Displaying posts published in

December 2018

Palestinians: Silencing and Intimidating Critics by Khaled Abu Toameh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13477/palestinians-silencing-intimidating-critics

Palestinian columnist Sami Fuda denounced the Hamas crackdown on its critics in Gaza: “Apparently, freedom of expression is unacceptable to the de facto rulers of the Gaza Strip… The policy of intimidating and imprisoning writers will not deter them and is completely ineffective and unacceptable.”

While these few Palestinians have expressed concern over Hamas’s effort to silence its critics, international human rights organizations, including some that operate in the Gaza Strip, continue to turn a blind eye to this assault on public freedoms. They are either afraid of Hamas, or they do not give a damn about human rights violations unless they can find a way of pointing an accusatory finger at Israel.

Hamas is prepared to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a rally marking the 31st anniversary of its founding, but says it cannot afford to provide financial aid to impoverished Palestinians. Meanwhile, any Palestinians who dare to ask Hamas the wrong questions will find themselves behind bars.

What does the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas do when it is not firing rockets at Israel or sending Palestinians to clash with Israeli soldiers along the border between the Gaza Strip and Israel? It sends its security officers to arrest, interrogate, intimidate and harass anyone who dares to criticize Hamas.

It is not as if anyone was expecting Hamas to act differently. The terms democracy and freedom of expression have never been in Hamas’s dictionary. For Hamas, it is either you are with us or you are against us. There is no third option for Palestinians living under Hamas’s rule in the Gaza Strip, even for those who were previously associated with Hamas, but later changed their minds and dared to express a different opinion or, worse, criticize the Islamist movement.

In the past week alone, Hamas has arrested two Palestinian academics on suspicion that they voiced criticism of the group: professor of biology Salah Jadallah and writer Khader Mihjez.

Turkey and EU: Can this Marriage be Saved? by Burak Bekdil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13404/turkey-eu-marriage

In Freedom House’s democracy index, Turkey belongs to the group of “not free” countries, performing worse than “partly free” countries including Mali, Nicaragua and Kenya.

Just as there cannot be a “not free” member of the EU, there cannot be a member that blatantly ignores rulings of the European Court of Human Rights.

“I think that, in the long term, it would be more honest for Turkey and the EU to go down new roads and end the accession talks … Turkish membership in the European Union is not realistic in the foreseeable future.” — Johannes Kahn, EU Enlargement Commissioner; interview in Die Welt.

When Turkey first applied for full membership in the European Union in 1987, the world was an entirely different place — even the rich club had a different name: the European Economic Community. U.S. President Ronald Reagan had undergone minor surgery; British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had been re-elected for a third term; Macau and Hong Kong were, respectively, Portuguese and British territory; the Berlin Wall was up and running; the demonstrations at the Tiananmen Square were a couple of years away; the Iran-Contra affair was in the headlines; the First Intifada had just begun; and what are today Czech Republic and Slovakia were Czechoslovakia.

In March 2003, just a few months after he was elected Prime Minister of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said that Turkey was “very much ready to be part of the European Union family.” In October 2005, formal accession negotiations between Turkey and the EU began.

Today, 31 years after the first date, the alliance seems to be broken, with no signs in the foreseeable future of a marriage between two perfectly unsuitable adults. Knowing that, both sides in the past decade have played an unpleasant diplomatic game of pretension: not be the one that throws away the ring. This boring opera buffa is no longer sustainable.

Turkey’s democratic deficit has grown just too bitterly huge to make it compatible with Europe’s democratic culture. According to the advocacy group Freedom House:

“In addition to its dire consequences for detained Turkish citizens, shuttered media outlets, and seized businesses, the chaotic purge has become intertwined with an offensive against the Kurdish minority, which in turn has fueled Turkey’s diplomatic and military interventions in neighboring Syria and Iraq.”

Pakistan Earned U.S. Designation as “Country of Particular Concern” by Kaswar Klasra

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13432/pakistan-country-particular-concern

“Occupations deemed as ‘dirty’ and ‘shameful’ are reserved for Christians, and many believers are victims of bonded labor. Pakistan’s notorious blasphemy laws target religious minorities but affect Christians the most…”. — Open Doors.

“Christians continue to be killed for accusations of blasphemy, as well as for their low status in society. In June 2017, a Christian sewage worker died in a hospital because three Muslim doctors refused to touch him, thereby making themselves unclean, during their Ramadan fast.” — Open Doors .

“Abusive enforcement of the country’s strict blasphemy laws resulted in the suppression of rights for non-Muslims, Shi’a Muslims, and Ahmadis.” — United States Commission on International Freedom.

Pakistan was among the nations recently designated by U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo as “Countries of Particular Concern under the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998 for having engaged in or tolerated ‘systematic, ongoing, [and] egregious violations of religious freedom.'”

Islamabad promptly issued an angry response, which reads, in part:

“Pakistan rejects the US State Department’s unilateral and politically motivated pronouncement… Besides the clear biases reflected from these designations, there are serious questions on the credentials and impartiality of the self-proclaimed jury involved in this unwarranted exercise.

“Around 4 percent of our total population comprises citizens belonging to Christian, Hindu, Budhists [sic] and Sikh faiths. Ensuring equal treatment of minorities and their enjoyment of human rights without any discrimination is the cardinal principle of the Constitution of Pakistan…”

“As a party to seven out of the nine core human rights treaties, Pakistan has been submitting compliance reports on its obligations with regard to fundamental freedoms. The government of Pakistan has devised well-establishment legal and administrative mechanisms to safeguard the rights of its citizens. Pakistan does not need counsel by any individual country on how to protect the rights of its minorities.”

Playing Defense in Lebanon A new book explores the changing tactics, and essential continuities, in Israel’s decades-long but mostly undeclared war against Hizballah. Matti Friedman

https://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/2018/12/playing-defense-in-lebanon/

One day in the mid-1950s, at a time of rising guerrilla incursions from Gaza, the Israeli chief of staff, Moshe Dayan, arrived to inspect a base on the border. The local commander proudly showed the one-eyed army chief the fortifications he’d built with his men, including trenches and reinforced emplacements. Imagine the commander’s rude surprise when, instead of praising him, Dayan asked furiously: “What did you dig in for? If anything serious happens, we want to attack, not defend!”

Dayan not only ordered the junior commander to fill in the trenches and take apart the emplacements but, according to his biographer Shabtai Tevet, went on to “forbid the digging of defensive networks anywhere along Israel’s borders.” The new Israeli army was supposed to be mobile and unpredictable, not to hobble itself in earthworks and concrete.

Just over 40 years later, in early 1998, I arrived as an infantryman at an Israeli outpost in south Lebanon. At this outpost, a forward position in the army’s long war against Hizballah fighters, there were trenches, concrete emplacements, and bunkers where we sheltered from shelling. Similar positions were to be found on nearby hilltops, all accessed by lumbering armored convoys that came up the roads from Israel. Beyond some minor activity like preparing ambushes or patrolling roads, and the odd special operation generating great excitement but little value, the army seemed to have no mobility, no real plan, and no hope of winning. We had fortifications and technology. The enemy had the initiative.

The story of the long, strange war against Hizballah in south Lebanon, and of the deep changes it wrought in the thinking of Israel’s army and society, has gone largely unnoticed amid the better-known episodes in the country’s history. This is striking, given the impact this nearly four-decade conflict has had on Israel; the number of Israelis who’ve been touched by it; the way that Hizballah tactics have inspired other players, like Hamas; the way that Hizballah itself has gone on to become a regional player, particularly in the Syrian conflict; and the war’s persistence to this day along Israel’s frontier with Lebanon, where Israeli engineers are busy right now demolishing Hizballah attack tunnels near the border town of Metullah.

Bomb Explosion in Athens Fuels Fear of New Generation of Terror Recent attacks have sparked fears of the emergence of a new generation of terrorist groups rooted in far-left organizations By Nektaria Stamouli

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bomb-explosion-in-athens-fuels-fear-of-new-generation-of-terror-11545907002

Two people were injured after a bomb exploded outside a church in central Athens on Thursday, fueling concerns of a resurgence of urban-guerrilla violence in Greece.

The growing number of recent attacks has sparked fears of the emergence of a new generation of terrorist groups rooted in far-left organizations that target the conservative establishment.

Thursday’s blast occurred just after 7 a.m. local time outside an Orthodox Church in the upscale neighborhood of Kolonaki, before it was due to open for service. A police officer and the church caretaker were wounded and rushed to hospital, the officials said. There was no warning call to authorities or claim of responsibility.

“The church caretaker spotted a box outside the entrance of the church, moved it and called the police,” a police official said. “It exploded a few minutes later when the police arrived; the blast was not powerful.” The two were slightly injured and were receiving treatment at local hospitals, officials said.

Earlier this month a powerful bomb exploded outside a big Greek media group, in what officials called an attack on free speech and democracy. In mid-November, a bomb was placed outside the house of senior Greek judge in central Athens. No one was wounded as there were warning calls for the attacks.

Last year, former Greek Prime Minister Lucas Papademos was wounded and hospitalized for several weeks after he opened a letter bomb while riding in his car. In March 2017 Greek politicians and European Union officials were targeted in the same manner. CONTINUE AT SITE

China’s Bumbling Police State The only thing protecting human rights from the bureaucracy? Inefficiency.By Maya Wang

https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-bumbling-police-state-11545869066

Barely a day goes by without a story about China’s ambition to use new technologies for nefarious means, and Human Rights Watch has amassed evidence that President Xi Jinping is building a “digital totalitarian state.” But Beijing’s aspirations to control people’s everyday lives are not so easily realized. Supporters of human rights have plenty of opportunities to limit the damage.

The recent headlines are chilling: “In China, your car could be talking to the government.” “China’s brightest children are being recruited to develop AI ‘killer bots.’ ” The country’s “social credit” system restricts the freedoms of citizens the state considers to have behaved badly. The government is pushing for national DNA and voice-recognition databases and for big-data “predictive policing” programs aimed at picking out political threats—all without any effective protections for privacy. The brutal crackdown on Muslims in the northwestern Xinjiang region of China involves both high- and low-tech surveillance.

Yet the Chinese government’s mass-surveillance capabilities are more fearsome in theory than in practice. “While big data has become a sizzling hot concept, there is so much more speculation than actual application,” laments one researcher working for the Chinese police, who adds that police leaders are frustrated they may be “sitting on” a “data gold mine” that they are unable to exploit properly. Authorities’ mass-surveillance ambitions are bedeviled by unreliable and incomplete basic data, as well as incompatible datasets and systems developed by different companies, among other problems.

Plus, citizens across China find ingenious ways to evade surveillance. Blacklisted by the social-credit system? Use documents other than ID cards to get around the restrictions. Concerned your calls are being monitored? Activists have learned creative ways to make police lose track of them.

Beijing has devoted enormous efforts to perfecting mass surveillance during the “Strike Hard” crackdown in Xinjiang, which began in late 2016. One element—the “Becoming Family” program, in which officials are dispatched to live with Muslim families, monitor and indoctrinate them—requires mobilizing 1.1 million government officials to keep tabs on a population of 13 million Muslims.

These programs depend on meticulous data input, which may prove unsustainable. Local officials report logging grueling hours—early morning until midnight, with hardly any vacation—to maintain a constant stream of “dynamic” data necessary for mass surveillance and other repressive measures. CONTINUE AT SITE

Sweet Shutdown, Roll On By Michael Walsh

https://amgreatness.com/2018/12/26/sweet

It never seems to occur to the Democrats, currently bellyaching about the largely phantom “government shutdown,” that the last people Donald Trump cares about offending are the army of Democrat-voting bureaucrats who will be the only folks inconvenienced by Senator Charles Schumer’s latest temper tantrum.

As far as the rest of America is concerned, the shutdown of “nonessential” government services can bloody well continue indefinitely, as the president has promised, in order to get funding for his wall along the Mexican border. It’s the best Christmas present ever.

The furloughed federal employees in question are the Beltway parasites who feed off the taxpayers in real America, and provide next to nothing in exchange for their three square meals a day and fancy digs in what has become, for all practical purposes, a one-party deep state that now consists of eastern Maryland, the District of Columbia, and northern Virginia—and thus the rest of America. Bureaucrats are happy to munch on the hands that feed them, with slovenly, indifferent “service” in useless, invented sinecures, but would never think of barking at the guys who actually throw them the bones, and thus keep them ensconced in petty power over their fellow citizens.

Which is why Trump has brought the nation to this happy pass: not simply for the wall, or to punish some of his most dedicated political enemies, but also for real Americans to see how thoroughly corrupted by the Left the Democrat Party has become.

The president has forced Schumer and his House sidekick, Maerose Prizzi, to make a choice between protecting their bureaucrat-class base or protecting the American people from the often feral and predatory consequences of the failed state just to our south. The collapse of Spanish-introduced Christianity in Mexico, it seems, has released the inner Native American spirit of much of the population, with the horrific results we see daily in Mexico–Aztlan. That similar levels of savage violence should cross the border with some of the “migrants” should surprise no one.

The Democrats, of course, no longer care about the current American population—they have their eyes on the replacements, which is why they will fight to their political end in order to keep the border open; in order for their mouthpiece media to hype every sick child and kiddie death while in neo-Nazi American “custody” and thus further their longstanding Marxist narrative that the United States is fundamentally illegitimate; and in order eventually to wear down the larger culture until, out of sheer exhaustion, it capitulates and commits cultural suicide to atone for its imagined sins.

Mueller Investigation Stirring Up More Trouble Than It’s Finding By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2018/12/26/mueller-investigation

After 19 months, special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation has charged a number of targets with almost every conceivable sin—except collusion with Russia to throw an election. Yet suspicion of collusion was the reason that Mueller was appointed in the first place.

President Trump’s former consigliere, Michael Cohen, pleaded guilty to lying to Congress. But as part of his plea deal, Cohen also confessed to a superfluous charge of a campaign finance violation.

Cohen allegedly negotiated a nondisclosure agreement concerning a supposed past Trump liaison with porn star Stormy Daniels. Yet no one alleges that Trump used cash from his 2016 campaign account to buy Daniels’ silence.

Instead, the accusation is that Cohen and Trump used Trump’s own money, but they did not report the payout as a “contribution” to his campaign. But Trump likely would have paid off Daniels anyway to protect his marriage, family, and reputation, regardless of whether he was running for office.

If you take media-sensationalized sex out of the equation, Trump, like any other American, has the right to pay anyone whatever he wishes to keep quiet about past embarrassing behavior, whether that be secretly gulping down too many Big Macs or cheating on the golf course.

Apparently, Cohen was leveraged by Mueller’s team to plead guilty to a crime that was likely not a crime. And in circular fashion, his confession was used as proof that the non-crime was actually a crime after all — and thus could serve as yet another way to find something on Trump.

Why Trump’s Wall is a Must And why a “virtual fence” will stop no one. Michael Cutler

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272349/why-trumps-wall-must-michael-cutler

President Trump has demonstrated, once again, that he is a man of his word, opting to shut down the government rather than accede to the globalist Democrats who refuse to provide funding for the wall to be erected to help secure the dangerous and porous U.S./Mexican border.

Schumer, Pelosi and others, mostly Democrats, have opposed a wall and called for drones and other elements of a “virtual fence” along the southern border insisting that a wall would be too expensive and not needed.

As I noted in an earlier article, America Needs A Border Wall Like Houses Need Insulation, just as the cost of insulating houses ultimately saves money, by keeping warm air from escaping the house in the winter, insulating America against contraband (including deadly, dangerous narcotics), illegals and the criminals and terrorists among them, would protect America and Americans; and help staunch the flow of tens of billions of dollars annually sent out of the United States by illegal alien workers and criminals.

The cost of a secure border wall should be considered an investment in national security, public safety and the livelihoods of American workers. This is one investment that would not only pay for itself and, indeed pay dividends, but save many, many innocent lives.

For years, drones–also known as UAV’s (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles)–have been deployed along that border at great expense and with little or nothing to show for the costly effort.

The deployment of the U.S. military’s Predator UAV’s to support the Border Patrol’s efforts to secure our borders provided many Americans with a sense of security. After all, the military relies on those drones and we all know the U.S. military’s prowess at achieving national security goals and objectives.

In reality, for the most part, that sense of security provided by the drones has been false security. False security is worse than no security.

Save the Children, Build a Wall Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272368/save-children-build-wall-daniel-greenfield

Since the Democrats went to war against what they called, “family separation”, two migrant children have died. They did not die, as the media would have you believe, because border security is cruel, but because encouraging migrants to cross the desert with their children, as the media has done, is evil.

The outrage, the tears and fury over the policy of deterring illegal migrants from using children to force their way into this country was not compassionate. It did not help migrant children. It killed them.

The 8-year-old boy from Guatemala and the 7-year-old girl from Guatemala, who died earlier this month, are the casualties of their false compassion for children. The media would have its viewers, readers and listeners believe that its outrage was meant to save children. It was not. It was meant to take their lives.

The dead children are not the victims of an overworked Border Patrol that has been deliberately starved of the resources to do its job, because its job would limit the ability of Democrats to steal elections. They are the victims of abusive parents or caretakers, who are willing to use the lives of their children as tickets to get inside the United States, not to escape persecution, but to double or triple their incomes.

The migrants are not refugees fleeing totalitarian regimes that are persecuting them for their beliefs. They are economic migrants who are willing to kill their children to earn more and get more free stuff. And they are every bit as guilty as the parents who leave their children to die in hot cars while they play slot machines. Any sane society would treat their murderous abuse of their children the same way.

Unfortunately we are not a sane society.