Displaying posts published in

September 2018

Melting Pot or Civil War? By Reihan Salam

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2018/10/15/immigration-america-melting-pot-or-civil-war/

The choice will depend on our immigration policies

On December 11, 2017, Akayed Ullah, a 27-year-old man born in Bangladesh, detonated a crudely designed explosive device in New York’s Port Authority Bus Terminal, which sees more than 230,000 commuters every day. Thankfully, Ullah injured no one but himself. His intention, however, had evidently been to take as many of those commuters with him to the afterlife as he could. In the days and weeks that followed, dogged reporters, in the United States and in Ullah’s native Bangladesh, pieced together a troubling story: Though not notably radical before settling in Brooklyn in 2011, the young man had come to loathe the U.S., the country that had welcomed him, and to see his true home as being with the Islamic State, a gang of zealots best known for its homicidal brutality. Ullah apparently concluded that innocent U.S. commuters, including any number of recent immigrants much like him, deserved to be put to death to avenge America’s war against the Islamic State.

News of the botched attack sent my mind reeling. For one, Ullah lived in Kensington, the neighborhood where I grew up, and he was born in the same country as my parents. Ullah and I had shared the same stretches of sidewalk, and probably frequented the same corner stores. He settled in the country legally via a green card sponsored by a family member, not an uncommon story among Bangladeshi immigrants. When I saw Ullah’s face, I saw someone who could have been a cousin, or who might have helped my mother carry an armful of groceries.

After I heard the news, I girded myself for what would come next. In the age of Trump, all conversations about immigration descend into dueling spasms of culture-war outrage. As a poor Muslim immigrant turned lone-wolf terrorist, Ullah was emblematic of some of the most polarizing aspects of the president’s immigration agenda. Trump had famously campaigned on banning Muslim immigration to the United States outright, a stance that enjoyed overwhelming support among GOP primary voters. As president, he had called for curbing family-based admissions on the grounds that they meant admitting millions of immigrants lacking in “merit.” Immi­gration advocates pushed back. Some argued that it was obscene to suggest that a man such as Ullah was representative of immigrants at large. Others said that it was racist to question our current approach to family-based admissions.

Watch Lindsey Graham Tear Democrats To Shreds At Kavanaugh HearingBy Bre Payton

http://thefederalist.com/2018/09/27/watch-lindsey-graham-tear-democrats-to-shreds-at-kavanaugh-hearing/

‘What you want to do is destroy this guy’s life, hold this seat open, and hope you win in 2020. … This is the most unethical sham since I’ve seen in politics.’

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham eviscerated his Democratic colleagues for their behavior on Thursday at the hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Shortly after several Democratic senators urged Kavanaugh to call off the confirmation process until the FBI could investigate the allegations of sexual assault made against him, Graham chided them by saying they could have asked the FBI to look into the matter themselves.

“If you wanted an FBI investigation, you could have come to us,” Graham said to his Democratic colleagues. “What you want to do is destroy this guy’s life, hold this seat open, and hope you win in 2020. You’ve said that! Not me. … When you see Sotomayor and Kagan, tell them Lindsey said ‘Hello,’ because I voted for them. I’d never do to them what you’ve done to this guy. This is the most unethical sham since I’ve seen in politics and if you really wanted to know the truth, you sure as hell wouldn’t have done what you’ve done to this guy.”

Tax-Funded Researcher Studying Trans Children Is Married To Trans Woman; Both Profit From Child Mutilation Jane Robbins

The more this information comes out, the more the public can understand what’s really going on with the debate over treatment for gender dysphoria.

Transgender activists and their hard-left political supporters have erected a wall of propaganda to block any objections founded in science, reality, or genuine compassion for sufferers of gender dysphoria. In a testament to their political skill, these activists have managed to shut down biologically based responses to their remarkable argument that gender is unrelated to biology and can be changed at will. But cracks in the wall are starting to show.

First came online discussion groups for parents whose teenagers (primarily girls) suddenly announced they were “trans” and asked for medical intervention to attain a masculine appearance. Websites such as 4thWaveNow and Transgender Trend (in the United Kingdom) allowed parents to compare notes about their remarkably similar experiences with this “rapid onset gender dysphoria” (ROGD)—when an average teen gets involved with “trans”-identifying individuals, usually peers, then discovers via Internet videos that whatever adolescent stresses she’s experiencing are certainly due to gender dysphoria and can be resolved with cross-sex hormones and mutilating surgery.

Then came a study from Dr. Lisa Littman at Brown University, demonstrating that such psychological and environmental factors can indeed contribute to ROGD. Although the transgender activists swung into action and, to no one’s surprise, bullied Brown into removing the press release about the study and otherwise groveling, the truth the study illumined lingers. Troubled parents now have scientific validation that they’re not crazy for believing their daughters are girls and their sons are boys—and for resisting the imposition of harmful, perhaps irreversible medical treatments.

Hard on the heels of the Brown controversy came news from the U.K, where the government “equalities minister” ordered an investigation into the reasons for the enormous increase (4,500 percent over a decade) in girls seeking so-called gender reassignment. The government wants to determine causes and “long-term impacts” of the phenomenon.

Kirsten Gillibrand’s Calculated Convictions By Kyle Smith

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2018/10/15/kirsten-gillibrands-calculated-convictions/

Friend of Bill yesterday, ‘Me Too’ stalwart today

In the Senate, you’re either a work­horse or a show horse. Kirsten Gillibrand, despite the dynamism with which she pushed into law such blockbuster legislation as the Merchant Marine Academy Improvement Act of 2017 and her noble fight for the Quiet Communities Act of 2018 (which stands a 5 percent chance of passing, according to Skopos Labs), doesn’t seem much like a workhorse. It used to be said among New York newspaper reporters that the most dangerous place to be was between Chuck Schumer and a TV camera. Now Schumer is the shy one in the New York senatorial delegation.

Gillibrand’s publicity-seeking engine is forever running, and the sound it makes is Notice me notice me notice me. She even voted against James Mattis as secretary of defense: Leave the Pentagon rudderless to own Trump? Sure, whatever. She cast the only vote in opposition to Mattis. As of early this year, she’d voted against Trump more than twice as often as Schumer had. Though she denied (this was a year and a half ago) that she is running for president in 2020, a Washington Post headline on a piece tracking her behavior this year read, “It sure looks as if Kirsten Gillibrand is running for president.”

At least that’s the way it looks to you and me. The way it looks to Mr. and Mrs. U.S. Voter is: Who the heck is Kirsten Gillibrand? An August Politico poll found that should she be the Democratic nominee against Donald Trump, he would win only 29 percent of the vote. Um . . . yay? Except Gillibrand received 24 percent in the same poll. Forty-seven percent were undecided. Michael Avenatti managed to get 20 percent, and no one had even heard of him until about six months ago. Hence Gillibrand’s nonstop effort to get in front of the cameras: Notice me notice me notice me.

Gillibrand is always up for a quote, no matter how half-thought or appalling. When lawyers for Christine Blasey Ford spent two days arguing that their client couldn’t possibly come and testify to the Senate Judiciary Committee until a nice leisurely FBI investigation had concluded — before dumping that excuse and moving on to others — Gillibrand made a beeline for the news crews. Though Ford did not allege a federal crime, which made the demand for FBI involvement look like an obvious slow­down tactic, Gillibrand said the dispute obviously indicated that Ford was telling the truth and Judge Kavanaugh was lying. “Someone who is lying does not ask the FBI to investigate their claims,” she said. “Who is not asking the FBI to investigate these claims? The White House. Judge Kavanaugh has not asked to have the FBI review these claims. Is that the reaction of an innocent person? It is not.”

Another Anonymous Allegation amid a Bungled Process By Andrew C. McCarthy

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/brett-kavanaugh-anonymous-allegation-amid-bungled-process/

Grassley could have told committee Democrats that, having abused the process, they had waived the right to present more evidence.

My main concerns all along about the Kavanaugh confirmation hearing have been (1) abuse of the process and (2) relatedly, the more delay you permit, the more delay you will have — which matters when one side’s objective is, precisely, delay.

Following Wednesday’s Avenatti circus, ably chronicled in our editorial, there has now been a fourth allegation lodged against Judge Kavanaugh. This one is wholly anonymous, coming into the office of Senator Cory Gardner (R., Colo.) with no attribution and no contact information. According to NBC News, the letter alleges that in 1998, an inebriated Kavanaugh, then 33 years old and a partner at a prominent D.C. law firm, got rough with an unidentified woman outside a Washington bar.

The woman making the accusation is not the woman who was allegedly assaulted; nor did she even see the alleged assault. She claims, instead, that she is the mother of a friend of the victim. The friend is said to have witnessed the incident — in which the victim was “shoved . . . up against the wall very aggressively and sexually,” whatever that means.

The complainant maintains that there were at least four witnesses, including her daughter, all of whom were drinking. None of them, nor the victim (described as “still traumatized” after 20 years), has come forward or identified anyone involved.

The Emerging Transnational Moral Majority By Michael Walsh

https://amgreatness.com/2018/09/26/the-emerging-transnational

Forget Brett Kavanaugh, Michael Avenatti, and Dianne Feinstein and the rest of the Erinyes females shrieking hysterically about their literal impotence in the face of old/white/male/Republican privilege. It’s a clown show, willingly orchestrated and televised by the ringmasters of the Democrat-Media Complex, whose own emasculation is now so graphically exposed with every new fantastic accusation.

Having gone from promoting a culture of complete sexual license to wimpled membership in an anchorite nunnery, the Left is now being consumed, to put it in terms they can understand, by the internal contradictions of their own satanic principles. So the hell with them.

Concentrate instead on what’s really important: the burgeoning moral and political alliance between the president of the United States and the leaders of four formerly captive nations in central Europe; Hungary, Poland, and the two halves of what used to be Czechoslovakia, aka the Visegrad Group. In a curious accident—or perhaps not so curious—the arc of history has not just bent but pretzled, uniting the late Soviet Union’s foremost antagonist with a quartet of the USSR’s most notable victims against a decadent, suicidal, and morally flaccid European Union (France and Germany, mainly) that is hell-bent on the destruction of Old Europe. It’s the Cold War all over again, but with the sides reversed.

Or maybe not. Germany’s Lumpenkanzlerin, Angela Merkel, is entirely a product of the German Democratic Republic, a bred if not born Communist with little or no love for the country she purports to lead. I’ve been watching German chancellors since Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt and, whether Left or Right, at least they pretended to love their country. As I recall, Helmut Kohl used often to end his speeches with the German equivalent of “God bless Germany,” but if Merkel has ever said that and meant it, I’m not aware of it. And as for the French, surrender has been their prophylactic substitute for even the l’esprit d’escalier of a nation that hasn’t won a war since Napoleon.

Opposing Merkel and the millions of cultural aliens she had imported into her country are the states of Eastern Europe, which remember both Soviet and Islamic occupation and don’t want to see the return of either. Having had their freedom forcibly stripped from them over the centuries, they refuse any “immigration,” and wish to preserve their countries—even if that means (gasp!) staying “white.” And they don’t care who knows it.

The Truths Behind Our Current Political Turmoil By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2018/09/27/the-truths-

Are there any guiding principles that can make sense of the sensational news that now overwhelms the senses seemingly every hour?

What is common to blaring headlines about the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination hearings, an anti-Trump “resistance” buried deep in the permanent bureaucracy and the improper behavior by top officials of the Obama administration, FBI, and Department of Justice?

There are a few subtexts to all these spectacles, scandals, and melodramas.

First, those in power had never imagined that Donald Trump either could or should win the 2016 election.

That reality emboldened federal employees to take risks and step over the line in efforts to ensure that Trump would be humiliated at the polls. Officials assumed that incoming President Hillary Clinton would either overlook or reward their zealotry.

FBI kingpins such as James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Lisa Page, and Peter Strzok either broke the law or made a mockery of the FBI’s ethical guidelines. They acted as if Clinton would win, or should have won, the election.

Had Clinton won the presidency, we would have absolutely no knowledge of any prior misconduct at the FBI, the Department of Justice, the National Security Agency or the CIA under the Obama administration. Trump prompted all that hysteria by winning.

Second, both the Democratic and Republican establishments, as well as the proverbial “deep state” bureaucracy, agreed that President Trump was so crude and uncouth that he must not continue in office.

The idea that any means necessary were justified by the noble ends of destroying Trump explains everything from the anonymous op-ed in the New York Times detailing formal White House resistance to Trump’s governance, to Bob Woodward’s latest unsourced expose of purported Trump chaos, to Robert Mueller’s investigation that was mandated to find “Russian collusion” and has ended up desperate to find any crimes that might prove Trump guilty of something.

Third, had Trump simply failed, as predicted, there would be far less frenzy. His Democratic opponents and many in his own party would have quietly found ways to remove him.

But instead, the economy is booming in a way previously unseen in the 21st century, with near-record-low unemployment and stock market highs. The economy is growing faster than it has in years. Domestic energy production is also hitting record highs.

Israel’s Lessons From Two Historical Events This month marks the 45th Anniversary of the Yom Kippur War and the 25th Anniversary of the Oslo Accords signing. Joseph Puder

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271413/israels-lessons-two-historical-events-joseph-puder

This month (September, according to the Hebrew calendar) marks the anniversary of two major historical events in the Middle East. Both of these events have had major repercussions on the region and in Israeli-Palestinian relations. Forty-five years ago, on October 6, 1973, the armies of Egypt and Syria launched an attack on Israel during the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, Yom Kippur. Israeli military intelligence cautioned against a rush to war. Major-General Zaira, Israel’s Chief of Intelligence, with an over-confident attitude, dismissed reports of Egyptian forces concentrating along the Suez Canal front as the same old Egyptian maneuvers. Prime Minister Golda Meir, conscious of what might be the western reaction to Israeli military mobilization, and in particular, wary of a negative U.S. reaction, declined to order full mobilization, even when the Mossad Chief Zvi Zamir brought her a tip from an Egyptian double-agent (President Sadat’s son-in-law) that the Egyptians would attack on Yom Kippur. As a consequence of the delay in Israel’s mobilization, and Egypt’s surprise attack, the Israeli fortification along the Suez Canal fell, albeit after a heroic fight by the defenders. The lack of preparedness on the part of Israel as a result of over-confidence stemming from the Six-Day War, cost the lives of almost 3,000 Israeli soldiers. Ultimately, Israel triumphed in spite of the early setbacks.

Twenty five years ago, on September 13, 1993, the Oslo Accords were formally signed on the White House lawn, with a grinning President Bill Clinton overseeing the historical handshake between Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat, Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) chairman. The signing of the Oslo Accords launched what we now know as the “peace process.”

Avenatti’s Freak Show Creepy porn lawyer presents a woman accusing Brett Kavanaugh of gang rape. Matthew Vadum

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271441/avenattis-freak-show-matthew-vadum

On the eve of a historic Supreme Court confirmation hearing, two more women have materialized out of thin air to accuse President Trump’s high court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual improprieties – bringing the total number of accusers to four.

Even more eleventh-hour character-assassination attempts may be coming given the enraged Left’s determination to prevent the judge’s ascent to the Supreme Court at all costs. Whether the claims are true is irrelevant to these people. Only the seriousness and luridness of the charges matter as they get aired over and over again in the 24-hour news cycle. They don’t care about the victims they create. Only the headlines.

The new allegations surfaced yesterday as the Senate Judiciary Committee battens down the hatches for a hearing today to receive oral evidence from the first accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, 51, who claims Kavanaugh, 53, tried to rape her decades ago when he was a high school student.

The third accuser is Julie Swetnick, a 55-year-old certified systems engineer, who on Wednesday claimed that in the early 1980s Kavanaugh and others spiked the drinks of young women at high school parties with intoxicants to clear the way for them to be gang-raped.

KNOWN WOLF: Westminster Terror Attacker Was on Radar of UK Authorities Since 2004 By Patrick Poole

https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/known-wolf-westminster-terror-attacker-was-on-radar-of-uk-authorities-since-2004/

An ongoing inquiry into the March 22, 2017 terror attack near the Houses of Parliament in Westminster has revealed that the UK’s MI5 spy service knew about attacker Khalid Masood and his connections to terrorists since 2004. However, an investigation of him had been dropped.

UK authorities now defend their decision to stop the investigation as “appropriate” despite his continued association with a banned organization.

The terror attack killed five and injured nearly 50 more. Masood ran over pedestrians, and then stabbed a police officer to death guarding the gates to Parliament’s entrance. Masood was shot and killed by police at the scene.

Just moments prior to the attack, Masood sent out a document entitled “Jihad” on WhatsApp that featured a picture on the cover of him standing in front of the Kaaba in Mecca.

The Daily Mail reports:

Masood’s phone number appeared in the contact list of one of the central figures in Operation Crevice, a plot to blow up the Ministry of Sound nightclub and Bluewater shopping centre in Kent using half a ton of ammonium nitrate fertiliser, in April 2004.

He continued to pop up as a link to a man associated with the Crevice plotters before appearing in another investigation six years later, as a potential facilitator for extremists travelling to Pakistan through Saudi Arabia.

But an MI5 witness told the hearing, from behind a green curtain, that the security service had taken the correct decision in closing their investigation into him in 2010 and did so two years later.

The MI5 officer, known only as Witness L, told the inquest that a person ‘subsequently identified’ as Khalid Masood had appeared in the contacts list for Waheed Mahmood, the man considered the spiritual leader of the fertiliser bombers…