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September 2017

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Robert E. Lee: Saladin of the South By Karl Spence

By on September 7th, 2017

AN EXCERPT OF A LONGER PIECE ON ROBERT E. LEEhttps://amgreatness.com/2017/09/06/robert-e-lee-saladin-south/

What does any of this have to do with current events? Three words: Robert Edward Lee.

General Lee may fairly be considered the Saladin of the South: a noble adversary honored even by those who fought him. And, just as any Christian who refuses to honor what is honorable in Saladin may fairly be said to hate Muslims, any Social Justice Warrior who today refuses to so honor Robert E. Lee may fairly be said to hate Southerners. The Lee statues that dot the American landscape are not symbols of hatred; they are objects of it.

Yet. back in the day, or I should say, in the night they drove old Dixie down, hatred was not the spirit that prevailed. Ulysses S. Grant would write in his memoirs that upon receiving Lee’s surrender, “I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.” And Grant silenced his army’s guns, which had begun firing a salute in exultation on the event, saying, “The war is over. The rebels are our countrymen again.”

The feeling in the victorious North came to be, “You fought a good fight, Reb.” Not that the Rebellion’s cause was good, but that the valor, prowess, and self-sacrifice of the rebels themselves was worthy of admiration. Such remained the prevailing sentiment in all of America, all the way through to my childhood, which coincided with the Civil War’s centennial. And if you stop to think about it, doing honor to the South does honor to the North as well. What glory is there, after all, in vanquishing a contemptible foe?

When the U.S. Army decided to turn Lee’s home in Arlington, Virginia, into a cemetery for Union war dead, the idea may have been conceived spitefully. But the move became a tribute to Lee in spite of itself. There stands Lee’s mansion, surrounded by Union graves like so many scalps around a tepee. It’s a testament not only to the courage and dedication of those who fought to preserve the Union, but also to the fearsome price that must be paid by anyone who thinks to conquer Americans, even when the conqueror is American himself.

So, do any of today’s Antifa thugs view today’s Lee-lovers as fellow Americans? Would any Social Justice Warrior today say, as Grant did, “The rebels are our countrymen again?” The question answers itself.

Consider another example, one especially appropriate in light of those other Live Action Role Players, the ones who marched around in Charlottesville with torches, as if they were extras in “Triumph of the Will.” Antifa is good at beating up people in the street, as good at it as any stormtrooper ever was. But beating real Nazis takes something more, something Winston Churchill had and Antifa doesn’t.

In all this world, Adolf Hitler had no deadlier enemy than that great British war leader. Had Churchill not become prime minister in 1940, Britain might well have made peace with Nazi Germany. Hitler then would have been free to achieve his dream of conquering Eurasia from Calais to Vladivostok. And when America’s turn came to go toe-to-toe with him, then even with every Lee-loving Southerner pitching in to whip the Axis, we might not have prevailed against such a behemoth. Had Churchill not lived, we all might be speaking German today.

Here’s what Churchill said about Hitler: “Nothing is more certain than that every trace of Hitler’s footsteps, every stain of his infected and corroding fingers will be sponged and purged and, if need be, blasted from the surface of the earth.”

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Kim Jong-Un’s Mainstream Media Defenders Leftists regurgitate North Korean propaganda in our own papers. Lloyd Billingsley

By on September 7th, 2017

As Matthew Vadum notes, the violent anti-Trump groups Refuse Fascism and the Workers World Party are siding with North Korea and “spouting pro-North Korean propaganda talking points, and in at least one case, copying and pasting official North Korean statements into communiques.” As it happens, North Korean propaganda is also showing up in the establishment media.

Consider “Reunification, not war, in Korea,” a “special” piece for the Sacramento Bee on September 5, when Kim Jong-un was fondling his new hydrogen bomb. Author Geoffrey Fattig, a “former speechwriter for the U.S. State Department,” is not disturbed by “Kim Jong-un’s blatant disregard of the will of the international community,” and describes it only as “distasteful.”

So threatening the United States and its allies is a matter of taste, as Molotov once said about fascism. Fattig’s problem is Donald Trump. “Unfortunately,” he explains, “sanity doesn’t seem to be a hindrance facing our new president.” But this is no boilerplate anti-Trump screed. For former State Department speechwriter Geoffrey Fattig:

“The problem, though, is not simply or even primarily Trump. The problem is that the country he leads has shown itself to have a capacity for violence that is matched only by its ignorance of foreign affairs. North Korea is not a threat to the United States; the only reason we fought the country in the first place was because the Truman administration split the peninsula immediately after World War II, then committed U.S. troops when Kim Il-sung sought to reunify the country in 1950.”

Likewise, regarding North Korea as a threat to the United States “profoundly misjudges the nature of the regime” which is “driven by a singular goal of reunifying the Korean peninsula, a goal that cannot be achieved while U.S. troops remain stationed in South Korea.” And back stateside:

“An American public that is naturally predisposed to fear and war” supports military action against North Korea. Instead of joining this chorus, “U.S. leaders should start thinking of ways to atone for our original sin of dividing the peninsula in 1945.” And according to Geoffrey Fattig, “Kim Jong-un isn’t going anywhere, and neither is his stockpile of nuclear weapons.”

Those fearful, violent, warmongering people in Anchorage, Boise, and Baton Rouge, can be forgiven for regarding Fattig’s “special” piece as goose-stepping North Korean propaganda. The former U.S. State Department speechwriter has had a lot of practice on that theme.

Fattig’s work has often appeared on the website of the Institute for Policy Studies, an interlocking directorate of the left. Despite the North’s “military bluster,” Fattig explains in a 2013 IPS piece, “there are signs that Kim Jong-un has been cautiously embarking on economic reforms during his first year in power.” Here Fattig shows the deft touch of a Walter Duranty or Anna Louise Strong, but there’s more.

The Korean standoff will improve with “withdrawal of American military forces, a normalizing of its dysfunctional relationship with the United States, and coordinated economic assistance from its neighbors.” So just get out, give Kim Jong-un what he wants, and all will be well.

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Commie Mayor Unleashed Bill de Blasio reminds weary New Yorkers what a menace he really is. Matthew Vadum

By on September 7th, 2017

New York’s unrepentant small-c communist mayor Bill de Blasio showed his true colors in a new New York magazine interview, reaffirming his radical roots and speaking of his plans to unleash a veritable Reign of Terror against wealthy, productive people.

In the interview, the America-hating, Puerto Rican terrorist-celebrating Democrat mayor reminds voters that he has learned nothing during his disastrous tenure at Gracie Mansion. The takeaway is that he believes taxes are too low not only in his city but throughout America, police haven’t been persecuted enough, criminals haven’t been coddled and subsidized enough, and President Trump is a dangerous racist demagogue whose fascistic policies need to be fought.

The great Anglo-American tradition, going back to the founding era and before, of strong governmental protection of private property is a bad thing, he believes. Get rid of property rights and utopia will be just over the horizon.

Like any leftist ideologue, de Blasio views markets – that is, the everyday choices made by free people – as an evil force that needs to be bludgeoned into submission by bureaucrats. Capital must be compelled, or better yet, abolished. Socialism works, he maintains, and people would see that if only the sclerotic, authoritarian system he adores were imposed on them by somebody smart and competent, like him, for example.

De Blasio told his interviewer he wants to see the end of private property and would like government to centrally plan more or less all living and financial arrangements. Yes, the mayor of New York City, the financial capital of the United States, actually said that.

When discussing property rights, de Blasio is a tedious garden-variety Marxist dreaming of imposing a dictatorship of the proletariat on his subjects. Come to think of it, the man sounds like Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders. Asked about fulfilling his much-repeated promise to reduce the scourge of income inequality, also known as freedom, he lectured:

What’s been hardest is the way our legal system is structured to favor private property. I think people all over this city, of every background, would like to have the city government be able to determine which building goes where, how high it will be, who gets to live in it, what the rent will be. I think there’s a socialistic impulse, which I hear every day, in every kind of community, that they would like things to be planned in accordance to their needs. And I would, too. Unfortunately, what stands in the way of that is hundreds of years of history that have elevated property rights and wealth to the point that that’s the reality that calls the tune on a lot of development.

A “socialistic impulse”? Nothing could be more un-American.

De Blasio, like so many academics and activists, is trapped in a communist fantasy of his own making. Central planners should be telling every New Yorker how to live, the modern-day Bolshevik insists, even though a hundred years of hard evidence, including a Mount Everest-size pile of corpses, proves him wrong.

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Administration Sources: Creepy Tweet Was a Coded Message to General McMaster About Leakers By David Steinberg

By on September 7th, 2017

A story fantastically strange, dancing between lowbrow and stupid, and it matters: this masterwork of a news item belongs in a time capsule, one day making the case to our descendants that we were, at least, blessed to live in interesting times.

Because this sort of thing happens in 2017, an alt-right crank who hasn’t won anyone’s trust beyond that of his loyal travelers seems to have become the white-whale obsession of National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster.

Also, a multi-national public relations campaign which occupied much of August — a campaign seemingly intended to repair General McMaster’s reputation with the President of the United States, to sully the reputation of Trump loyalists whom McMaster had removed from the National Security Council, and to drive out Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka, all in one shot — may have been unintentionally destroyed by said alt-Right crank tweeting the words …

“Spirit Animal” :

✔ @Cernovich

McMaster what’s your spirit animal? @Breitbartnews is Honeybadger.

Mike Cernovich posted this tweet on August 11. To an objective observer, that’s inscrutable nonsense. And — also objectively — it’s creepy.

But when considered with its actual context, and pivotally, its timing, that rational observer should be driven to conclude that, ahem, the “McMaster what’s your spirit animal” tweet is a political thunderbolt with ramifications much beyond what Cernovich appears to have intended.

Here goes:

Sources within the Trump Administration claim that the “spirit animal” tweet is a reference to a small meeting that McMaster and select others within the National Security Council held in the days prior to August 11.

At that meeting, attendees reportedly joked about each other’s “spirit animals.” Indeed, as of this writing, I cannot neither confirm nor deny that a prominent member of the NSC is imbued with the soul of a platypus.

Since August 11, Cernovich has offered other information that also points to him having sourcing within the NSC. However, the “spirit animal” tweet reportedly represented a more concerning breach. Yet even so, the breach itself is of less evident concern to McMaster and his supporters than is the fact of its August 11 publication.

Why?

Because if Cernovich still had a source leaking to him on that date or in the days immediately prior, then the tweet necessarily deconstructs much of the past month’s administration-orchestrated media defense of General McMaster’s personnel decisions.

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The Inconvenient Truth About Obamacare’s Premium Spiral By Sally C. Pipes

By on September 7th, 2017

Insurers have until Sept. 5 to reveal what they will charge for coverage through Obamacare’s exchanges next year. They are required to finalize their rates by Sept. 5 — and sign their contracts by Sept. 27. The numbers they’ve released thus far aren’t pretty.

In Iowa, insurer Medica is seeking a 43.5 percent increase. BlueCross Blue Shield of South Carolina put in for a 33 percent increase. Molina, which is pulling out of most states’ exchanges, wants a 55 percent boost in the few markets where it will remain. In Idaho, one insurer is asking for an 81 percent jump.

Obamacare’s defenders — and insurers themselves — have attributed these rate hikes to the “uncertainty” Republicans have injected into the marketplace. First with their on-again, off-again effort to repeal the law, and second with their indecision about ending the law’s Cost Sharing Reduction subsidies.

But a new analysis of premium data from the past four years provides evidence that two regulations at the heart of Obamacare are largely to blame for years of rate hikes. Those regulations are the law’s guarantee of coverage to all and its requirement that insurers charge the same premium to all people of the same age, regardless of health status or history.

The analysis was conducted by McKinsey for the Department of Health and Human Services. The consulting firm looked at rate hikes in four states: Georgia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Tennessee. Premiums in each had doubled or tripled since 2013 — the year before Obamacare went into effect.

In Georgia, the average premium for the equivalent of a mid-level “Silver” plan for a 40-year-old male went from $94 a month in 2013 to $323 a month in 2017. In Tennessee, it went from $104 a month to $431.

Some critics of Obamacare have claimed that the law’s “essential health benefit” mandates, which require policies to cover certain treatments, bear much of the blame for these premium hikes. According to McKinsey they have raised premiums, but not much. These mandates contributed as little as 5 percent to the hikes in Georgia and Ohio, 7 percent in Pennsylvania, and 1 percent in Tennessee

Obamacare’s taxes and fees have boosted premiums, too — but only between 3 and 7 percent. The general growth of health costs is responsible for 10 percent of the premium increases in the four states studied.

The biggest reason for Obamacare’s rate hikes? Two of its most popular provisions, guaranteed issue and community rating. These are the technical terms for Obamacare’s ban on insurance companies denying coverage or charging people who are sick more.

The McKinsey report found that in Georgia, these mandates added between 44 and 52 percent to premiums. In Ohio, they were responsible for 41 to 50 percent of the hikes — and in Pennsylvania, as much as 62 percent. In Tennessee, guaranteed issue and community rating accounted for between 73 and 76 percent of premium increases.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise. A study by Milliman, a consultancy, in 2013 predicted that Obamacare’s guaranteed issue and community rating rules would sharply increase premiums.

Further, several states experimented with guaranteed issue and community rating in the 1990s. All of them saw premiums spiral upward, insurance companies drop out of the market, and consumers stop buying individual policies. Most of those states ended up either abandoning the two rules altogether or seriously watering them down.

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Can a White Person Make a Movie about African Americans? Some on the left say no. By Brendan O’Neill

By on September 6th, 2017

Not content with harassing white people who wear their hair in cornrows and branding as “cultural appropriation” everything from college cafés serving sushi to Beyoncé donning a sari, now the new racial purists are coming for film director Kathryn Bigelow. Her crime? She’s a white woman. More specifically, she’s a white woman who dared to tell the story of the 1967 Detroit riots in her latest movie. It’s wrong for whites to tell black stories, apparently, because they can never truly understand those stories. It’s a profoundly philistine argument that exposes the misanthropy of the racial thinking that passes for radical commentary these days.

Bigelow’s Detroit is a blistering movie. It focuses on one incident in those crazy days of July 1967: the stand-off in the Algiers Motel between a group of young African Americans (and a couple of white girls) and the Detroit police and the National Guard. Through distilling the Detroit disturbance into one bloody clash, with a huge bulk of the film’s action taking place in a single motel corridor, Bigelow captures the racial and social tensions of the ’60s in a way few other filmmakers could. It’s both taut and expansive; part thriller, part social commentary. In that corridor, in those black heads pressed in fear against the wall, and in the jitteriness and hatefulness of certain of the cops (not all of them, though), the audience is given a stirring picture of a nation on the edge.

But Bigelow’s artistic achievement with Detroit, alongside that of her longstanding screenwriter Mark Boal, counts for little in the face of her racial heritage, it seems. Her whiteness apparently voids her artistic vision. No sooner had Detroit hit theater screens than she was being “called out” — PC for publicly shamed — for her cultural arrogance.

A Variety cover story asked: “How could Bigelow — a white woman raised just outside San Francisco by middle-class parents and educated at Columbia University — understand and illuminate [this] kind of raw experience?” This movie speaks to “the problem with watching black pain through a white lens,” said a writer for the Huffington Post, as if Bigelow were reducible to her whiteness; as if she turned up to work on Detroit every morning thinking and behaving as a white woman, a racial creature, rather than as a storyteller. This is a “white filmmaker [using] the spectacle of black pain as an educational tool,” says the HuffPost, which is bizarre, since Detroit doesn’t feel educational at all: It invites both emotional and intellectual responses, but it never once feels like a lecture.

At Slate, Dana Stevens argues that film directors — and surely by extension, all artists — cannot escape their origins when telling stories: “The people behind the camera . . . will create a different film from a different perspective depending on the lives they’ve led and the bodies they inhabit.” Bodies — here we get to the ironically dehumanizing element of PC racial thinking, where people are mere skin, driven, sometimes without realizing it, by their bodies, their biology. “The fact of the filmmakers’ whiteness can’t help but inflect their depiction [of racial history],” says Stevens. Can’t help. This resuscitates the very fatalism that lay at the heart of older varieties of racial thinking — namely, that we are prisoners of race, that our racial origins shape how we view and act in the world.

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The Coming Terror by Mark Steyn

By on September 6th, 2017

Most of the news bulletins I’m exposed to are on the radio, as I’m tootling around hither and yon. So it took me a while to discover that what the media call “peace activists”, “anti-racists” and “anti-Nazis” are, in fact, men and women garbed in black from head to toe, including face masks. Thus, as I pointed out on the radio last month, the violence on American streets derives from today’s paramilitary wing of the Democrat Party – antifa – working itself up over yesterday’s paramilitary wing of the Democrat Party – the Ku Klux Klan. Both have stupid pseudo-exotic self-romanticizing names and, as many commentators have observed, both have strict dress codes intended to conceal their identities. From white sheets to black bandanas is a mere fashion evolution: the purpose is the same – to do ugly things one could not confidently do with one’s face known to all.

Yet, as disturbing as antifa is, its romanticization by the respectable classes is even worse. My swaggeringly obtuse compatriot Warren “Catsmeat” Kinsella tweeted:

‘Antifa’ is short for anti-fascist. The only ones who should oppose antifa are fascists.

To which Charles C W Cooke responded:

Exactly. This is why I don’t understand anyone who is critical of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

But you’d be surprised how far a name can take you. Why, only a fascist would be anti-antifa! As Todd Gitlin explains in The New York Times:

Despite the spurious rhetoric of equivalency, supporters of antifa have, to date, killed no one.

Click below to see Mr Gitlin’s finely calibrated distinction in action on the streets of Berkeley last weekend:

Clip is from live chopper feed by @kcranews in #Berkeley. No cops seen, this is #Antifa. https://t.co/vQHUculNTX pic.twitter.com/AJvowKzbev
— Nick Short

Or as a CNN headline unironically cooed:

Activists Seek Peace Through Violence

So violent thugs who “have, to date, killed no one” are peace activists, and peaceful citizens who made the mistake of voting for Trump are the real violent threat. From Todd Gitlin’s New York Times colleague Nicholas Kristof:

We’re Journalists, Mr Trump, Not the Enemy

Mr Kristof is worried that the President’s contempt for the American media may egg on his supporters:

I’ve lost reporter and photographer friends in war zones all over the world, and have had other friends kidnapped and tortured. When Trump galvanizes crowds against reporters in the room, I worry that we may lose journalists in the line of duty not only in places like Syria but also right here at home. Trump will get people hurt.

In fact, it’s Kristof, Gitlin, CNN et al who are getting people hurt, right now – including reporters and photographers. Their willingness to cover for brute thuggery has incentivized antifa, who, entirely reasonably, have concluded they’re free to punch the lights out of any fascist who gets in their way. And, happily, if you’re deluded enough to believe that the principal threat to the United States in the year 2017 is “fascism”, why then everyone and his l’il old spinster auntie looks like a “fascist”. In that video up above, that’s a cameraman getting beaten up by antifa. Here’s a female journalist for The Hill getting punched in the face by an “anti-fascist”. Oh, and here’s a CBS reporter antifa put in the hospital. What’s your problem? In America today, Democrat state senators urge the assassination of the President and pay no price. To be fair, Senator Maria Chappelle-Nadal was at pains to point out that she had no plans to kill Trump herself, merely that she wouldn’t be averse to some John Wilkes Booth type volunteering his services – like that Bernie Sanders supporter who pumped those bullets into House Majority Whip Steve Scalise the other week and left him with injuries that will afflict him for the rest of his days. And without Nicholas Kristof fretting that “Bernie will get people hurt”. After all, Scalise is out of intensive care, so, as Mr Gitlin would point out, his shooter has “to date killed no one”.

This then is the good violence – the violence that brings peace. Mark Bray, author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, says that “antifa isn’t concerned with free speech or other liberal democratic values” – because “fascism cannot be defeated through speech”.

One reason “fascism cannot be defeated through speech” is because the desiccated plaints of the left so hollow out speech that they render it so meaningless a graduate of “journalism school” can find himself typing up the headline “Peace Through Violence” and never stop to think, “Hang on a minute…” That CBS reporter antifa beat up? Who cares? He was “perpetuating rape culture”:

He intentionally ignored the denial of consent, still without identifying himself (though we still wouldn’t care), which was a threat to safety and should be considered in a context of perpetuating rape culture. Denial of consent by the media is still a denial of consent and is disgusting and parasitic behavior.

If the “rape culture” shtick doesn’t do it for you, well, he’s a white man with a telephone:

Due to the intensity and context of this time people are very scared of white men running full speed at them with iPhones as this is the exact behavior of a white supremacist trying to out identity of people of color and anti fascists in order to invoke fear.

I don’t know what that last bit means, but, if that Liberty Bell is named after Alexander Graham, the sooner they blow it up the better. White men with telephones cannot be defeated through speech!

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Lessons for the West: Imprisoned for One’s Faith by Majid Rafizadeh

By on September 6th, 2017

There is much that we the West — and feminists — can learn from her tale… For one thing, freedom cannot be taken for granted. For another, liberal attitudes towards Muslim fundamentalism serve only to imperil the free world.

Anyone who ignores the plight of women such as Rafizadeh — or who makes excuses for radical Islam — is effectively emboldening the extremists and enabling them to export their repressive ideology to the West.

The “biggest battle [that] lies ahead” is not merely for women’s rights; it is “against an ideology that regards female empowerment as an evil that must be eradicated.” — Gavin Mortimer, The Spectator.

Women in the West are increasingly being targeted by jihadists for persecution and murder, noted the British historian Gavin Mortimer in a recent piece in the Spectator. The radical Islamists are doing this, Mortimer said, “because in their minds [females] represent empowerment and enlightenment, and also immodesty.”

Women in Muslim-majority countries are all too familiar with this attitude. Subjected to the dictates of the strictest interpretation of Islam at the hands of their patriarchal societies, they live as second-class citizens across the Middle East. Those who dare to go against the grain in any fashion — even by belonging to another religion — meet cruel fates.

Azita Rafizadeh, for instance, a wife and mother (and not related to the author), is serving a four-year sentence in Iran’s notorious Evin Prison for “acting against national security” and “membership in an illegal Baha’i institute.” The way she is being treated gives a glimpse into the severe oppression under which a non-Muslim woman is forced to live in a state governed by Islamic law, Sharia.

Born in 1980 to a Baha’i family in Shiraz, Rafizadeh was not allowed by the Iranian regime to attend university. She got around this restriction by attending programs offered at the Bahai Institute of Higher Education (BIHE), an underground university established in 1987 by Iran’s minority Baha’i community for its young members, who are discriminated against by the government because of their faith.

After completing a BA in computer engineering, she married Payman Koushk-Baghi, a fellow Baha’i whom she met at the BIHE. Together, the couple continued their education in India, and returned to Iran in 2008 with teaching jobs at the BIHE. The following year, Rafizadeh gave birth to a son. In the spring of 2010, she and her husband were arrested — and their computers and books confiscated — as part of a crackdown by regime intelligence services on BIHE teachers.

Azita Rafizadeh and her husband, Payman Koushk-Baghi, holding their son, Bashir, in a photo taken before their imprisonment.

When she was brought before a judge, Rafizadeh refused to enter a plea deal according to which she would not be sent to prison if she guaranteed that would never work for the BIHE again. She refused. Ultimately, both she and her husband were incarcerated, leaving their young son to be forced to live with another family.

To make matters worse, to punish her further, in October 2016, Iranian authorities transferred her husband to a different prison, and have denied the couple most of their visitation rights.

Due to the Islamist regime in Iran, a leading state sponsor of global terrorism, Rafizadeh had two obstacles to contend with throughout her life: being a female and a Baha’i. A third hurdle, for which she is paying dearly — as her health has deteriorated seriously in jail — is her refusal to compromise on her ideals and values. She could have remained abroad after leaving to further her education, but she chose instead to return to Iran to help others in her predicament. She could have had a far easier life in another country, where she would be free to practice her faith proudly and in peace. Yet she opted for a difficult existence, putting herself in danger for a humanitarian cause. For this she is being punished beyond all reason, other than that which Islamists employ to justify their behavior towards “infidels.”

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The Forgotten Palestinians by Khaled Abu Toameh

By on September 6th, 2017

Ayman Qawasmeh and Issa Amro would have been better off being arrested by Israeli authorities. Had that happened, their stories would have made it to the pages of major Western newspapers. CNN or NBC might have dedicated an entire program to their ordeal. Without a way for the Western media outlets to implicate Israel, however, their tale remains buried — along with their freedom.

The group also points out that it has documented some 472 cases of deaths consequent to torture in Syrian detention centers and prisons over the past few years.

Would anyone like to know about the true apartheid laws applied to Palestinians in different Arab countries? The information is readily available: all that needs to happen is for the Western media and the rest of the international community to reconsider their obsession with Israel and to start paying attention to the real Palestinian victims — those living in the Arab countries.

More than 1,600 Palestinians have gone missing in Syria, and hundreds have been killed, since the beginning of the civil war there. This is not the type of news that makes it to mainstream media in the West, however.

To catch the eyes of the international community and media, Palestinians need to live in the West Bank, Gaza Strip or Jerusalem. These are the lucky Palestinians whose stories (and plights) are regularly covered by the international media. Why? Mostly because these are the Palestinians whose stories are often linked, directly and indirectly, to Israel.

It is no secret that Western journalists and mainstream media outlets have developed an obsession with Israel. Everything that Israel does (or does not do) receives widespread coverage, especially if there is a way to blame Israel for inflicting suffering on the Palestinians.

When Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas imposed punitive measures against the two million Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip, denying them medicine, electricity and salaries, somehow the mainstream media finds a way to implicate Israel.

Abbas’s ongoing crackdown on the Palestinian media, including the arrest of journalists and Facebook users, is also apparently not newsworthy, in the view of the Western media. Who cares if Abbas blocks 30 news websites because of their criticism of his policies and actions? Who cares if Abbas just this week ordered the arrest of journalist Ayman Qawasmeh, the director of a private radio station in Hebron?

Qawasmeh was arrested shortly after he criticized Abbas and called on him and his prime minister, Rami Hamdallah, to resign. Western journalists covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict dismiss these stories only, it seems, because they lack an anti-Israel angle.

As if the arrest of Qawasmeh were not enough, Abbas’s security forces later arrested Issa Amro, a Palestinian activist from Hebron, for speaking out against the arrest of the journalist. Amro was taken into custody after he published a Facebook post criticizing the Palestinian Authority security forces for arresting the journalist and stifling freedom of expression.

Qawasmeh and Amro would have been better off being arrested by Israeli authorities. Had that happened, their stories would have made it to the pages of major Western newspapers. CNN or NBC might have dedicated an entire program to their ordeal. Without a way for the Western media outlets to implicate Israel, however, their tale remains buried — along with their freedom.

The tragic tale of Palestinians in Syria exposes the double standard of the international media and community when it comes to covering the Middle East: when Israel is not involved, journalists are not involved.

What happens to Palestinians in Arab countries seems to be rather ho-hum to most of the world. So what if thousands of Palestinians have gone missing or have been killed? If an Arab state is involved, the media stays away.

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Syria: Elections Gambit to Get Russia Off the Hook by Amir Taheri

By on September 6th, 2017

In a U-turn that might enter diplomatic annals as among the most bizarre, the United Nations’ special envoy on Syria, Staffan di Mistura, is forecasting an end of the war and the holding of elections there next year.

In a BBC radio interview this week, di Mistura more than implied that the international community must now accept the prolongation of President Bashar al-Assad’s rule and the holding of elections by what is left of his administration.

Di Mistura’s new position is in sharp contrast with the analysis he offered last year when he explicitly ruled out “any possibility of holding elections under the present regime.”

Spelling out his new analysis yesterday, di Mistura speculated that the Islamic State will lose its last strongholds in Syria by October, paving the way for “free and fair elections.”

In a U-turn that might enter diplomatic annals as among the most bizarre, the United Nations’ special envoy on Syria, Staffan di Mistura (pictured), is forecasting an end of the war and the holding of elections there next year. (Image source: UN Photo / Jean-Marc Ferré)

“What we are seeing is, in my opinion, the beginning of the end of this war… what we need to make sure is that this becomes also the beginning of peace. And that is where the challenge starts at this very moment,” he said.

Analysts believe that di Mistura, frustrated by his failure to broker a deal between the rival blocs in this conflict, is trying to inject a bit of “positive mood” into what is an increasingly grim picture. Just a few weeks ago, diplomatic circles were abuzz with rumors about di Mistura either being sacked or throwing in the towel.

“His new optimism may be due to some vague promises from Moscow,” says a UN official on condition of anonymity.

“With the Trump administration apparently letting Russia play the lead in this phase of the Syrian drama, di Mistura needs some backing from Russia to get anything done. Russia, in return, demands that the issue of al-Assad’s future be set aside for the time being.”

To cajole di Mistura in line, Moscow seems to have also promised a set of as yet unspecific concessions by the Assad clan in Damascus.

What di Mistura ignores is the fact that Assad and his backers who think they have won the war are in no mood to make any meaningful concessions to their opponents who may represent a majority of the Syrian people.

“Russia and Iran are certainly trying to split the anti-Assad opposition,” says Iranian analyst Nasser Zamani. “The issue of early elections without a decision on Assad’s fate is likely to cause such a split.”

The so-called Cairo and Moscow opposition groups, believed to have a tacit understanding with at least part of the Assad regime, are likely to welcome the idea of elections in 2018. The main opposition coalition, known as the High Negotiations Committee, however, is likely to reject elections in circumstances in which the Assad regime controls at least 40 per cent of the population.

Di Mistura’s election gambit may, in fact, have little do with the core problems of the Syrian tragedy. It is clear that no serious elections could be held in such a short time and with no transition authority in place.

The dramatic changes in the Syrian demographic composition mean that no credible electoral register could be established without a proper census. By most estimates, at least half of Syria’s population has been transformed into refugees or displaced persons within the country.

Even if some kind of register is worked out, other key issues such as designating constituencies or adopting the system of proportional representation are complex enough to require more time to tackle.

Then there is the problem of who will organize, monitor and ultimately certify any election.

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