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February 2019

Religion vs. Free Speech by Denis MacEoin

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13539/religion-free-speech

Courts and government bodies still find it hard to make useful distinctions between gratuitous, racist, or violent speech about Islam and Muslims on the one hand, and reasoned argument that questions aspects of Islam, or even the religion overall, from the point of view of human rights, on the other.

The situation in Europe is even more ambiguous. Most European states have laws that purportedly support free speech, yet accusations of hate speech and Islamophobia often lead to trials and sentencing can lead to imprisonment. This skewing of facts is one crucial reason why free speech needs to be defended.

It is more than ever necessary to educate the public and many of its leaders about both the benign and troubling facts of Islamic history, doctrine, and culture. Those leaders who must require a more solid grounding include the ones who deny that terrorism has genuine links to issues such as jihad warfare — and who are constantly told that “real” Islam is above rebuke.

We must indeed paint a positive picture of what so many Muslims contribute to their host societies. We should, for example, celebrate the way in which Muslim-Americans in Philadelphia launched an appeal that raised over $100,000 to help repair two Jewish cemeteries that had been vandalized. Or the Muslim veteran in Arkansas who volunteered to stand guard with others at any Jewish site that was threatened with attack.

Speaking and writing about Islam today requires discretion, sensitivity, and a good grasp of facts. Doing this is harder in most European countries than it is in the United States, where the First Amendment insists on powerful free speech rights. The need for sensitivity stems from the almost universal condemnation of “Islamophobia”, a mainly good-hearted response to democratic worries that innocent Muslims may be targeted with violence or hate speech, even as many (but far from all) seek to integrate themselves and their families into Western society.

Nigeria Braces for Climax of Rancorous Presidential Showdown Vote on Saturday pits challenger seeking economic shake-up against incumbent focused on security and corruption By Joe Parkinson and Gbenga Akingbule

https://www.wsj.com/articles/nigeria-braces-for-outcome-of-rancorous-presidential-showdown-11550226600

KADUNA, Nigeria—The largest election in Africa’s history is already shaping up to be one of its more volatile.

Some 84 million people are registered to vote on Saturday in a presidential race that will determine who controls Africa’s largest economy, top oil producer and an important U.S. counterterrorism ally.

The winner, in a bout between two heavyweights with a decadeslong history in a patronage-based political system, will face sluggish economic growth, entrenched corruption and a dizzying array of security threats.

In one corner is President Muhammadu Buhari, the former military junta leader who returned to power in 2015 elections on a promise to defeat Nigeria’s Islamist insurgency and quell rampant corruption.

In the other, Atiku Abubakar, a former vice president and businessman whose dominance of the logistics sector brought him wealth and decades of graft allegations, is pledging to reinvigorate the country’s moribund economy.

Polls show a race that is too close to call, with Mr. Buhari as the favorite, armed with the advantages of incumbency and a broader base among the more populous Muslim north.

Chinese, U.S. Trade Negotiators Inch Toward an Agreement U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin met with President Xi By Lingling Wei

https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinese-u-s-negotiators-expected-to-show-progress-on-trade-deal-framework-11550212318

BEIJING—Chinese and U.S. trade negotiators concluded weeklong talks Friday, making some progress toward a broad agreement aimed at defusing the countries’ trade tensions, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

The agreement would be in the form of a memorandum of understanding and could serve as the framework for a deal that President Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping could later finalize at a summit, the people said. Negotiators on both sides have agreed to continue the talks next week in Washington, according to the people.

During negotiations this week in Beijing, officials on both sides have been seeking to narrow the still-substantial gap between the concessions China is willing to offer and what the Trump administration will accept.

The memorandum in the works is expected to cover issues related to Beijing’s offers to purchase more American goods and services, accelerating China’s market-opening efforts in sectors such as financial services and manufacturing, as well as improving its protection of U.S. intellectual-property rights.

Thornier issues like how to enforce a trade deal are also expected to be included in the memorandum, the people said.

U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, the lead negotiator, and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin met with President Xi on Friday afternoon before returning to Washington. The U.S. delegation is expected to release a statement on the latest negotiations.

Throughout the talks, sharp divisions remained on items such as how Beijing can address U.S. complaints that China pressures U.S. companies to share technology and that its policies favor state-owned companies at the expense of U.S. competitors. CONTINUE AT SITE

The Honor of Elliott Abrams By The Editors

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/the-honor-of-elliott-abrams/

Three weeks ago, Elliott Abrams returned to government. This was very good news for U.S. foreign policy. He is the State Department’s special representative for Venezuela. And his presence on the public stage has reignited passions about the Reagan administration’s record in Latin America.

Abrams was the assistant secretary of state for Latin America in Reagan’s second term. During the first, he had been assistant secretary for international organizations, and then for human rights. (Abrams joined the administration when he was in his early 30s.)

Like many others he was caught up in the Iran-Contra affair, and he pleaded guilty to withholding information from Congress. (Two misdemeanor counts.) He was pardoned by the first President Bush. There is a story to be told about all this, which we will not get into here. Abrams told it in a book, Undue Process: A Story of How Political Differences Are Turned into Crimes.

The second President Bush made Abrams part of his national-security team, first in the area of democracy and human rights. Then he gave Abrams a Middle East portfolio. Later, Abrams wrote a memoir, Tested by Zion: The Bush Administration and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. In recent years, he has been a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

In short, Elliott Abrams is one of the wisest, most experienced foreign-policy heads in this country. He is also a steadfast advocate of freedom, democracy, and human rights, or American values, if you like.

After the Coup is Gone By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2019/02/14

As the perpetrators of one of the most shameful scandals in American political history begin slowly to retreat, we are left to ponder one overarching question:

What now?

The tale we’ve been told for more than two years—that Donald Trump’s campaign team, possibly even the candidate himself, colluded with the Kremlin to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election—has been exposed as a lie. Various investigations into this alleged conspiracy are coming up empty and the accomplices are trying to change the subject. Even more pathetically, some still are clinging to the farce, desperate to salvage whatever still remains of their already sketchy credibility.

To describe it as a witch hunt, the president’s preferred term, is too generous. The American public has witnessed a seditious attempt by powerful interests garrisoned throughout our political complex to overthrow a sitting U.S. president. The orchestrated and failed coup has exceeded the routine combat of our two-party system, where out-of-power partisans disrupt and agitate the other side. No, this has been a full scale insurrection that has violated the boundaries of law, normalcy, and civility in an unprecedented way.

Both Democrats and Republicans have been complicit. The national news media have acted as hatchet men. Influential public officials, operating both inside and outside of government, have aided the stratagem. One of the main culprits just revealed—no, bragged—how a handful of corrupt bureaucrats plotted unlawfully to remove the president from the Oval Office based on the fantastical scheme.

Fact Checking The “Fact Checkers” on Illegal Aliens “Outing” Orwellian fake news. Michael Cutler

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272861/fact-checking-fact-checkers-illegal-aliens-michael-cutler

On Monday, February 11th I was a guest on a radio show, “The Americhicks” on radio station KLZ to discuss a Feb 4, 2019 CBS News article, The facts on immigration: What you need to know in 2019- CBSN fact-check on immigration.

The CBS article ostensibly responded to nine questions about immigration raised by President Trump. I was asked to weigh in about the honesty and accuracy of the “Facts” published by CBS to discredit what the President had said.

I reviewed the article during the weekend that preceded that show and found that falsehoods permeated this supposed “fact-check on immigration.”

Unfortunately this sort of deceptive “reporting” is all too common.

By understanding how to unravel the tapestry of lies contained in this article will provide a methodology that can be brought to bear to critically analyze all supposed “news” articles.

To begin with, the late criminal defense attorney Johnnie Cochran remarked at the O.J. trial, “If you can’t trust the messenger, you cannot trust the message.”

Trump To Formally Declare Border Emergency The battle over America’s security heats up. Matthew Vadum

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272878/trump-formally-declare-border-emergency-matthew-vadum

A defiant President Trump promised yesterday to declare a national emergency to get the wall he promised to build constructed on America’s porous southern border, as Congress gave him funding –with plenty of strings attached– to build 55 miles of border barriers.

“President Trump will sign the government funding bill, and as he has stated before, he will also take other executive action—including a national emergency—to ensure we stop the national security and humanitarian crisis at the border[,]” the White House tweeted Thursday at 3:44 p.m.

Trump, who said he was “not thrilled” with the omnibus spending bill, is nevertheless expected to sign “and declare the national emergency in an appearance Friday morning, according to a senior White House official who spoke on the condition of anonymity,” the Washington Post reports.

On the Senate floor, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said declaring an emergency was “a very wrong thing to do.”

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) indignantly tweeted, “The Congress will defend our constitutional authorities.”

Rep. Omar’s Anti-Semitism is Just CAIR’s Anti-Semitism Pull on the string of Rep. Omar’s anti-Semitism and you go right back to the Muslim Brotherhood. Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272879/rep-omars-anti-semitism-just-cairs-anti-semitism-daniel-greenfield

Rep. Ilhan Omar defended the anti-Semitic Black Israelites hate group in January. In February, she was originally scheduled to speak at an Islamic Relief USA dinner alongside IRUSA’s Yousef Abdallah who had endorsed violence against Jews and described former Governor Chris Christie “down on his knees before the jewish lords and masters… only money makes stuff like this happen.”

Abdallah’s comments were very similar to the anti-Semitic Twitter slurs that got Omar in trouble.

That’s not a coincidence. Omar’s worldview, including her anti-Semitism, was shaped by a familiar network of Islamist organizations which control life for most Muslims in the United States.

In March, Rep. Omar is headed to California to speak at CAIR’s Los Angeles dinner. There she will appear alongside CAIR’s Florida boss Hassan Shibly who has defended Hamas and vocally praised Hezbollah. “Israel & it’s supporters are enemies of God and humanity!” he had tweeted.

Shibly has vocally defended Rep. Omar over her comments about Jews.

Rep. Omar’s comments about Jews are a commonplace CAIR talking point. Nihad Awad, the co-founder and executive director of CAIR, had made an even more explicit version of the same argument. “Who of Clinton’s advisors … is opposing the latest agreement with Iraq? Look at their names. Look at … their ethnic or religious or racial background.”

“The Jews plan to distort Islam’s image and have succeeded in their plans,” he later claimed.

‘The Road to Shariadom’ in America By Janet Levy

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/02/the_road_to_shariadom_in_america.html

The Assembly of Muslim Jurists in America (AMJA) is part of an international network of Muslim scholars that preaches shariah rule as a government system, even issuing a fatwa delineating sharia’s “superiority” over democracy. It is one of many Muslim organizations now dangerously and politically active in the United States. They include the 25-year-old Council of Islamic Relations, CAIR, self-described as a “Muslim civil rights organization” with an Islamic perspective on American public issues. More recent organizations – created in 2015 and similarly politically dedicated – include JETPAC, the Justice, Education and Technology Policy Advocacy Center, which encourages American Muslims to get involved in local politics, and MPower Change, committed to creating a political platform for Muslim issues and organizing around it.

All these politically active Muslim-American groups, prominent Muslims and other Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated organizations within the U.S. publicly avow that they have no intention of implementing sharia in the U.S. Yet, their stated political goals, public statements and recent reports, betray their true intentions: to grow in political strength sufficient to replace our democracy with their religious governance.

More than 100 top Muslim leaders belong to AMJA, which began in 2003. Imams at over 3,100 U.S. mosques look to AMJA for instructional guidance to lead their congregations. The group’s name in Arabic, “The Group of Sharia Specialists in America,” implies its purpose: to impel Muslims to follow its comprehensive, sharia-compliant fatwas. Many of the group’s leaders attended Egypt’s Al-Azhar University, the world’s highest academy of Islamic learning and interpreter of the definitive sharia text – The Reliance of the Traveller.

Stop the Impeachment Fishing Expedition Congress has no business investigating the president for conduct that occurred before he took office. By David B. Rivkin Jr. and Elizabeth Price Foley

https://www.wsj.com/articles/stop-the-impeachment-fishing-expedition-11550188732

As William Barr begins his term as attorney general, House Democrats are aiming a “subpoena cannon” at President Trump, hoping to disable his presidency with investigations and possibly gather evidence to impeach him. Mr. Trump fired back in his State of the Union address: “If there is going to be peace and legislation, there cannot be war and investigation.” To protect the presidency and separation of powers, Mr. Barr should be prepared to seek a stay of all congressional investigations of Mr. Trump’s prepresidential conduct.

The president is not one among many, as are legislators and judges. Crippling his ability to function upsets the constitutional balance of power. For this reason, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel has repeatedly concluded that a sitting president may not be indicted or prosecuted. The same logic should apply to congressional investigations.

Congress is targeting Mr. Trump’s actions before becoming president because there are well-established constitutional limits, grounded in separation-of-powers doctrine, on its ability to investigate his official conduct. In U.S. v. Nixon (1974), the Supreme Court recognized a constitutionally based, although not unlimited, privilege of confidentiality to ensure “effective discharge of a President’s powers.” In Nixon v. Fitzgerald (1982), the justices held that presidents and ex-presidents have absolute immunity against civil liability for official presidential acts.

Executive immunity for prepresidential activity is less clear. In Clinton v. Jones (1997), which arose out of Paula Jones’s accusation that Bill Clinton sexually harassed her while he was governor of Arkansas, the justices reasoned that Ms. Jones’s lawsuit could proceed because the burden on the presidency objectively appeared light. Specifically, because only three sitting presidents had been sued for prepresidential acts, the justices thought it “unlikely that a deluge of such litigation will ever engulf the presidency.”

The court did, however, consider the question of whether civil litigation “could conceivably hamper the President in conducting the duties of his office.” It answered: “If and when that should occur, the court’s discretion would permit it to manage those actions in such fashion (including deferral of trial) that interference with the President’s duties would not occur.” CONTINUE AT SITE