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November 2017

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ELECTIONS ARE COMING: Seth Leibsohn for Congress

By on November 16th, 2017

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.

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

By on November 16th, 2017

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

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

By on November 16th, 2017

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.

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

By on November 16th, 2017

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

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

By on November 16th, 2017

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

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

By on November 16th, 2017

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.”

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France: Escalating Muslim Anti-Semitism by Yves Mamou

By on November 16th, 2017

“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.

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Protecting Academic Freedom Through All the Campus Smoke Peter Wood

By on November 16th, 2017

This article originally appeared at Minding the Campus on October 18, 2017.

Once many years ago I spoke to an Army recruiter who tried to convince me that I would learn many valuable skills in the military, including how to jump from helicopters. I was puzzled. How exactly was learning to jump from a helicopter a valuable skill? He explained that I could then qualify for a career as a flame jumper fighting wildfires.

I passed up that career in favor of the far more practical training in social anthropology. But sometimes it seems I still ended up in the business of jumping into burning terrain. Attempting to make sense of the claims and counterclaims in the debates over free speech strikes me as something like smokejumping. The destination is often obscure, the heat is intense, and the goal keeps changing.

I have good friends in Santa Rosa and don’t mean my metaphor to diminish the awful reality of the devastating California fires. But the image has some purpose. Here, there, and then suddenly over there on a distant ridge, the wildfires burst to life. So too the assaults on intellectual freedom.

I have been working on a larger project in which I attempt to reframe many of the current controversies about free speech by looking at the psychological and anthropological aspects of verbal defiance and transgression. As part of that project, I have been looking over recent examples and attempting to draw distinctions between what we should, perhaps with gritted teeth, accept as provocative speech that still must be tolerated, and speech that “crosses the line” into what should not be tolerated. Not everyone will agree with the lines I’ve drawn. It is easiest, of course, to draw fire from those who profess a doctrine of “no lines.” But as an anthropologist, I know that “no lines” is a fiction. All societies have them. The real questions are Where are they drawn? Who draws them? How are they maintained?

Heckling Democrats at Whittier

On October 5, Whittier College in California hosted an event titled, “A Conversation with the Attorney General,” which was intended to be an hour-long Q & A session with California Attorney General Xavier Becerra. The event, open to the public, had been organized by Ian Calderon, a Democrat and majority leader of the California State Assembly. Becerra has been in the news for his public opposition to President Trump’s positions on Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) which deals with the legal standing of the approximately 800,000 individuals in the United States who arrived here illegally as children.

The Q & A session took an unexpected turn. About a dozen pro-Trump hecklers showed up and attempted to shout down Becerra and the other speakers. They didn’t succeed in derailing the event, but they impeded it. This is apparently not the first time that pro-Trump protesters have disrupted events put on by elected officials, but it is, as far as I know, the first time it has happened as part of an organized campus event. A key figure and possibly the organizer of the Whittier protest is Arthur Schaper, who has publicly boasted of his role in disrupting other public events involving Democratic speakers. FIRE, which reported the Whittier incident, quotes Schaper as saying:

“I am prepared to be an uncivil civilian, and I don’t care who’s offended. Civility, accommodation, and playing nice with Republican and Democratically elected officials is over. … Making America great again is not about placating and pleasing everyone, but standing up for what is right, even if it means disrupting a few tea parties.”

Stanley Kurtz, writing at National Review Online, responded to the FIRE report and the accompanying video of the protest with distress. Kurtz noted that many have warned that the “leftist campus disruptors” were endangering their own rights by creating a precedent that right-wing activists could copy. That’s exactly what happened at Whittier on October 5. A small consolation is that the protesters included few if any students. This was a mob of partisans from off campus. That doesn’t absolve the college for its failure to maintain order, but it means that the eventuality of heckling from both political extremes among students hasn’t yet materialized.

Lest there be any ambiguity about this, the National Association of Scholars strongly condemns the shout-down of Attorney General Becerra at Whittier College. The actions of Mr. Schaper and others in his group are an assault on academic freedom, the integrity of higher education, and the civility on which our republic depends.

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Professor: Add ‘Weight-Based Microaggressions’ to School Diversity Curriculum The list of reasons for why people face difficulties is literally endless — are we going to add every single one of them to schools’ diversity programs? By Katherine Timpf

By on November 16th, 2017

A sociology professor at the University of Alabama has called for “weight-based microaggressions” to be added to the school’s diversity curriculum.

The professor, Andrea Hunt, surveyed 13 overweight college administrators and found that many of them reported having experienced “fat shaming” on campus, according to an article in Campus Reform. Hunt co-wrote an academic article on the issue titled, “Fat pedagogy and microaggressions: Experiences of professionals working in higher education settings.”

Tammy Rhodes, the program coordinator and administrative assistant in the University Success Center at the University of North Alabama, co-wrote the article with Hunt.

The article’s abstract cites an observation by an English professor at California University of Pennsylvania, Christina Fisanick — that “fat professors feel compelled to overperform” — and argues that it’s applicable to all areas of higher education, even beyond the classroom.”

“Directors, coordinators, and administrative assistants in academic departments and units also experience this strain in which overworking and taking on too many responsibilities can somehow overcompensate for the societal belief that someone larger is less credible or knowledgible [sic] than someone in a thinner body size,” the abstract states.

“The research concludes by highlighting how body weight should be integrated into diversity training and programming,” it continues.

According to Campus Reform, the text of the article also details some examples of microaggressions that the “fat” people she interviewed told her they’d experienced. For example, a woman named Anita told Rhodes that “business-casual [attire] requirements” were a form of an anti-fat microaggression. One college administrator, Desiree, said she had experienced outright “verbal weightshaming:”

“Because I am a chubby black woman who happens to be very curvy, folks think that it is acceptable to sing songs about big butts or make comments about having some ‘junk in the trunk,’” she said.

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America’s Indispensable Friends As long as the U.S. remains good to weaker but humane states located in dangerous neighborhoods, it will remain great as well. By Victor Davis Hanson

By on November 16th, 2017

The world equates American military power with the maintenance of the postwar global order of free commerce, communications, and travel.

Sometimes American power leads to costly, indecisive interventions like those in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya that were not able to translate superiority on the battlefield into lasting peace.

But amid the frustrations of American foreign policy, it is forgotten that the United States also plays a critical but more silent role in ensuring the survival of small, at-risk nations. The majority of them are democratic and pro-Western. But they all share the misfortune of living in dangerous neighborhoods full of bullies.

These small nations are a far cry from rogue clients of China and Russia — theocratic Iran, autocratic North Korea, and totalitarian Venezuela — that oppress their own people and threaten their regions.

In the Middle East, there are two places that consistently remain pro-American: the nation of Israel and the autonomous region of Iraqi Kurdistan. Both show a spirit and tenacity that so far have ensured their survival against aggressive and far larger neighbors. Both have few friends other than the United States. And both are anomalies. Israel is surrounded by Islamic neighbors. The ethnic Kurds live in the heart of the Arab Middle East. Quite admirably, the U.S. continues to be a patron of both.

For some 500 years, the Ottoman Empire terrified the Christian Middle East and Mediterranean world. Almost every country in its swath was Islamicized. Two tiny unique places were conquered but not transformed: Armenia and Greece. Both suffered terribly at the hands of the Ottomans and their successors, the early-20th-century Turkish state.

Yet both Armenia and Greece remained Christian and kept their languages and cultures. Today, both are still quite vulnerable to renewed neo-Ottoman Turkish pressures.

America has been a friend to both Armenia and Greece, although their histories with the U.S. were often controversial. In turn, they have sent millions of talented and skilled immigrants to the U.S. The world is a far better place because there are 11 million Greeks who keep the legacy of Hellenism alive. Armenia still remains a Western outpost — the first country to formally adopt Christianity as a state religion, and a nation that has preserved its faith under centuries of cruel foreign persecutions.

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