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June 2019

ISRAEL Comments turned off

JARED KUSHNER IS RIGHT. PALESTINIANS DO NOT DESERVE A STATE- JOSH HAMMER

By on June 5th, 2019

https://www.dailywire.com/news/48018/hammer-jared-kushner-right-palestinians-do-not-josh-hammer

White House senior adviser and presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner, who is helping the president devise and (one expects) eventually unveil his much-ballyhooed “deal of the century” for Israeli-Palestinian peace, is in the news this week for some recent comments made in an interview with Axios. In the interview, Kushner equivocated on the purported urgency of Palestinian statehood and seemed to question whether the Palestinian-Arab populace is presently deserving of an autonomous state to call its own. As summarized by Jordan Schachtel of Conservative Review:

“The hope is that they over time will become capable of governing,” Kushner said in an interview broadcast on HBO on Sunday.

“There are some things the current Palestinian government has done well, and there are some things that are lacking,” Kushner added. “And I do think that in order for the area to be investable, for investors to want to come in and invest in different industry and infrastructure and create jobs, you do need to have a fair judicial system, you need to have freedom of press, freedom of expression, tolerance for all religions.”

A people that needs more “time” to “become capable of governing” is, by definition, not capable of governing in the present. And a people that is deemed incapable of governing in the present is necessarily undeserving of a state in the present.

For this bit of axiomatic truth-telling, Kushner was lambasted by all the usual suspects. This was a “condescending slur,” bellowed Muhammad Shehada at far-left Haaretz! “Kushner very clearly hasn’t spoken to a single Palestinian if this is what he thinks,” tweeted the self-hating ignoramuses of the egregiously misnamed jihadist apologists at “Jewish Voice for Peace.”

But Jared Kushner is clearly correct. And it is easy to understand why.

Let’s start with irredeemable, ubiquitous, genocidal Jew-hatred.

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MY SAY: Comments turned off

MY SAY: ON D-DAY A REFLECTION ON HEROISM

By on June 5th, 2019

I reflect on the heroism of those who have been drafted or who volunteer to fight for nation and freedom.

Hannah Senesh was one of 37 Jews from Mandatory Palestine parachuted by the British Army into Yugoslavia during the Second World War to assist in the rescue of Hungarian Jews about to be deported to the German death camp at Auschwitz.  Senesh was arrested at the Hungarian border, then imprisoned and tortured, but refused to reveal details of her mission to the Nazis. She was executed by firing squad November 7, 1944 five months after D-Day.

She wrote these words in a poem found decades after her death:

Blessed is the flame that burns in the secret fastness of the heart.

Blessed is the heart with strength to stop its beating for honor’s sake.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

The great “Awokening”

By on June 5th, 2019

https://www.bradleyfdn.org/prizes/

New Criterion editor Roger Kimball, has been named a co-recipient of the 2019 Bradley Prize .

In accepting the award he lamented how “many things have mutated into their opposites”.

“Consider, to take just one example, the fate of our colleges and universities. Once upon a time — and it was not so long ago, they were institutions dedicated to the pursuit of truth and the transmission of the highest values of our civilisation. Today most are devoted to the repudiation of truth and the subversion of those values. In short they are laboratories for the cultivation of wokeness…”

Roger is only getting started. The full address is above. Only 10 minutes, every second is gold.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Dirty Rotten Climate Scandals Tony Thomas

By on June 5th, 2019

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet

Shakespeare’s monster, Caliban, dreamed of clouds opening to  show riches ready to drop upon him. Climate scientists don’t have to dream about it – honors, awards and cash prizes rain down in torrents. Other scientists try to help humanity, but while climate scientists may kid themselves and others that they share that goal, their practical intent is to raise energy costs and harm nations’ energy efficiency via renewables. While they posture as planet-savers in white coats, some of them pocket awards of half-million dollars, even a million, and notch up more career-enhancing medals than a North Korean general.

A couple of local prizes are the Prime Minister’s Prize for Science ($A250,000) for ex-President of the Australian Academy of Science Kurt Lambeck last October, and in January UNSW Professor John Church pocketed a $A320,000 half-share of the 400,000 Euro BBVA Prize.

Both have done science work of international repute and their reputations in their specialist fields are deservedly high. However, Lambeck is a long-standing smiter of “deniers” and Church propagates via the ABC such lurid scenarios as  this: “… if the world’s carbon emissions continue unmitigated, a threshold will be crossed which will lead to the complete melting of the Greenland ice sheet. This, with melts from glaciers and ice in Antarctica will lead to a sea level rise in the order of seven metres.” 

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Death and the Democrats By Sebastian Gorka

By on June 5th, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/06/05/death-and-the-democrats/

Our nation is unique.

Most every other nation was established in a capricious fashion. Whether defined by an ethnicity, a linguistic community, or the happenstance of being ruled by a royal dynastic elite, other countries were not the result of their people appealing to first principles, of building a political structure from scratch based upon the lessons of prior centuries. Ours is different.

Yes, our Republic was born out of war, as has been the case with so many others over the centuries. But our Revolutionary War wasn’t simply waged over a brute demand for self-determination. The catalyst for the fight that would result in our being an independent nation-state was the grievous transgressions of a monarch who our Founding Fathers saw as acting in direct contravention to objective and universal truths.

After our unlikely victory against what was then the most powerful empire the world had ever seen, our forefathers enshrined those truths into our founding documents. And the Declaration of Independence and our Constitution have served not only to codify those principles as the foundation of our political system for at least 11 generations, they have become a beacon for hundreds of millions of non-Americans around the world who also believe in “government of the people, by the people, and for the people.” When dissidents escape house arrest or brave shark-infested waters in search of freedom, their destination is rarely the French embassy or the shores of Africa.

When discussing rights—particularly those rights enumerated in our Constitution—we often weigh priorities. Freedom of speech purists, for example, insist that without the First Amendment, all other rights are nugatory, while Second Amendment advocates stand unwavering in their conviction that without the right of the population to protect itself from a tyrannical government, everything else is hypothetical.

Yet it should be obvious where our existence as free men and women starts. Not with the right of association, or a free press, or freedom of conscience, or the right to keep and bear arms. Everything begins with the right to life.

That is, unless you are a Democrat in 2019.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, POLITICS Comments turned off

David Marcus: From Occupy To AOC: The Rise Of The New Progressives, Part 3 With the election of Donald Trump, the New Progressives seized their opportunity to turn protest into political power with a new star.

By on June 5th, 2019

https://thefederalist.com/2019/06/05/from-occupy-to-aoc-the-rise-of-th

Entering The Halls Of Power

On January 21, 2017 Donald Trump woke up as president of the United States for the first time. In those morning hours, hundreds of thousands of protesters were making their way to Washington DC for the most significant protest since Occupy Wall Street, which had occurred roughly five years earlier. Donning pink p-ssy hats and dedicated to overthrowing the patriarchy, and Trump, the Women’s March took to the streets.

At the time it was presented as an organic outpouring of anti-Trump emotion. But we now know that it was not only carefully organized, but that the New Progressives were the march’s driving force and leadership. Its manifesto, among other things, promised intersectionality, and to break down systems of oppression.

Suddenly these concepts once limited to a few thousand in Zuccotti Park were being marched on by hundreds of thousands. That is not to say that all of these women and men supported the entire far-left agenda of the Women’s March. Rather, Trump’s election provided the New Progressives the opportunity to cast themselves as his opposite, and if Trump was the ultimate evil, that made them the ultimate good.

Indeed, even the Women’s March itself was accused of insufficient wokeness, as illustrated by a Washington Post headline just three days later that asked, “Was the Women’s March just another display of white privilege? Some think so.”

The irony of this is that the organizers, people like Tamika Mallory and Linda Sarsour, had pushed the march’s manifesto and goals so far left of center using the exactly the same justification as was used for the Occupy General Assembly’s progressive stack: the most marginalized must lead, white women were to take a back seat and listen. Just as with Occupy Wall Street, there was, at best, antipathy towards Israel, and at worst outright anti-Semitism.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, POLITICS Comments turned off

Warren Says Combating Climate Change Is ‘A Bigger Challenge Than WWII’ Elizabeth Warren dished out a climate change agenda that is as improbable as it is expensive, then turned around and insulted WWII vets.By Susanna Hoffman

By on June 5th, 2019

https://thefederalist.com/2019/06/05/warren-says-combating-climate-change-is-a-bigger-challenge-than-wwii/

At a campaign event in Detroit, Michigan, on Tuesday, 2020 Democrat presidential candidate and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren said that climate change is an even bigger challenge than World War II.

“America has faced huge challenges before, WWII and putting a man on the moon,” Warren said. “This environmental catastrophe bearing down on us may be the biggest challenge yet.”

Warren’s disconcerting comparison to WWII must mean her plans to prevent climate change are drastic indeed. To handle this global threat, Warren weirdly implies we must have to mobilize a greater American industrial base than was in place during WWII, as well as more scientific innovation and resources than required to put a man on the moon.

This is Warren’s pitch for her Green Manufacturing Plan, which is part of her commitment to the Green New Deal that Democrats across the board have pledged to support. According to her website, Warren is looking at a 10-year plan to invest $2 trillion into an expected $23 trillion market for clean energy technology. This investment will help us “achieve the ambitious targets of the Green New Deal,” Warren wrote on her website.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Will Mueller’s Testimony Make a Difference? By Matthew Continetti

By on June 5th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/robert-muellers-testimony-will-it-make-difference/

Plenty of Democrats, and more than a few Republicans, would like to see Robert Mueller testify before Congress despite the special counsel’s reluctance to appear. Each party has its reasons. Democrats want to score political points by re-litigating Mueller’s report on national television. Republicans want to ask him about when, exactly, he knew there was no criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, and about the origins of the investigation itself.

Some liberals go further. They say Mueller’s testimony might have a galvanizing effect on public opinion, and help convince voters that President Trump should be impeached. “If history is any guide,” writes Steve Benen at MSNBC, “the more Americans are confronted with damaging details about the president’s alleged misdeeds, the more the polls are likely to shift.”

Count me skeptical. While there have been slight ups and downs, for the most part polling on impeachment has been stable. The public continues to oppose it.

For example: In the November CNN exit poll, 40 percent of voters were for impeachment. After the release of the Mueller report, the debate over its findings, and Mueller’s press conference last week, CNN’s most recent poll of adults has support for impeachment at . . . 41 percent.

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Mexico Is an Asylum Free-Rider By Mark Krikorian

By on June 5th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/06/mexico-asylum-policy-hypocrisy/

It embraces an expansive definition of asylum, then passes the buck by waving asylum-seekers northward.

President Trump’s threat to impose tariffs on Mexican goods starting next week may or may not get Mexico to be more cooperative in preventing third-country “asylum-seekers” from passing through on the way to our border. I’m not too concerned about the costs that such a tariff would impose on U.S. businesses and consumers (which would be real), because the costs would be worth it if the tactic were actually to work. I’m skeptical it will, since Mexico always has a chip on its shoulder with regard to us. But recent signs suggest I might be pleasantly surprised. Here’s hoping.

Perhaps more important than the means, however, are the desired ends. During a call with reporters last week, acting DHS secretary Kevin McAleenan laid out three specific steps the administration wants Mexico to take. First is tightening security on Mexico’s border with Guatemala and chokepoints in southern Mexico (such as the Isthmus of Tehuantepec). Second is targeting the smuggling organizations; as McAleenan said, “The logistical effort to move 100,000 people through a country every four weeks is immense. This is noticeable.”

Mexico might well agree to these two demands, potentially averting the tariffs. But the third demand is the most consequential, and the most difficult. As McAleenan put it, “We need to be able to protect people in the first safe country they arrive in — really, all through the hemisphere, but certainly with our partner to the south.” In other words, the administration wants Mexico to sign a “safe third country” agreement, whereby foreigners who pass through Mexico would not be permitted even to apply for asylum at the U.S. border, and Mexico would agree to take them back, because if they were genuinely fleeing persecution, they should have applied in the first safe country they reached. As Hans von Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation wrote last fall about one of the migrant caravans, “ignoring Mexico’s asylum process is prima facie evidence that a claim for asylum in the U.S. is bogus.”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

9 Times The Obama Administration Fought Subpoenas or Blocked Officials from Testifying Before Congress By Matt Margolis

By on June 5th, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/trending/9-times-the-obama-administration-fought-subpoenas-or-blocked-officials-from-testifying-before-congress/

After the long and thorough, and, of course, incredibly expensive Mueller investigation, Democrats were left distraught over a lack of any crime to justify going forward with impeachment. In the wake of the Mueller Report, they’ve since promised new investigations in the hopes of finding some crime to justify putting the country through a process that most don’t want us to go through just because Democrats haven’t gotten over the 2016 election. In recent weeks, stories about subpoenas being challenged and Trump officials being instructed not testify have been saturating the news and being presented as evidence of further obstruction. Most notably, Attorney General Barr faces a forthcoming vote of contempt in the House for not wanting to be a part of the Democrats’ witch hunt.

It seems as good a time as any to remind Democrats that we know their outrage is phony and that we know this is just pandering to their base who wants to see them “resist, resist, resist” at all costs. So, I’ve compiled nine examples of fights over subpoenas or testimony during the Obama years. The point here is that fights between the executive branch and the legislative branch over executive privilege are nothing new. Despite the rhetoric that the Trump administration’s fighting back against Democrat witchhunts being unprecedented, Barack Obama spent eight years fighting with Congress over their exercising their rights to oversight.

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