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October 2018

Synagogue Massacre: We Guard What We Value By David Stolinsky

http://www.stolinsky.com/

We guard what we value. Our political leaders? Of course. Our money? Absolutely. Our children or our houses of worship? Not so much.

My wife and I often visit a nearby mall. The Rolex store and the Louis Vuitton store have very large men in dark suits standing near the door to inhibit shoplifting. The mall is large enough to require three armored-car services to remove the cash. We see the armored-car guards walking briskly, with the money bag in one hand and the other hand hovering near their holstered pistol.

When we go to the bank, we see the tellers behind thick sheets of bullet-resistant glass. Other banks employ armed guards. Money is obviously valuable, and we go to great pains to protect it. Perhaps that is why Los Angeles no longer has the distinction of being the bank-robbery capital of America.

But when we pass schools – elementary, middle, or high schools – we see young people and teachers, and an occasional elderly crossing guard. But we never, literally never, see an armed guard, much less a police officer. Yes, we know that Los Angeles, like many cities, has a school police force. We know that there may be an officer somewhere in the high school. But we also know that he or she is there to try to enforce some semblance of discipline, which teachers and principals are no longer willing or able to do. But protect the young people from attackers? Not really.

Similarly, when we pass synagogues, we see no security officers. The only exception is that on the High Holidays, we may see traffic officers to help with the congestion and parking. The same is true for churches on Christmas and Easter. But protect worshippers from attackers? No, not really.

Dead Jews–What else is new? By Joan Swirsky

http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/swirsky/181030

This past Saturday morning, 11 Jews were shot to death in a Pittsburgh synagogue by one of the millions of Jew haters who contaminate our world.

To Jews like me, who know and appreciate Jewish history as I do, this is no surprise. Tragic, yes; shocking, no.

We are a tiny, indeed microscopic, people, only 15 million in a world of nearly eight billion. That ratio equals the proverbial grain of sand on the vast beaches of life, only one drop in the immense oceans that cover most of our globe.

But Jew hatred is very powerful, written about in thousands of books and articles by erudite scholars who posit theories ranging from resentment that God selected Jews as his “chosen people,” to the myth that the Jews killed Jesus, to the accusation that Jews are either greedy capitalists or cruel communists, to the grievance that Jews run the world.

My own take is that when you peel back every layer of the onion of anti-Semitism, the root cause is that the anti-Semites among us are obsessively jealous. How can it be, they wonder, that this tiny people – dispersed in a diaspora for the last 5,000 years to far-flung communities all over the world where they landed with no language skills, no money, no resources, no nothing and in the process survived the Jew-targeting Inquisition, Crusades, pogroms, concentration camps, and pandemic outbreaks of anti-Semitism – managed to flourish and rise to prominence wherever they went?

Here in America, we have living proof that the green-eyed monster is alive and well, Exhibit No. One being the execrable “Reverend” Louis Farrakhan – one of Barack Obama’s buds – who little more than a week ago spoke before a smiling, nodding, applauding audience as he called Jews “termites” and “stupid.”

Did I mention his glowing admiration for Hitler? “The Jews don’t like Farrakhan,” he said some years ago, “so they call me Hitler. Well, that’s a good name. Hitler was a very great man.” Last May, this Nation of Islam leader – who has been manically obsessed with Jews his entire life – spoke of “Satanic Jews who have infected the whole world with poison and deceit.”

In dramatic move, PLO pulls out of all agreements ‎with Israel ‎

http://www.israelhayom.com/2018/10/30/in-dramatic-move-plo-pulls-out-of-all-agreements-%e2%80%8ewith-israel-%e2%80%8e/

Palestine Liberation Organization’s Central ‎Council suspends recognition of Israel until Israel acknowledges an independent Palestinian state, severs security and economic ties • Decision is nonbinding, but PA President Abbas says he is inclined to endorse it.

The Palestine Liberation Organization’s Central ‎Council declared that it was suspending its ‎recognition of Israel until Israel agrees to acknowledge an ‎independent Palestinian state within the 1967 borders ‎and with east Jerusalem as its capital, Ramallah’s Wafa news agency reported Monday.‎

The council further decided to suspend all security ‎and economic ties with Israel, as outlined in the ‎‎1994 Paris Economic Protocol.‎

The decision, announced after a ‎two-day meeting ‎in Ramallah, is declarative and nonbinding, the ‎report said.‎

According to the report, the PLO essentially wants ‎to cease compliance with the 1993 Oslo Accord, on ‎which the Israeli-Palestinian peace ‎process is founded. ‎

Ending Birthright Citizenship Is No Panacea By Reihan Salam

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/ending-birthright-citizenship-donald-trumps-immigration-plan/

According to Axios, President Trump is gearing up to sign an executive order that would, in their words, “remove the right to citizenship for babies of non-citizens born on U.S. soil.” There is some ambiguity in this formulation. Will the executive order in question limit birthright citizenship to the children of U.S. citizens, or will it extend citizenship to the children of lawful permanent residents, as in the case of most market democracies that have revised their birthright citizenship rules in recent decades? It is not clear from the video clip provided by Axios on HBO.

In truth, Trump’s response to reporter Jonathan Swan’s question seems rather off the cuff. At first, the president explains that while he once thought bringing an end to automatic birthright citizenship — presumably for the children of any class of non-citizens born in the U.S., whether legally present or otherwise — would require a constitutional amendment, he has since been persuaded that a statute would do, or even an executive order. Pressed by Swan as to whether such an executive order was in process of being drafted, Trump confidently replied that “it’s in the process, it’ll happen.” Will it happen, though? I’m skeptical.

First, I should stipulate that I have in the past argued for an amnesty for the long-settled unauthorized-immigrant population that would be accompanied by a constitutional amendment that would do two things: (a) grant Congress the authority to revise the rules around automatic birthright citizenship and (b) allow naturalized U.S. citizens who are otherwise eligible to serve as president. I’ve since changed my mind.

Though an amendment along these lines would have a hard time clearing the high hurdles we rightly put in the way of new constitutional amendments, it struck me as a tough-minded but ultimately fair way to address a serious and legitimate concern often raised by critics of an expansive amnesty: that such an amnesty would encourage further unauthorized inflows, future unauthorized immigrants would form families in the U.S. (including native-born citizen children), and these mixed-status households have long been among the most sympathetic cases, as most Americans are, for good reason, reluctant to divide families. If mixed-status households are a barrier to stringent enforcement, revising the rules around automatic birthright citizenship seemed like a legitimate solution — indeed, a solution that has in the past appealed to partisans of more open borders.

Can Trump End Birthright Citizenship by Executive Order? By Andrew C. McCarthy

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/donald-trump-end-birthright-citizenship-by-executive-order/

On substance, I believe President Trump is right on birthright citizenship — the 14th Amendment does not require it. I do not believe, however, that the president may change the interpretation of the 14th Amendment, which has been in effect for decades, by executive order, as he is reportedly contemplating.

My friend John Eastman explained why the 14th Amendment does not mandate birthright citizenship in this 2015 New York Times op-ed. In a nutshell, the Amendment states: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” The highlighted term, “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” was understood at the time of adoption to mean not owing allegiance to any other sovereign. To take the obvious example, if a child is born in France to a married couple who are both American citizens, the child is an American citizen.

I won’t rehash the arguments on both sides. With due respect to our friend Dan McLaughlin (see here), I think Professor Eastman has the better of the argument. As I have observed before, and as we editorialized when Donald Trump was a candidate (here), this is a very charged issue, and it is entirely foreseeable that the Supreme Court (to say nothing of the lower federal courts teeming with Obama appointees) would construe the term jurisdiction differently from what it meant when the 14th Amendment was ratified.

For today, the more narrow question is: Assuming arguendo that the 14th Amendment does not require birthright citizenship, is our practice of conferring it merely an executive policy that the president has the power to change by executive order?

I don’t think so.

The Electronic Committee of Public Safety By Victor Davis Hanson

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/10/megyn-kelly-halloween-costumes-social-media-controversy/

Modern-day Robespierres send counterrevolutionaries to the virtual chopping block. They should recall his fate.

Celebrities, politicians, and almost anyone of influence and wealth are always an incorrect or insensitive word away from the contemporary electronic guillotine. Regardless of the circumstances of their dilemmas, the beheaded rarely win sympathy from the mob. Coliseum-like roars of approval greet their abrupt change of fortune from their past exalted status.

So, for example, perhaps few feel sorry for anchor Megyn Kelly, recently all but fired by NBC and now walking away with most of her $69 million salary package as a severance payout.

Kelly was let go ostensibly for making a sloppy but not malicious morally equivalent comparison between whites at Halloween dressing up in costumes as blacks, and blacks likewise appearing as whites. But she sealed her fate by uttering the historically disparaging word “black face” as some sort of neutral bookend to her use of “white face.” Her fatal crime, then, was insensitive thought and speech and historical ignorance.

For someone so familiar with the rules of our electronic French Revolution and the felonies of speech and thought, Kelly proved surprisingly naïve in a variety of ways.

First, she should have known that there are revolutionary canons surrounding victimization indemnities. And for all her success, she is actually protected by few of them, given that she is fabulously well paid, attractive, still young, white — and at one time conservative and a former Fox News anchor person.

So when Kelly said something historically dense and insensitive, she should have grasped that she, despite being an emancipated coastal female, was immediately (and ratings-wise) expendable, even if expensively expendable.

Had Kelly been unapologetically progressive (especially one deemed vital to the cause), like Elizabeth Warren, who fabricated and profited from an entire minority identity, then she might well have survived the incident. Perhaps had she been a minority, such as Sarah Jeong, and written (rather than spoken off the cuff) far more racially offensive things about whites, she would have kept her job — as did Jeong on the New York Times editorial board after her racist tweets surfaced, such as this, from 2014: “Dumbass f****** white people marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs pissing on fire hydrants.”

Anti-Semitism fight begins on campus Nolan Finley,

https://www.detroitnews.com/story/opinion/columnists/nolan-finley/2018/10/29/finley-anti-semitism-fight-begins-campus/1806326002/

If you’re hunting for the places where anti-semitism thrives in America, you’d be better off looking on its college campuses than in the White House.

Just two days after the slaughter of Jewish worshippers inside a temple in Pittsburgh, the University of Michigan staged a teach-in dedicated to the nationwide drive to prod universities to shun Israel.

The Boycott, Disinvest and Sanction (BDS) Movement condemns the Jewish state as an apartheid government for its treatment of Palestinians, and pressures colleges to break ties with Israel.

It has a vigorous presence at UM, and that’s caused discomfort for Jewish students who have traditionally found a welcoming environment on the Ann Arbor campus. It’s a thin line between demonizing Israel and dehumanizing Jews.

Former student Molly Rosen, writing in The Tower magazine in 2014, said when she arrived at UM, “I was not prepared to be told that, if I cared about human rights, I could not support Israel. I was not prepared to be told that my community was racist.

“I was not prepared to see my fellow students attacked with anti-Semitic slurs.”

The audacity of Obama’s lying Brazenness is key. If you’re going to lie, don’t be shy Roger Kimball

https://spectator.us/audacity-obamas-lying/

What makes a good liar? It’s a harder question to answer than you might think, partly because it’s a harder and more complex thing to accomplish than you might think.

Let me begin by acknowledging that I do not have a satisfactory answer to the question. Nevertheless, as an aficionado of the sport, I admire from afar expert practitioners. And I was reminded just a few days ago that we have in our midst a grand master of mendacity. In his speech in Milwaukee on Friday, Barack Obama demonstrated once again his effortless, masterly deployment of deceit.

Again, I do not say that we groundlings have been vouchsafed all the inner workings of the mechanism. But one thing is clear from Obama’s performance: brazenness is key. If you are going to lie, don’t be shy. Capitalise on the public’s inherent goodwill — and its poor memory.

Another useful gambit: accuse others, preferably in violent terms, of precisely that of which you are yourself guilty.

Watch this: ‘What we have not seen before in our public life is politicians just blatantly, repeatedly, baldly, shamelessly, lying. Just making stuff up.’ Nice!

As in, ‘if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor’?

‘Nobody In My Administration Got Indicted,’ said the Big O, but consider Eric ‘kick ’em when they’re down’ Holder, the only Attorney General in history to have been held in contempt of Congress. Consider also Lois Lerner, the senior IRS official whose shameless ‘I take the Fifth’ performance before Congress was its own humiliating indictment. Or consider Hillary Clinton herself, whose list of possible felonies would have kept the the DOJ busy for years were it not for her best buddy, the disgraced James Comey, another Obama apparatchik who should be lawyering up.

‘MAGA Bomber’ Worked at West Palm Nightclub Where Stormy Daniels Stripped in Anti-Trump Tour By Tyler O’Neil

https://pjmedia.com/trending/maga-bomber-worked-at-west-palm-nightclub-where-stormy-daniels-stripped-in-anti-trump-tour/

Cesar Sayoc, the alleged attempted bomber behind the suspicious packages sent to former president Barack Obama, former first lady Hillary Clinton, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), and others, worked at a strip club in West Palm Beach, Fla., on the day before he was arrested. Stormy Daniels, the porn star who allegedly had an affair with Donald Trump, stripped at the same club in April — in her “Make America Horny Again” anti-Trump tour.

Ultra Gentlemen’s Club manager Stacey Saccal confirmed to WPTV that Sayoc worked there as recently as Thursday afternoon. He had worked there for two months as a DJ and doorman. Saccal said there had been no complaints about Sayoc from other employees before Sayoc’s arrest Friday.

The other employees were in “shock and disbelief” after learning about the arrest, the manager said. “I never knew that his van was covered in political stickers. I thought it was an ice cream truck,” Saccal said.

In April, porn star Stephanie Clifford — better known by her stage name “Stormy Daniels” — performed at Ultra, inspiring a protest. She stripped days before the president arrived at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, less than five miles west of the club.

Clifford’s performance was part of her “Make America Horny Again” tour, drawing attention to her alleged affair with President Trump.Stormy Daniels drew two types of crowds to Ultra. “They want to see what the big guy put his hands on,” Fabian Uribe, a limousine driver who drove a group to the club and stayed for the show, told the Palm Beach Post in April. “I’ll pay $35 just to see what she looks like. I guess the president didn’t want to come.”

MY SAY:A GOVERNMENT WHICH TO BIGOTRY GIVES NO SANCTION, TO PERSECUTION NO ASSISTANCE

America is the sunniest corner of the Jewish Diaspora, and every single President, including previous ones who did not esteem Jews has adhered to this principle set forth by our magnificent first President George Washington. It is assiduously upheld by President Trump and arguments to the contrary are pure partisan rot….rsk

Thanks to e-pal Laz for reminding me of this.

On August 17th, 1790, Moses Seixas warden of the Hebrew Congregation of Rhode Island wrote a letter to our magnificent first President George Washington welcoming him to Newport: Excerpt:

Sir:

Permit the children of the stock of Abraham to approach you with the most cordial affection and esteem for your person and merits — and to join with our fellow citizens in welcoming you to Newport……..Deprived as we heretofore have been of the invaluable rights of free Citizens, we now with a deep sense of gratitude to the Almighty disposer of all events behold a Government, erected by the Majesty of the People — a Government, which to bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistance — but generously affording to all Liberty of conscience, and immunities of Citizenship: deeming every one, of whatever Nation, tongue, or language equal parts of the great governmental Machine……”

On the very next day, President Washington responded, quoting Seixas…..Excerpt.

Gentlemen:

“It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, for, happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support…”…..“May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants—while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.”