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November 2019

The ‘Thought Police’ Come to Norway by Bruce Bawer

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15192/norway-thought-police

[A]s commentator Nina Hjerpset-Østlie put it, it is now illegal “to burn your own books”. Which, she added, means that although Norway’s longstanding blasphemy law was taken off the books four years ago, Bjørnland has, in effect, reinstated it.

Jon Wessel-Aas, a prominent lawyer… called Bjørnland’s one-woman revision of the racism clause “at best prior restraint of an illegal utterance,” and at worst “prior restraint of a legal utterance.” Both forms of restraint, he noted, are unconstitutional.

In defense of Bjørnland’s novel interpretation of criminal law, Martin Bernsen, a senior official of the PST, the agency in charge of Norway’s national security, argued that burning copies of the Koran can trigger acts of violence. Under this kind of logic, of course – the so-called heckler’s veto – any statement or action whatsoever that just might antagonize violence-prone Muslims should presumably be treated as illegal, whereas burning, say, any number of copies of the Talmud or Bible is no problem, since Jews and Christians aren’t in the habit of responding to such actions with mass acts of savage bloodshed.

Americans whose memory of public events goes back more than a news cycle or two may recall Terry Jones, a previously obscure Gainesville, Florida, preacher whose announcement in 2010 of a plan to burn copies of the Koran drew public condemnations from then President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and the top US military commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David Petraeus. Secretary of State Robert Gates phoned Jones personally and asked him not to go ahead with the burning.

In the end, Jones put off his planned 2010 action, burning one Koran in 2011, another in 2012, and hundreds on September 11, 2014.

Jones did not escape legal consequences for these actions. In 2011 he was jailed for a few hours in Dearborn, Michigan, by authorities worried about the possible consequences of his planned participation in an anti-Islam rally, but the ACLU took his side and a county court ruling upheld his First Amendment rights. He was fined $271 in 2012 for violating Gainesville’s fire safety rules. A planned mass burning of Korans on September 11, 2013, resulted in an arrest for transporting fuel, but this verdict was overturned by a circuit court judge. In short, although high-ranking federal officials from the president on down were concerned about Jones’s activities, and although some local officials overreached in their efforts to squelch his plans, the courts ultimately protected his rights.

‘Climate Emergency’ Is Oxford Dictionaries’ Word of the Year Catherine Smith

https://amgreatness.com/2019/11/22/climate-emergency-is-oxford-dictionaries-word-of-the-year/

Oxford Dictionaries has declared the phrase “climate emergency” as its Word of the Year, after a 10,000 percent spike in usage.

Since 2004, Oxford has selected a Word of the Year from a word or phrase that has seen an upsurge of interest and reflects the ethos, mood, or preoccupations over the past year, with lasting potential for long term cultural significance.

Oxford defines “climate emergency” as “a situation in which urgent action is required to reduce or halt climate change and avoid potentially irreversible environmental damage resulting from it.”

The phrase“climate emergency” was once relatively obscure, but after a huge spike in its usage this year, it has become one of the most prominent expressions among English speakers. According to a statement published by their panel, “In 2018, climate did not feature in the top words typically used to modify emergency, instead the top types of emergencies people wrote about were health, hospital, and family emergencies. But with climate emergency, we see something new, an extension of emergency to the global level.”

This existential threat surpassed all other “emergencies” in writing by a “huge margin” despite not even making the list in 2018. Even other variations of the same concept, exhorting attention to the health of our native planet, were eclipsed by the relative urgency of the phrase.

The phrases “climate crisis” and “climate action” also made Oxford’s Word of the Year 2019 shortlist.

The Curtain Closes on ‘The Schiff Show’ The California Democrat and chief inquisitor might have exited the stage but his impeachment reel is forever. Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2019/11/22/the-curtain-closes-on-the-schiff-show/

Every theater rat knows that closing night is even tougher than the debut.

After all the auditions, the practices, the blocking, the tech rehearsals, the dress rehearsals, the opener, and the full run, the final performance usually comes quicker than expected.

Exhausted and emotional, nerves are as raw as they were during callbacks. The leading man glances around at his castmates one last time, realizing he’ll never have the same experience again. A bow to the orchestra pit, a gesture to the lighting crew, roses for the director, and a prolonged, bittersweet wave to the crowd—then the heavy red curtain slowly closes the stage off from the cheering audience.

The show, the ensemble must accept, is over.

In what presumably was his final encore Thursday afternoon, U.S. Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) bid an emotional farewell to his long run as the lead role in his impeachment inquiry, a.k.a. “The Schiff Show.” As the lights dimmed and folks headed for an early exit, Schiff choked up during his closing monologue.

“In my view, there is nothing more dangerous than an unethical president who believes they are above the law,” Schiff emoted, voice trembling, tears welling. “And I would just say to people watching here at home and around the world [dramatic pause] . . . we are better than that!” Voice breaking, Schiff then gaveled his theater to a close.

Winning Was Trump’s High Crime and Misdemeanor His conflict with his staff over Ukraine was nothing compared with Obama’s decision to leave Iraq. By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/winning-was-trumps-high-crime-and-misdemeanor-11574466051

When I don’t get the feeling Adam Schiff is secretly working for the Russians, I get the feeling he’s secretly working for Donald Trump. The latter feeling predominated during two weeks of impeachment hearings. The case, which doesn’t strike me as strong, should be that Mr. Trump withheld, or threatened to withhold, congressionally mandated military aid for Ukraine for an illegal purpose. But the witnesses who were supposed to be harmful to Mr. Trump weren’t. They failed to establish, or even argue, that Mr. Trump’s concern with the Biden role in Ukraine, or Ukraine’s role in the 2016 election, was illegitimate.

State Department witness George Kent testified that he himself upbraided Ukrainian officials for ending an investigation of Burisma, Hunter Biden’s employer, which U.S. taxpayer dollars had helped support. He called for—guess what?—an investigation: “I would love to see [Ukraine’s government] find out who the corrupt prosecutor was, and who took the bribe, and how much he was paid.”

William Taylor, another presumably hostile State Department witness, was sufficiently open to the agenda of his outsider president to propose that an official other than Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky make the wished-for announcement, “in coordination with Attorney General Barr’s probe into the investigation of interference in the 2016 elections.”

Like a dinner-theater detective, Mr. Schiff shouts “Aha!” at every confirmation of what has been obvious since the White House released its own transcript of the Trump call with Mr. Zelensky. The Trump administration was keen on arming Ukraine and supporting its new government to exact a cost from Vladimir Putin. That is, everybody in the Trump administration except the president himself, who was cool or indifferent to this agenda but intruded only occasionally to push the Biden talking point.

His staff, apparently appreciating who actually received votes from the electorate, busied itself at times trying to reconcile Mr. Trump’s agenda with their own. And yet, in the manner of factotums everywhere, the agenda they ended up delivering was their own—Ukraine got its arms and presidential meeting—while Mr. Trump’s fell through the cracks.

Mr. Trump is chaotic, unschooled and politically motivated, but only the first two qualities differentiate him from other presidents. He cares only about “the big things,” Ambassador Gordon Sondland testified. Isn’t that the job description? If President Obama’s staff had been as successful as Mr. Trump’s, U.S. troops would never have left Iraq. Yet Mr. Obama was entitled to make the trade-off he did, unfortunate as it was. Securing re-election is the first thing any president owes his supporters. It’s what makes our system go ’round.

Unfortunately, the media, in the grip of narrative-itis and its own partisan myopia, leaves no fact or logical premise unmolested. Numerous outlets peddle the fallacy that election meddling is what economists call a rivalrous good: If Russia engaged in it, Ukraine couldn’t have. An NBC reporter, lacking any bombshells, proclaims that a “bombshell” is the word “more” in an official’s recollected impression that Mr. Trump “cared more” about investigations than he did about Ukraine.

The national media is an idiot at this point to keep the name of the whisteblower, which they’ve known for weeks, from the public. His identity and motives are unquestionably newsworthy. The media exists to report newsworthy information. All the press does is sow distrust about what other news it’s hiding. CONTINUE AT SITE

Former CIA Officer Sentenced to 19 Years in Prison Over Chinese Espionage Contacts By Tobias Hoonhout

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/former-cia-officer-sentenced-to-19-years-in-prison-over-chinese-espionage-contacts/

A Central Intelligence Officer who was paid nearly $1 million from Chinese sources, and admitted to taking directions from Chinese agents to reveal classified U.S. intelligence, was sentenced to 19 years in prison Friday, the third former U.S. intelligence officer to be convicted this year over contacts with China.

Jerry Chun Shing Lee, who served for over a decade in the CIA, “had firsthand knowledge of some of the CIA’s most significant secrets, from the location of operations to counterintelligence techniques to the identities of clandestine human sources and the identities of covert CIA officers,” prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memo.

Lee was arrested in January 2018 after the FBI found notebooks and a thumb drive containing classified intel on CIA operatives and locations. He pleaded guilty in May to conspiring to provide national defense information with a foreign government.

Israeli Settlements Are a Political, Not a Legal Issue By Douglas J. Feith

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/11/israeli-settlements-are-a-political-not-a-legal-issue/

It was not radical for Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to revive the Reagan policy.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has just upended longstanding, widely held opinion about the legality of Israel’s West Bank settlements. Critics say he is off on the law, has radically broken with U.S. policy, and is undermining the pursuit of peace. Those critics are wrong on all scores.

Pompeo made four main points. First, the settlements are not “inherently illegal.” Second, the West Bank’s fate should be determined through negotiations. Third, international law “does not compel a particular outcome” in favor of Israel or the Palestinians. And fourth, the issue is political in nature, not legal, and attacking the settlements’ legality “hasn’t advanced the cause of peace.”

For 35 years U.S. administrations refrained from repeating President Carter’s criticism of Israeli settlements as illegal, Pompeo recounted, but then President Obama broke with this policy by taking the Carter position at the United Nations. President Reagan had rejected Carter’s view. “This administration,” Pompeo said, “agrees with President Reagan.”

I advised President Reagan on the subject. Here’s some background.

President Carter had a famously strained relationship with Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin. Carter pressured him to make concessions to the Palestinians. This included condemnation of Israeli settlements as illegal, supported by a five-page letter dated April 21, 1978, and signed by State Department legal adviser Herbert Hansell.

Ford v Ferrari Makes Race-Car Movies Great Again By Armond White

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/11/movie-review-ford-v-ferrari-makes-race-car-movies-great-again/

An unusual Hollywood exception to the derision of American exceptionalism

There’s a MAGA moment in Ford v Ferrari when the British-immigrant auto mechanic and race-car driver Ken Miles (Christian Bale) stops being a loner and decides to be a team player. He slows down on the track to let the other American drivers on his team join him so they can cruise across the finish line together. This “bringing them in” scene turns out to be Miles’s undoing, relegating him to forgotten history, but it’s one of the few scenes in Ford v Ferrari that audiences unapologetically enjoy; they respond to it as part of their natural, national, car-culture heritage.

Conservatives should pay attention to any element in a Hollywood film that supports their political and moral beliefs. Ford v Ferrari provides that sustenance. Director James Mangold dramatizes the 1964 competition in the 24-hour race at Le Mans, distilled to a three-man alliance of Miles; his mentor, the veteran driver Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon), who had previously raced Le Mans in 1957; and entrepreneur Henry Ford II (Tracy Letts). They bring the Ford Racing Team up to the level of its faster, sleekly engineered European contenders.

The America First implications of Ford v Ferrari can’t be ignored. After the big-screen spectacle and vibrant sound design of revved-up motors and cheering crowds, Mangold swerves into quasi-political points about character. His best scenes show the way ambitious men commit themselves. It’s not about “toxic masculinity,” as producer Jane Rosenthal described Scorsese’s The Irishman (to make it seem progressive). Instead, he revels in high-speed, high-pressure contexts where egotism, expertise, and privilege vie for domination.

New Assault on Orthodox Jew in Brooklyn Reported

http://www.algemeiner.com/2019/11/22/new-assault-on-orthodox-jew-in-brooklyn-repo

Yet another Orthodox Jew was assaulted in Brooklyn on Thursday night, the latest in a series of violent incidents that have set Jewish communities in several of the borough’s neighborhoods on edge.

Thursday’s assault was caught on camera shortly before midnight on Sanford Street near Willoughby Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Police said the unprovoked attack was carried out by a 32-year-old man, who punched his 21-year-old victim without exchanging a word with him.

The suspect was arrested on assault charges shortly after.

More than half of the hate crimes reported in New York City this year have been antisemitic in nature, with over 150 incidents targeting Jews — a rise of 63 percent from the previous year, according to figures released by the New York Police Department in September.

Speaking to The Algemeiner in an extensive interview earlier this month, Rabbi Yaacov Behrman — the founder of the Brooklyn-based Jewish Future Alliance — said that the spate of attacks over the last two years against Orthodox Jews in the Williamsburg, Crown Heights and Borough Park neighborhoods were overwhelmingly perceived within the community as driven by antisemitic hatred.

Doubt lingers about ADL’s ability to fight anti-Semitism in Brooklyn, despite the new push By Shiryn Ghermezian

https://www.jns.org/doubt-lingers-about-adls-ability-to-fight-anti-semitism-in-brooklyn-despite-the-new-push/

“The ADL has failed to call out any form of anti-Semitism that isn’t borne of white supremacy, and their curriculum is more about tolerance and racism in general than it is about the unique history of anti-Semitism,” said Bryan Leib, a board member of Americans Against Anti-Semitism.
Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt announcing an expansion for the “No Place for Hate Peer to Peer Program” in Brooklyn to combat rising anti-Semitism. Source: Anti-Defamation League via Twitter.

Standing alongside Brooklyn Borough president Eric L. Adams, local faith leaders, elected officials and community partners, ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt announced last week that the New York-based group will be doubling the number of Brooklyn schools involved in its “No Place for Hate Peer to Peer Program” for the 2019-20 school year. The ADL committed $250,000 to expanding the initiative, which has helped promote tolerance in more than 1,700 public and private schools nationwide since 1999.

The program has already been rolled out in 22 schools in Brooklyn, N.Y., and reached more than 8,200 students, according to ABC7. The number of schools administering the program will expand to up to 40 this academic year, with a focus on the neighborhoods of Crown Heights, Williamsburg and Borough Park, where most of the recent anti-Semitic incidents against Orthodox Jews have taken place.

ADL: Extreme Antisemitism Among Western European Muslims “Almost Three Times” National Rates Andrew Bostom

https://www.andrewbostom.org/2019/11/adl-2019-data-extreme-antisemitism-among-western-european-muslims-almost-three-times-national-rates/
Yesterday, November 21, 2019, the ADL released its 2019 survey data on the prevalence (occurrence) of extreme Antisemitism (defined, below) within 18 countries assessed between April 15 and June 3, 2019. Six of these countries—Belgium, The United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, France, and Italy—included a Muslim over-sample, allowing for a direct comparison of Muslims vs. Christians, those professing no religion, and the overall populations. 

As ADL’s own press release stated:

“Muslim acceptance of anti-Semitic stereotypes was substantially higher than among the national populations—on average almost three times as high—in the six countries tested: Belgium, France, Germany, Italy”

In sadly typical fashion, however, the ADL downplayed these findings in its press release, effectively concealing them as the last of six bullet points, i.e., # 6 of 6.

The ADL also failed to expressly note how compared to Western European Christians, specifically, Muslims were also ~3-times more likely to harbor extreme Antisemitic attitudes as gauged by abiding at least 6 of 11 Antisemitic stereotypes queried. (see tabulated data)