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June 2018

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Peter Smith : Wrongheaded About ‘Rights’

By on June 21st, 2018

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/06/wrongheaded-rights/

To maintain our right not to be assaulted and perhaps killed we all, as individuals — men and, yes, women — must keep our wits about us. This is such a straightforward proposition it shouldn’t need to be explained, least of all to the Premier of a state whose courts regularly turn monsters loose.

I don’t want to comment directly on the horrific and tragic rape and murder of Eurydice Dixon in a Melbourne park in the early hours last Wednesday. It is so sad and beyond anything that words can convey. I want to comment first on the Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews and second on women’s (so-called) rights.

Andrews is quite clearly stupid beyond the normal degree of stupidity that is increasingly evident among the political class. Among other inanities he reportedly broadcast this message to women:

“Go out with friends at night. Or don’t. Go about your day exactly as you intend, on your terms. Because women don’t need to change their behaviour. Men do.”

Apparently, “his comments have been met with a wave of approval online, with many women thanking him for his remarks.” They are simply deluded. He, on the other hand, is not only deluded but, much worse, recklessly irresponsible with the lives of others.

I am a father of two daughters. I can’t imagine ever advising them to go out alone where they liked and when they liked? That would be a form of abuse. No-one should be advised to be careless of their circumstances – least of all young women. The Victoria Police were right to advise women to be careful of their circumstances. This is one of the reported tweets, critical of the Victorian police, no doubt typical of many:

“Frankly I think Victoria Police should apologise for their victim-blaming and completely useless ‘advice’ following the murder of Eurydice Dixon. Don’t tell us to be more careful. Tell men they will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law if they choose to commit a crime!”

I don’t want to be too damning of this sentiment. It comes from an emotional and passionate place. But it is silly, and the premier of a state has a duty to steer the conversation towards a measured place. He has abjectly failed in that duty. And to say that men have to “change” is bordering on the deranged. Men do not commit atrocities on women. Monsters do. Men protect women from monsters. That’s their job and most try to do it as they are able and as circumstances allow.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Palestinians: How to Achieve a Better Life by Bassam Tawil

By on June 21st, 2018

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12559/palestinians-protests-dictatorship

“It’s become safer to demonstrate against Israel than against Abbas or the Palestinian Authority. Israel is at least a country of law and order and they have human rights organizations and a powerful media and judicial system. We can only continue to dream of having something like what the Jews have.” — Palestinian activist.

At the end of the day, Palestinians know that the power struggle between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas is not between good guys and bad guys, but between bad guys and bad guys. These bad guys are no different from other Arab dictatorships that enslave and kill their people. Anyone who thinks that Mahmoud Abbas is eager to go back to the Gaza Strip is living in a dream world.

If the Palestinians ever wish to seek a better life, the first thing they need to do is rid themselves of the “leaders” who have destroyed their lives.

In the past two weeks, Palestinians received yet another reminder that they are living under undemocratic regimes that have less than no respect for public freedoms.

The regimes of the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank and Hamas in the Gaza Strip never miss an opportunity to remind their people of the dire consequences that await anyone who speaks out against the leaders. The two Palestinian regimes have been forcing it down the throats of their people for many years.

Still, some Palestinians seem surprised each time the PA or Hamas send their police officers to break up (or, more precisely, to break bones in) a demonstration in Ramallah or the Gaza Strip.

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A Canadian U-Turn on Iran? by Tom Quiggin

By on June 21st, 2018

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12549/canadian-iran-policy

Tom Quiggin is a former military intelligence officer, a former intelligence contractor for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and a court appointed expert on jihadist terrorism in both the Federal and criminal courts of Canada.

Most alarming to the U.S. has been Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s position on Iran, where the regime seems to want to increase its influence in Canada due to its proximity to the U.S. Trudeau has been enabling this penetration.

The discord between Canada and the U.S. was evident on a series of matters related to the North American Free Trade Agreement, but what went on behind the scenes was far more critical.

As long as leaders in the West who hold such views remain in power, Canada will be on the watchlist of those who oppose the spread of Islamic extremism and theocratic dictatorships. Canada may well be living through its highest-risk moment since World War II.

On June 12, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau led the Liberal Party in supporting a Conservative Party motion condemning “the current regime in Iran for its ongoing sponsorship of terrorism around the world, including instigating violent attacks on the Gaza border.” It also called for designating the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organization.

Trudeau’s vote marked a sudden, unprecedented U-turn from more than 10 years of his personal and very public support for pro-Islamist causes and Iran, beginning in 2008 when he entered the parliament.

Since Justin Trudeau’s election two and a half years ago, however, the U.S. has grown increasingly worried about the Canadian government in general, and the prime minister in particular. Trudeau has called those who oppose the return of ISIS fighters to Canada “Islamophobic.” He also has said that ISIS fighters can be a “powerful voice for preventing radicalization” in Canada, even though his government does not have a deradicalization program. In addition, the government has yet to appoint a leader for the Canada Centre for Community Engagement and Prevention of Violence.

The approximately 60 ISIS fighters who have returned to Canada roam the country freely. None has been charged or convicted. The government has shown no will to deal with them, not even when one was caught on tape describing how he had executed prisoners. Canada also has stopped sending the names of known ISIS fighters to the UN registry of terrorists, in spite of the fact that some of them are reported to be a chemical-weapons risk.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Why Democracies Should Support Tough U.S. Iran Policy by Jagdish N. Singh

By on June 21st, 2018

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12561/support-us-iran-policy

“On one level, Iran acts as a legitimate Westphalian state conducting traditional diplomacy… At the same time, it organizes and guides nonstate actors seeking regional hegemony based on jihadist principles: Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria; Hamas in Gaza; the Houthis in Yemen.” — Henry Kissinger, 2015.
Last week came to light “… details about a second building at the Parchin site involved in high explosive work related to nuclear weapons in an explosive chamber. This building has not been visited by the IAEA… [There was also] direct evidence that the secret Fordow enrichment site was being built to make weapon-grade uranium.” — David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security.
It is time for everyone to join the U.S. and President Trump in their efforts to prevent the Islamic Republic of Iran from having the ways and means to becoming a full-fledged nuclear power.

President Donald Trump’s May 8 announcement that the United States was withdrawing from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and considering fresh sanctions on Iran is a step in the right direction toward defending the country against Iran’s growing nuclear-weapons program and open aim to destroy both Israel and America.

In addition, last week came to light in testimony by the founder and president of the Institute for Science and International Security, David Albright, that Iran had:

“… blueprints for the production of all the components of nuclear weapons, the location of planned nuclear weapons test sites, [and] details about a second building at the Parchin site involved in high explosive work related to nuclear weapons in an explosive chamber. This building has not been visited by the IAEA… [There was also] direct evidence that the secret Fordow enrichment site was being built to make weapon-grade uranium.”

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BOOKS Comments turned off

The Horrors of Honor Violence: Terrorism At Home A harrowing glimpse into a deadly form of “tribal violence”. Abigail R. Esman

By on June 21st, 2018

https://www.investigativeproject.org/7489/the-horrors-of-honor-violence-terrorism-at-home

She was a 15-year-old student at San Antonio’s Taft High School with a soft smile and dark eyes. Like most girls her age in Texas, she favored blue jeans. Unlike most girls her age in Texas, in 2017 she was promised in marriage to a man 10 years her senior, who would pay her parents $20,000 to take her as his wife.

But the Iraqi-born Maarib Al Hishmawi had no intention of marrying so young, least of all to a man so much older and whom she hardly even knew. She refused.

Her parents, who had moved to the United States from their native Iraq two years prior, were furious. They “choked her almost to the point of unconsciousness,” said Bexar County Sheriff Javier Salazar. They beat her with broomsticks. Her mother, 33-year-old Hamdiya Sabah Al Hismawi, threw hot oil on her body.

Maarib escaped, running away from home in January. Claiming they feared she’d been kidnapped, her parents called in local police and the FBI to help track her down. But even from the start, Salazar told CBS News, it was clear to him that “this wasn’t an ordinary missing persons case.” When police found her in an undisclosed location some weeks later, Maarib explained her story. She and her five brothers were taken in by Child Protective Services and her parents immediately taken into custody. Her father blamed Maarib for his arrest.

This is not just a story about domestic abuse. It is a story about cultural mores, institutionalized violence against women and girls (and occasionally young men) in the name of family honor. And it happens to thousands of them every year, not just in places like Afghanistan and Somalia and Iraq, but in America, England, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, France, and elsewhere across the Western world.

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

The Real Child Abusers of Border Insecurity The zombie lawsuit causing family separation that never dies. Daniel Greenfield

By on June 21st, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270517/real-child-abusers-border-insecurity-daniel-greenfield

What the media has been falsely calling President Trump’s family separation policy began with Hollywood actor Ed Asner’s housekeeper and a lawsuit by the ACLU during the Reagan administration.

The issue was child trafficking.

Teenage girls were being smuggled into the United States. Some were being sent on to their illegal alien family members in the United States. Others were being sent to the United States as cheap labor or being trafficked for prostitution. People purporting to be family members might show up asking for them to be released into their custody. And immigration authorities were faced with a horrible situation.

The ACLU was less interested in the teens than in Attorney General Edwin Meese. Reagan’s AG was the Sessions of the day. A man whose name so enraged the left-wing group that at one point it circulated petitions demanding that Reagan fire Meese and called him the most dangerous official since Nixon.

Flores v. Meese, the case that led to the family separation policy, was born with Ed Asner’s housekeeper and the ACLU’s obsession with Meese. But the case, with various AGs replacing Meese, dragged on. And the ACLU went on insisting that refusing to release teenage illegal aliens violated the Constitution.

In ’93, when Jenny Lisette Flores, the girl at the center of the original case, was 23, the Supreme Court finally ruled 7-2 against the ACLU and rejected its bizarre claim that illegal teens had a right to be released. The verdict was brutal and made a hash of the ACLU’s opportunistic misreading of the Constitution.

And that should have been it. But by then it wasn’t Flores v. Meese, but Flores v. Reno.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Scandals Sanitized with Linguistic Trickery By Victor Davis Hanson

By on June 21st, 2018

https://amgreatness.com/2018/06/21/scandals-sanitized-with-linguistic-

Throughout Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s massive report on the Hillary Clinton email investigation are lots of strange things. One of the weirdest is the extent to which the FBI went to make up words and phrases to disguise reality.

An early draft of the 2016 FBI report on the email scandal was reportedly subjected to linguistic surgery to exonerate the former secretary of state, who at the time was the Democratic nominee for president. Clinton was originally found to be “grossly negligent” in using an illegal email server. That legalistic phrase is used by prosecutors to indict for violation of laws governing the wrongful transmission of confidential government documents.

Yet the very thought of a likely President Clinton in court so worried the chief investigator, FBI Director James Comey, that he watered down “grossly negligent” to the mere “extremely careless.”

FBI investigators also had concluded that it was “reasonably likely” foreign nations had read Clinton’s unsecured emails. Comey intervened to mask such a likelihood by substituting the more neutral word “possible.”

Former President Barack Obama was found to have improperly communicated with Clinton over her illegal server while she was in a foreign country. Obama had denied that fact by falsely claiming that he never knew of her server until much later, after it was publicized.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

EDWARD CLINE: IF HILLARY HAD BECOME PRESIDENT PART 2

By on June 21st, 2018

https://edwardcline.blogspot.com/2018/06/if-hillary-had-become-president-ii.html

This is a continuation of my previous column, “Had Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election” and what news we would be rationed with by the MSM and the Clinton regime.
Barack and Michelle Obamawould debut their first Netflixe ffort, “Black is the New White,” in which President Clinton has an extended, walk-on-speaking role, portraying herself. It will use archival news footage, and be a fictional account of her struggles to win the Democratic nomination and her valiant effort to secure the electoral and national votes to win the election, based roughly on her autobiographical book from 2016, What Can Happen. The screenplay would be penned by Robert DeNiro with Margaret Atwood (author of The Handmaid’s Tale). Gwyneth Paltrowwould portray Clinton in most of the scenes, and Jeff Goldblum would play her loyal Secret Service Chief.

The President would host a special dinner in the White House for news reporters, Hollywood celebrities, and members of Congress who criticized Donald Trump before and after the 2016 presidential campaign. She would give special plaudits to actor Peter Fonda and comedienne Kathy Griffin. Fonda was famous for calling for Barron Trump to be kidnapped from Mrs. Trump’s arms and locked in a room with pedophiles, while Griffin gained notoriety for posing with a fake decapitated head of Donald Trump to express her opposition to the candidate’s policies. Charles Schumer, Senator for New York, and Andrew Cuomo, governor of New York, also attended the dinner, and would be praised by the President for their steadfast and often vociferous opposition to Donald Trump.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The ACLU Retreats From Free Expression The organization declares that speech it doesn’t like can ‘inflict serious harms’ and ‘impede progress.’ Wendy Kaminer

By on June 21st, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-aclu-retreats-from-free-expression-1529533065

The American Civil Liberties Union has explicitly endorsed the view that free speech can harm “marginalized” groups by undermining their civil rights. “Speech that denigrates such groups can inflict serious harms and is intended to and often will impede progress toward equality,” the ACLU declares in new guidelines governing case selection and “Conflicts Between Competing Values or Priorities.”

This is presented as an explanation rather than a change of policy, and free-speech advocates know the ACLU has already lost its zeal for vigorously defending the speech it hates. ACLU leaders previously avoided acknowledging that retreat, however, in the apparent hope of preserving its reputation as the nation’s premier champion of the First Amendment.

But traditional free-speech values do not appeal to the ACLU’s increasingly partisan progressive constituency—especially after the 2017 white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville. The Virginia ACLU affiliate rightly represented the rally’s organizers when the city attempted to deny them a permit to assemble. Responding to intense post-Charlottesville criticism, last year the ACLU reconsidered its obligation to represent white-supremacist protesters.

The 2018 guidelines claim that “the ACLU is committed to defending speech rights without regard to whether the views expressed are consistent with or opposed to the ACLU’s core values, priorities and goals.” But directly contradicting that assertion, they also cite as a reason to decline taking a free-speech case “the extent to which the speech may assist in advancing the goals of white supremacists or others whose views are contrary to our values.”

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Warmists lynching an innocent bystander, CO2 By Viv Forbes

By on June 21st, 2018

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/06/warmists_lynching_an_innocent_bystander_co2.html

I live in SE Queensland. Yesterday the surface air temperature rose from a frosty 36ºF at sunrise to a balmy 72ºF in mid-afternoon. The enormous heat needed to achieve this 36º of warming came via radiation from the sun. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere plays no significant part in this daily heating event – in fact it may intercept a tiny proportion of the incoming solar radiation and re-radiate it in all directions, thus keeping the daytime surface temperature a tiny bit cooler than it would have been otherwise.

At the deep Mount Isa Mine in NW Queensland, the surface temperature may average about 77ºF but it increases by about 20ºF every 50 meters of depth – rock walls are red hot in places. The enormous heat causing this comes via conduction from Earth’s geothermal heat plus some oxidation and heating of the sulphide ores as they come in contact with natural air containing oxygen. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere plays no part in this heating.
There are volcanic windows open right now in Hawaii, Japan and the Galapagos revealing the vast resources of volcanic geothermal heat which is always migrating towards the cooler surface, sometimes violently.

Temperatures vary greatly over Earth’s surface, making a mockery of attempts to calculate an “average” for the globe. Air surface temperature may be minus -22ºF at the South Pole, while at the same time it can be plus 86ºF at the Equator. This enormous difference is caused by the varying intensity of solar radiation striking the surface – carbon dioxide in the atmosphere plays no significant part in creating this variance.
Surface air temperatures in big cities can be 9ºF hotter than surrounding rural land partly because bitumen roads, roofs and runways heat up more than grassy or forested countryside. Mega-cities are also full of heat-producing humans, engines, trains, vehicles, air conditioners, heaters, stoves, fridges, pumps and mowers.

Urban heat also comes from the warm bodies and hot exhalations from millions of humans digesting carbon-based foods, from stored chemical energy from burning hydro-carbons (wood, lignite, coal, oil and gas) or from nuclear power. Using green energy also adds to urban heat. Wind towers and solar panels extract energy from wind and sun in the countryside and release it where most of the electricity is used, usually in cities and suburbs. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere plays no measurable part in producing these islands of urban heat.

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