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May 2018

MY SAY: HEADLINES AT THE NEW YORK TIMES

1.I Helped Start the Gaza Protests. I Don’t Regret It. by Ahmed Abu Ratima, New York Times

2. A Grotesque Spectacle in Jerusalem Michelle Goldberg, New York Times

3. Trump’s Failure in Jerusalem New York Times

4. A Hope ‘Each Bullet Was Justified’: Israelis Reflect on Gaza Deaths A day after their soldiers killed 60 mostly unarmed Palestinians in Gaza, Israelis were defiant, defensive or blasé. By ISABEL KERSHNER and DAVID M. HALBFINGER

5.Amid Debate and Violence, Trump Delivers Embassy Victory to Christian Base By ELIZABETH DIAS

Sweden in Free Fall by Judith Bergman

If it is considered ‘objectionable’ in the West to talk about the factual consequences of migration, in Sweden it is now viewed as a crime.

The kind of ‘integration’ that the mosque in Växjö is reportedly spreading to the local Muslim inhabitants is that Muslims are urged not to participate in the Christmas celebration of “kuffars” [a derogatory term for ‘disbelievers’], and Jews are, of course, mentioned as the enemies of Allah. The mosque’s school uses Saudi Arabian school curricula, and encourages women not to dress in ‘Western clothes’.

“Silence has become an established norm in certain groups of inhabitants” in these areas…. there is pressure from relatives and religious communities, not to contact authorities, but to use the local alternative systems, such as the mosque, instead. Sometimes, the local criminal gangs even tell the residents to call them, instead of the police, to minimize the presence of police in the area. — BRÅ, the Swedish Crime Prevention Council

It increasingly appears that it will be Sweden that integrates into Islamic culture.

In 2017, a Swedish police report, “Utsatta områden 2017”, (“Vulnerable Areas 2017”, commonly known as “no-go zones” or lawless areas) showed that there are 61 such areas in Sweden. They encompass 200 criminal networks, consisting of an estimated 5,000 criminals. Twenty-three of those areas were especially critical: children as young as 10 had been involved in serious crimes there, including ones involving weapons and drugs. Most of the inhabitants were non-Western, mainly Muslim, immigrants.

A new report “The Relationship with the Judiciary in Socially Vulnerable Areas” from BRÅ (Brottsförebyggande Rådet), the Swedish Crime Prevention Council, shows that more than half of the inhabitants of these areas — around 500,000 people — think that criminals affect people in the areas by scaring people from appearing as witnesses, from calling the police, from moving freely, and from intervening when witnessing vandalism. Residents fear repercussions from the local criminals, not only against themselves but also against family members.

NBC News swings, hits self by Scott Johnson

What is it with NBC News? If you thought they’d hit rock bottom, you may have to revisit the question with a look at national reporter Heidi Przybyla’s piece on the Gatestone Institute last month: “John Bolton presided over anti-Muslim think tank.”

This is an old-fashioned hit piece. The headline reveals the true object of the hit. John Bolton drives the left absolutely nuts. He has their number and he can call them out with great skill. This they cannot abide. Bolton was the target of Pryzbyla’s piece; Gatestone was just the club that she took to hand.

Nina Rosenwald is the founder and president of Gatestone. At the invitation of Lawrence Kadish, John and I spoke to a group including Nina in New York in 2005. She is a formidable force in her own right and one of the nicest people with whom I have had the good fortune to cross paths as a result of my work for Power Line. Meeting her was a great kick.

Since its founding, Nina has made Gatestone a go-to source of news and analysis from reporters and knowledgeable observers such as Khaled Abu Toameh, Bruce Bawer, Soeren Kern, Douglas Murray, Richard Kemp, Guy Milliere, Alan Dershowitz, and many others. We feature their work almost every day in our Picks here. It is great stuff.

Today, to take just one example, Gatestone has posted Richard Kemp’s “Smoke & mirrors: Six weeks of violence on the Gaza border.” It is more informative than the sum total of everything else NBC News has on offer today.

Letitia Chai’s Barren Ivy League Education By Dennis Prager

The most remarkable thing about the title of this column is that not one reader will think it’s a joke. That, my friends, is further proof of the low esteem in which most Americans hold our universities.

The Left has rendered our universities, in the description of Harvard professor Steven Pinker, laughingstocks.

As reported in the Cornell Daily Sun and then around the world, this is what actually happened last week at Cornell University, one of our “Ivy League” universities: Senior Letitia Chai presented a trial run of her scholar senior thesis wearing a blue button-down shirt and cutoff jean shorts. Her professor, Rebekah Maggor, asked her, “is that really what you would wear?”

The professor went on to say that Chai’s shorts were “too short”—that as a speaker she was making a “statement” with her clothes. As reported in the newspaper, “The class does not have a formalized dress code, but asks students to ‘dress appropriately for the persona (they) will present.’”

Offended and hurt by the professor’s suggestion, Chai decided that she would present her thesis in even less clothing. She appeared before her fellow students in her shirt and shorts and then removed them. As she stripped down to a bra and panties, she explained: “I am more than Asian. I am more than a woman. I am more than Letitia Chai. I am a human being, and I ask you to take this leap of faith, to take this next step—or rather, this next strip—in our movement and to join me in revealing to each other and to seeing each other for who we truly are: members of the human race. . . . We are so triumphant, but most importantly, we are equals.”

Twenty-eight of the 44 audience members followed suit, stripping down.

Mueller Year One: The Real Heroes in Journalism By Julie Kelly

The American media are broken.

Part one of a two-part series.

After eight years of feeding the Obama cult of personality—swooning over his suave personal traits, covering for mistakes and misconduct, applying little if any scrutiny to his policies or performance—the news media suddenly developed a keen interest in presidential accountability and integrity on November 9, 2016.

Since the day Donald Trump won the election over their strenuous objections, the media have been out to get the man they deem unworthy of the presidency. They have teamed up with the Left of and the NeverTrump Right to campaign for his removal from office. (Victor Davis Hanson recently documented #TheResistance’s full list of tactics.) Trump’s family, aides, and cabinet members have been harassed and reviled in despicable ways.

Reporters eagerly transcribe salacious stories pitched by unnamed sources to incite an already inflamed body politic. Events are twisted in grotesque ways to fuel the anti-Trump hysteria. (Look no further than this week’s reporting on the Hamas-led “protest” during the opening of the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem.)

At the same time, the American media arrogantly portray themselves as martyrs—even heroes—for acting as bulwarks against a purportedly devious, inept and cruel administration. The self-puffery on display at last month’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner sounded like war veterans commending each other for bravery on the battlefield, although veterans are far more modest than your average cable news anchor or political pundit.

But it took the self-assured comfort that comes from getting too comfortable with such puffery to draw the media out, unwittingly perhaps, at that very event. For it was at the White House Correspondents dinner that they acknowledged their sycophancy to #TheResistance, their gullibility in being snookered by Obama loyalists, their flat-on-their-back willingness to be used by anti-Trump pimps.

CNN won an award for its January 2017 report about President-elect Trump being briefed on the bogus Steele dossier. While we now know the story was improperly leaked by former Director of National Intelligence (and virulent Trump foe) James Clapper to shotgun the Trump-Russia collusion plotline days before the inauguration—and the celebrated CNN reporters did little more than regurgitate talking points spoon-fed to them by political operatives (one is known to have close ties to Fusion GPS)—the network was applauded for its “depth of reporting.”

WATCH: Nikki Haley Slams UN, Walks Out On Palestinian Representative ‘Those who suggest the violence has anything to do with the U.S. location of the embassy are sorely mistaken.’ By Bre Payton

U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley slammed the United Nations on Tuesday for pushing an investigation into the measures Israel took to secure its border during violent clashes with Hamas-backed insurgents earlier this week. After she concluded her speech, she walked out of the chamber when a Palestinian representative began to speak.

For months, Palestinians have been protesting along the Gaza-Israeli border in objection to Israel’s 70 years in existence. Protestors have been reportedly burning tires in order to create a thick black cloud of smoke that obfuscates them and enables them to carry out acts of violence. Israel Defense Forces (IDF) say Hamas insurgents used the U.S.’s embassy relocation to Jerusalem as an excuse to storm the border and plant explosives. At least 58 Palestinians were killed yesterday, spurring the U.N. to propose investigating the IDF to determine if their actions violated international law — a proposal Haley slammed as preposterous.

The Nature of Progressive Insensitivity By Victor Davis Hanson

Why do so many famous social-justice crusaders turn out to be racist and sexist?

Former vice president Joe Biden is back in the news yet again. For a second time, he seems surprised that poor residents of the inner city are capable of doing sophisticated jobs:

We don’t think ordinary people can do things like program, code. It’s not rocket science, guys. So, we went and we hired some folks to go into the neighborhoods and pick 58 women, as it turns out, from the hood, for a 17-week program, if my memory serves me correctly, to learn how to code.

In 2014 Biden had said about the same thing about women from the “hood”:

They asked me to come by this program they had at a community college in the inner city in Detroit. And I walked in and — I think it was a 15-week program — and it was a group of women from the neighborhood. Or, from “the hood.”

What was the point of emphasizing “hood” instead of just “neighborhood”?

Maybe the same condescending reason that the impulsive Biden once in 2016, speaking to a black audience, attacked Mitt Romney with the slavery slander:

He is going to let the big banks once again write their own rules, unchain Wall Street. He is going to put y’all back in chains.

Earlier, Biden had scoffed:

In Delaware, the largest growth of population is Indian Americans, moving from India. You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I’m not joking.

Retracting the Retraction, Fusion’s Simpson Stands by Testimony that FBI Had Spy in Trump Campaign By Andrew C. McCarthy

My weekend column dealt with the claim by Glenn Simpson that the FBI had a confidential informant embedded in the Trump campaign.

Simpson is the co-founder of Fusion GPS. In August 2017, he related to the Senate Judiciary Committee that the former British intelligence officer, Michael Steele, told him that the FBI had a spy in the Trump campaign. Steele, of course, is the former British spy who collaborated with Simpson in 2016 on a Clinton campaign anti-Trump research project, now known as the Steele dossier. The document sets forth sensational allegations of a Trump-Putin conspiracy. These claims, multiple hearsay accounts from anonymous Russian sources, have never been verified, according to statements by government officials. Major media outlets that were aware of the dossier allegations refrained from publishing them because they could not be corroborated.

Steele had good FBI contacts from his MI-6 days, and Simpson assented to his sharing the dossier information with the Bureau. Steele met with FBI agents in London in July 2016, and again in Rome three months later. According to Simpson, Steele told him that one of the reasons the FBI believed his allegations was that the Bureau had an informant inside the Trump campaign, leading Steele (and thus Simpson) to infer that his reports were being verified.

Understanding Gaza And Beyond… Understanding Gaza and Beyond by Gerald Honigman

Renewed tragedy has been occurring in Gaza for weeks now. Before it’s over, there will be much destruction, and many lives will have been lost or seriously impacted in other ways.

The near-sighted blame this on President Trump’s recognition that, since King David purchased it from Jebusites three thousand years ago (with Jerusalem subsequently becoming the heart and soul of Jewish existence), he would heed Congress’s call to acknowledge Zion as Israel’s capital, moving America’s embassy there on the 70th anniversary of Israel’s rebirth, May 14, 2018. Like all other nations on Earth, Israel finally got to choose its own most important city.

Mentioned over 600 times in the Hebrew Bible, the Arabs’ Qur’an does not mention Jerusalem even once. Medieval Arab historians themselves, like Jalaluddin, admitted that Islam’s 7th century C.E. prophet, Muhammad, only paid respect to Jerusalem to gain support from influential tribes of Jews who, fleeing Roman conquest in Judea earlier, founded the date palm oasis of Medina in the Arabian Peninsula. Muhammad fled there to escape fellow pagan enemies in Mecca. After giving him refuge, introducing him to Jewish monotheistic beliefs, important human and non-human luminaries (like Abraham, Moses, the important Angel Gabriel), and such, when the Jews refused his religio-political claims, Islam’s prophet decapitated all their men and enslaved the women and children.

The US Embassy in Jerusalem enhances US interests Yoram Ettinger

1. The recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish State, and the site of the US Embassy, reflects a realistic assessment of Middle East/Arab priorities, notwithstanding official Arab statements. Thus, the Arab walk – unlike the Arab talk – does not consider Jerusalem and the Palestinian issues to be nearly as critical as are the clear, present and lethal threats to all pro-US Arab regimes, which are posed by Iran’s Ayatollahs, ISIS, the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamic terrorists; the regional powder kegs in Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Libya; and the inherent turbulence throughout the tectonic Middle East with many potential eruptions (in Jordan, Egypt, etc.) of devastating, anti-US lava.

2. Recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and relocating the US Embassy to Jerusalem – as prescribed by the 1995 Jerusalem Embassy Act – represent the resolve to focus on US interests in accordance with Middle East reality, while defying Arab pressure/threats and overruling the conventional “wisdom” of the State Department bureaucracy.

3. Relocating the US Embassy to Jerusalem underscores the reassertion of the US independent and unilateral – rather than multilateral – action. It distinguishes the US President, most members of the House and the Senate and most constituents from the UN state-of-mind, the European vacillation and the worldview of the “elite” media and think tanks.