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November 2017

Butcher Bob Out of His Job? by Mark Steyn

On becoming Zimbabwe’s first Prime Minister in 1980, Robert Mugabe told Ian Smith, the defiant leader of white Rhodesa, “you have given me the jewel of Africa”. Mugabe took the jewel and shattered it, leaving a few splinters and shards strewn across a wasteland. Today, history came calling for the nonagenarian thug. He is apparently under house arrest as the army takes over and his wife flees.

Mugabe had an advantage over the first generation of post-colonial leaders from twenty years earlier: The mistakes were well known and he didn’t have to repeat them.

But he did anyway. And he managed to hang on longer than Nkrumah and Nyerere, Kenyatta and Kaunda and the other Afro-Marxist kleptocrats.

I wrote about the old monster (and his Chinese-made prosthetic) here. Half a decade or so back, I wrote: “It’s a good basic axiom that if you take a quart of ice-cream and a quart of dog feces and mix ’em together the result will taste more like the latter than the former. That’s the problem with the U.N.”

Absolutely right, if I do say so myself. When you make the free nations and the thug states members of the same club, the danger isn’t that they’ll meet each other half-way but that the free world winds up going three-quarters, seven-eighths of the way.

That’s how it went last Friday when the World Health Organization, ostensibly one of the least nutty operating units of the UN (compared with, say, the Human Rights Council), announced that Robert Mugabe was being appointed a WHO “Goodwill Ambassador”. Mr Mugabe’s idea of “goodwill” is to send his goons round to your farmhouse to announce he’s stealing your land – and, if you’re minded to object, kill your farm workers or wife or kid. When Zimbabwe’s nonagenarian monster goes Goodwill hunting, best not to stand in his path.

Yesterday the WHO was forced to back down. But how did it ever get as far as an official announcement? Mugabe’s greatest contribution to “world health” has been to raise the comparative life expectancy of every other country by dramatically reducing his own over his first quarter-century:

The Suicidal Narrative of the Modern Environmental Left By Michael Walsh

Should you ever doubt the importance of the “narrative” to the modern Left, all you need to do is look around you. It’s the in the air we breathe, and the water in which we swim, attached to the products we buy and behind just about every news story we read or see. At every turn, we are admonished, hectored, harangued to get with the cultural-Marxist program.https://amgreatness.com/2017/11/16/the-suicidal-narrative-of-the-modern-environmental-left/

On a plane recently, the attendants handed out complimentary dark chocolates. The brand? Something called Endangered Species Chocolate, a company that bills its products as “the first ever chocolate bars made in America from Fairtrade certified West African cocoa beans that can be fully traced from farm to chocolate bar. ESC has committed that only fully traceable cocoa beans sustainably grown and harvested under Fairtrade standards will be used to make their chocolate.”

In case, like me, you had no idea fluffy chocolate bunnies were an endangered species, or that a guilty nibble at a Hershey bar could lay waste to vast stretches of the veldt, the company offers this helpful explanation:

The cocoa used by ESC is grown by West African farmers who follow rigorous standards for protection of workers’ rights and the environment. When a customer purchases ESC’s Fairtrade certified bars, West African farmers earn a fair price and an additional Fairtrade social premium to invest in business and community projects such as improving education and healthcare, protecting their environment and improving their economic well-being.

Who could be against that? Westerners from Dickens’ Mrs. Jellyby on have sought to improve the plight of sub-Saharan Africans, but this statement of virtue-signaling posits that West African farmers are currently not getting a fair price for their cocoa beans; in our mind’s eye, we picture some nasty Belgian—call him Mr. Kurtz—terrorizing the natives from his Congolese redoubt.

Similarly, on a recent trip to the health-food store I bought a bag of moringa, a currently voguish “superfood” of powdered plant protein. Yum. It’s made by Kuli Kuli (which, like Endangered Species Chocolate, sports a nurturing “green” logo). Here’s what the packaging has to say:

Once eaten by the ancient Greeks and Romans, moringa leaves have been used in traditional medicine for many centuries… our moringa is sustainably sourced from women’s cooperatives in West Africa, where we work to improve nutrition and livelihoods. Nourishing you, nourishing the world.

A Male Prisoner with Gender Dysphoria Wants to Go to a Female Prison The law doesn’t require that, but he makes serious allegations that guards have mistreated him. By Margot Cleveland

Yesterday, a male prisoner serving a three-to-four-year sentence for drug offenses sued the Massachusetts Correctional Institution, demanding, among other things, that the state transfer him to a female correctional facility because he suffers from gender dysphoria.

In his lawsuit, filed by GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders under the pseudonym Jane Doe, Doe alleged violations of his federal and state constitutional rights to equal protection and due process, as well as his rights under the Americans with Disabilities Act. All of Doe’s legal theories are dubious, but none so much as his disability claim under the ADA.

Passed in 1990, the ADA prohibits discrimination on the basis of a disability, and also requires employers and public entities — including prisons — to provide reasonable accommodations to disabled individuals. But in passing the ADA, Congress explicitly provided that “the term ‘disability’ shall not include (1) transvestism, transsexualism, pedophilia, exhibitionism, voyeurism, gender identity disorders not resulting from physical impairments, or other sexual behavior disorders.” And Doe’s complaint specifically says that his “doctor ultimately diagnosed Jane Doe with Gender Identity Disorder, or transsexualism.”

Given the clear statutory language, a court should quickly toss out Doe’s ADA claim. But that is not what happened the last time a man suffering from gender dysphoria brought a disability-discrimination claim under the ADA. Rather, when Kate Lynn Blatt sued his employer in 2014 under the ADA, the case lingered until May 2017, when federal district-court judge Joseph F. Leeson Jr. refused to dismiss the lawsuit, and instead held:

It is fairly possible to interpret the term gender identity disorders narrowly to refer to simply the condition of identifying with a different gender, not to exclude from ADA coverage disabling conditions that persons who identify with a different gender may have — such as Blatt’s gender dysphoria, which substantially limits her major life activities of interacting with others, reproducing, and social and occupational functioning.

The court’s reasoning is illogical: As Ed Whelan asked at the time, “We’re supposed to believe that it is ‘fairly possible’ to read gender identity disorders to mean only gender identity (‘identifying with a different gender’) and not to extend to disorders?” Because the parties in the Blatt case settled shortly after Judge Leeson refused to toss out the plaintiff’s case, a higher court will not have the opportunity to correct the district court’s flawed analysis.

ELECTIONS ARE COMING: Seth Leibsohn for Congress

Seth Leibsohn for Congress Arizonans should send Leibsohn to the House of Representatives.
By Andrew C. McCarthy — http://www.nationalreview.com/node/453802/print

I can’t say I was vested in any of the Republicans who were thumped in Virginia, New Jersey, and New York City on Election Day. I sensed, though, that last week’s off-year, not-exactly-bellwether contests were mainly a matter of blue states acting blue (and, as Jim Geraghty illustrated regarding Virginia, getting bluer). That said, there’s no doubt the GOP took a battering ten months into the tumultuous Trump presidency. The 2018 alarms are already sounding.

On that score, I’ve been meaning to note that my good friend of many years, Seth Leibsohn, has thrown his hat in the ring for the congressional seat in Arizona’s ninth district, which includes Maricopa County. His campaign website is here. It will be a competitive race, especially if Democrats remain as energized as they now appear to be. Still, the thought of Seth running for the House makes me feel better about the midterms . . . and the reality of Seth in Congress would make me feel better for the country.

A number of us NR-types know Seth from his years as former education secretary Bill Bennett’s radio producer, co-host, and sometime co-author (including a book, The Fight of Our Lives). Seth has been settled in Arizona for a number of years now. He co-hosts a radio program there with Chris Buskirk, and he’s a senior fellow at a West Coast conservative powerhouse, the Claremont Institute (of which Seth was vice president, as he was at Empower America).

As that pedigree implies, Seth is as solid a conservative as you’ll find — on policy points and on the things that really matter, such as the defense of liberty and Western civilization. He will promote an Arizona that has more say in how it is governed, and an America that is unabashedly proud to be American because of what that means about equality and dignity, about how we best lift every person up by unleashing every person’s ingenuity.

Seth would also come to Washington as a conservative who can work with the Trump administration. Here at National Review, our views about the president vary, but generally within a range from opposition to grudging acceptance, which is natural because he is transactional and we are not. Seth, to the contrary, has been a Trump supporter from an early stage. In American Greatness: How Conservative Inc. Missed the 2016 Election and What the D.C. Establishment Needs to Learn, the book he co-authored with Buskirk, he acknowledged Donald Trump’s flaws but found them, in historical context, to be forgivable, or at least tolerable. He thus chided the president’s conservative critics — “critics” is putting it mildly — for failing to distinguish Trump the man from the policy agenda Trump the candidate represented to his supporters.

Hillary Clinton PERSONALLY Overturned Visa Ban for Islamist Figure Now Accused of Rape By Patrick Poole

European Islamist scion Tariq Ramadan was banned from the U.S. by the Bush administration in February 2004 for his financial support of a charity that funded terrorist groups. In January 2010, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton overturned that ban. Clinton personally approved a visa for the controversial grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Now, Tariq Ramadan is facing multiple accusations of rape and sexual assault of minors.

Hillary Clinton’s visa for Tariq Ramadan was seen as part of the new Obama administration policy of embracing more hardcore Islamists.

The New York Times reported in 2010:

Six years after using the Patriot Act to revoke the visa of a prominent Muslim academic, the United States State Department reversed itself and said Wednesday that it would no longer bar the scholar from entering the United States.

The decision came in the form of an order signed by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. It paves the way for the scholar, Prof. Tariq Ramadan, to apply for a new visa free of the authorities’ former accusation that he had contributed money to a charity connected to terrorism.

Here’s a copy of the signed Clinton order clearing the way for Tariq Ramadan’s visa to the U.S.:

Since last month, Ramadan has been the target of multiple rape claims.

The National reports:

Mr Ramadan, who is professor of contemporary Islamic studies at Oxford University, has been accused of rape and sexual assault by three women in the past 10 days.

One of them, French writer Henda Ayari, says Mr Ramadan raped her in a Paris hotel room in 2012. Ms Ayari, 41, who lodged a rape complaint against the 55-year-old Swiss national on October 20, claimed that for Mr Ramadan, “either you wear a veil or you get raped”.

“He choked me so hard that I thought I was going to die,” she told Le Parisien on Monday.

Mr Ramadan is also accused of raping another woman in a hotel room in 2009. The unnamed 42-year-old, who is reported to have disability in her legs, said on Friday that the professor had subjected her to a terrifying and violent sexual assault.

A third complainant, identified as Yasmina, told Le Parisien in an interview on Saturday that Mr Ramadan sexually harassed her in 2014 and blackmailed her for sexual favours.

Mr Ramadan has denied the accusations and has filed counter-charges for libel. CONTINUE AT SITE

House Committee Votes to Limit Palestinian Aid if ‘Pay-to-Slay’ Policies Continue By Bridget Johnson

WASHINGTON — A bill to kill funding to the Palestinian Authority if they continue paying stipends to the families of terrorists passed through the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Wednesday despite some activists asserting that the legislation had been weakened to the point where it wouldn’t deeply wound the PA.

The act is named after Taylor Force, a 28-year-old Army vet, was stabbed to death by a terrorist from the West Bank while visiting Tel Aviv with Vanderbilt grad school classmates in March 2016.

A study of the Palestinian Authority’s 2017 budget by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs found that nearly half of all foreign aid received by Ramallah goes to prisoners, former prisoners or families of “martyrs,” defined as those “killed or wounded in the struggle against Zionism.” The PA’s budget allocates $190,869,166 for “martyr” payments, up from $174,630,296 in 2016.

The bill would stop U.S. direct aid to the PA unless the secretary of State certifies the Palestinian Authority “is taking credible steps to end acts of violence against United States and Israeli citizens that are perpetrated by individuals under its jurisdictional control,” “is publicly condemning such acts of violence and is taking steps to investigate or is cooperating in investigations of such acts to bring the perpetrators to justice,” and “has terminated payments for acts of terrorism against United States and Israeli citizens to any individual who has been imprisoned after being fairly tried and convicted for such acts of terrorism and to any individual who died committing such acts of terrorism, including to a family member of such individuals.”

There are two Democrats among the 155 co-sponsors: Foreign Affairs Committee Ranking Member Eliot Engel (D-N.J.) and Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.).

“Since 2003, it has been Palestinian law to reward Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails with a monthly paycheck. Palestinian leadership also pays the families of Palestinian prisoners and suicide bombers. These policies incentivize terrorism,” said Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce (R-Calif.). “With this legislation, we are forcing the PA to choose between U.S. assistance and these morally reprehensible policies, and I am pleased to see this measure move forward in both chambers with so much support.”

The Taylor Force Act moved forward in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in August before lawmakers left for the summer recess.

The Zionist Organization of America said Wednesday that they “reluctantly” supported the House bill as it puts conditions on only a portion of U.S. aid.

McConnell, Schumer Unite on Ethics Probe as Franken Apologizes for Sexual Assault By Bridget Johnson

WASHINGTON — Both GOP and Democratic Senate leaders said they want the Senate Ethics Committee to investigate Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) over a radio reporter saying he kissed and groped her without consent in December 2006.

In a testimonial posted today on the website of L.A.’s 790 KABC, Leeann Tweeden said she was on her ninth USO tour with comedian Franken as the headliner.

“Franken had written some skits for the show and brought props and costumes to go along with them. Like many USO shows before and since, the skits were full of sexual innuendo geared toward a young, male audience,” Tweeden said. “As a TV host and sports broadcaster, as well as a model familiar to the audience from the covers of FHM, Maxim and Playboy, I was only expecting to emcee and introduce the acts, but Franken said he had written a part for me that he thought would be funny, and I agreed to play along.”

“When I saw the script, Franken had written a moment when his character comes at me for a ‘kiss’. I suspected what he was after, but I figured I could turn my head at the last minute, or put my hand over his mouth, to get more laughs from the crowd,” she continued. “On the day of the show Franken and I were alone backstage going over our lines one last time. He said to me, ‘We need to rehearse the kiss.’ I laughed and ignored him. Then he said it again. I said something like, ‘Relax Al, this isn’t SNL…we don’t need to rehearse the kiss.’ He continued to insist, and I was beginning to get uncomfortable.”

Tweeden said he insisted on rehearsing the kiss, she finally agreed, and “he came at me, put his hand on the back of my head, mashed his lips against mine and aggressively stuck his tongue in my mouth.”

“I immediately pushed him away with both of my hands against his chest and told him if he ever did that to me again I wouldn’t be so nice about it the next time,” she said. “I walked away. All I could think about was getting to a bathroom as fast as possible to rinse the taste of him out of my mouth. I felt disgusted and violated.” When they performed the skit for the USO show, she turned her head at the kiss part, she added.

“I avoided him as much as possible and made sure I was never alone with him again for the rest of the tour. Franken repaid me with petty insults, including drawing devil horns on at least one of the headshots I was autographing for the troops.”

She then found a photo from the trip in which she had fallen asleep on a C-17 flying out of Afghanistan and Franken was grabbing her breasts. CONTINUE AT SITE

Is ObamaCare Killing People? A new study suggests unintended—and fatal—consequences. James Freeman

Former President Barack Obama and his advisers claimed that their 2010 health insurance law would create incentives to provide better and more efficient patient care. A new study suggests that one of their bright ideas has since gone disastrously wrong.

This week the Journal reports:

The Affordable Care Act required Medicare to penalize hospitals with high numbers of heart failure patients who returned for treatment shortly after discharge. New research shows that penalty was associated with fewer readmissions, but also higher rates of death among that patient group.

The researchers said the study results, being published in JAMA Cardiology, can’t show cause and effect, but “support the possibility that the [penalty] has had the unintended consequence of increased mortality in patients hospitalized with heart failure.”

The policy went into effect in October 2012 and the new study examines hospital readmission and mortality rates both before and after the penalties were in force. It’s just one study, generated by the experiences of 115,245 Medicare patients hospitalized for heart failure at 416 hospitals between 2006 and 2014. But the results are disturbing:

One in five heart failure patients returned to the hospital within 30 days before the ACA passed. That dropped to 18.4% after the penalties. Mortality rates increased from 7.2% before the ACA to 8.6% after the penalties, or about 5,400 additional deaths a year for Medicare beneficiaries not in managed care plans.

While doctors and researchers consider whether this particular Affordable Care Act policy is killing thousands of patients, the larger question is whether ObamaCare overall is making us less healthy. The implementation of the law has coincided with bad news on U.S. mortality and life expectancy.

Last month the Society of Actuaries reported:

The age-adjusted mortality rate for 2015 was 733.1 (per 100,000), an increase of 1.2% over the 2014 rate of 724.6. This was the first year-over-year increase in the age-adjusted U.S. mortality rates since 2005, and only the seventh year-over-year increase since 1980. In fact, the only other time since 1980 that an annual age-adjusted mortality rate increased by more than 1.0% was in 1993, when the rate increased 2.3% over the 1992 rate.

Back in the early ‘90s, the U.S. was battling the AIDS crisis. Now, we face a number of health challenges, which many believe are related to diminished economic prospects and other long-term trends. Also, preliminary data for 2016 look better than the 2015 numbers, though not as good as 2014, according to the actuaries.

It may be a little early to pronounce that ObamaCare has made us sicker and is—at the margin—killing us. But given all the cost and disruption, Americans can reasonably be disappointed if it’s not making us healthier. Also, given the abundant evidence that wealthier people are healthier and the disincentives to work embedded in ObamaCare, it’s hard to be optimistic about our future health if the law remains unreformed. CONTINUE AT SITE

A Leftist Crank on Fox News Tucker Carlson fetes an Israel-hater. Sohrab Ahmari

Strange ideological changes are afoot over at the Fox News Channel. The latest sign came Tuesday, with a Max Blumenthal appearance during prime time. https://www.commentarymagazine.com/politics-ideas/leftist-crank-fox-news/

The anti-Israel author and agitator–whose virulent hatred of the Jewish state has long made him a darling of neo-Nazis and Iranianstate television–looked delighted to be on the network, courtesy of Tucker Carlson. And with good reason. Here was a fine opportunity to hawk his conspiratorial vision of Israel and U.S. foreign policy to a conservative audience that is normally well-disposed toward Jews. (Full disclosure: I used to work for the Wall Street Journal, whose parent company and Fox News share common ownership.)

The topic was the Justice Department’s decision on Monday requiring the Kremlin propaganda outlet Russia Today (RT) to register as a foreign agent. “It’s no defense of the content of RT,” Carlson said, “to wonder why journalists who are rightly concerned about any government attempt to regulate their product are applauding the regulation of this cable channel. Why is that?”

Blumenthal framed the DOJ move as an attempt to silence brave dissidents such as, well, Max Blumenthal: “I go on RT fairly regularly, and the reason I do so is because, while the three major cable networks are promoting bombing and sanctioning half the world, at least the non-compliant nations, RT is questioning that.” Yes, and when RT’s “questioning” comes up short on facts, the network resorts to using video-game footage to claim that Washington is supporting Islamic State.

There was no pushback from Carlson, usually known for his spunky, combative style. Nor did he bother to present a charitable version of the opposing argument. In the Washington Post, Brookings fellow and COMMENTARY contributor James Kirchick has written a strong brief for why the U.S. should make it harder for RT to access American airwaves. Yet I’m not quite persuaded of the wisdom of such restrictions. I worry about opening the door, even an inch, to government regulation of broadcast speech, even if that speech comes from an adversarial, autocratic regime. Perhaps such moves make sense in small, fragile, Kremlin-endangered states that lack a robust indigenous media. But in the U.S., with its large and diverse media market, the best antidote to Moscow’s lies is truthful reporting.

But never mind all that. What Blumenthal wanted to talk about were the real sources of malign foreign influence in Washington: the Jews. Or as Blumenthal put it to Carlson, “the Israel lobby and organizations like [the American Israel Public Affairs Committee], which have been promoting a humanitarian catastrophe in the Gaza Strip, war on Lebanon, war on Iran, which is [sic] not required for some reason to register as a foreign agent, and I don’t why that is.”

France: Escalating Muslim Anti-Semitism by Yves Mamou

“My mother said that Arabs are born to hate Jews.” — Abdelghani Merah (brother of Mohamed Merah, a French Muslim terrorist who murdered seven people), speaking on French television.

“I heard with my own ears, Mohamed Merah’s mother saying: “in our religion it is permitted to kill Jewish children.” — Mohamed Sifaoui, journalist and director of a documentary on the Merah family, on Canal+ TV.

Incidentally, while Abdelkader Merah’s trial was underway, the headstone of Ilan Halimi — a Jew tortured to death in 2006 — was desecrated and broken. By whom? Guess.

In France, any public mention of Muslim anti-Semitism can lead you to court. In February 2017, the scholar Georges Bensoussan was sued for “incitement to racial hatred” because he mentioned in a radio debate how vastly widespread anti-Semitism is among French Muslim families.

Now, however, two types of Muslim anti-Semitism are being highlighted by the media. These two types could be called “hard anti-Semitism” and “soft anti-Semitism”.

Hard Muslim anti-Semitism is the anti-Semitism of murderers. Soft Muslim anti-Semitism is anti-Semitism of “anti-Zionists” and harrassers of various stripes.

The recently concluded trial of terrorist Abdelkader Merah is a clear and pathetic illustration of hard Muslim anti-Semitism. Abdelkader Merah is the brother of Mohamed Merah, a French Muslim extremist who murdered seven people, including three Jewish children and their teacher at a Jewish school, in Toulouse. Mohamed Merah was killed in a shoot-out with police on March 22, 2012. Abdelkader Merah, Mohamed’s brother, was on trial during the past few weeks. He was accused of being a member of a terrorist organization and to have closely monitored his brother during his murder spree. Abdelkader’s trial ended on November 2, 2017; he was convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Abdelkader’s Merah’s trial illustrated the atmosphere in a Muslim family where hatred for Jews was like a bond in the family culture. L’Express writes:

“A sinister little music hovers above all this tragedy: visceral anti-Semitism. In their indictment, investigating judges noted that Abdelkader Merah approved the ‘chosen targets’ of his brother, including ‘the Jews, against whom he seemed to be angry’. In the absence of love and attention, the Merah couple indeed fed their children with the hatred of Jews.”

Abdelghani Merah, Abdelkader’s brother, is the only member of the family who succeeded in climbing out of his family’s culture of hate: hatred of France, hatred of Jews, hatred of everyone who is not Muslim. “My mother said that Arabs are born to hate Jews” Abdelghani said on television.