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January 2019

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The Character That Matters By Roger Kimball

By on January 5th, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/01/04/the-character

A few days ago, American Greatness published some thoughts of mine about Jonah Goldberg’s contention that “President Trump is not a man of good character” and that, consequently, his administration “will end poorly.”

“Character,” Jonah says, “is destiny.” Trump’s character is bad. Therefore his destiny is grim.

While acknowledging that the president is an imperfect man (but at whom can that criticism not be leveled?), I also defended Trump’s character. Quoting Cardinal Newman, I noted that character was a multifaceted attribute. A man, said Newman, “may be great in one aspect of his character, and little-minded in another. . . . A good man may make a bad king; profligates have been great statesmen, or magnanimous political leaders.” I believe President Trump has been astonishingly successful during his first two years. I believe further that his success is a testament to the strength of his character.

Jonah disagrees with me absolutely about Trump’s character and, in a more qualified way, about my assessment of Trump’s successes. I am pleased that his explanation of those disagreements provides me an opportunity to expand on and clarify a couple of points.

To start with a clarification. Jonah says that in my earlier column I seemed determined “to minimize, dispute, divert, and debunk the contention that Donald Trump is a person of bad character, while never actually denying it. The goal seems to be less to rebut my argument than to confuse the issue.”

I apologize for my lack of clarity. Let me rectify that by stating baldly I do believe Donald Trump is, in the ways that matter for a president, a man of good character.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trump Keeps Giving Mueller Reasons to Pursue the ‘Collusion’ Probe By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on January 5th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/politics-policy/The special counsel is going to keep digging until Trump stops this.

I t’s a new year with a new Congress, but it’s the same question: When is Special Counsel Robert Mueller going to file his much-anticipated final report?

My 2018 answer was: When he’s good and ready.

I have a caveat for 2019, though: Maybe when President Trump stops giving him additional reasons to keep digging.

Don’t get me wrong. I am reasonably confident that the bottom line will be that there is no criminal collusion case. That is, the original rationale for the investigation that the FBI commenced during the 2016 presidential campaign and that Mueller inherited in 2017 — pretextually opened as a counterintelligence investigation but conducted as a criminal investigation in search of a crime — is a dry hole: There was no conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin to commit cyber-espionage against Democratic email accounts. Putin did not “hack the election.” If there had been a collusion conspiracy, the indictments Mueller has filed would look very different; the potential witnesses would have pleaded guilty to a collusion conspiracy — and they’d be preparing to testify against the president, not being sentenced for lying to the FBI.

Unjustified Appointment
It also remains true that there was no justification for Mueller’s appointment. The FBI was formally conducting a counterintelligence investigation. In the Justice Department, counterintelligence investigations do not have a prosecutor assigned; the point is not to prosecute but to collect information about a foreign power. In counterintelligence, if the FBI needs assistance in getting surveillance warrants from the FISA court, lawyers in the Justice Department’s National Security Division handle that. There is no need for a prosecutor — not just for a special counsel but for any prosecutor at all — unless concrete evidence emerges that gives rise to good-faith suspicion that a crime has been committed.

Moreover, there is no need for a special counsel (a creature of federal regulation) in the absence of a conflict of interest with respect to the suspected crime — a conflict so profound that DOJ is ethically incapable of investigating the matter. Here, there was no crime and no conflict. The FBI, aided by DOJ’s National Security Division, could easily have conducted an aggressive investigation of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election — and were doing so before Mueller’s appointment, even after Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Israel Replaced With Palestine on Rashida Tlaib’s Office Map By Tyler O’Neil

By on January 5th, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/trending/israel-replaced-with-palestine-on-rashida-tlaibs-office-map/

Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), a newly-minted Muslim congresswoman now infamous for calling President Donald Trump a “motherf**ker,” supports Palestine over Israel and now has a world map where Israel has been re-marked as “Palestine” with a sticky note.

Tlaib has not responded to multiple requests for comment on whether or not she approved the alteration and what it might mean. She has, however, celebrated with Women’s March leader Linda Sarsour, who has urged Muslims not to “humanize” Israelis.

“Someone has already made a slight alteration to the map that hangs in Rashida Tlaib’s new congressional office,” BuzzFeed reporter Hannah Allam tweeted Thursday, showing the map with a sticky note reading “Palestine.”

While the note was clearly intended as a replacement for the name of the Jewish state, it includes an arrow that points just barely north of Cairo, the capital of Egypt.

According to reports, Tlaib herself may not have posted the note. BuzzFeed’s Allam reported that a comedian in the crowd put up the sticky note, and Forward identified him as Palestinian-American comedian Mo Amer. Amer did not respond to PJ Media’s request for comment as to whether or not he had Tlaib’s permission.

Whether or not the sticky note remains, and whether or not Amer got permission, Tlaib opposes the two-state solution that would allow both Israel and Palestine to have separate governments. Instead, she supports a one-state solution with Palestine essentially subsuming Israel. She has also advocated for the withdrawal of all U.S. funds from the Jewish state.

She framed this withdrawal of funds as preventing “American foreign aid” from being “used to violate the human rights of people of any race, nation, or ethnicity.”

In fact, her support for the one-state solution is a minor scandal, since her early support for a two-state solution gained her the endorsement of J Street, a pro-Israel organization. She changed her position shortly after winning the Democratic primary, and faced no Republican opponent last November. CONTINUE AT SITE

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

European Court of Human Rights Promotes Human Wrongs by Tommaso Virgili

By on January 5th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13376/european-court-human-wrongs

One might also wonder where, in the European Convention on Human Rights, “feelings” are mentioned. Following the court’s logic, would it be appropriate to cover the windows of steakhouses not to hurt the feelings of animal activists? Or only if they threatened to riot? Is the new ruling just a capitulation to extortionistic threats of violence?

The supposition seems to be, “If you had just kept quiet, these bad things (fill in the blank) would not be happening.” It is both a false premise — the “bad things” might have happened anyway, as they did, for example, when the Bataclan Theater in Paris or the Brussels airport were attacked — and it is a demand for enforced self-censorship. Moreover, who gets to decide who is accountable? Who watches the watchers?

How soon will the public be asked to stop other activities — drinking alcohol, men and women dancing together, ringing church bells, art that depicts the human image, separation of religion and state, and equal justice under the law for women, to name just a few — that also might hurt “religious feelings?”

Will the ECHR’s Grand Chamber — the only authority that could reverse the decision — correct this treacherous path?

October 26 marked a historic day for Ireland, where citizens, in a national referendum, overwhelmingly voted to repeal the country’s blasphemy law.

Blasphemy remains a serious offence in many parts of the world, in some Muslim countries even requiring the death penalty.

More astonishing is that even some European countries are criminalizing “defamation of religion”.

Recently, an actor was detained in Spain for failing to appear in court where he would face the accusation of “having insulted God and the Virgin Mary”.

The outcome of the Irish referendum will entail a modification of the Irish Constitution, which states in Article 40.6.1:

“The publication or utterance of blasphemous, seditious, or indecent matter is an offence which shall be punishable in accordance with law.”

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MEDIA Comments turned off

The New York Times Incentivizes Hamas Violence by Alan M. Dershowitz

By on January 5th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13498/the-new-york-times-incentivizes-hamas-violence

While Hamas is happy to boast openly about their fighters tearing at the border fences in Gaza and hiding behind civilians to evade Israeli soldiers—the New York Times makes no mention of this. Israeli soldiers are portrayed as faceless killing machines, without a single reference to the fire kites, terror tunnels, rockets or cross border explosive devices utilized by the Palestinians, or to the double war crime of Hamas targeting Israeli civilians by firing rockets from behind Palestinian civilians.

These Israeli civilians are not occupiers or usurpers. They live in Israel proper not in occupied or disputed territory. This area was built from scratch by Israelis on barren desert land and the Israelis have a right to be protected from fire bombs and mobs determined to breach the protective fence. How would other nations respond to such threats? Certainly not by treating these dangerous mobs as peaceful protestors merely exercising their freedom of speech and assembly.

The Times’s absurd conclusion that the shooter may have committed a “war crime,” ignores the law of war crimes.

Contrast what Israel does with how the Palestinians treat terrorists who willfully target and kill Jewish children, women and other civilians. The Palestinian Authority pays their families rewards – in effect bounties — for their willful acts of murder. Hamas promotes and lionizes terrorists who kill Jews. But you would not know any of that from reading the one-sided New York Times screed….All in all, it is a shockingly irresponsible report.

In the Sunday New York Times — the most widely read issue of the week — the lead story was about a young Israeli soldier whose bullet ricocheted off the ground and killed a young Palestinian medic who had admitted to being a human shield and who was videoed throwing a smoke bomb. The next day— in the less well-read Monday issue — the Times reported on the murder and torture committed at the hands Afghan troops affiliated with and trained by the American CIA. The piece opens with the troops shooting and burning an entire family including a three-year-old girl. The number of deaths associated with these units (who at times were mistaken for ISIS) could not be verified but accounts put them at hundreds in one month. Apparently, the Times’s editors believe that the Israeli story, involving one soldier who shot one Palestinian under questionable circumstances, deserves wider coverage than deliberate massacres perpetrated by Afghan troops trained by the CIA.

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