Displaying posts published in

February 2019

Anti-Semitism in UK reaches record-high numbers, report says

https://worldisraelnews.com/anti-semitism-in-uk-reaches-record-high-numbers-report-says/

The increase in anti-Semitic incidents in the United Kingdom has set a new record for the third year in a row.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

The number of anti-Semitic incidents in the United Kingdom has set a new record for the third year in a row, according to a report released this week by the Community Security Trust (CST).

In 2018, 1,652 expressions of hatred of Jews were reported across the country, which represented a 16% jump from the previous year. The number for 2017 showed an increase of 3% over 2016.

The vast majority of incidents – 1,300 – consisted of verbal invective, hate mail, and graffiti.

The “good” news is that physical assaults were down by 17%, with 123 attacks versus 149 in 2017. Property damage was on a similar downward trend, with 78 occurrences as opposed to 93 the previous year.

Nearly three-quarters of the incidents took place in London and Manchester, home to the largest Jewish communities in the U.K. Most of them “involved verbal abuse randomly directed at visibly Jewish people in public,” the CST stated, while almost 25% were found on social media.

PART4: LLOYD BILLINGSLEY -THE STATE OF AFFAIRS AT U.C.L.A.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272807/down-kang-jong-un-lloyd-billingsley
Down With Kang Jong-Un! Pushing back against UCLA diversity dictator Jerry Kang.

UCLA’s Vice Chancellor for Equity Diversity and Inclusion is a specialist in “implicit bias” theory but shows a distinct preference for politically correct groups of the Left. Meanwhile, professors of a certain ethnicity and conservative political profile are ostracized for championing free speech. Even their staff and student supporters come under fire.

1.https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272686/diversity-lysenkoism-rules-ucla-lloyd-billingsley

2.https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272720/king-kang-makes-ucla-safe-jew-hatred-lloyd-billingsley

3.https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272745/king-kang-rampage-lloyd-billingsley

As a UCLA student, Keith Fink won a national debating championship defending the proposition that “illegal aliens” are inimical to the United States. Today, as he noted in his recent video, that would be a “microaggression,” that would trigger warnings and of course be “summarily dismissed.” The way UCLA dismissed Fink should serve up a warning to students, parents and policymakers alike.

UCLA teaching assistant Justin Gelzhiser, a PhD candidate, wrote a letter in defense of Fink. After Fink’s departure, longtime communications department manager Jane Bitar told Gelhizer he was the subject of a sexual harassment complaint. As he told the Daily Bruin, they would report the claim to the Title IX office if he didn’t leave his teaching position. The department, Gelhizer said, “wanted to get rid of me because they had just got rid of Fink.”

The Title IX department did investigate the harassment claim, which turned out to have some existential problems. Fink called it “a fiction” and notes that Bitar also violated the mandatory reporting requirements. For that lapse, she would suffer no consequences.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: A one-woman EMP By Patricia McCarthy

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/02/alexandria_ocasiocortez_a_onewoman_emp.html

The ubiquitous Miss O-C made her big splash yesterday and introduced her Green New Deal, and an amusing prescription it is. If even a fraction of her plans were ever implemented, the U.S. would be transported back to before the Industrial Revolution. No fossil fuels, no airplanes, no cars, no heat, no air conditioning, no meat, no dairy. Every home and building in the country would have to be retrofitted to comply with her ridiculous demands. There would be “charging stations” everywhere; she does not say where the power to those charging stations would come from. She apparently thinks wind (now provides 1.9%) and solar (now provides 0.5%) can fill the bill. She must think the trucking industry that above all others makes our country work can run on wind or solar; it cannot. When asked how to pay for all this, she suggests printing more money! Has this woman ever considered how groceries and all other merchandise in stores get there? Obviously not.

The first time I ever heard the phrase “as dumb as a rock” was years ago. It was a caller to Larry Elder’s radio program; the caller was talking about Sean Penn, whom the caller knew. It is an apt phrase, and never more than to describe Miss O-C. Boston U, from where she received a degree in economics, should immediately be de-certified and shuttered. No public person has ever displayed more ignorance, not just on economics, but on practically every topic relevant to the public realm. The fact that the media have made her a celebrity far beyond her ability to speak coherently will most likely be her undoing. They will at some point realize their catastrophic mistake and take her down. If they don’t, as the face of the Democratic Party, she will take them down.

Mythology Trumping Facts The president was wrong to malign the criminal-justice system in his State of the Union speech. Heather Mac Donald

https://www.city-journal.org/trump-racial-bias-criminal-justice-system

President Trump maligned the criminal-justice system in his State of the Union speech last night. Touting a recent federal law that gives federal judges greater discretion in sentencing violent criminals and drug traffickers, Trump claimed that the previous sentencing regime “wrongly and disproportionately harmed the African-American community.”

The claim that the criminal-justice system is racist is the mantra of left-wing activists the country over. Adopting it for the State of the Union was an unfortunate attempt to score bipartisan political points. The effort has already proven unavailing: Trump and his supporters continue to be charged with racism, while the legitimacy of law enforcement has been undermined.

It is crime, not the punishment of crime, that disproportionately harms the black community. And the demand for strict drug enforcement has always originated most forcefully in the black community. In 1959, Harlem’s New York Age newspaper called for “no leniency for the criminals, the recidivists, the junkies, dope pushers, muggers, prostitutes, or pimps. Clean out this scum—and put them away as long as the law will allow.” New York’s Rockefeller drug laws, now reviled by the elites, were passed in the 1970s because of activism in the black community, as Michael Fortner shows in Black Silent Majority.

The infamous federal crack penalties followed a similar trajectory. It was New York congressman Charles Rangel who initiated the federal crack legislation in 1986 by pointing out crack’s effect on urban youth. Other members of the Congressional Black Caucus agreed. New York congressman Alton Waldon called on his colleagues to increase federal crack penalties: “For those of us who are black this self-inflicted pain is the worst oppression we have known since slavery.”

Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel by Matti Friedman

Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel by Matti Friedman

AVAILABLE ON MARCH 6

Award-winning writer Matti Friedman’s tale of Israel’s first spies has all the tropes of an espionage novel, including duplicity, betrayal, disguise, clandestine meetings, the bluff, and the double bluff–but it’s all true.

The four spies at the center of this story were part of a ragtag unit known as the Arab Section, conceived during World War II by British spies and Jewish militia leaders in Palestine. Intended to gather intelligence and carry out sabotage and assassinations, the unit consisted of Jews who were native to the Arab world and could thus easily assume Arab identities. In 1948, with Israel’s existence in the balance during the War of Independence, our spies went undercover in Beirut, where they spent the next two years operating out of a kiosk, collecting intelligence, and sending messages back to Israel via a radio whose antenna was disguised as a clothesline. While performing their dangerous work these men were often unsure to whom they were reporting, and sometimes even who they’d become. Of the dozen spies in the Arab Section at the war’s outbreak, five were caught and executed. But in the end the Arab Section would emerge, improbably, as the nucleus of the Mossad, Israel’s vaunted intelligence agency.

Spies of No Country is about the slippery identities of these young spies, but it’s also about Israel’s own complicated and fascinating identity. Israel sees itself and presents itself as a Western nation, when in fact more than half the country has Middle Eastern roots and traditions, like the spies of this story. And, according to Friedman, that goes a long way toward explaining the life and politics of the country, and why it often baffles the West. For anyone interested in real-life spies and the paradoxes of the Middle East, Spies of No Country is an intimate story with global significance.

The tragedy of Venezuela shows us how dangerous Jeremy Corbyn and his acolytes really are By William Hague

https://premium.telegraph.co.uk/newsletter/article4/the-tragedy-of-venezuela-shows

In 2014, John McDonnell, now Labour’s shadow chancellor, said that the socialist regime in Venezuela showed “the contrast between capitalism in crisis and socialism in action”.

In a way he never intended, he has turned out to be right. For the people of that country are now enduring a situation worse than any crisis of capitalism, anywhere in the world, at any time in the last 100 years. Their economy has shrunk by at least half – far worse than the Great Depression or the recent economic woes of Greece.

Three million people have fled the country. Inflation, having reached 1.7 million per cent, has made money worthless. Basic commodities are scarce and hardship widespread. More than half the population are now living in extreme poverty.

Yes, this is socialism in action. This is what happens when you take a promising nation, rich in natural resources and human talent, and subject it to nationalisation, excessive spending, state control of prices and the discouraging of enterprise and foreign investment. These were the policies of the egotistical Hugo Chavez, and his utterly corrupt and tyrannical successor, Nicolas Maduro.

This catastrophic approach was praised endlessly by the current leadership of the Labour Party. Diane Abbott said “it shows another way is possible”.

As for Jeremy Corbyn, he appeared on every possible platform to praise Chavez and support Maduro. On the death of Chavez in 2013, he went out of his way to laud his “inspiring” leadership and to say: “Thanks Hugo Chavez for showing that the poor matter and wealth can be shared”.

In practice, Chavez was one of the world’s most outstanding hypocrites, amassing a fortune estimated at a billion dollars while campaigning as a friend of the poor. Now that most people in Venezuela are desperate for change, there are three charges that can be levelled against Corbyn, McDonnell, Abbott and their acolytes.

The first is that their economic beliefs are verging on madness – if they don’t understand that trying to control the prices of everything in the shops soon leads to severe shortages of everything from food to toilet paper, then their understanding of economics is near zero. A set of policies they were happy to support has led to countless starving people searching for food among the rubbish piled high in the streets. Yet these are the people who would be running our economy if Labour wins the next election.

The 10 Most Insane Requirements Of The Green New Deal The Green New Deal isn’t just un-America, it’s also completely bonkers. David Harsanyi

http://thefederalist.com/2019/02/07/ten-most-insane-requirements-green-new-deal/

Note: Ocasio-Cortez’s office has taken down their page describing the Green New Deal.

A number of Democratic Party presidential hopefuls — including Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand, Julián Castro, and Beto O’Rourke, for starters — have already endorsed or expressed support for the “Green New Deal” (GND). Today, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Edward J. Markey dropped details about her plan.

It is not hyperbole to contend that GND is likely the most ridiculous and un-American plan that’s ever been presented by an elected official to voters. Not merely because it would necessitate a communist strongman to institute, but also because the societal cost are unfathomable. The risible historic analogies Markey and Ocasio-Cortez rely on, the building of the interstate highway system or moon landing, are nothing but trifling projects compared to a plan overhauls modernity by voluntarily destroying massive amounts of wealth and technology. That is the GND.

While some of the specifics need to be ironed out, the plan’s authors assure that this “massive transformation of our society” needs some “clear goals and a timeline.” The timeline is ten years. Here are some of the goals:

Ban affordable energy. GND calls for the elimination of all fossil fuel energy production, the lifeblood of American industry and life, which includes not only all oil but also natural gas — one of the cheapest sources of American energy, and one of the reasons the United States has been able to lead the world in carbon-emissions reduction.
Eliminate nuclear energy. The GND also calls for eliminating all nuclear power, one of the only productive and somewhat affordable “clean” energy sources available to us, in 11 years. This move would purge around 20 percent of American energy production so you can rely on intermittent wind for your energy needs.
Eliminate 99 percent of cars. To be fair, under the GND, everyone will need to retrofit their cars with Flintstones-style foot holes or pedals for cycling. The authors state that the GND would like to replace every “combustion-engine vehicle” — trucks, airplanes, boats, and 99 percent of cars — within ten years. Charging stations for electric vehicles will be built “everywhere,” though how power plants will provide the energy needed to charge them is a mystery.
Gut and rebuild every building in America. Markey and Cortez want to “retrofit every building in America” with “state of the art energy efficiency.” I repeat, “every building in America.” That includes every home, factory, and apartment building, which will all need, for starters, to have their entire working heating and cooling systems ripped out and replaced with…well, with whatever technology Democrats are going invent in their committee hearings, I guess.
Eliminate air travel. GND calls for building out “highspeed rail at a scale where air travel stops becoming necessary.” Good luck Hawaii! California’s high-speed boondoggle is already in $100 billion dollars of debt, and looks to be one of the state’s biggest fiscal disasters ever. Amtrak runs billions of dollars in the red (though, as we’ll see, trains will also be phased out). Imagine growing that business model out to every state in America?
A government-guaranteed job. The bill promises the United States government will provide every single American with a job that includes a “family-sustaining wage, family and medical leave, vacations, and a pension.” You can imagine that those left in the private sector would be funding these through some unspecified “massive” taxation. On the bright side, when you’re foraging for food, your savings will be worthless.
Free education for life. GND promises free college or trade schools for every American.
A salubrious diet. The GND promises the government will provide “healthy food” to every American (because there are no beans or lettuce in your local supermarket, I guess).
A house. The GND promises that the government will provide, “safe, affordable, adequate housing” for every American citizen. I call dibs on an affordable Adams Morgan townhouse. Thank you, Ocasio-Cortez.
Free money. The GND aims to provide, and I am not making this up, “economic security” for all who are “unable or unwilling” to work. Just to reiterate: if you’re unwilling to work, the rest of us will have your back.
Bonus insanity: Ban meat. Ocasio-Cortez admits that we can’t get zero emissions in 10 years “because we aren’t sure that we’ll be able to fully get rid of farting cows and airplanes that fast.” The only way to get rid of farting cows is to get rid of beef.

Nine Months Later, Trump’s Iran-Deal Withdrawal Is a Clear Success By Fred Fleitz

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/donald-trumps-iran-deal-withdrawal-is-clear-success/

Europe is coming to acknowledge and act on the nuclear threat posed by Tehran.

Despite howls of protest by the Left, the foreign-policy establishment, and European leaders, and contrary to misleading assessments by U.S. intelligence agencies, it is now clear that President Trump’s decision last May to withdraw the United States from the controversial 2015 nuclear deal with Iran (the JCPOA) was the right call and is a huge policy success.

Trump’s JCPOA withdrawal did not lead to war with Iran, as many critics predicted. Instead, Iran is far more isolated than it was when President Trump assumed office. The United States has worked to unite its Middle East allies, especially Israel and Saudi Arabia, against Iran and, in Warsaw this month, will co-chair an international conference with Poland on the threat from Iran. Iran’s economy is under unprecedented pressure thanks to reimposed U.S. sanctions, especially oil sanctions, with negative 1.5 percent growth in 2018 and an expected negative 3.6 percent growth in 2019. Iran’s current year-on-year inflation rate through last month was 40 percent.

Some Trump critics predicted that any effort by the president to reimpose U.S. sanctions lifted by the JCPOA would have little effect, since other parties to the agreement — in particular the EU, Germany, France, and the U.K. — would not follow suit. But numerous European companies have resisted pressure from their governments to defy reimposed U.S. sanctions. On January 31, European leaders announced a special finance facility to help European firms skirt U.S. sanctions on Iran, but that initiative is months behind schedule and few experts believe it will work.

Instead, as a result of reimposed U.S. sanctions, European airlines Air France, British Airways, and KLM ended service to Iran last year. European companies Total, Siemens, and Volkswagen also withdrew from Iran, along with U.S. companies GE, Boeing, and Honeywell and the Russian oil firm Lukoil. In November, Germany’s Bundesbank changed its rules so it could reject an Iranian request to withdraw 300 million euros from Hamburg-based trade bank Europäische-Iranische Handelsbank, to protect the central bank’s relationships with institutions in “third countries.” That is, the United States.

Bury My Heart at Wounded Pride : Michael Walsh

https://pjmedia.com/trending/bury-my-heart-at-wounded-pride/
Time for Fauxcahontas to pack up the wigwam and slink away in disgrace.

As I mentioned in our Live Blog the other day, almost lost in the news of the Democrat meltdown in Virginia, and the success of the president’s State of the Union speech in front the Harridan Handmaiden’s Caucus and its denture-sucking leader, Maerose Prizzi, was this astonishing and richly satisfying end of the national political career of that unctuous phony, Elizabeth Warren of Oklahoma, Massachusetts, but not the Cherokee Nation:

Elizabeth Warren’s whole embarrassingly improbable account of her claims to Native American ancestry has just fallen completely apart. It’s now indisputable that she’s been lying all along. The Washington Post has uncovered her 1986 Texas State Bar registration card, which Warren personally filled out and signed, where she listed her race as “American Indian.” And, she now admits, there may be other such documents out there.

Funny: Back in 2012, when news first hit that Warren had been recorded as an American Indian in various faculty directories, she insisted she was unaware of the listing and hadn’t asked for it. The implication was that someone else had filed the listing without her knowledge. This, even as she cited family lore of Native American ancestors.

In other words, she’s been making the claim to minority status for well over three decades. And while she insists she “never got any benefits from it anywhere” (citing as proof an article in the Warren-friendly Boston Globe), what other possible motive could she have had?

Death and valor on a warship doomed by its own Navy. By T. Christian Miller, Megan Rose and Robert Faturechi

https://features.propublica.org/navy-accidents/uss-fitzgerald-destroyer-crash-crystal/

A little after 1:30 a.m. on June 17, 2017, Alexander Vaughan tumbled from his bunk onto the floor of his sleeping quarters on board the Navy destroyer USS Fitzgerald. The shock of cold, salty water snapped him awake. He struggled to his feet and felt a torrent rushing past his thighs.

Around him, sailors were screaming. “Water on deck. Water on deck!” Vaughan fumbled for his black plastic glasses and strained to see through the darkness of the windowless compartment.

Underneath the surface of the Pacific Ocean, 12 miles off the coast of Japan, the tidy world of Berthing 2 had come undone. Cramped bunk beds that sailors called coffin racks tilted at crazy angles. Beige metal footlockers bobbed through the water. Shoes, clothes, mattresses, even an exercise bicycle careered in the murk, blocking the narrow passageways of the sleeping compartment.

In the dim light of emergency lanterns, Vaughan glimpsed men leaping from their beds. Others fought through the flotsam to reach the exit ladder next to Vaughan’s bunk on the port side of the ship. Tens of thousands of gallons of seawater were flooding into the compartment from a gash that had ripped through the Fitzgerald’s steel hull like it was wrapping paper.

As a petty officer first class, these were his sailors, and in those first foggy seconds Vaughan realized they were in danger of drowning.

At 6 feet, 1 inch and 230 pounds, Vaughan grabbed a nearby sailor by the T-shirt and hurled him toward the ladder that led to the deck above. He yanked another, then another.

Vaughan’s leg had been fractured in three places. He did not even feel it.

“Get out, get out,” he shouted as men surged toward him through the rising water.

Berthing 2, just below the waterline and barely bigger than a 1,200-square-foot apartment, was home to 35 sailors. They were enlisted men, most in their 20s and 30s, many new to the Navy. They came from small towns like Palmyra, Virginia, and big cities like Houston. They were white, black, Latino, Asian. On the Fitzgerald, they worked as gunners’ mates, sonar experts, cafeteria workers and administrative assistants.

Seaman Dakota Rigsby, 19, was newly engaged. Sonar Technician Rod Felderman, 28, was expecting the birth of his first child. Gary Rehm Jr., 37, a petty officer first class, was the oldest sailor in the compartment, a mentor to younger crew members.

As the water rose past their ankles, their waists, their chests, the men fought their way to the port side ladder and waited, shivering in the swirling debris, for their chance to escape.

Shouting over a crescendo of seawater, Vaughan and his bunkmate, Joshua Tapia, a weapons specialist, worked side by side. They stationed themselves at the bottom of the ladder, grabbing the sailors and pushing them, one by one, up the steps. At the top, the men shot out the small opening, as the rising water forced the remaining air from the compartment.

Suddenly, the ship lurched to the right, knocking sailors from their feet. Some slipped beneath the surface. Others disappeared into the darkness of a common bathroom, carried by the force of water rushing to fill every available space.

Vaughan and Tapia waited until they were alone at the bottom of the ladder. When the water reached their necks, they, too, climbed out the 29-inch-wide escape hatch. Safe, they peered back down the hole. In the 90 seconds since the crash, the water had almost reached the top of Berthing 2.

Now they faced a choice. Naval training demanded that they seal the escape hatch to prevent water from flooding the rest of the ship. But they knew that bolting it down would consign any sailors still alive to death.

Vaughan and Tapia hesitated. They agreed to wait a few seconds more for survivors. Tapia leaned down into the vanishing inches of air left in Berthing 2.

“Come to the sound of my voice,” he shouted.

At the top of the flooded berthing compartment, just seconds after Tapia’s shout, a hand thrust up through the scuttle opening. It was Jackson Schrimsher, a weapons specialist from Alabama. Vaughan reached down and pulled him up.

Schrimsher had gotten trapped in his top bunk by floating furniture that blocked the aisle. He climbed over to another bunk and jumped down. A wall of water rushed toward him, and a locker toppled onto him. Looking up, he saw the light coming from the open scuttle and fought his way toward it.

Schrimsher had recently become certified as a master helmsman, specially trained to maneuver the ship during complicated operations. With the Fitzgerald in distress, his skills were needed. He raced off for the ship’s bridge, clad only in a drenched T-shirt and shorts heavy with seawater.

Vaughan and Tapia took one last look at each other. It was time to seal the hatch.