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January 2018

IRAN: Woman Arrested After 10 Minutes of Hijab Protesting, Two People Filming Her Also Arrested By Tyler O’Neil

The massive uprisings in Iran from earlier this year may be over, but women across the country are still protesting the state enforcement of the hijab. On Monday, at least six women removed their hijabs in an act of protest, and one was arrested in Tehran, reportedly on the very spot where another woman protested at the beginning of the uprising. Worse, two people attempting to film her protest also got arrested.

“I took my scarf off because I’m tired of our government telling me what to do with my body,” a 28-year-old protester reportedly told feminist author and New York Times columnist Mona Eltahawy.

Mona Eltahawy
✔ @monaeltahawy
Replying to @monaeltahawy

#Iran https://twitter.com/faranak_amidi/status/958008395797233664 …

Mona Eltahawy

✔ @monaeltahawy

“I took my scarf off because I’m tired of our government telling me what to do with my body,” 28yo woman protestor.
At least one of the 6 women protesting Monday was arrested by police, a shopkeeper who witnessed the arrest said. #Iran

Eltahawy reported that six women stood on street corners with their hijabs waving in the wind. Photos of at least three women circulated on Twitter. CONTINUE AT SITE

Republicans Vote to Release Classified Memo on Russia Probe By Mary Clare Jalonick, Chad Day & Jonathan Lemire

WASHINGTON (AP) — Brushing aside opposition from the Justice Department, Republicans on the House intelligence committee voted to release a classified memo that purports to show improper use of surveillance by the FBI and the Justice Department in the Russia investigation.

The four-page memo has become a political flashpoint, with President Donald Trump and many Republicans pushing for its release and suggesting that some in the Justice Department and FBI have conspired against the president.

The memo was written by Republicans on the committee, led by chairman Rep. Devin Nunes of California, a close Trump ally who has become a fierce critic of the FBI and the Justice Department. Special counsel Robert Mueller is investigating Russian meddling in the 2016 election and whether Trump’s campaign was involved.

Republicans have said the memo reveals grave concerns about abuses of the government surveillance powers in the Russia investigation. Democrats have called it a selectively edited group of GOP talking points that attempt to distract from the committee’s own investigation into Russian meddling.

The vote on Monday to release the memo is an unprecedented move by the committee, which typically goes out of its way to protect classified information in the interest of protecting intelligence sources and methods. The memo was delivered by courier to the White House on Monday evening. Trump now has five days to object to its release by the committee.

The White House said late Monday that the president will meet with his national security team and White House counsel to discuss the memo in the coming days.

Be Cautious, But Take The Devin Nunes Memo Seriously There is no legal or ethical reason for the American people not to see it. By David Harsanyi

For more than a year now, Democrats have been driven into hysterics on a weekly basis by highly selective, often partisan leaks fed to them in 900-word increments by the political media. Whether these sensationalist stories were debunked or not, no Democrat demanded that every scrap of information related to their leaks be declassified immediately to ensure that the nation see the appropriate context. It’s a process, we were told.

You’ll notice that many of the same process-oriented folks, now preemptively dismissing the four-page summary memo alleging surveillance abuses by the Justice Department and FBI as a bunch of conspiracy theories, have a different set of standards for Rep. Devin Nunes and Republicans.

“FISA warrants typically are big thick documents, 50-60 pages,” John McLaughlin, a former CIA deputy director, recently wrote. “If the Nunes memo about one is just 4 pages, you can bet it’s a carefully picked bowl of cherries. Made all the more dishonest by holding back the minority rebuttal memo. A real debate needs both. Someone fears that.” Indeed.

McLaughlin is repeating a well-worn talking point. As far as I can tell, none of the critics of the memo have argued that the contentions are untrue, only that the contentions are out of context, misleading, cherry-picked, and so on. But since the memo — which is culled from a year-long investigation — isn’t an indictment or the entire story, there’s no real reason we shouldn’t use it to help ascertain whether there were potential abuses in intelligence-gathering in the Obama administration. Once we have an outline, we can take the issues on one at a time, or disregard all of them.

Adam Schiff’s Versions Of Events Are Frequently False Or Missing Key Details: Molly Hemingway

Adam Schiff is portrayed by many in the media as a straight shooter. His record in reality is of fanning the flames of every single Trump-Russia collusion allegation out there.

Yesterday the House Permanent Select Committee On Intelligence voted to release a four-page summary document alleging surveillance abuses by the Justice Department and FBI. The committee’s memo has been available to all 435 House members for more than a week. Some of those who read it described it as “troubling,” “shocking,” “jaw-dropping,” “sickening,” and “criminal.”

FBI Director Christopher Wray reviewed the memo on Sunday. As soon as the committee had finished voting, ranking member Rep. Adam Schiff ran to the cameras to spin the news. From that point, he began explaining things in a non-truthful manner. This inability or unwillingness to accurately convey information is not a surprise so much as a regular feature of his work with journalists, but it’s worth noting how that played out in just one few-hour span.
1: Omitting Facts About Committee Business

For background, Schiff has spent the last week and a half upset that the majority’s memo alleging abuses was available for House review. He and his fellow Democrats had voted against making such a memo available to the House, much less the public. He said it was reckless to discuss anything in the memo and that it compromised national security. A compliant media lapped it up. He announced, though, that he had created a counter-memo in support of the Trump-Russia collusion theory we keep hearing about.

Liberals have lost their minds over immigration Damon Linker

Something very odd and potentially self-defeating is happening to liberalism in the Trump era.

Confronted by the rise of a harder right, the center-left has responded by declaring the intellectual and political equivalent of a public health emergency. Policy positions adopted by their opponents, which liberals of the past would have considered wrong but perfectly legitimate, are now deemed morally unacceptable threats to our form of government — a hazard to the soul of American democracy akin to the danger that an outbreak of a deadly plague would pose to individual American bodies.

Nowhere has this change been clearer or more dramatic than on immigration, and never more so than in reactions to the proposal floated by the White House late last week. In return for providing a permanent path to citizenship for immigrants brought to the country illegally as children, the Trump administration hopes to gain approval for significant cuts to legal immigration.

There are three ways to respond to such a proposal. The first is to make a pragmatic case that cutting legal immigration will harm the economy. The second is to make a moral case that cutting legal immigration will betray America’s highest ideals. Both responses implicitly presume that there will be legitimate arguments made on the other side and that those arguments may well prevail in the back and forth of public debate.

But a surprisingly large number of liberals are taking a third, and very different, approach — not claiming that cuts to legal immigration shouldn’t be made, but that the very act of proposing and defending them in the first place is morally illegitimate. These liberals appear to believe that immigration restrictionists should be excluded on principle from participating in public debate and discussion about immigration policy in the United States.

This is absurd.

The Humanitarian Hoax of Collectivism: Killing America With Kindness – hoax 21 by Linda Goudsmit

December 7, 1941, the date of infamy when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor killing 2,400 Americans and wounding 1,178. President Franklin D. Roosevelt responded decisively by addressing Congress and unambiguously seeking a formal declaration of war on Japan.

September 11, 2001, the date of infamy when 19 mostly Saudi Al-Queda Muslims living in the U.S. attacked New York City killing 3,000 Americans and wounding 6,000. President George W. Bush responded ambiguously by addressing the nation and declaring a War on Terror without naming the enemy. Instead, he disarmed America by assuring the country that Islam is a religion of peace.

Roosevelt’s War on Japan was far more successful than Bush’s War on Terror. Why?

Sixty years ago Americans had not yet been attacked by political correctness, moral relativism, or historical revisionism – the three basic tenets of radical left-wing liberalism that support collectivism. Americans unapologetically loved their country, their families, and their God. Roosevelt’s America was still the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Individualism is the foundation of America that values freedom for individuals over collective or state control. Individualism is the infrastructure that supports our Constitution and protects our right to live freely with minimal government interference. Individualism encourages independence, adulthood, personal responsibility, and allegiance to the United States of America. Individualism and the meritocracy incentivizes production and created the most powerful and freest country in the world.

Sixty years ago collectivism was in its nascent stages in America. Collectivism is the practice of giving a group priority over each individual in the group. Collectivism encourages dependence, perpetual childhood, government control, and allegiance to a world community without national borders or national sovereignty. Collectivism is the enemy of individualism. Collectivism is the enemy of a free and sovereign United States.

After WWII the enemies of the United States did not go quietly into the night – they adjusted to military defeat by changing strategies. Instead of targeting soldiers and military installations they targeted civilians and cultural institutions to destroy America from within by shattering the infrastructure of American individualism – no bullets required. This is how it works.

The re-education of America is a longterm information/indoctrination war targeting the entire population of children and adults. From its inception the information war was a Culture War on America designed to eliminate patriotism, minimize family influence, and eradicate the religious authority of the church – the cultural pillars that support individualism. To win an informational war it is necessary to indoctrinate and propagandize the children as early as possible and the adults as much as possible.

The re-education of America began after WWII with a marketing campaign designed to sell collectivism to adults through the media. The effort required rebranding to sell it to Americans who were culturally averse to collectivism and committed to individualism. Communism was renamed socialism and socialism sold as globalism. Collectivism was falsely advertised as the compassionate selfless political system that provides social justice and income equality.

Palestinian Blackmail: US Is Our Enemy by Bassam Tawil

The Palestinians’ mock trial and “execution” of Trump and Pence gives the Palestinians a green light to target Americans physically. More interesting still is that members of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s ruling Fatah faction participated in the mock trial and “execution” of the US president and the Vice President.

Strikingly, this event took place inside a refugee camp that is run by the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA). More precisely, the execution took place outside a school run by UNRWA. Trump and Pence were “hanged” with the UNRWA flag flying atop the school in the background.

The US and other Western countries would do well to take the Palestinian campaign of threats and incitement extremely seriously – and severely counter these threats. Submission to the intimidation will simply result in even more intimidation, more violence and more threats.

Palestinian incitement against the US has reached new heights. While the Palestinians have never been fans of the US, the past few weeks have revealed the extent to which they truly loathe Americans. The US, it is worth noting, funds the Palestinians to the tune of nearly $800 million every year — $368 million every year to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA); and $400 million every year to the Palestinian Authority (PA), with $363 million from USAID and $36 million every year for security.

This is how the Palestinian incitement machine works: PA leaders and officials set the tone, while ordinary Palestinians take to the streets to express their hatred of the US.

Hardly a day passes in the West Bank and Gaza Strip without a photo or effigy of President Donald Trump and US flags being burned before local and foreign journalists and camera crews.

Such scenes have become commonplace since Trump’s December announcement recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

Until recently, such scenes of rage were reserved for Israeli leaders and the Israeli flag. The Palestinians, however, have now added the US to their list of enemies — they do not like Trump’s announcement on Jerusalem and see him as being “biased” in favor of Israel.

Oxford University: Delirious Capital of Political Correctness by Giulio Meotti

Oxford University had been criticized for “lack of racial diversity”. So, in the name of the multiculturally correct view, Oxford purged “male, pale and stale” with gay, female and black icons. If you think about it honestly, that is racist.

The Oxford Equality and Diversity Unit, which monitors respect for the canons of anti-racism, has ruled that not looking into the eyes of a student belonging to a minority constitutes a “microaggression” that can lead to “mental disorder”. Oxford’s multicultural political correctness looks as if has come right out of George Orwell’s “1984”.

For the first time in 800 years, Oxford eliminated the obligatory course on Christianity for theology students.

Oxford Professor Timothy Garton Ash announced that today, at British universities, “Jesus Christ would be banned”.

“Don’t feel guilty about our colonial history”, Oxford Professor Nigel Biggar titled a column in The Times. He asked his colleagues and students to have “pride” in many aspects of their imperialist past:

“Pride at the Royal Navy’s century-long suppression of the Atlantic slave trade, for example, will not be entirely obscured by shame at the slaughter of innocents at Amritsar in 1919. And while we might well be moved to think with care about how to intervene abroad successfully, we won’t simply abandon the world to its own devices”.

Dozens of Oxford academics immediately united to condemn the “simple-minded” defense of British colonialism by the professor. Student associations also branded Biggar a “racist” and a “bigot”, and asked the university to suspend him. Trevor Phillips, former chair of the UK Equalities and Human Rights Commission, said that Biggar’s critics are using “an attack line of which Joseph Stalin would have been proud”. Its goal, in fact, seems the moral destruction of the intellectual adversary.

Biggar’s case illustrates the atmosphere in Oxford, the West’s capital of political correctness. Oxford’s students and professors are the leaders of a movement which, under the guise of “anti-racism”, is closing the Western mind and killing the Western culture with dogmatism, tribalism, anti-intellectualism and groupthink. All this indoctrinating has led only to a militant loathing of the Western past and a public revulsion for humanistic Western values, culture and the ability at least to try to correct our wrongs — as only the West does. Students and professors are now unable to explain why a culture that treats women and men equally or that protects freedom of thought is superior to a culture that subjugates women and oppresses individual choice.

The Tet Offensive Revisited: Media’s Big Lie How an American victory was transformed into a symbol of defeat By Arthur Herman —

Josef Goebbels called it the Big Lie, the deliberate misrepresentation of facts and reality in order to achieve a political objective. It’s been part and parcel of the New World Disorder we’ve lived under for the past century, ever since Vladimir Lenin first used a Big Lie to disguise his seizure of power from Russia’s post-czar provisional government in November 1917, by telling the Russian people he was preventing a coup not perpetrating one.

America’s first major encounter with the Big Lie, with all its disastrous consequences, started 50 years ago today, when the American mainstream media — CBS and the other networks, plus the New York Times and the Washington Post — decided to turn the major Communist Tet offensive against U.S. forces and South Vietnam on January 30, 1968, into an American defeat, rather than what it actually was: a major American victory.

We’ve all lived in the disorder and chaos that campaign set in motion ever since.

By the end of 1967, the Communist cause in the Vietnam War was in deep trouble. The build-up of American forces — nearly half a million men were deployed in Vietnam by December — had put the Vietcong on the defensive and led to bloody repulses of the North Vietnamese army (NVA), which had started intervening on the battlefield to ease the pressure on its Vietcong allies.

Hanoi’s decision to launch the Tet offensive was born of desperation. It was an effort to seize the northern provinces of South Vietnam with conventional troops while triggering an urban uprising by the Vietcong that would distract the Americans — and, some still hoped, revive the fading hopes of the Communists. The offensive itself began on January 30, with attacks on American targets in Saigon and other Vietnamese cities, and ended a little more than a month later when Marines crushed the last pockets of resistance in the northern city of Hue.

It not only destroyed the Vietcong as an effective political and military force, it also, together with the siege of Khe Sanh, crippled the NVA, which lost 20 percent of its forces in the South and suffered 33,000 men killed in action, all for no gain. By the end of 1969, over 70 percent of South Vietnam’s population was rated by the U.S. military as under government control, compared with 42 percent at the beginning of 1968.

Hillary’s ‘Sure’ Victory Explains Most Everything Stretching or breaking the law on her behalf would have been rewarded by a President Clinton. What exactly were top officials in the FBI and DOJ doing during the election of 2016?By Victor Davis Hanson

The Page-Strzok text exchanges might offer a few answers. Or, as Lisa Page warned her paramour as early as February 2016, at the beginning of the campaign and well before the respective party nominees were even selected:

One more thing: she [Hillary Clinton] might be our next president. The last thing you need us going in there loaded for bear. You think she’s going to remember or care that it was more doj than fbi?

The traditional way of looking at the developing scandals at the FBI and among holdover Obama appointees in the DOJ is that the bizarre atmospherics from candidate and President Trump have simply polarized everyone in Washington, and no one quite knows what is going on.

Another, more helpful, exegesis, however, is to understand that if we’d seen a Hillary Clinton victory in November 2016, which was supposed to be a sure thing, there would now be no scandals at all.

That is, the current players probably broke laws and committed ethical violations not just because they were assured there would be no consequences but also because they thought they’d be rewarded for their laxity.

On the eve of the election, the New York Times tracked various pollsters’ models that had assured readers that Trump’s odds of winning were respectively 15 percent, 8 percent, 2 percent, and less than 1 percent. Liberals howled heresy at fellow progressive poll guru Nate Silver shortly before the vote for daring to suggest that Trump had a 29 percent chance of winning the Electoral College.

Hillary Clinton herself was not worried about even the appearance of scandal caused by transmitting classified documents over a private home-brewed server, or enabling her husband to shake down foreign donations to their shared foundation, or destroying some 30,000 emails. Evidently, she instead reasoned that she was within months of becoming President Hillary Clinton and therefore, in her Clintonesque view of the presidency, exempt from all further criminal exposure. Would a President Clinton have allowed the FBI to reopen their strangely aborted Uranium One investigation; would the FBI have asked her whether she communicated over an unsecure server with the former president of the United States?

Former attorney general Loretta Lynch, in unethical fashion, met on an out-of-the-way Phoenix tarmac with Bill Clinton, in a likely effort to find the most efficacious ways to communicate that the ongoing email scandal and investigation would not harm Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. When caught, thanks to local-news reporters who happened to be at the airport, Lynch sort of, kind of recused herself. But, in fact, at some point she had ordered James Comey not to use the word “investigation” in his periodic press announcements about the FBI investigation.