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June 2018

The Anti-Trump Media’s ‘Missing Kids’ Myth By Jonathan S. Tobin

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/ice-loses-1500-children-myth-shows-media-bias/The viral story not a mistake but the product of unchecked bias.

It was a mistake so egregious and so widespread that even the New York Times, the flagship of liberal journalism — and not the source of the original story — felt it had to devote an article to explaining how it happened.

Last weekend a horrifying tale about the Trump administration “losing” 1,500 children was all over the Internet. The hashtag #Wherearethechildren went viral on Twitter. Adding fuel to the fire was a photo depicting children being kept in cages.

The only problem was that the children weren’t lost and the photo was taken during the Obama administration. The Left’s eagerness to embrace this “fake news” stemmed, according to the Times’s Amanda Taub, from “partisan polarization,” and as a result the tale “spread across liberal social media.”

Yet the problem goes a lot deeper than that. Anti-Trump readers and viewers may have fallen victim to confirmation bias, but prestige media outlets also deserve a lot of the blame. Even when such stories are later debunked, as this one was, these outlets habitually feed viral myths to the public and create a climate in which any anti-Trump claim seems believable. Instead of asking readers to engage in some introspection about their credulousness, liberal journalists should look at their own behavior.

For starters, it wasn’t just social media that spread the “missing children” myth. Some media outlets ran headlines asserting that the government had “lost track” of immigrant children, a claim easily conflated with Trump’s decision to separate parents and children at the border. Most egregiously, an Arizona Republic story (republished at USA Today and corrected about a week later) reported as fact that the government had lost children in its own custody.

Australia ‘Audits’ Children’s Books to Make Sure ‘Gender’ Isn’t ‘Labelled’ By Tyler O’Neil

https://pjmedia.com/parenting/australia-audits-childrens-books-to-make-sure-gender-isnt-labelled/

Australian officials are combing through children’s books — and toys — in kindergartens, schools, and libraries, aiming not just to promote “gender neutral” options but to avoid “gender stereotyping” of any kind.

At least two city councils in the Australian state of Victoria — Manningham and Melbourne, specifically — have started “auditing” children’s books, ultimately considering a kind of ban on the terms “boy” and “girl.”

The effort follows research from the Australian National University showing that children were influenced by “gender stereotyping.” The research suggested that educators should “minimise the extent to which gender is labelled” and avoiding telling children what girls and boys should do, News.com.au reported.

In seeking to undermine “gender stereotypes,” activists seem willing to promote confusion among children, undermining the important discoveries kids make about gender early in life.

Parents were none to pleased to hear the news.

“For goodness sake, this is social engineering gone crazy,” Marie Hardwick wrote on Facebook. “Leave kids alone to be kids. Stop trying to destroy kids’ childhoods.”

Sarah Lovejoy, mother of a 2-year-old daughter, responded to a video on the Australian TV show Sunrise’s Facebook page.

“This needs to stop. I’ve got a two-year-old daughter (yes I picked her gender based on what genitals she was born with) and she plays with cars, trains, tractors, Barbies, dolls and uses her imagination and pretends she’s cooking food or being a doctor,” Lovejoy argued. “Let’s just let kids be kids.”

“Banning the availability of anything, or taking choice away, is definitely the wrong way to go about making classrooms gender neutral,” Billie Deborah Chin wrote. “It should be about making everything available to everyone.”

Defenders of the idea cited studies showing that girls and boys develop gender preferences early in life and that toys are becoming more gender stereotyped. “The research is actually very interesting,” commentator Cath Webber said. “What they’re telling people to do is … don’t tell girls they have to play with Barbies and don’t tell boys they have to play with Lego.”

Webber insisted that the female deficit of interest in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) may trace back to the idea that Legos are for boys. Lego actually makes a broad range of toys — for boys and girls — and it is arguably likely that boys generally gravitate toward objects more and girls generally gravitate toward people.

As The Wall Street Journal’s Michael Taube noted, Australia’s social justice warriors attempted to maintain calm, assuring parents that their kids’ Winnie the Pooh and Thomas the Tank Engine books were safe. Tania King, one of the authors of the recent paper on minimizing gender “labelling,” argued that the entire hubbub emerged from one line misquoted from her 40-page literature review. CONTINUE AT SITE

An Obama Scandal to Probe By Rachel Ehrenfeld

http://acdemocracy.org/

Re-writing history has become a staple of former President Barack Obama, as exhibited by his bragging “I didn’t have scandals.” He had. But throughout his time in office, and even now, the “fact-checkers” of most of the progressive-Left media outlets continue to gleefully act as his echo-chamber (recall Ben Ben Rhodes boasting to the New York Times Magazine, on May 7, 2016, ” We created an echo chamber…to help create the narrative.” )

When the Obama administration failed to prevent scandals from reaching the public, the media eagerly echoed the Obama White House version of events, often competing on providing cover-up stories, never failing to pounce upon and deride anyone critical of his policies.

Two incidents that took many Americans lives stand out. The first is the selling of guns to Mexican criminals, allegedly to monitor them. The scandal led Congress to hold Obama’s Attorney General, Eric Holder, in contempt. The second is the Benghazi affair, in which the Obama Administration lied about the reason for and the terror attack against the U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi, in which US Ambassador J. Christopher Steven and three other American officers lost their lives, and four others were gravely wounded.

There were other scandals, but an especially brazen exploit has yet to be probed. It is the Obama administration’s January 2016 laundering and delivering at least $1.7 billion, in cash, in non-U.S. currency, as material support to the foremost state sponsor of terrorism, the Islamic Republic of Iran. Obama and his Secretary of State John Kerry and other officials acknowledged they knew this action was a violation of the U.S. laws. Moreover, in a press-conference in Davos, in January 2016, then-secretary of State John Kerry acknowledged that some of the money “will end up in the hands of the IRGC or other entities, some of which are labeled terrorists. I’m not going to sit here and tell you that every component of that can be prevented.”

Israel versus Iran By S. Fred Singer

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/06/israel_versus_iran.html
Professor Emeritus (University of Virginia) S. Fred Singer was among the first prominent scientists speaking out against global warming alarmism. An atmospheric and space physicist, he headed the U.S. Weather Satellite Service (now part of NOAA). He founded the Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP) and the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC).

Persian and Jewish people have had friendly relations since biblical times. Emperor Cyrus liberated Jewish exiles in Babylon and helped rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem. More recently, the Shah of Iran and Israel planned a pipeline from Eilat on the Red Sea to Ashdod on the Mediterranean to supply Iranian oil to Israel and bypass the Suez Canal.

Things have changed, and in dealing with the hostile regime in Tehran, Israel’s aim has been twofold: to interdict weapons transfers to Hezb’allah and to keep Iranian ground forces away from its northern border.

Several weeks ago, DEBKA, a military intelligence website based in Jerusalem, reported on an aircraft strike on 50 Iranian military installations in Syria. All this was accomplished in less than two hours. If true, this represents an important achievement in military intelligence and in operational planning and coordination.

We do not know how many planes took part in the operation, but presume they all returned safely. Somehow, they evaded the vaunted Russian S-300 anti-aircraft (AA) system. Not many Western news services took note of this event, which occurred in the early morning hours of May 11. According to a report in Al Hayat, a London-based pan-Arab newspaper, Russia was not altogether unhappy about the operation.

On May 1, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu demonstrated another intelligence coup, exposing a truckload of material, consisting of reports, pictures, etc. revealing the continued nuclear activities of Iran. We do not know how Mossad stole all this well guarded material, nor how the operatives managed to transfer it to Israel, but they did.

A few days later, on May 8, President Donald J. Trump declared that he was pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal. Secretary of state Mike Pompeo announced that severe sanctions will be applied to Iran; the aim clearly was to effect regime change, removing the present theocracy.

In a recent American Thinker article, Boris Gulko expressed his belief that the Iranian rulers will not last long. He speculates that the mullahs may not be around to celebrate the 40th anniversary of their revolution next year.

Why International Farhud Day Stymies Invented Palestinian History Remembering the movement to exterminate the Jews of the Middle East. Edwin Black

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270324/why-international-farhud-day-stymies-invented-edwin-black

When International Farhud Day was proclaimed at a conference convened at the United Nations headquarters on June 1, 2015, its proponents wanted to achieve more than merely establish a commemoration of the ghastly 1941 Arab-Nazi pogrom in Baghdad that killed and injured hundreds of Iraqi Jews. Farhud means violent dispossession. The Farhud but the first bloody step along the tormented path to the ultimate expulsion of some 850,000 Jews from across the Arab world. That systematic expulsion ended centuries of Jewish existence and stature in those lands.

Jews had thrived in Iraq for 2,700 years, a thousand years before Mohammad. But all that came to end when the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, led the broad Arab-Nazi alliance in the Holocaust that produced a military, economic, political, and ideological common cause with Hitler. Although Husseini spearheaded an international pro-Nazi, anti-Jewish Islamic movement from India to Central Europe to the Middle East, it was in Baghdad—a 1,000-kilometer drive from Jerusalem— that he launched his robust coordination with the Third Reich.

In 1941, Iraq still hosted Britain’s Anglo-Persian Oil Company, which controlled the region’s oil. Hitler wanted that oil to propel his invasion of Russia. The Arabs, led by Husseini, wanted the Jews out of Palestine and Europe’s persecuted Jews kept away from the Middle East. Indeed, Husseini persuasively argued to Hitler that Jews should not be expelled to Palestine but rather to “Poland,” where “they will be under active control.” Translation: send Jews to the concentration camps. Husseini had visited concentration camps. He had been hosted by architect of the genocide Heinrich Himmler, and the Mufti considered Shoah engineer Adolf Eichmann not only a great friend, but a “diamond” among men.

The Conflict Beyond Advocacy The Jewish community is in danger and so is the Free World as we know it. Dr. Shmuel Katz

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270320/conflict-beyond-advocacy-dr-shmuel-katz

Reprinted from IsraelNationalNews.com.

Who would have believed that within certain communities, there could be more supporters of the radical Arab Palestinian agenda than supporters of the free, democratic and altruistic State of Israel. The relentless Arab Palestinian deceitful and well-organized propaganda, with the irrational support of many in the Western Media, may be a part of this transition.

The Democratic Party in the USA used to be a staunch supporter of the just cause of the State of Israel, but a recent Pew Research Center report showed a dangerous shift in this attitude. Within the more radical liberal branch of the Democratic party, about 38% will be anti-Israeli while the supporters of Israel will be only about 26%. When you look at the overall numbers as they relate to the Democratic party, you find that about 31% will be anti-Israeli and only 33% will be pro-Israel. On the other hand, within the Republican party, about 74% will be pro-Israel.

If one wants to know what the intentions of the Radical Palestinians, Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran are, one should just listen to them. They are not bashful.

Despite an absolute bipartisan support for moving the USA Embassy to the legitimate Capital City of Israel, Jerusalem, there were no Democratic members of Congress in attendance at the opening ceremony of the US Embassy in Jerusalem. Even more surprisingly, Chuck Schumer, who voted in Congress against the Iran Deal, criticized President Trump bitterly for exposing the bad intentions and the lies of the Iranians, and for withdrawing from the originally ill-conceived Iranian Deal, implemented by President Obama via an executive order, without the ratification by Congress.

Singapore or Bust Trump gets the summit he wants with Kim Jong Un.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/singapore-or-bust-1527894119

The Trump Presidency is often harrowing but never dull, so perhaps it was inevitable that a summit between Donald Trump and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un would be back on again. The two adversaries who were publicly trading schoolyard taunts a few months ago will now meet on June 12 in Singapore after all, and the only thing we can say with any confidence is that no one has a clue what will happen.

Mr. Trump announced that the summit is back on a week after he cancelled it amid North Korean insults and unanswered phone calls. But in a sign of the surreal nature of this diplomacy, Kim then sent a top emissary who is on the U.S. sanctions list, Kim Yong Chol, to meet in New York with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. On Friday Kim Yong Chol met with Mr. Trump for more than an hour in the Oval Office, and the summit was full speed ahead.

“I think we’re over that, totally over that, and now we’re going to deal and we’re going to really start a process,” Mr. Trump said at the White House. “The relationships are building and that’s a very positive thing.” Asked if the North had committed to giving up its nuclear weapons, Mr. Trump said, “I think they want to do that. I know they want to do that.”

But there is the rub. If the North is committed to giving up its weapons, it hasn’t said so publicly. It has merely committed to a diplomatic process and a “phased” denuclearization in return for certain unspecified concessions from the U.S. But that is also what the North committed to do in the 1990s and again in the 2000s only to continue its nuclear work in secret and eventually toss out United Nations inspectors.

The summit will be an immediate propaganda coup for Kim, a sanctioned rogue who will appear on the world stage with a U.S. President for the first time. The question is what Mr. Trump will be able to take away beyond the photos of a presidential meet and greet. Mr. Trump is nothing if not confident in his negotiating abilities, and he clearly savors dominating world attention with this kind of made-for-global-TV drama.

But he also isn’t known for mastering policy details, and it was only days ago that the North released three American hostages after months of captivity, and only months ago that it essentially murdered American tourist Otto Warmbier after arresting him for trying to take home a wall poster.

The Catholic School Difference A new study shows the benefit of demanding student self-discipline.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-catholic-school-difference-1527894168

For the thousands of nuns who have served as principals at Catholic schools, their emphasis on self-discipline must seem like common sense. But a new academic study confirms the sisters are on to something: You can instill self-discipline in students, a virtue that will help them in their studies and later in life.

The study was conducted for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute by University of California-Santa Barbara associate professor Michael Gottfried and doctoral student Jacob Kirksey. The authors analyzed two waves of national data on elementary school students collected under the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study for the National Center for Education Statistics. They compared children in Catholic schools with those in public schools and other private schools, religious and secular.

The authors found statistically meaningful evidence that students in Catholic schools exhibited less disruptive behavior than their counterparts in other schools. “According to their teachers, Catholic school children argued, fought, got angry, acted impulsively, and disturbed ongoing activities less frequently,” the authors write. Specifically, students in Catholic schools “were more likely to control their temper, respect others’ property, accept their fellow students’ ideas, and handle peer pressure.” In other words, they exhibited more self-discipline.

The Real Reason Why the FBI Had a Spy in the Trump Campaign By D. C. McAllister

https://pjmedia.com/trending/the-real-reason-why-the-fbi-had-a-spy-in-the-trump-campaign/

The FBI had a human source in the Trump campaign, and nearly everyone commenting on it is wrong. This will set the record straight.

On July 31, the FBI opened a counterintelligence investigation into Russian interference in the election and possible collusion with the Trump campaign. Before launching the full investigation, the FBI sent a confidential human source (CHS) to spy on a Trump campaign adviser. The CHS was reportedly Stefan Halper, a slick political operative for past GOP campaigns and a foreign policy expert with extensive CIA and MI6 connections.

Halper is the latest twist in a Trump-Russia collusion narrative that has been peddled past its expiration date. The question is, did the Obama administration have the authority to spy on the Trump campaign? The answer is—sort of, but not really. The devil, as they say, is in the details.

As stated by FBI Director James Comey, the investigation into Russian interference and any links with the Trump campaign was not a regular criminal investigation but a “counterintelligence” investigation. A national security operation of this sort comprises three stages: threat assessment, preliminary investigation, and full investigation. The FBI Domestic Investigations and Operations Guidel (DIOG) has established specific requirements at each stage.

What Are Islam’s ‘Claims’ to Jerusalem? By Raymond Ibrahim

https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/what-are-islams-claims-to-jerusalem/

An Islamic preacher who recently appeared on official Palestinian Authority television made all the usual angry remarks that Muslims often make concerning Israel’s right to exist, particularly in the context of its claim to Jerusalem. His comments may suggest to the casual Western listener that “by rights,” and as a matter of universal justice, Jerusalem belongs to Muslims. However, the comments are laden with religious and historical references and observations that only Muslims might understand, and of which none accord with Western notions of universal rights and justice.

This is especially evident in the cleric’s assertion that Jerusalem “is a religious, Sharia, and historical right of the Muslims, and of no one else but them.”

Why is Jerusalem a “religious” right for Muslims? Because Islamic tradition teaches that one night in the year 610, Muhammad — miraculously flying atop a supernatural horse-like creature (al-Buraq) — visited and prayed in it.

Why is Jerusalem a “Sharia” — or legal — right for Muslims? Because according to all interpretations of Islamic law, or Sharia, once a territory has been “opened” to the light of Islam, it forever belongs to the House of Islam, or Dar al-Islam.

This leads to the third, and most telling “right”: that Jerusalem is a “historical right of the Muslims” because in the year 637, Muslim Arab armies “opened” — that is to say, conquered — Jerusalem.

After raiding the Eastern Roman Empire’s Syrian territories for years, Emperor Heraclius mustered a massive army that met and fought the Muslims near the Yarmuk River in August 636 (this pivotal battle is featured in Chapter 1 of my new book, Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West). The Muslims defeated the Christian army, and by November were at and laying siege to the Holy City. The preserved sermon of its holed up patriarch, Sophronius, captures these times:

Why are the troops of the Saracens attacking us? Why has there been so much destruction and plunder? Why are there incessant outpourings of human blood? Why are the birds of the sky devouring human bodies? Why have churches been pulled down? Why is the cross mocked? Why is Christ … blasphemed by pagan mouths? … [T]he vengeful and God-hating Saracens, the abomination of desolation clearly foretold to us by the prophets, overrun the places which are not allowed to them, plunder cities, devastate fields, burn down villages, set on fire the holy churches, overturn the sacred monasteries, oppose the Byzantine armies arrayed against them, and in fighting raise up the trophies [of war] and add victory to victory.

It’s worth noting that the majority of descriptions of the invaders written by contemporary Christians portray them along the same lines as Sophronius: not as men, even uncompromising men, on a religious mission, as later Muslim sources claim, but as godless savages come to destroy all that is sacred. Writing around the time of Yarmuk, Maximus the Confessor (b. 580) described the invaders as “wild and untamed beasts, whose form alone is human, [come to] devour civilized government.” Due to the Muslims’ penchant for desecrating churches and “trampling on, mocking, setting on fire, and destroying” every cross, icon, and even Eucharist they came across, Anastasius of Sinai (b. 630) described them as “perhaps even worse than the demons.”

After several months of being holed up and reduced to starvation and plague, Jerusalem capitulated in the spring of 637. The conquest of the Holy City was enough for Caliph Omar to pay it a visit from Medina. There he saw the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, a massive complex built by Constantine (c. 331) over the site of Christ’s crucifixion and burial. CONTINUE AT SITE