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October 2019

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Why Are Palestinians ‘Disappearing’ in Saudi Arabia? by Khaled Abu Toameh

By on October 17th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15035/saudi-arabia-palestinians-disappearing

The Geneva-based Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor (Euro-Med), a youth-led independent organization that advocates for human rights across Europe and the Middle East, said it has collected names of about 60 Palestinians detained by the Saudi authorities in recent months

Euro-Med said it considers the “practices of the Saudi authorities a flagrant violation of the requirements of justice, which guarantees everyone the right to a fair trial, including knowing charges against and the right to defense and access to a lawyer… [and] affirms that the relevant authorities do not comply with the international legal rules that guarantee the simplest rights of litigation for any individual…”

The Saudi authorities have offered no explanation for the widespread campaign targeting Palestinians in the kingdom. It appears that PA President Mahmoud Abbas and his officials in Ramallah fear that any critique of this behavior would jeopardize the financial handouts and political support they receive from Saudi Arabia…. For Palestinian leaders, Saudi money and political backing far outweigh the fate of a few dozen Palestinians held without trial in an Arab country.

It is only Palestinians who are held by Israel for terrorist-related crimes who Abbas and his friends remember to mention in their endless litanies of complaints.

Dozens of Palestinians have been “disappearing” in Saudi Arabia in recent months and are believed are being held in detention in the kingdom’s prisons, according to Palestinian sources and international human rights organizations.

The Palestinian Authority (PA) leadership in the West Bank, which regularly condemns Israel for arresting Palestinians suspected of involvement in terrorism and other anti-Israel activities, has been reluctant to speak out against the Saudi purge of Palestinians, ostensibly for security reasons, not to harm its relations with the kingdom.

The PA is not only keeping mum about the unprecedented Saudi crackdown, but it is also trying to prevent the families of the detainees from protesting in public. Last week, the PA’s Preventive Security Service summoned the family of Palestinian engineer Abdullah Odeh, being held in a Saudi prison, and warned them not to protest their son’s detention.

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Greece: Reminding the New Government Why It Was Elected by Maria Polizoidou

By on October 17th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14981/greece-government-fear

A press report on September 24 revealed that Greece’s National Intelligence Service is investigating five Greek NGOs operating in tandem with Turkish intelligence agencies and people-smugglers to transport illegal immigrants to the Greek islands.

Ankara’s goal in this operation is an open secret: to unleash a flow of Muslim migrants on Europe.

On September 27, Greek Minister of Defense Nikos Panagiotopoulos said that illegal immigration “is taking on the dimensions of a national crisis, and poses a threat to the country’s internal security.”

The emergency measures appear laughable, however, when one considers that about 500 people are entering Greece illegally each day, and millions more are waiting to come over from the other shore of the Aegean Sea.

Illegal immigration into Greece cannot be tackled as long as the left-wing elites and media — with a solid push from neighboring Turkey — continue to cloak what constitutes a hostile invasion in a mantle of political correctness.

A resolution adopted by the European Parliament on September 20, “paying tribute to the victims of communism, Nazism and other totalitarian and authoritarian regimes,” was passed by an overwhelming majority. This is as it should be, given that communist regimes around the world have caused the deaths of more than 100 million people.

Surprisingly, however, only one out of 21 Greek members of the European Parliament — the New Democracy Party’s MEP, Anna Michel Asimakopoulou — voted in favor of the resolution. This was in spite of the thousands of casualties and massive damage resulting from the Greek Civil War in 1945-1949 between the communists and the democratic forces in the country.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Australia’s Future and Its Enemies Mervyn F Bendle

By on October 17th, 2019

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2019/10/109925/

Finally! The National Farmers Federation has announced that it will implement a long-term public relations campaign to mobilise public and political support for a major expansion of the agricultural industry in Australia and combat the zealotry of animal rights activists and green extremists.

Such a response is well overdue. As I discussed over six years ago in a Quadrant Online article, Australia faces an epoch-defining challenge. With the global population projected to exceed nine billion people by 2050 our country is well placed to become a major food supplier to the world, doubling — even quadrupling — agricultural production, and generating an additional $1.7 trillion in aggregate export earnings over the next four decades. Estimates vary, but global food supply will have to increase by between 60 per cent and 100 per cent by 2050 to satisfy requirements. This is not idle musing: hundreds of millions of people will starve if the global food supply is not greatly increased.

Much of the demand will be in Asia, including from an increasingly massive middle class with evermore discerning tastes and evolving consumption patterns that will respond to the efforts of a sophisticated agricultural industry. Australia has a potentially major role to play in meeting this challenge, capitalising on its geographical position, expanding its agricultural sector, improving its crop yields and productivity, adopting new technologies, developing its infrastructure, and bringing virgin lands under cultivation. It is in the unique position of being a developed economy that nevertheless possesses large-scale under-utilized land and water resources, especially those located in northern Australia in close proximity to these emerging markets.

At the economic level the outlook for this initiative is positive and Australia is well placed to take advantage of this stupendous opportunity. While it will be a major task to mobilize the investment required to finance the project, it appears there are vast funds available internationally. Foreign investors, pension funds, international corporations and foreign governments are already buying Australian farmland to capitalise on the growing Asian demand.

However, at the cultural level the situation is different, as the NFF has finally realized.  Tragically, Australia is afflicted with deeply entrenched anti-development forces. It must therefore re-affirm its national identity as a frontier society, ready to engage in nation-building projects on a continental scale, and prepared systematically to harness the natural and human resources required to develop a thriving, highly productive society. This is a battle that must be won in the realm of culture, and it can no more be ignored than the financial or physical infrastructure requirements of this gigantic project can be ignored.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

National Security Doesn’t Care About Your Feelings We are in the Middle East for one reason: To ensure that terrorist groups based there do not plan and effect mass-casualty attacks here in America. Going to war with NATO ally Turkey is not part of the plan. Sebastian Gorka

By on October 17th, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/10/16/national-security-doesnt-care-about-your-feelings/

Ben Shapiro has become famous for the line: “Facts don’t care about your feelings!” Neither does strategy. And the last week should serve as a lesson in how to do strategy properly, and how to serve the national interest: clinically and without emotion.

Since President Trump made his decision to relocate 50 U.S. troops from Northern Syria, who were in the way of incoming Turkish forces, the commander-in-chief has been relentlessly attacked by the Left, their accomplices in the press, and the forever war neoconservatives and RINOs on the Right. After 18 years of war, thousands of Americans dead, and trillions of taxpayer dollars wasted, the president is being pilloried for not wanting to go to war with Turkey, a NATO ally with the largest Army in Europe.

Just let that sink in. After a generation of war, the “elite” is attacking President Trump for not getting us into another war.

Why are we told we should go to war again? Because the Kurds are suffering. Are the Kurds members of NATO? Are they our formal allies in any way? Are they even members of the same Judeo-Christian civilization to which we belong? The answers are no, no, and most definitely no.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, POLITICS Comments turned off

Global Warming Alarmism Deflated By The Dem Debate

By on October 17th, 2019

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/10/17/global

As we noted Wednesday, this week’s Democratic presidential debate was unconstitutional, all about radicalizing American society. But there was one positive development. Screeching about global warming was limited.

While a large slice of America sees this as a feature, the Democrats’ allies in the press thought it was a bug.

“CNN slammed for asking about Ellen, but not climate change, at Democratic debate,” howled USA Today.

“Ellen DeGeneres’ friendship with former President George W. Bush made it onto the agenda but climate change and immigration did not,” moaned Newsweek.

“Democrats have spent more than 90 minutes so far talking about health care — about twice as much time as they’ve spent discussing either foreign policy or climate change,” said Vox.

Even the candidates themselves groused.

“Three hours and no questions tonight about climate, housing, or immigration,” tweeted former Housing Secretary Julian Castro, who believes “climate change is an existential threat.” 

Sen. Kamala Harris, apparently looking over Castro’s shoulder as he tittered on Twitter — or maybe it was the other way around — tweeted “Three hours. Not one question about the climate crisis.”

“An entire debate without a single question on climate change — the existential issue facing not just our country, but our entire planet,” Tom Steyer, the billionaire who made a good portion of his fortune investing in coal and other fossil fuels, grumbled in an overheated tweet.

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BOOKS, EDUCATION Comments turned off

The South Bronx School That Outscores the Suburbs A new book profiles the rigors and achievements of New York City’s Success Academy. Ray Domanico

By on October 17th, 2019

https://www.city-journal.org/harlem-success-academy-charter-school

How the Other Half Learns, by Robert Pondiscio (Avery, 384 pp., $27)

Robert Pondiscio’s new book, How the Other Half Learns, chronicles what he observed in the year he spent in Success Academy Bronx I Charter School. Success Academy is New York City and State’s largest and fastest-growing charter school network and also, by far, the most successful—earning it and its founder Eva Moskowitz the disdain of Mayor Bill de Blasio, a teachers’ union partisan. Pondiscio addresses the criticisms—some fair, some not—that Success has received, while offering a vivid picture of daily interactions among administrators, teachers, students, and parents, showing the culture of the school in action.

Two things struck me in reading his account: first, Success Academy’s design and methods are pragmatic and firmly grounded in the here and now; second, Success Academy requires a tremendous amount of work from all associated with it—staff, students, and parents. The school’s detailed design is tailored to the needs of its students, and teachers and administrators are expected to implement it thoroughly. This attention to planning sets Success apart from other schools—much more so than its admissions policies, which have been the subject of intense controversy.

Despite its reputation for rigor, Success is not trying to recreate a mythical golden age of Victorian-style instruction. Supporters and critics of the network might be surprised to learn that its pedagogical orientation is broadly progressive. Founder Eva Moskowitz describes her schools as “Catholic school on the outside, Bank Street on the inside.” Pondiscio notes that the school sometimes fails to live up to all the ideals of “Bank Street”—a stand-in for progressive education—but that its math instruction is “easily the most ‘constructivist’ aspect of its curriculum; at least at the elementary level.” In math, Success reaches seemingly impossible levels of achievement on the state’s annual exam. Progressive or not, though, the school is certainly defined by hard work, from the two weeks of staff preparation prior to the first day of school through the last day before summer break. No one—administrator, teacher, student, or parent—gets off the hook for student outcomes.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Heather Mac Donald:Gigabytes of Virtue-Signaling Eager to win praise from homeless advocates, guilt-ridden tech CEOs pony up with donations—and disparage capitalism.

By on October 17th, 2019

https://www.city-journal.org/homelessness-tech-industry

Tech mogul Marc Benioff has been winning media accolades for his declaration that “capitalism, as we know it, is dead.” The billionaire founder and CEO of Salesforce, a cloud-based customer-relations company, has launched an advertising blitz promoting his new book, Trailblazer, which calls for a “more fair, equal and sustainable capitalism,” as Benioff put it in a New York Times op-ed on Monday. This “new capitalism” would not “just take from society but truly give back and have a positive impact,” Benioff maintains.

Benioff’s belief that providing products to willing consumers “takes” from society is apparently shared by the 181 CEOs of the Business Roundtable, who rejected the traditional principle of corporate shareholder responsibility this August in favor of “stakeholder responsibility.” Benioff suggests that the Securities and Exchange Commission (or, as he put it in his Times op-ed, the Security and Exchange Commission) start requiring corporations to document how their actions affect this amorphous and infinitely expandable set of “stakeholders.”

Fortunately for anyone seeking to evaluate what the new capitalism might entail, Benioff has provided a concrete example of a CEO solving “social challenges”—the challenge in this case being San Francisco’s festering homeless problem. Salesforce is headquartered in San Francisco and is the city’s biggest employer. In 2018, Benioff, in conjunction with San Francisco’s most fearsome advocacy group, the Coalition on Homelessness, put a new tax on the local ballot to double the taxpayer dollars already going to the city’s main homelessness agency. Proposition C would impose an extra 0.5 percent gross-receipts sales tax on companies with more than $50 million in annual revenue, raising an estimated $250 million to $300 million, all of which would be funneled into the homelessness-industrial complex.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Robert Spencer:Loyola Marymount University: It’s “Islamophobic” to be “Counter-Jihad” If you don’t like the prospect of getting blown up by a Muslim screaming “Allahu akbar,” you’re a hateful bigot.

By on October 17th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/10/loyola-marymount-university-its-islamophobic-be-robert-spencer/

The Los Angeles Loyolan tells us that it is Loyola Marymount University’s “award-winning, student-run news organization,” and it is not surprising that it would have won awards from the people who give out awards these days, because like all campus papers, it is a reliable guide to how deeply the far-Left indoctrination that most professors are conducting is taking root in their unwitting students. One of those students is the Assistant Opinion Editor for the Los Angeles Loyolan, a young man (I know that because he helpfully informs us that his pronouns are “He/Him/His”) named Cristobal Spielmann, who is, like all well-informed, duly woke students today, horrified at the prospect that someone would be so “racist” as to oppose jihad mass murder and Sharia oppression of women and others.

Inside Higher Ed may weep bitter crocodile tears over my noting the ominous assumptions behind Spielmann’s words, as the young fellow is only a child, but he is a child putting his views out in the public forum, and consequently must deal with public dissent from his views – at least until he and his fellow fascists secure power.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Is America Becoming Sinicized? By Victor Davis Hanson

By on October 17th, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/is-america-becoming-sinicized/

“All these reasons and more explain why there wasn’t a single major Western politician who warned the world of a frightening, Chinese-dominated future — one in which the West turned into China rather than China into the West. The single figure who finally issued such a warning, brash Donald Trump — without prior military or political experience — was as loudly and publicly damned as he was privately and quietly admired for doing so.”

A little over 40 years ago, Chinese Communist strongman and reformer Deng Xiaoping began 15 years of sweeping economic reforms. They were designed to end the disastrous, even murderous planned economy of Mao Zedong, who died in 1976.

The results of Deng’s revolution astonished the world. In four decades, China went from a backward basket case to the second-largest economy on the planet. It lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese into the global middle class.

Deng’s revolution came at a cost of terrible environmental damage, the rampant destruction of local communities and continued political repression. A more efficient economy empowered dictatorship.

Abroad, China systematically violated every tenet of international trade and commerce. It stole copyrights and patents. It ran up huge trade surpluses. It dumped products at below the cost of production to hook international customers. It threatened critics with boycotts, divestments and expulsions. It manipulated its currency. It demanded technology transfers from companies doing business in China. It created a vast espionage network in Western countries to steal technology. And it increasingly bullied and threatened its Asian neighbors.

Such criminality abroad and such repression at home was contextualized and mostly excused by Western nations.

U.S. foreign policy toward China seemed to be based on the belief that the more China modernized and the more affluent its citizens became, the more inevitable Chinese political freedom would be.

Supposedly a free-market China would drop its communist past to become a Westernized democracy such as Japan, South Korea or Taiwan. Once China fully joined the family of successful, law-abiding nations, it would empower Western freedoms and help create a stable international order.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Rural Voters’ Pride and the Left’s Prejudice Progressives say the poor go ‘against their interests’ but don’t mind when the rich favor high taxes. By Crispin Sartwell

By on October 17th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/rural-voters-pride-and-the-lefts-prejudice-11571263966

They’re at it again, trying to find the reasons rural Americans “vote against their own interests”—in this case why people out here still support President Trump (though folks I know are wavering). The question was classically formulated by Thomas Frank in his 2004 book, “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” But it’s an application of a basic human thought process.

I tell you my views. You disagree with me. I believe my opinion is the one every rational person would come to in an objective assessment of the facts. It’s irrational to disagree with me, especially because I went to a good college and you didn’t, and especially because you are working against your own interests as people like me define them. So what needs explaining is how you could be so irrational.

Sheer genetic redneck boneheadedness is a possibility. If I am feeling generous toward you, I’ll conclude that it isn’t your fault. You are being manipulated by malevolent forces—the surviving Koch brother, Fox News, the Russians, Mr. Trump’s Twitter feed. Those are the targets I was aiming at in the first place—after all, who needs to grapple seriously with the views of ignorant, manipulated rubes? After I figure out how to fix Fox News, I can work on fixing you so that you vote according to your interests, as I enumerate them.

What’s missing from this analysis? Social-justice leftists understand the interests of nonrich people in purely material terms. A poor person who isn’t a strong advocate of food stamps or public housing is regarded as plainly irrational. There’s no accounting for intangible qualities such as self-respect, which a particular person or subculture might value highly. By contrast, progressives don’t regard it as irrational when a wealthy person favors high taxes or other policies that would hurt his bottom line. This account of what is and what isn’t in people’s interests, and who is and who isn’t rational, conveniently always militates toward the future to which progressives are already committed.

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