Displaying posts published in

January 2020

The Palestinians and Europe’s Secret Agenda by Khaled Abu Toameh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15455/europe-palestinians-agenda

The foreign media and human rights organizations seem quite uninterested in Palestinians who are arrested or tortured to death by PA security forces. After all, they have not been arrested by Israel for security-related offences.

The European Union is said to be pressuring the Palestinians to hold long overdue presidential and parliamentary elections. It is not clear, however, how the Palestinians would hold new elections at a time when the PA and Hamas are busy in the West Bank and Gaza Strip locking up their political opponents.

The “political arrests” are yet another indication of human rights violations perpetrated by Palestinian leaders against their own people. Inexplicably, though, the EU appears unfazed by them. Instead of pressuring the PA and Hamas to hold elections — that in any case neither side seeks, as it would almost certainly hand a further victory to the terrorist group Hamas — it would be better for the EU to encourage Palestinian leaders, as a first step towards holding free elections, at least to cease and desist making political arrests.

Failing to hold Palestinian leaders accountable for their human rights violations casts serious doubt on the EU’s desire to hold new elections in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and their deeper, seemingly malign desires for the region as a whole.

For many years, the Palestinian Authority (PA) and other Palestinian parties have been reporting on a daily basis about Palestinians who are arrested by the Israeli authorities in the West Bank and east Jerusalem. These Palestinians are arrested on suspicion of involvement in anti-Israel security offences. There is nothing unusual about these arrests, which have been taking place for decades and are even publicly announced by the Israeli authorities.

It Is Time for Iran to Reenter Negotiations on the Nuclear Deal by Con Coughlin

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15447/iran-negotiations-nuclear-deal

Speaking in his first interview since his impressive victory in last month’s general election, Mr Johnson said he recognised US concerns about the 2015 deal, but insisted there had to be a way of stopping Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons. “If we are going to get rid (of the 2015 deal), we need a replacement,” he told the BBC. “Let’s replace it with the Trump deal.”

Mr Johnson’s comments came shortly after the three European signatories to the deal — Britain, France and Germany — announced that they were triggering a dispute mechanism in the deal following Iran’s recent violations of the deal.

Which means that Tehran now faces a stark choice: either it reenters negotiations and addresses the serious flaws in the deal agreed by Mr Obama, or it faces yet further international isolation.

Iran’s belated admission that it was, after all, responsible for shooting down Ukraine International Airlines flight PS752, killing all 176 people on board, could ultimately pave the way for a fresh round of negotiations on the controversial issue of its nuclear programme.

The fact that Tehran has now been forced to admit that the Ukrainian aircraft was shot down by an Iranian anti-aircraft missile, and that the disaster was not the result, as Iranian aviation experts had initially claimed, of a catastrophic engine failure, represents a major setback for the regime’s hardliners, who have ultimate authority over the country’s military.

Rashida Tlaib and Rasha Mubarak, American Muslims for Hamas Why are Democrats ignoring the Islamist fifth column infiltrating their party? Joe Kaufman

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/01/rashida-tlaib-and-r

Following the founding of Hamas in 1987, the Muslim Brotherhood set up worldwide committees to assist the newly formed terrorist group. In the US, it was called the Palestine Committee, and by the end of 1994, it would consist of four organizations, all falling under the leadership of then-global head of Hamas, Mousa Abu Marzook. Of the four, only one remains, CAIR. However, remnants of the others came together in the form of a more recent group, American Muslims for Palestine (AMP). Given AMP’s connection to a terrorist organization, why would Democrat officials, including US Representative Rashida Tlaib, go out of their way to aid and abet the group, and why isn’t the Democratic Party doing anything to stop this?

AMP was established, in 2006, with the goal of vilifying and delegitimizing Israel. True to its Hamas roots, AMP’s message is laced with support for violence. The Executive Director of AMP is Osama Abu-Irshaid. Prior to AMP, he served as editor of Al Zaytounah, the official newsletter of the Palestine Committee’s Islamic Association of Palestine (IAP). This month, Abu-Irshaid stated at an AMP event, “Palestinians, if they don’t take what they want willingly, they will take it forcefully. We promise you this, we’re going to liberate our land and we’re going to liberate our people, whether they like it or they don’t like it. Well, they have picked the wrong enemy!”

Last month, AMP celebrated, on its Facebook page, the 32nd anniversary of the First Intifada, the violent uprising against Israel from which Hamas was created. During its January 2018 ‘JERUSALEM IS A RED LINE’ rally, AMP repeatedly led chants of “Long live Intifada.” AMP’s Chairman, Hatem Bazian, who is also the founder of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), at an April 2004 rally held in San Francisco, called for an intifada in America. He stated, “Well, we’ve been watching intifada in Palestine, we’ve been watching an uprising in Iraq. And the question is what are we doing? How come we don’t have an intifada in this country?”

Muslim Illegal Alien Accused Of Strangling 92-Year-Old Woman In Sanctuary City Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2020/01/muslim-illegal-alien-accused-strangling-92-year-daniel-greenfield/

This is what happens when you have a sanctuary city and treat criminals as an oppressed minority and a protected class.

Police are investigating the death of a beloved neighborhood grandma whose body was found on a Queens street as a homicide.

Maria Fuertes, 92, was found unconscious and unresponsive near Liberty Avenue and 127th Street in the Richmond Hill section just after midnight on Monday.

Police say surveillance video shows the man strangling Fuertes until she falls to the ground.

Fuertes was affectionately known as the “cat lady.” Neighbors say she would come out at night to feed stray animals.

But the problem is that New York City has been feeding a different kind of stray.

Federal officials say the suspect in the murder of a 92-year-old woman should’ve been turned over to immigration officers months ago.

Why New World Slavery Was Inevitable What The 1619 Project gets wrong. Jason D. Hill

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/01/1619-project-omits-significant-detail-new-world-jason-d-hill/

The 1619 Project on slavery is a program organized by The New York Times in 2019 under the auspices of one of its chief staff writers, Nikole Hanna-Jones, with the goal of re-examining the legacy of slavery in the United States — and timed for the 400th anniversary of the arrival in America of the first enslaved people from West Africa. The goal of the project is to reframe the country’s history, and to establish 1619 as true a founding of America as was the formal 1776 creation of the United States of America. The essays range in scope from attempting to prove how modern American capitalism is indelibly tied to slavery, to the alleged massive contributions the backward agrarian Southern institution of slavery actually made to the financial magnificence of the United States.

What I hope to establish in this article is not an attack against the 1619 Project — which has many well-documented nefarious components. I’d like to offer something different: a philosophical-anthropological account of why I believe chattel slavery was the inevitable outcome of a clash between the presence of a manifest destiny of European man, and the absence of one in African and, generally speaking—Indigenous Man.   

When European Man and African Man first encountered each other it must have been a shock to the sensibilities of both. Having established a particular relationship to the earth that differed greatly from that of African man, European man saw himself as more than custodian of the earth—he was its earthly owner who exercised Divine dominion over it. He had done this by creating an abstract personality that had devised a method of exploiting and conquering nature to adapt it to suit his needs. He had, in effect, divorced himself from his animality, transcended it, and placed nature in a subordinate position which he dominated and controlled with weapons, tools and reason. Objects he encountered, including soil, trees, animals, minerals and figures resembling human-beings outside the historical process who presented themselves as part of nature—were treated as nature; that is, they were simply appropriated, controlled, taken out of the state of nature and commodified into socially useful artifacts for human consumption.

Pelosi’s Impeachment Offenses The Senate should vote to acquit or convict on the evidence at hand.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/pelosis-impeachment-offenses-11579134502?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

House Democrats have finally vouchsafed to deliver their impeachment articles to the Senate, a month after they claimed their rushed votes were essential to save the republic. The Senate can now do better by the Constitution by holding a trial that judges President Trump without validating the partisan House process and its weak case.

Nancy Pelosi’s delay in appointing House managers further exposes how Democrats have defined impeachment down. The House hearings blocked GOP witnesses and limited cross-examination. Despite selective leaks and a pro-impeachment media, they failed to move public opinion or persuade Republicans that Mr. Trump committed impeachable offenses.

And now the Speaker admits she withheld the articles to intimidate Republicans into calling witnesses that the House wouldn’t call. “We think we accomplished in the past few weeks is that we wanted the public to see the need for witnesses, witnesses with firsthand knowledge of what happened, documentation which the president has prevented from coming to the Congress,” Mrs. Pelosi said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.” “Now the ball is in their court to either do that or pay a price.”

Impeachment and the Fight Over the Deep State By Charles Lipson –

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/01/15/impeachment_and_the_fight_over_the_deep_state_142152.html

Why is official Washington so determined to rid itself of Donald Trump? The usual answers focus on the country’s ideological divisions, now calcified in the parties, and Trump’s polarizing personality. Democrats of all stripes truly loathe him. All true, but those are only part of the answer. 

There is a deeper reason that helps explain both the origins of the impeachment articles and the larger movement to remove Trump. The key is that Trump not only ran against Washington’s entrenched power, he is actually delivering on that promise. Nothing is more dangerous to the Beltway’s power and profits, to its most powerful actors and the foot soldiers behind them. Those endangered interests are the essential backdrop to the House impeachment and Senate trial. 

Trump not only ran against the capital’s lobbyists, lawyers, and bureaucrats, he has avoided capture by them since taking office. Instead of making his peace with traditional Republican constituencies, such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, he has shut them out. He pays little attention to familiar Republican think tanks. Instead of deferring to state party leaders, he stepped into the primaries, backed his own candidates (often underdogs), and showed it was fatal for Republicans to oppose him. Back in Washington, the Democrats shut out Trump, deciding from the outset to block as many of his Cabinet and judicial appointments as they could. The result is that Trump firmly controls his own party and is uniformly opposed by Democrats, who are otherwise fractured by ideology and age. 

Millionaires demand that California save others from their fate By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/millionaires_demand_that_california_save_others_from_their_fate.html

In California, America’s limousine liberals are at it again, demanding that the rapacious California legislature step in and manage corporations lest anyone within the corporation become too rich. Leading the charge is Walt Disney’s great niece.

Abigail Disney is a child of incredible privilege because she is the granddaughter of Roy O. Disney and great niece of Walt Disney, the two men whose genius combined to create The Walt Disney Company. Abigail, a degree jockey, went to all the right schools, by which we really mean all the leftist schools: Yale, Stanford, and Columbia.

As an adult, Abigail has taught English, written about the celebration of violence in American fiction, and produced and directed a handful of documentary films. She is purely leftist in her politics and is, of course, hostile to Israel.

Although Abigail claims to have given away $70 million since she gained control of her inheritance in 1981, she is still estimated to be worth $120 million. In other words, she still has a lot left to give away.

San Francisco continues to shine a light on what Leftism does to civilization By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/san_francisco_continues_to_shine_a_light_on_what_leftism_does_to_civilization.html

In the 1970s, San Francisco, as was true for most major American cities, had gotten very shabby. While tourists still flocked to the neighborhood directly north of Market Street, where they could find Union Square, fancy stores, and upscale hotels, those who crossed Market Street and headed south found themselves in a four-block-square area of unpleasant squalor. There were always a handful of drunken men sleeping it off in the doorways of decrepit buildings and the sidewalks stank of urine.

By the end of the 1970s, San Francisco began a massive plan to revitalize that area. It tore down the decayed buildings and, in their place, built the Moscone Conference Center, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Yerba Buena Gardens, and the Metreon theater and shopping center. It was all beautiful and inviting. People loved coming to trade shows and conferences in San Francisco, and families happily took their children to the museum, the garden, the skating rink, and the movie theaters.

Things aren’t like that anymore. While it was once just the South of Market region that was icky because of a few sleeping (or rambunctious) drunks, some stinky pee, and some shabby buildings, tourists are discovering that San Francisco’s entire downtown is inundated with hundreds of scary homeless people, mounds of fecal matter, thousands of discarded needles, and clusters of tents and shopping carts.

For the time being, at least, the dead can vote in Wisconsin By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/for_the_time_being_at_least_the_dead_can_vote_in_wisconsin.html

Two days ago, we hailed the good news that a trial court judge in Wisconsin held the Elections Commission and three of its Democrat members in contempt because they refused to abide by his December order that they remove 200,000 non-viable names from the state’s voting records. One day later, on Tuesday, the state appellate court stepped in to stop the Elections Commission from cleaning out the cemetery vote:

The removal of as many as 209,000 names was put on hold a day after an Ozaukee County judge found three members of the Wisconsin Elections Commission in contempt of court for ignoring an order he gave in December 2019.

An appeals court judge also blocked the contempt finding in a separate order, putting on hold a decision that fined the three Democratic members $250 a day each until they voted to purge the names.

The appeals court on Tuesday ordered the lower court’s order against the commissioners, and a Dec. 13 order to purge the names from voter rolls, “stayed until further order of this court,” the court clerk wrote.

The rulings will ensure, temporarily, that thousands of names will not be removed from the rolls, until the appeals court reviews the dispute. Democrats have raised the alarm over the potential removal of so many names from the voter roll in a state set to be a battleground when President Donald Trump seeks reelection in November.