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September 2019

PM exposes ‘nuclear weapons development site’ in central Iran Israeli leader says Iran tried to “destroy evidence after they realized we are onto them,” calls on international community to exert more pressure. “This is the only way to stop Iran from getting the bomb,” he warns.

https://www.israelhayom.com/2019/09/09/watch-pm-netanyahu-makes-live-statement-on-iran/

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu revealed on Monday that Iran was apparently in violation of its nuclear obligations, saying it had a “nuclear weapons development site” south of Isfahan.

Netanyahu said that the site, in Abadeh, was uncovered in the nuclear archives that Israel seized in a secret mission.

“In this site, Iran conducted experiments to develop nuclear weapons,” he said. “When they realized we uncovered this site, they destroyed it; they wiped it out. When they realized we were onto them, they tried to destroy the evidence,” he continued.

He then sent “the tyrants of Tehran” a stern warning: “We know what you are doing; Israel knows when you are doing it, and Israel knows where you are doing it. We will continue to expose your lies; what we see is a consistent pattern of Iranian lies, deception, and violations.”

He also spoke about the “atomic nuclear warehouse” that Iran had just outside Tehran, a day after nuclear inspectors confirmed it was indeed an undeclared site that contained radioactive material.

Polite Persuasion is Wasted on the Shrieking Left Peter Smith

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2019/09/civility-is-wasted-on-the-left/

Like Jordan Peterson’s reputation, Lionel Shriver’s conservative credentials were burnished by leftist idiocy. In Peterson’s case it was his interview on the UK’s Channel 4 by Cathy Newman. In Shriver’s case it was Yassmin Abdel-Magied walking out of the Brisbane Writers’ Festival in 2016 in protest at Shriver’s views on identity politics and cultural appropriation.

Neither Peterson nor Shriver are my kind of conservatives and, to be fair, I am sure they would not claim to be or would want to be. That’s fine. What I would like to say is that conservative warriors are now needed more than ever. Much less useful are prominent notables on the conservative side who come over all reasonable in the face of those intent on our destruction.

Peterson lost his standing with me when he suggested that Brett Kavanagh should first win his confirmation to the Supreme Court but then immediately resign to clear his name. That was a ridiculous suggestion, to put it extremely mildly. Clearly Peterson has no idea about the enemy we face.

I caught Shriver on Q&A last week. True, I could only stand five minutes or so before turning it off. Any longer spent watching Q&A is injurious to my peace of mind. Nevertheless, I saw enough to sense that Shriver was trying hard to appear “reasonable” to other panellists and to the usual green-leftist ABC audience. Hint for Shriver: Prostration is pointless. They’ll always despise you. Look to, say, Michelle Malkin for a role model.

Did I get a false impression of Shriver’s demeanour? I think not. The following evening I attended the Bonython Lecture in Sydney, where she explained that her engagement, front and backstage, with other Q&A panellists was civil; and, furthermore, she made a point of extolling the need for civility generally in political debate.

From Sussex, England, to New England, Gender Activists Are Losing By Madeleine Kearns

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/gender-activists-losing-cult

A broad group of dissenters is united by the belief that every woman matters, that every girl matters — that the female sex matters.

Remember the viral video of the Scottish teenager who was thrown out of class for saying there are only two genders? Now there’s another clip, in the same genre, doing the rounds. This week, approximately 150 parents and pupils (mostly girls, the footage suggests) staged a protest against enforced “gender neutral” uniforms outside a high school in Sussex, England.

Piers Morgan, the presenter of Good Morning Britain, who attended the school in question, tweeted, “The protesting parents & students have my full support. This whole gender neutral craze is out of control. Let girls be girls & boys be boys.”

Interestingly, this kind of teenage activism appears to be on the rise. The same goes in the United States. National Review readers who follow my reporting on gender extremism will be familiar with Selina Soule, the brave young athlete from Connecticut who, along with two other girls, has filed a Title IX complaint with the Education Department, which is now investigating the state’s policy allowing boys to thrash them in sports.

The Taliban Shouldn’t Get within 5,000 Miles of Camp David

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/the-taliban-shouldnt-get-within-5000-miles-of-camp-david/

The best thing to be said for the planned Camp David meeting with the Taliban is that it didn’t happen.

President Trump has a weakness for the grand gesture. Hosting the leadership of a vicious, terrorist insurgency that aided and abetted September 11 and is trying to kill Americans as we speak certainly would have been . . . memorable.

The invitation was part of the effort to bring to a conclusion negotiations that were close to a deal, although not one favorable to the interests of the United States.

The deal envisioned the U.S. reducing its current troop presence of roughly 15,000 down to zero about 16 months from now, at which point any commitments the Taliban had made would be worthless. We understand the frustration with a war that has lasted 18 years, but it would be foolish to end the “endless war,” or our part of it, with the Taliban once again in position to threaten Kabul and harbor international terrorists who mean us harm. We’ve had recent experience with a president following through on campaign pledge to end a war no matter what — and, of course, Barack Obama had to order troops back to Iraq when ISIS took over a swathe of the country.

If and when the Afghan civil war ends, it will involve a settlement with the Taliban and the Afghan government. This was not even close to that. The Taliban agreed to begin talking only to the Afghan government, and the deal didn’t even entail a ceasefire. There were reportedly conditions in an annex that the Taliban would be very unlikely to meet, giving us the leeway to put the brakes on our withdrawal. But if we don’t want to get out — and we shouldn’t — why ink a deal that creates even more doubt about our staying power and legitimizes the Taliban?

Bucknell University To Host Antifa Leader Who Promotes Political Violence At the campus where I teach, this week we are seeing an example of this insidious creep toward the left’s open embrace of violence against those who advocate for conservative ideas. By Alexander Riley

https://thefederalist.com/2019/09/09/bucknell-university-to-host-antifa-leader-who-promotes-political-violence/

On the American college campus, the constant advance of extremist ideas goes on. Sometimes, those ideas are put into direct action in the form of violence, such as when radicals attack speakers and physically prevent audiences from gathering to hear them. But the more insidious aspect of the advance takes the form of invitations to propagandists in the garb of scholars who defend and encourage violence while attempting to mask their deeply totalitarian motivations in a superficial and mendacious veneer of moral self-righteousness and academic respectability.

At the campus where I teach, this week we are seeing an example of this insidious creep toward the left’s open embrace of violence against those who advocate for conservative ideas. The Humanities Center at Bucknell University has invited Mark Bray to speak on September 10, 2019, the day before the 18th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States.  It is the inaugural event in a year-long series the Humanities Center has put together on the theme “Confronting Fascism.”

Bray is an advocate for and participant in Antifa, an amorphous group of communists and anarchists who engage in thuggish street violence, attacking property and individuals they label “fascists” or “white supremacists,” designations they use sufficiently liberally as to include just about anyone they feel like vilifying and attacking. In his book, “Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook,” Bray carefully adheres to this crude and toxic system of definition, calling all those who support the current president of the United States “everyday fascists” and wrapping up with a concluding chapter with the astounding title “Whiteness is indefensible.”

Don’t Believe These Tired Myths About Ending The 18-Year War In Afghanistan After 18 years, thousands of casualties, and a price tag that could be as high as $1 trillion, the United States has done all it can in Afghanistan. Instead of finding excuses to stay, it’s time to come home. Daniel DePetris

https://thefederalist.com/2019/09/09/dont-believe-tired-myths-ending-18-year-war-afghanistan/

Zalmay Khalilzad, the Trump administration’s chief negotiator with the Taliban, has endured a lot of pressure in the last week. Former U.S. ambassadors, Fox News pundits, and think tank analysts alike have denounced his draft agreement in full without knowing what is in the final document.

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani’s advisers have already expressed that the terms of the accord “need serious debate and revision.” Words such as “surrender,” “defeat,” and “abandonment” are being tossed in the air as if the United States has an obligation to serve as the Afghan government’s defenders in perpetuity.

Khalilzad and his boss, President Trump, will feel even more heat as additional details become available to the public. Trump’s cancellation on September 7 of a direct meeting between himself, the Taliban, and Afghan President Ashraf Ghani is a blinking red light that the president is increasingly experiencing second-thoughts about the entire process. So it is as good a time as any to reexamine the usual myths that will resurface in editorials and television segments over the ensuing weeks as opponents try to tank any agreement that could conclude U.S. involvement in this 18-year war.

Myth 1: The U.S. Is Signing Its Own Defeat

Mattis Says He’d Wouldn’t Have Been So Critical of Biden in Memoir if He Knew He’d Run for President By Matt Margolis

https://pjmedia.com/trending/mattis-says-hed-wouldnt-have-been-so-critical-of-biden-in-memoir-if-he-knew-hed-run-for-president/

On CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday, former Defense Secretary James Mattis said he regrets being so critical of Joe Biden in his memoir since he didn’t know at the time he was writing that Biden would run for president.

In an interview on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” Margaret Brennan read him an excerpt from his new book “Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead,” in which he harshly criticizes the former vice president.

“You wrote, ‘He exuded the confidence of a man whose mind was made up, perhaps even indifferent to considering the consequences were he judging the situation incorrectly,’” Ms. Brennan said.

“Well, I was writing a history book at that point, Margaret, because I started writing this book in 2013,” Mr. Mattis replied. “Had I known the former vice president was going to run for office, I assure you I would not have probably been that forthcoming.”

“Are you raising questions about his judgment?” Ms. Brennan asked.

“I think the Obama administration, President Obama’s administration had made the decision to leave Iraq despite what the intelligence community was telling us what would happen,” Mr. Mattis said. “They were very clear that an al Qaeda-associated group would rise, that the Iraqi government, the Iraqi people, the Iraqi nation was in a post-combat, pre-reconciliation phase. We needed to keep our influence there a little longer.”

While many in the media were hoping for a scandalous tell-all about his time in the Trump administration, Mattis’s memoir has instead proven to be very unflattering to Barack Obama and Joe Biden. The biggest bombshell so far has been Mattis’s revelation that Obama chose not to respond to an Iranian bomb plot on American soil in order to protect his terrible nuclear deal.

Coddling college campuses and a crippled culture If the snowflake insanity persists, so will the demand for ‘safe spaces’ By Everett Piper –

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/sep/6/coddling-campuses-and-crippled-culture/

Summer is over. School has started. Students from coast to coast have returned to their college campuses, and the nation waits with bated breath as to what will happen next. 

Will the self-absorbed snowflake insanity persist? Will you continue to hear cries of “you offended me” and “trigger warnings” in the halls of the academy? Will the demands for “safe spaces” continue to trump the study of science? Will the fixation on “micro-aggressions” continue to be more important than teaching morality? Will victimization continue to trump virtue?  

In the days ahead, what will the news from the ivory tower be? If the old axiom that the best predictor of future behavior is always past behavior is true, here is just a shortlist of what you can expect in the coming weeks and months.

Students at Emory University will renew their cry for counseling because someone used chalk to write the name of an unpopular politician on a campus sidewalk. 

Young intellectuals at Yale will continue to demand the termination of professors because of their “hurtful” views on such critical issues as Halloween costumes.

Southern Illinois University will double down on its brilliant plan to host campus “naps” in its library so students can snuggle up together in sleeping bags as they seek to solve our nation’s ills. 

In the coming academic year, millennials from campuses across the land will persist in their juvenile fits of rage. 

At American University, the University of Wyoming and the University of California-San Diego, burgeoning scholars will, once again, receive coloring books to help them cope with their stress and anxiety.  

Is a Dark Ages disease the new American plague threat?  BY Dr. Marc Siegel

https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/460442-is-a-dark-ages-disease-the-new-american-plague-threat

Diseases are reemerging in some parts of America, including Los Angeles County, that we haven’t commonly seen since the Middle Ages. One of those is typhus, a disease carried by fleas that feed on rats, which in turn feed on the garbage and sewage that is prominent in people-packed “typhus zones.” Although typhus can be treated with antibiotics, the challenge is to identify and treat the disease in resistant, hard-to-access populations, such as the homeless or the extremely poor in developing countries.

I also believe that homeless areas are at risk for the reemergence of another deadly ancient disease — leprosy, also known as Hansen’s disease. Leprosy involves a mycobacteria (tuberculosis is another mycobacteria) that is very difficult to transmit and very easy to treat with a cocktail of three antibiotics.

Yet according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), there are more than 200,000 new cases of leprosy reported in the world every year, with two-thirds of them in India, home to one-third of the world’s poor. The poor are disproportionately affected by this disease because close quarters, poor sanitation, and lack of prompt diagnosis or treatment easily can convert a disease that should be rare to one that is more common.

Thought of the Day – “The 1619 Project” Sydney Williams

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

There is so much in today’s news that is both silly and dangerous. The anti-democratic crowd in Britain, like their brethren in the United States, chose not to accept the outcome of an election. The vote three years ago was definitive, with 52% of the electorate voting to leave the European Union. For those of you who speak and write of the closeness of the vote, yes it was. Nevertheless, it was the will of the people. In the same vein there has been a refusal by many on the left in the U.S. not to accept the outcome of our 2016 election. We have corporate leaders who feel it is more important to be “woke” than to accept the reality that a corporation’s most important goal must be profitability. If a business is not profitable, employees, the community, suppliers and customers will not benefit. It seems the entire field of Democrats who would be President have chosen to end fracking and exit the fossil fuel industry – including natural gas, the commodity that has allowed us to come closer to global emission standards than any other industrial nation – and move quickly to renewables like wind and solar, no matter the costs or the effect on the environment. We have big-city politicians – the most prominent example being New York City – who would dumb-down public education to the lowest common denominator, in the name of equality. They would do so to the detriment of minorities and the impoverished, while sending their own children to private institutions.

The common thread running through all these tantrums posing as policies is hypocrisy. It is enough to make an old man wince. But, enough, on to the main message:

Slavery is barbaric, but to argue that it was the “foundation” on which our country was built is hyperbole and disingenuous. In 1619, Virginia was a colony of Britain. It would be 157 years before the American colonies revolted, and they did so to be free and independent. In that year 1776, Thomas Jefferson wrote that “all men are created equal,” words, as we know, that did not capture the truth of slavery, but which suggested a road map for the banning of international slave trade, which was done in 1808; the freeing of slaves in 1863 under the Proclamation Emancipation, and for the Civil Rights legislation of 1964 and 1965. One might argue that 188 years is too long, but keep in mind slavery has been in existence since before written history. Also, remember, in 1776 slavery existed in all thirteen colonies and throughout Europe. And it persists today, enslaving forty million people, particularly in Asia, Africa and Central Asia.