Displaying posts published in

July 2018

The Abuse of Egypt’s Coptic Christians by Salim Mansur

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12661/egypt-christians-abuse

The violence, and incitement to violence, directed by Egyptian Muslims against the Copts — especially those organized sectarian campaigns by the Muslim Brotherhood and related groups — are crimes against humanity and should be treated as such by the international community.

We know that a few drops of lemon will curdle an entire bowl of milk. Egypt’s Muslims, as many Muslims elsewhere, have poured the entire Nile River — made toxic by their bigotry and violence — into their faith-tradition. We, Muslims, have degraded our culture by authoritarianism and the obstinate tendency to blame others for our own failings. We have thus perverted the very Islam that we believe is the final revelation.

Muslims in Egypt and elsewhere know from experience the extent to which Western powers have betrayed in practice what they pronounce in theory when it comes to support for people subjected to authoritarian regimes.

What is long overdue from the West is a robust policy to defend and secure human rights for everyone, especially minorities, in Muslim-majority countries… [as in] the Helsinki Agreement of 1975.

We have seen and recoiled from the horrific footage of Coptic Christians beheaded by ISIS in 2015 in Libya and the repeated bombings over the past two decades of Coptic churches in Egypt. We read about the Maspero massacre in 2011, when Egyptian military tanks, deployed to protect peaceful Christian demonstrators, instead rolled over them, crushing many to death. And we continue to receive reports of Coptic girls abducted, compelled to convert to Islam and forced into marriages with Muslims.

Why are we so willing to believe in doomsday scenarios that virtually never materialise? Things Are Getting Better, So Why Are We All So Gloomy? By Marian L. Tupy (January 2018)

https://humanprogress.org/article.php?p=1084

At the end of last year on CapX, I documented the constant stream of technological, scientific and medical breakthroughs that are improving the lives of billions of ordinary people. Given all this good news, the real question is why people are so unbelievably pessimistic.

Judging by a 2016 poll of close to 20,000 people in some of the world’s richest countries, you could barely overstate the extent of the gloominess. In response to the question “All things considered, do you think the world is getting better or worse, or neither getting better nor worse?”, just 10 per cent in Sweden, 6 per cent in the US, 4 per cent in Germany and 3 per cent in France thought things were getting better. Why? Because, it turns out, we are pessimists by nature.

Over the last 200 years or so, the world has experienced previously unimaginable improvements in standards of living. The process of rapid economic growth started in Europe and America, but today some of the world’s fastest growing countries can be found in Asia and Africa – lifting billions of people from absolute poverty. Historical evidence, therefore, makes a potent case for optimism. Yet, pessimism is everywhere. As the British author Matt Ridley noted in The Rational Optimist:

The bookshops are groaning under ziggurats of pessimism. The airwaves are crammed with doom. In my own adult lifetime, I have listened to the implacable predictions of growing poverty, coming famines, expanding deserts, imminent plagues, impending water wars, inevitable oil exhaustion, mineral shortages, falling sperm counts, thinning ozone, acidifying rain, nuclear winters, mad-cow epidemics, Y2K computer bugs, killer bees, sex-change fish, global warming, ocean acidification and even asteroid impacts that would presently bring this happy interlude to a terrible end. I cannot recall a time when one or other of these scares was not solemnly espoused by sober, distinguished and serious elites and hysterically echoed by the media. I cannot recall a time when I was not being urged by somebody that the world could only survive if it abandoned the foolish goal of economic growth. The fashionable reason for pessimism changed, but the pessimism was constant. In the 1960s the population explosion and global famine were top of the charts, in the 1970s the exhaustion of resources, in the 1980s acid rain, in the 1990s pandemics, in the 2000s global warming. One by one these scares came and (all but the last) went.

Ridley raises a more specific point that general pessimism: Why are we as a species so willing to believe in doomsday scenarios that virtually never materialise?

‘Abolish ICE’ and the Democrats’ Regression to Extremism By Kyle Smith

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/abolish-ice-rhetoric-democrat-self-defeating-strategy/The race to be most radical is a self-defeating strategy.

The Democrats have an all-but-unbeatable potential presidential candidate lined up for 2020. She’s a woman who enjoys an A rating from the National Rifle Association and brags about going out to shoot the family turkey for Thanksgiving. She has spoken out in favor of federal fines for sanctuary cities, supported making English the national language, called for more border enforcement, and opposed driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants. She is a fiscal moderate and a proud face of rural America. Ohio? Pennsylvania? Wisconsin? She’d romp in all of them.

Unfortunately for her party, this woman no longer exists. She is Kirsten Gillibrand circa 2008, the days when she was a congresswoman representing New York’s largely rural 20th district. The 2018 Gillibrand has renounced all of these stances, moving left and left and left again. She supports the New New Deal that is today’s progressive economics (Medicare for all, a federal jobs guarantee, a $15 minimum wage) and says she “couldn’t have been more wrong” about her previous support for gun rights. By 2010, her first full year in the Senate, the NRA had altered its rating of her record — to an F. A decade ago Gillibrand was a strong supporter of Israel; these days she is writing hymns of praise in Time magazine for the far-left anti-Semitic activist Linda Sarsour. She was the only senator to vote against confirming James Mattis as secretary of defense.

Harper’s Bazaar Editor Calls for ‘Sex Strike’ to Support Abortion Rights By Faith Moore

https://pjmedia.com/trending/harpers-bazaar-editor-calls-for-sex-strike-to-support-abortion-rights/

Great news, everybody! Feminists are going on a “sex strike”! That’s right, it’s #Lysistrata2018 and it’s absolutely glorious. Jennifer Wright, political editor-at-large for Harper’s Bazaar, tweeted out the idea on Monday and it’s gaining traction among feminists who don’t understand logic (but I repeat myself).

“We’re very likely to lose Roe Vs. Wade,” Wright tweeted, following the announcement of Justice Kennedy’s retirement. “Some men may think that doesn’t concern them. Make it.” That’s right, feminists are protesting a potential abortion ban by — you gotta love ‘em — suggesting women stop doing the thing that could cause them to feel they need an abortion in the first place. Hold the phone, I think feminists just banned abortion!

Sadly, it’s not that simple. Wright suggests women add a female judge emoji to their “dating profiles” to “show people you won’t date/sleep with anyone who doesn’t support a woman’s right to choose.” She then coins the hashtag #Lysistrata2018.

Lysistrata, for those who don’t know, is a comedy by Aristophanes in which women withhold sex from their men in an attempt to end the Peloponnesian War. Wright’s hashtag — and her entire premise — on the other hand, doesn’t actually do anything.

Wright and her supporters — if I’m following the logic correctly, which is to say, not at all — aren’t withholding sex, per se. They’re only signaling their unwillingness to sleep with or date (which, to modern feminists, is pretty much the same thing) anyone who wouldn’t okay an abortion if he accidentally got her pregnant.

It’s possible that Wright thinks that she and all pro-choice women are so mind-blowingly desirable that anyone who sees their “dating profile” is going to suddenly rethink his moral and political stance for a chance to get her into bed. (How’s that going for ya, Jennifer?) But I think what Wright is really saying is that she believes that all women are pro-choice. Otherwise, why target only men? CONTINUE AT SITE

Will the FBI Come Clean? Lawmakers demand the truth about the origin of the 2016 Trump investigation. Kimberley Strassel

https://www.wsj.com/articles/will-the-fbi-come-clean-1530833315

In the trench war between congressional Republicans and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, we have arrived at a crucial battle. A House resolution sets Friday as the deadline for the Justice Department to come clean on the beginning of its investigation into the Trump campaign. We’ll find out if the FBI has been lying to the public.

That is, if the department complies. It has flouted so many subpoenas, and played so many games with redactions and deadlines, that the entire House GOP united last week to vote for the resolution demanding submission to Congress’s requests for documents. The vote was an order but also a warning—that this is the last chance to comply, and the next step will be to hold officials in contempt. It is a measure of the stakes that even that threat doesn’t guarantee cooperation.

At issue is the FBI’s “origin story,” in which it claims its full-fledged investigation into a presidential campaign was conducted, as it were, by the book. According to this narrative, the FBI did not launch its probe until July 31, 2016, only after Australia tipped it to a conversation junior Trump aide George Papadopoulos had with Australian diplomat Alexander Downer in the spring of 2016 in London. Only after this formal commencement of a counterintelligence probe—Crossfire Hurricane—did the FBI begin to target U.S. citizens with spying, wiretapping and other tools usually reserved for foreign infiltrators. Or so the story goes.

This account, relayed by the New York Times in December 2017, has proved highly convenient for the FBI. The Australian “government” connection allowed the bureau to infuse the meaningless Papadopoulos conversation with significance, justifying the probe. The origin story suggested the FBI had followed procedure. Mostly, it countered the growing suspicion that the bureau had been snooping on a presidential campaign on the basis of truly disreputable info—a dossier of salacious information compiled by an opposition research firm working for the rival campaign. CONTINUE AT SITE

A Social-Justice Mob Takes Montreal A theater yields to the philistines and shuts down a critically acclaimed musical about slavery. By Elliot Kaufman

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-social-justice-mob-takes-montreal-1530914174?cx_testId=16&cx_testVariant=cx&cx_artPos=3&cx_tag=collabctx&cx_navSource=newsReel#cxrecs_s

Betty Bonifassi has spent 18 years researching, reworking and performing slave songs. In “SLĀV,” the hit new play on the same topic, she is the lead singer—or was. The Montreal International Jazz Festival canceled “SLĀV” on Wednesday: “We would like to apologize to those who were hurt.” Why the pain? Because Ms. Bonifassi and director Robert Lepage are white. Two of the seven cast members were black, but they won’t be performing either.

“SLĀV” sold out its first five shows and was booked for 11 more at Montreal’s Théâtre du Nouveau Monde. It also received glowing reviews in the Quebecois press. One critic wrote that the show reminds him of the “need to overcome” and makes him feel “ashamed” of his own “insane non-activism.” A writer at Le Journal de Montréal credits it with “demonstrating the absurdity of racism.”

Ms. Bonifassi, whose mother is Serbian and who sings the play’s first slave songs in Bulgarian, has said that because of her own heritage, she feels “touched by slavery.” “SLĀV” makes its way from the Balkans through Ireland and Quebec before reaching the U.S., where it not only confronts slavery but depicts a present-day black American jogger arrested for no reason.

Marquette’s Black Eye A professor’s victory for contracts and academic freedom.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/marquettes-black-eye-1530916646

Wisconsin’s Supreme Court has given Marquette University a bracing refresher on contracts and academic freedom. In a decision overturning a lower court’s dismissal of the case, the court on Friday ruled that Marquette breached its contract with political science professor John McAdams when it disciplined him “for exercising his contractually protected right of academic freedom.”

The case stems from a blog post by Mr. McAdams about a graduate instructor who had told a Marquette student that opinions against same-sex marriage would not be tolerated in her ethics class. The university says Mr. McAdams proved himself unfit by naming the graduate instructor, Cheryl Abbate, and linking to her publicly available website in his post on the encounter, so it suspended him. Even after losing the case Friday, the university continues to accuse Mr. McAdams of having used his blog to intentionally expose “her name and contact information to a hostile audience that sent her vile and threatening messages.”

The court is categorical in rejecting this argument. “Our review of the blog post,” reads the majority opinion, “reveals that it makes no ad hominem attack on Instructor Abbate, nor does it invite readers to be uncivil to her, either explicitly or implicitly.”

Terror, Excitement — It Goes with the Territory :Diana West

http://dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/3757/Terror-Excitement-It-Goes-with-the

A couple of weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal published a short interview dating back to 2011 with convicted Communist agent Morton Sobell, now 101 years old. As a member of the Rosenberg spy ring in the 1940s, Sobell passed US ballistic missile secrets to the USSR — secrets, the paper reminds readers fleetingly, that were “used against America in both Korea and Vietnam.”

Just to de-antisepticize things, “America” translates into grandfathers, fathers, husbands, brothers and sons who were sent to fight communists on the brutal battlefields of Asia in the 1950s and 1960s, after other communists had “occupied” our own government in the 1930s — the early Deep State — and managed to help Stalin seize massive territories in Europe and Asia in the 1940s. Unbelievably, we still believe that the free world, and not just another totalitarian death machine (USSR), really won World War II.

This long-hidden history couldn’t be more relevant today. Without seeing the continuity of subversion over the previous century, it’s hard to appreciate what is unfolding as the Deep State today, triggered by Trump, panics and exposes itself. This is why “court historian” efforts to enage in Soviet-style disinformation against fuller accountings are so darn incriminating.

Viktor Orban and Anti-Semitism: David Goldman

https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2018/07/the-real-modern-anti-semitism

Brezhnev-era joke asked whether it was a crime to say that the party chairman was an idiot. The answer was yes, because it’s a state secret. For those who miss Soviet-era humor, French President Emmanuel Macron has provided some consolation, by firing the French ambassador to Budapest for observing in a private memorandum that the president of Hungary is not an anti-Semite. Evidently that is a state secret in France.

In a June 18 dispatch, Eric Fournier, the French ambassador to Hungary, reported that the alleged anti-Semitism of Hungarian President Viktor Orban was “a fantasy of the foreign press.” He added that the allegation diverted attention from the “real modern anti-Semitism,” whose source is “Muslims in France and Germany.” The private memorandum was leaked by the left-wing website Mediapart and reported widely in the French press. Hungary’s “management of illegal immigration” might be a model for France, Fournier added.

The French president denounced the memo as “contrary to the French official position,” saying that if it were shown that Fournier’s views had been made in public, he would be removed. The memo was private, but Macron fired him anyway. Fournier’s memo had struck a raw nerve. On April 18, 250 French notables, including former president Nicolas Sarkozy, had denounced the “new anti-Semitism” arising from “Islamic radicalization,” declaring: “We demand that the fight against this democratic failure that is anti-Semitism becomes a national cause before it’s too late. Before France is no longer France.” Nearly a tenth of France’s half-million Jews have emigrated in the past decade in response to Muslim violence against Jews.

British government plans inquiry into incitement in Palestinian textbooks

https://www.jns.org/british-government-plans-inquiry-into-incitement-in-palestinian-textbooks/

“It is grotesque that U.K. taxpayers’ money is helping to support the teaching of a curriculum which incites violence and terrorism and spreads anti-Semitism,” said Parliament member Joan Ryan.

The British government is set to review the Palestinian Authority’s educational curriculum over growing concerns that British taxpayers are paying for the Palestinians to teach children incitement and anti-Semitism.

In a letter to Labour Friends of Israel (LFI), Parliament members Joan Ryan and Ian Austin, and Middle East Minister Alistair Burt “brought forward a planned assessment of the Palestinian curriculum, which will involve a rigorous and independent review of the pilot PA textbook,” the U.K. Jewish News reported.

The United Kingdom pays more than £20million ($26 million) per year for Palestinian schools. LFI has been pushing for a review of P.A. curriculum for several months.