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February 2019

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Progressives Bearing Gifts By Victor Davis Hanson

By on February 11th, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/02/10/

Donald Trump in 2016 did not only run against the planted rumors of the fake Steele dossier, 90 percent negative media coverage, his own boisterous past, and the “Access Hollywood” tape. He also was campaigning against Hillary Clinton—and the nation’s quarter-century weariness with the Clinton scandals, crimes, money-grubbing, and hypocrisies.

For a quarter of the country, independents especially, a vote for Trump was not a referendum on a Democrat or Republican, or even love or hate for Donald Trump, but rather reflected a “Never Hillary” desire to be done with the very name Clinton.

So, too, in 2020 Trump will not be running only on his own record, or even his person but also against a living and breathing alternative candidate, one that both offers a precise antithetical agenda and displays a concrete personage.

Considering all of that, during the last week, Trump has been given great gifts in a way no one might have imaged just a month ago.

True Lies
Trump in 2020 might have controversially slurred his future Democratic rival as a socialist, radical late-term abortion advocate, open borders chauvinist, a Medicare destroyer who wished to make it free for everyone, or wacko environmentalist intent on banning gas and diesel engines.

Now he won’t have to smear anyone: the Democrats have largely done that to themselves. Policy-wise the 2020 choice will be between Trump’s mostly doctrinaire conservatism, spiced with populist trade and immigration agendas, and what is a now a new Democrat orthodoxy of Bernie Sanders’ adolescent socialism and incoherent Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Neverland something or other.

Trump legitimately will be able to say of a 2020 opponent, “Candidate X wants over the next 10 years to junk your present car, to scrap your combine, to stop your jet travel, to ban your cruise ship, to take away your lawn mower and snow blower, to outlaw your snowmobiles and jet skis, to shut down the fracking industry, the heavy equipment manufacturing sector (I doubt there will be a replacement battery-powered Cat D-11), the pipeline and rail business, and to make every homeowner an indebted remodeler, refitting his house while for all his green trouble and expense he still will be paying more for solar and wind-generated electricity.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Amnesty International Reveals Boko Haram Killed 60 People In January 28 Attack On Rann “This week’s attack on Rann was the deadliest yet by Boko Haram, killing at least 60 people.”

By on February 11th, 2019

http://saharareporters.com/2019/02/01/amnesty-international-reveals-boko-haram-killed-60-people-january-28-attack-rann

Sixty people were killed in Monday’s attack on Rann, Borno State, by Boko Haram, Amnesty international has said.

The agency said analysis from satellite images revealed the figure, just as it feared that camps for Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) were also affected in the attacks.

In a statement released on Friday, the human rights organisation noted that the murdered persons were people who came to Rann to seek protection.

The statement read: “At least 60 people were killed following the 28 January devastating Boko Haram attack on Rann, a border town in Borno state, northeast Nigeria, Amnesty International has confirmed.

“The organization also analyzed satellite imagery which shows hundreds of burned structures in the town. Many of the destroyed structures only date back to 2017, suggesting they were shelters for internally displaced people who came to Rann seeking protection.”

Osai Ojigho, Director of Amnesty International Nigeria, noted that they had “confirmed that this week’s attack on Rann was the deadliest yet by Boko Haram, killing at least 60 people”.

“Using satellite imagery we have also been able to confirm the mass burning of structures as Boko Haram unleashed a massive assault on Rann, most of which is now destroyed. This attack on civilians who have already been displaced by the bloody conflict may amount to possible war crime, and those responsible must be brought to justice. Disturbingly, witnesses told us that Nigerian soldiers abandoned their posts the day before the attack, demonstrating the authorities’ utter failure to protect civilians,” she said.

The organisation alleged that troops withdrew, which “triggered a massive exodus of civilians to Cameroon, as fear spread that Boko Haram would take advantage and attack the town”.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

UK: A Defeat Dressed Up as a Victory by Douglas Murray

By on February 11th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13712/uk-holocaust-exhibit-muslims

The mosque that agreed to hold the secret event was in Ilford; the chairman of the Muslim Community Centre at the mosque, Bashir Chaudhry, said the exhibition was an “eye-opener” and added that he would encourage other people to see it.

A story such as this should provide the strongest possible alarm bells to government and civil society. If, in 2019, any Muslim organization wants to commemorate the bravery of some Muslims in the Holocaust, this has to be staged secretly, covertly, and in fear of some violent or non-violent backlash?

In Britain, in 2019, government and non-government figures still feel they must flit around, letting no one know of their movements to commemorate an aspect of the Holocaust. They manage to have a commemoration of the Holocaust in secret. And they think this is a victory.

Remember the Holocaust exhibition in London that couldn’t be staged last month — the exhibition at Golders Green about Muslims who helped to save Jews from the Nazis in Albania during the Second World War? The small exhibition appeared clearly intended for two reasons. First to try to build trust between a new local mosque and the large Jewish community in Golders Green, and second, to remind Muslims in Britain that hostility towards Jews is an ancient and modern evil. The intentions behind the exhibition seemed good.

Not everyone, however, in Britain’s Muslim communities approved. The radical Islamist website “5Pillars” said that there was a problem about the exhibit. They said that it had originated from Yad Vashem, a memorial and research institute. Of course, Yad Vashem just so happens to be in Israel — and any contact with the state of Israel is absolutely verboten to many Islamists, such as those at “5 Pillars” (who of course would deny many accusations of anti-Semitism). So, “5 Pillars” denounced the Muslims and others who were supportive of the Holocaust exhibition being shown in Golders Green. They said that Muslims and non-Muslims who thought the Holocaust exhibition should go ahead were “Zionists.” Then, in a demonstration of the sway that such Islamist groups seem to have in their own communities, the exhibition was promptly cancelled.

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FOREIGN POLICY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Should Washington Heed Intelligence Assessments about North Korea? by Peter Huessy

By on February 11th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13713/north-korea-intelligence-assessments

In spite of the fact that Reagan ultimately won the Cold War — and the Soviet Union subsequently fell — his policies and extraordinary global achievements were partially discarded by the failures and laziness of the U.S. intelligence community. Starting in 1993, the US cut back excessively its military defenses. And the US allowed China both militarily and non-militarily to run rampant.

Almost worse, the intelligence community failed to recognize the rise of Islamic terrorism in Iran and elsewhere, which would culminate in the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

What is clear, is that the U.S. intelligence community often has a terrible track record where threat assessments are concerned. Alarmingly, it would not be surprising they were wrong again today.

United States intelligence chiefs told Congress on January 29 that Pyongyang is unlikely to give up its nuclear weapons in any deal with Washington. This assessment was made a month ahead of U.S. President Donald Trump’s February 27-28 second summit — to be held in Vietnam — with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, the purpose of which is to make strides in achieving the very denuclearization that FBI Director Christopher Wray, CIA Director Gina Haspel and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats consider improbable.

One would have thought that if these intelligence chiefs disagreed with Trump’s efforts to reach a deal with North Korea, they would have presented an alternative. They might have explained what a deal with Pyongyang is liable to do to America’s relations with Japan and South Korea. They might have provided a future scenario for the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which North Korea signed in 1968, then violated and withdrew from in 2003.

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MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

Gosnell: When Art Collides with Reality and Exposes the Truth By John Fund

By on February 11th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/gosnell-movie-late-term-abortion-new-york-virginia/

A new law in New York legalizes the actions for which abortionist Kermit Gosnell was sent to prison for life.

Rarely has a new movie become available at a time when the news made its subject matter timelier and more appropriate. Gosnell: The Trial of America’s Biggest Serial Killer is the true story of a doctor who went to prison for life in 2013 for stabbing several infants he had delivered alive inside his hellhole of an abortion clinic in Philadelphia. After being almost completely ignored by critics during its release last year, last week the movie went on sale in Walmart and on Amazon, where it is the No. 1 best-selling dramatic DVD. At the same time, infanticide became a key issue in major stories in Virginia and New York.

Last week, Virginia governor Ralph Northam became engulfed in a controversy over whether he had appeared in his medical-school yearbook in costume, either in blackface or in the white sheet and hat of a Ku Klux Klan member. The photo came to light because a medical-school classmate of Northam’s was appalled at the governor’s candid support for a bill that would remove many restrictions on late-term abortion. While the media outrage was largely directed at his alleged racist actions 35 years ago, the abortion bill was promptly killed in committee, hours after Northam had been overly honest in describing what the bill would allow.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The SDNY Investigation Is Real Peril for President Trump By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on February 11th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/sdny-investigation-real-peril-for-trump/

Don’t look at Capitol Hill; look a few hours’ drive to the north.

All eyes are on Capitol Hill. House Democrats, flexing their new majority muscles, wasted no time after President Trump’s State of the Union address to announce expansive investigations of the president and those around him: There will be probes into his administration, the 2017 presidential transition, the 2016 Trump campaign, and the Trump Organization — the real-estate business Donald Trump spent a lifetime conducting.

It’s a dragnet, or at least as much of a dragnet as congressional committees can muster. Their investigative powers do not compare with those of federal prosecutors and FBI agents, who compel grand-jury testimony, execute search warrants, arrest suspects, and file indictments to squeeze cooperation from potential witnesses.

That is one reason why the most consequential Trump action may be happening in the place getting the least attention from the national media: the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York (SDNY).

This is not to belittle the congressional probes. As Rich Lowry and I discussed in this week’s episode of The McCarthy Report, Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff (D, Calif.) and the chairmen of the other relevant House committees are laying the groundwork for imminent battles over the scope and disclosure of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s eventual report to the Justice Department. They are opening the front into the president’s family-run real-estate empire — investigations that will seek his tax returns, probe fraud allegations raised in an explosive October 2018 New York Times report on the Trump empire’s accumulation of wealth, and explore the Trump Organization’s dealings with Deutsche Bank, which has been fined hundreds of millions of dollars for helping Russian oligarchs launder money.

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

It’s Not Just the Wall — Democrats Hate Interior Enforcement, Too By Rich Lowry

By on February 11th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/its-not-just-the-wall-democrats-hate-interior-enforcement-too/

My post below on border funding assumes that there is a deal, which isn’t a guarantee. The sticking point at the moment is the interior:

But throughout the talks, Democrats had also been focused on limiting ICE’s ability to detain unauthorized immigrants, which has become a major issue for the party because of their opposition to the Trump administration’s aggressive detention tactics. The Democrats’ proposal included a new limit on detention beds for immigrants picked up not at the border but in the interior of the country.

Democrats wanted to cap that number at 16,500, which they said is around the level of interior detentions in the final years of the Obama administration. Republicans proposed excluding immigrants with criminal records from the cap. But Democrats said that would make the cap toothless, because it would amount to giving ICE free rein to round up thousands of immigrants without criminal records, on top of unlimited numbers of immigrants with criminal convictions.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Slippery Slope of Speech Suppression at CUNY The dire consequences of violating students’ First Amendment rights. David Seidemann

By on February 11th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272797/slippery-slope-speech-suppression-cuny-david-seidemann

Reprinted from jamesgmartin.center.

Public universities morally should and legally must uphold free speech. Unfortunately, the university where I’ve taught for 43 years has a very bad record, and matters are getting worse.

The City University of New York (CUNY) has a long history of speech suppression, as a sampling of legal cases at its various campus units reveals. For example, in 2007, a federal appeals court ruled that the College of Staten Island’s president violated students’ First Amendment rights when she nullified a student election; in a 2017 court settlement, Queens College administrators agreed to reverse their arbitrary decision to deny official recognition of a pro-life group litigation.

The administration of Brooklyn College has been particularly aggressive in suppressing speech. This is illustrated in a series of court cases involving students who were attempting to stop the college from collecting a mandatory fee in support of the New York Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG), an off-campus, liberal lobbying group.

In 1996, the college arbitrarily canceled a referendum on the issue. A New York court ordered it reinstated. In 1997, the college blocked a similar referendum based on the (risible) claim that the students running it had libeled NYPIRG in a campaign poster by portraying the group as a rat. The college agreed to rescind that decision in a federal court stipulation. In 1998, the college refused to allow students to even start petitioning for a referendum, but a federal court ordered the college to permit petitioning. In 2001, the college refused to allow students all the allowed time for petitioning. That too was reversed in a federal court stipulation.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Who Is Behind the “Green New Deal”? A look at the Sunrise Movement and its socialist dreams.

By on February 11th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272814/who-behind-green-new-deal-discover-networks

The Sunrise Movement (SM) is a 501(c)(4) environmental advocacy organization that, while denying that it is loyal to either “the right or left” side of the political spectrum, in fact throws its full support behind left-wing Democratic Party candidates and agendas. Most notably, SM endorses the enactment of a “Green New Deal,” environmental legislation whose multifaceted mission is to eliminate all fossil-fuel use from the U.S. economy (in favor of renewables like wind and solar energy) by the year 2030; create a “basic income program” and a federal jobs guarantee that would provide a “living wage” to every person who wants one; implement a government-run, single-payer health care system; and “transform our economy and society” in a manner that will restore its ecological and moral integrity.

Rooted in the premise that the greenhouse gas emissions associated with human industrial activity are a major cause of potentially catastrophic “climate change,” SM is composed chiefly of what it terms “an army of young people” who aim to take “immediate and decisive action to transform our energy system” and thereby address the “climate crisis” that threatens to consign humanity to “a future ravaged by wildfires, heatwaves, and hurricanes.” In pursuit of this objective, SM vows to “end the corrupting influence of fossil fuel executives on our politics.” That “handful of wealthy oil and gas executives,” says the organization, “will stop at nothing to squeeze the last bit of money out of the earth” – no matter how many “children must breathe toxic air,” or how many “parents must choose between a dangerous and polluting job, and no job at all.”

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

The Brutal Murder of a Jewish Teen A glimpse into the horrific Palestinian practice of “Pay for Slay”. Ari Lieberman

By on February 11th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272833/brutal-murder-jewish-teen-ari-lieberman

When police and security forces discovered 19-year-old Ori Ansbacher in Jerusalem’s Ein Yael forest on Friday, she was already dead. Police noted that she was murdered in a brutal fashion having been stabbed at least 12 times in the chest and neck. There were other signs of brutality but in deference to police requests and the dignity of the Ansbacher family, I will refrain from noting them here. Needless to say, this was a barbaric crime even by Palestinian standards of barbarity.

Forensic teams scoured the site for evidence and within 24 hours, there was a significant evidentiary breakthrough that led to the doorstep of 29-year-old Hebron resident, Arafat Irfayia. So strong was the physical evidence that police noted that they could secure a conviction even without a confession. Following the crime, Irfayia hid in a mosque in the Arab village of El-Bireh, and subsequently made his way to a home adjacent to the mosque where Israeli security forces nabbed him. His Hebron home has already been mapped for demolition.

On Sunday, Irfayia reenacted the crime for investigators. On day of the murder, Irfayia, who was known to law enforcement, left his Hebron home armed with a knife and made his way to Jerusalem, where he stumbled upon his innocent female victim. It was a crime of opportunity and unfortunately, Ori became a victim of Irfayia’s monstrous hate of Jews and deviant sexual proclivities.

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