is a person,” said a tweet from the account of Waleed Al Nasser.CONTINUE AT SITE

Trump’s Supporters Have His Back, Poll Finds Survey underscores many of the themes that led to the president’s surprise victory By Michael C. Bender

People in counties that propelled President Donald Trump’s election victory see him as the change agent needed to shake up political and economic systems that they said are stacked against them, a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found.

The president’s job performance and his handling of the economy are viewed more favorably in these so-called Trump counties than in the rest of the nation, helping to overcome doubts some people have about the president’s personal qualities and some of his policy decisions.

The GOP president draws wide support in these counties for bargaining with employers to keep jobs in the U.S., with 75% of residents supporting those efforts and 14% opposing.

More than two-thirds of respondents in those counties back his signaling that he is willing to take action if North Korea goes further in developing long-range missiles and nuclear weapons, and a similar share backs his military response in April to Syria’s use of chemical weapons. A majority supports his push for a ban on entry into the U.S. residents of some countries.

In these counties, 50% said they approve of Mr. Trump’s job performance, compared with 46% who disapprove, the survey found. That is a stronger showing than the 40% in a nationwide Journal/NBC survey from last month who approved of Mr. Trump’s performance in office.

The survey underscored many of the themes that led to Mr. Trump’s surprising victory in November, most notably the resonance of his call to protect U.S. jobs and the unfavorable view that many voters took of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.

Hypocrites on the Temple Mount By Avrohom Gordimer

Palestinian Authority leader Rami Hamdallah has just warned of “grave consequences” and called on Muslims to “shoulder their responsibilities and put a stop to Israeli violations against Al-Aqsa Mosque and to provide international protection for our people and holy places.” The Fatah Party of Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas has called for a “Day of Rage.” Other Palestinian Authority spokesmen condemned the Israeli “fierce and organized attack against Jerusalem Arabs.” There have been nightly violent protest riots, in which large groups of Palestinians have assaulted Israeli police with rocks and bottles.

Reading the above, one would surmise that the Israelis must have done something horrific.

The Israelis’ crime? Installing metal detectors on the Temple Mount, and closing the Mount for two days due to extreme security concerns, immediately after Muslims shot two Israeli policemen dead there last Friday in a terror attack. There was also the discovery of numerous weapons being stored by Muslims on the Temple Mount.

Yes, the Israeli “crime” was that the nation dared to install metal detectors at the scene of a double-murder of its policemen and take basic security precautions. The Muslim terrorists are not the villains; that would be the Israeli police, who keep the Mount safe and allow innumerable Muslims to safely ascend there for prayer every day.

And there is more: Grand Mufti Mohammed Hussein, the Temple Mount’s chief Muslim cleric, has just warned Muslim worshipers that they should violate security protocol and refuse to enter through the metal detectors, as “Allah will not accept offered prayers through a Zionist metal detector” (!). Never mind that Saudi king Salman, who is the official custodian of the Temple Mount’s mosques, expressed a full understanding of the Israeli security upgrade. Never mind that the Saudis themselves have mandated the use of GPS bracelets at the annual Hajj pilgrimage to prevent violence and injury amid the millions of Muslims who travel to their prayer site in packed crowds for the Hajj’s rock-throwing ritual. Never mind that the violence and terror at the Temple Mount are solely the work of Muslims, and that the Israelis have acted with civility to assure security. Palestinian leadership, whose tools are deception, intimidation and violence, know better.

The West Bank security wall has greatly curbed Palestinian terror. Hopefully, the Temple Mount metal detectors will do the same. But the ingrates who ascend the Temple Mount to ask Allah to curse the Israelis, and who celebrate terror against Israelis, have it too good. Most countries would severely crack down on them, shut the Mount’s mosques for an extended period, and take really forceful action.

The Israelis act with restraint but with a strong dose of reality. And Palestinian leadership responds with lies, delusion and violence.

Another lopsided trade: Israel compromises, Palestinians keep everything By Shoshana Bryen

On Friday, two Israeli policemen were murdered on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The same day, Seth Siegel wrote in The New York Times, “A Good Story about Israel and the Palestinians,” detailing how Israeli and Palestinians sat on a dais to announce an update on the Red Sea-Dead Sea project. Siegel, author of Let There be Water, is probably Israel’s greatest water expert, and his understanding of the challenges of water use and distribution in Israel and with its neighbors is unsurpassed. But what he passes off as a “good story” is simply the old story of Israel giving something to the Palestinians (and Jordan) in exchange for a phony smile.

The agreement includes no change in the Palestinian Authority’s nasty attitude or incitement to violence against Israel. No decision to stop paying terrorists for killing Jews. There was condemnation of Israeli security measures after the murders from P.A. strongman Mahmoud Abbas, King Abdullah of Jordan, and the Arab League – not a positive comment from any of them about the water project. The extent of the good news appears to be that Palestinian water officials were permitted to accept Israeli-generated improvements in Palestinian life.

Reviewing Siegel’s excellent book a year ago, I wrote:

Rawabi, a planned Palestinian community, is a case in point. Existing Palestinian-Israeli protocols require the two sides to meet to discuss new pipelines for the town, but for years the PA refused to convene a meeting on principle. After the developer was nearly bankrupt and the PA was telling the world Israel was withholding water from thirsty Palestinians, Israel finally just turned on the water. The PA called it a win, but for the Palestinians who invested in the construction of the town and the Palestinians who hoped to live and work there, the delay was no win at all.

Siegel acknowledges precisely that in the Times:

Beginning in 2008, the Palestinian leadership decided to turn water into a political tool to bludgeon Israel. The claim, which gained currency among some in the human rights community and the news media, was that Israel was starving Palestinians of water to oppress them and to break their economy. Never mind that Israel was scrupulously adhering to the Oslo Agreement and providing more than half of all of all of the water used by Palestinians in the West Bank. The Palestinian Authority and its supporters began to speak of Israel’s “water apartheid.”

In short form: Palestinian leadership subjects its people to limited dirty water or no water so it can blame Israel for the limited dirty water or no water.

It did the same in Gaza, as I wrote then in covering Siegel’s book:

Gaza is a disaster ready to happen – happening already, in fact – between illegal wells draining the aquifer, salt water running in to fill the space, and lack of sewage treatment. When Israel had farms inside Gaza, the deal was to supply an amount of water to Gaza authorities equal to the amount used by the farms. When, in 2005, Israel left Gaza, the government continued providing the water – and later doubled the amount. But that doesn’t address the underlying issues.

The Iran-Deal Swindle We thought we were the ones buying time. By Elliot Kaufman

Two years on, the Iranian nuclear deal is a failure.

Some will surely protest that this cannot be; on Monday, the Trump administration just indicated that it plans to certify Iranian compliance to Congress. But that certification does not mean what it may seem to.

It certainly does not indicate that Iran has been in perfect compliance with the deal. Iran has already exceeded its limits on uranium enrichment and production of heavy water on several occasions. Furthermore, a series of recent German intelligence reports discovered Iranian efforts to procure technology that “can be used to develop plutonium for nuclear weapons.” One report concluded there was “no evidence” of the “complete about-face in Iran’s atomic policies” that had been hoped for.

But of course there’s no evidence of that. This was the central flaw of the Iran deal: There was never any reason to suspect that the nature or aims of the Iranian regime had changed. Iran of course has scaled back its nuclear advances, but the Supreme Leader and his cronies still seek to obtain a nuclear weapon to fortify their regime, advance Iranian regional hegemony, and threaten Israel. Until this changes, the Iranians can safely be expected to use any deal to better pursue those aims. This is why it matters when H. R. McMaster, director of the National Security Council, explains that Iran has violated the spirit of the agreement.

So why does Trump plan to certify compliance? One debilitating weakness of the Iran deal is that there are no punishment mechanisms short of re-imposing sanctions, at which point Iran can reasonably argue that the deal is dead and it is free to pursue whatever nuclear advances it wants.

The deal provides a process whereby America can allege misconduct and force the U.N. Security Council to vote on a resolution. This resolution would maintain the deal’s suspension of sanctions, so any veto — including the U.S.’s own — would trigger the reestablishment of the legal basis for sanctions. But there are several hurdles to getting the sanctions to “snap back” as promised.

As Eric Lorber and Peter Feaver wrote in Foreign Policy, “An effective sanctions regime consists of a legal basis, the institutional capacity to implement the sanctions, and the political will to carry it through. This course of action only provides for the first.” Indeed, if the sanctions are rejected by Russia or opposed by European allies eager to continue trading with Iran, both of which are likely in the absence of truly flagrant Iranian violations, the sanctions regime will not be effective. It might not even get off the ground and certainly will fail to pressure Iran the way our previous sanctions regime, which took a decade to ratchet up, did. That’s why formally alleging Iranian misconduct is extremely risky: It would unleash Iran and offer only weak and disunited sanctions.

This means that incremental Iranian cheating will likely continue to go unpunished. The best we can do is remain neutral, neither certifying compliance nor alleging noncompliance. But even with this meek third route, declined by the Trump administration this time, the deal leaves us helpless to stop Iran from slowly — never radically — preparing itself to push for a nuclear weapon once the deal’s restrictions wear off in ten and 15 years.

That’s why the deal will be certified. But why is it a failure? Some might say that pushing back a confrontation with Iran by ten or 15 years is a major accomplishment. We’ve bought ourselves time, claimed the deal’s advocates, over and over again.

Philip Gordon and Richard Nephew, two of the Obama-administration officials who negotiated the Iran deal, now repeat this mantra in The Atlantic. The deal was supposed to “buy time for potential changes in Iranian politics and foreign policy,” they write. But have we actually bought ourselves time?

What if it is Iran that has been buying time, using the sanctions relief to put itself in a stronger position for an eventual confrontation? What if, at the end of the Iran deal, Iran is stronger economically, geopolitically, and domestically, while we find ourselves with less power in the region and bereft of an international sanctions coalition?

Then, you might say, we got swindled.