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January 2020

Progressive Petards When the Left has to live according to its own rules, it will rue the loss of the civilization it destroyed. Victor Davis Hanson *****

https://amgreatness.com/2020/01/19/progressive-petards/

Since at least 2016, CNN has mostly ceased being a news agency, but that hasn’t stopped it from being an active participant in #TheResistance. The network is so caught up in the fervor of this movement that many of its guests and regular hosts have been fired, reprimanded, or apologized for threats to the president or general obscene references (e.g., Reza Aslan, the late Anthony Bourdain, Kathy Griffin).

Many of its marquee reporters have resigned, were fired, or reassigned for fake-news bias (e.g., Thomas Frank, Eric Lichtblau, and Lex Haris), or came under fire for false reporting (Jim Sciutto, Marshall Cohen, and Carl Bernstein) or have had to offer retractions and/or apologies (Gloria Borger, Eric Lichtblau, Jake Tapper, and Brian Rokus.)

Its anchors have apologized for obscenity (Anderson Cooper) or simply making up false statements (Chris Cuomo), while analysts have been caught in a number of contradictions about their own role in on-going scandals (James Clapper).

The common denominator has been the new journalistic ethos that aborting the Trump presidency justifies any means necessary to achieve such noble ends. Throughout CNN’s descent into parody, progressives still smiled at the usefulness of CNN for the larger project of delegitimizing the Trump presidency. Few understood the Thucydidean concept that once nihilists destroy norms and protocols of ethical behavior for perceived short-term advantage, they usually rue the loss when they themselves become victims of their own biased zealotry and are in dire need of the civilizational help they recently ruined.

Violent Muslim Antisemitism In Europe Isn’t “New” Andrew Bostom

https://www.andrewbostom.org/2020/01/violent-muslim-antisemitism-in-europe-isnt-new/

“[A] Jew [is] of that most contemptible of religions, the most vile of faiths…They [Jews] both the ancient and modern* [*defined below] are altogether the worst liars…They are the filthiest and vilest of peoples, their unbelief horrid, their ignorance abominable…The vilest infidel ape [i.e., Jews; per Koran 5:60, 2:65, 7:166]; Do not consider that killing them [Jews] is treachery.”

I recalled those words (above) from my The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism, newly re-issued,in light of a Der Spiegel report on January 14, 2020, and the recent Der Spiegel interview of French philosopher, Alain Finkielkraut, published December 28, 2019.

 

Spiegel’s online news website reported 1/14/20 the arrest of suspected Chechen jihadist men, aged 23 to 28, who had surveilled Berlin’s historic “New Synagogue”, and made video recordings of the building, in preparation for an apparent attack. (Indeed, some 3-months earlier, on October 5, 2019, a knife-wielding Syrian Muslim, identified as Murad M., screaming the jihadist war cry,“Allahu Akbar” [“Allah is Greatest”],  and “Fuck Israel,” was tackled and disarmed at the entrance to the same Berlin New Synagogue.)

 

During his 12/28/19 Der Spiegel interview, Finkielkraut opined that Germany was “encountering a different, new antisemitism.” He observed, accurately, that, “hatred of the Jews is very widespread in the Arab countries,” and “Germany has recently opened its doors wide to a large number of immigrants from these countries.” Finkielkraut then re-emphasized what has become a standard trope: the ostensible sui generis nature of this Muslim strain of Western European Antisemitism, dubbed “new” Antisemitism:

“Will Germany withstand this? Will Germany react to the new antisemitism with exactly the same harshness and relentlessness as against the emergence or reappearance of neo-Nazism? We’ll see about that. Germany may find this just as difficult as France.”

Past as prologue, the opening quotes I cited—within their appropriate doctrinal and historical context—underscore this pervasive modern ignorance (and/or denial) about the millennial legacy of canonical Islamic Jew-hatred, and jihadism, in Europe. Ibn Hazm (d. 1064), an important Muslim jurist, and Abu Ishaq el-Biri, a prominent mid-11th century Muslim poet, made the opening observations about Jews, while residing in mythically “ecumenical,” Muslim-controlled Spain. As analyzed by the pre-eminent scholar of Islam’s Medieval anti-Jewish polemic, Moshe Perlmann, their inflammatory rhetoric, particularly the Koranic epithet “ape” for Jews, was common parlance, which ultimately precipitated the mass slaughter and destruction of the Jewish community in Granada, during a 1066 pogrom by rampaging Muslims. It is estimated that up to four thousand Jews perished, making it the largest anti-Jewish pogrom, till then, in European history.

What’s Next for the Iran Nuclear Deal? by Soeren Kern

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15466/iran-nuclear-deal-what-next

“It’s unlikely that the parties will be able to reach a serious resolution, and the EU knows it….” — Tom Rogan, Washington Examiner, January 17, 2020.

“Trump has distinguished himself from his predecessor. The world’s most famous dealmaker appears not to be angling for a deal, and for good reason — there’s no deal to be had because there’s nothing left to negotiate. [Former U.S. President Barack] Obama set it up that way.” — Lee Smith, Tablet Magazine, January 13, 2020.

“The JCPOA guaranteed that the Iranians would all but have a bomb within 10 years — or by the end of the second term of Obama’s successor…. The point of the deal was not to stop Iran from ever building a bomb but to prevent the Iranians from doing so until Obama left office.” — Lee Smith, Tablet Magazine, January 13, 2020.

“The nuclear deal with Iran is over — it failed. You cannot and must not continue to negotiate with the Islamic regime, you cannot trust it. Such talks are useless. Governments should stop defending the regime through such talks, keeping it alive.” — Mina Ahadi, Chairwoman of the Central Council of Ex-Muslims in Germany, Bild, January 14, 2020.

Britain, France and Germany, the three European signatories of the Iran nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), have activated the agreement’s dispute mechanism in an effort to force Tehran into compliance with its commitment to curb its nuclear program.

The three European countries — also known as the E3 — triggered the so-called Dispute Resolution Mechanism (DRM) on January 14, a week after Iranian authorities announced that they would no longer be bound by any of the agreement’s restrictions in terms of the numbers or type of centrifuges that they can operate or the level of uranium enrichment that they can pursue.

The DRM (Paragraphs 36 and 37 of the JCPOA) starts the clock on a process that could result in the return of international sanctions on Iran. The deal’s signatories now have up to 30 days to resolve their differences, although that time period can be extended by consensus. If the dispute cannot be solved, the matter could be brought before the UN Security Council and could result in the re-imposition of sanctions that had been lifted under the deal. That effort, however, could also easily be blocked by a Chinese or Russian veto.

Iranian authorities said that they were justified in violating the deal because the United States broke the July 2015 agreement by withdrawing in May 2018. In a statement, the E3 foreign ministers rejected Tehran’s argument:

“We do not accept the argument that Iran is entitled to reduce compliance with the JCPOA. Contrary to its statements, Iran has never triggered the JCPOA Dispute Resolution Mechanism and has no legal grounds to cease implementing the provisions of the agreement.”

Christian Couple Kidnapped in Turkey by Uzay Bulut

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15465/turkey-christians-kidnapped

Since January 11, an elderly Assyrian Christian couple, Hurmuz Diril (71) and his wife Şimoni (65), have been missing from the Assyrian village of Mehr, Kovankaya in the province of Şırnak, in Turkey’s southeast.
If the kidnapping of the Diril couple were to terrorize the remaining Assyrian community in Turkey into fleeing the country, it would mark the complete annihilation of yet another native community in the region. Such a tragedy should not be allowed to happen.
Western governments should help to find this elderly couple and see to it that those responsible are held to account.

Since January 11, an elderly Assyrian Christian couple, Hurmuz Diril (71) and his wife Şimoni (65), have been missing from the Assyrian village of Mehr, Kovankaya in the province of Sirnak, in Turkey’s southeast. In wintry, sub-zero conditions, their children, followed by military special units, have been searching for them.

“We found out that my parents were missing when I and my relatives… went to our village on January 12. My father’s uncle last saw them in the morning of January 11…. And my brother last spoke to them on January 7,” the couple’s son, Father Adday Remzi Diril told the newspaper Cumhuriyet.

Father Diril is an Assyrian-Chaldean priest in Istanbul and well known for his life of service to more than 7,000 Iraqi Christian refugees displaced throughout Turkey.

“A neighbor of ours in the village initially did not tell us my parents were kidnapped because he was scared,” Diril told the Mesopotamia News Agency, “but later said they had been kidnapped by armed men.”

An investigation concerning the missing couple is underway; the prosecutor’s office in Sirnak has issued a gag order regarding the matter. The Turkish authorities, Diril said, are in touch with the family. The weather conditions, though, have been treacherous and the search so far unsuccessful.

Yes I Con Lloyd Billingsley’s new book unveils the United Fakes of America. Mark Tapson

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/01/yes-i-con-mark-tapson/

Rachel Dolezal, the white woman who rose to president of an NAACP chapter by pretending to be black. Jussie Smollett, the black actor who blamed a fake hate crime on MAGA hat-wearing white rednecks. Senator Elizabeth Warren, who parlayed a false claim of Native American heritage into acceptance at Harvard Law School.  These are just a few of the most controversial recent examples of Democrats attempting to dupe the public in order to further their careers and/or their radical agendas.

That’s the theme of the new book Yes I Con: United Fakes of America by FrontPage Mag contributor Lloyd Billingsley, author of Hollywood Party: How Communism Seduced the American Film Industry in the 1930s and 1940s, Bill of Writes: Dispatches from the Political Correctness Battlefield, and more. In Yes I Con, Billingsley presents several exhibits of evidence of the left’s habitual fraudulence and self-deception, including Presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Barack Hussein Obama, Somali-born Congresswoman Ilhan Omar and stolen valor perpetrator Sen. Richard Blumenthal, purported gay rights icon Harvey Milk and the aforementioned Elizabeth “Fauxcahontas” Warren, and more. He also indicts the left-leaning media’s complicity in covering up or turning a blind eye to these duplicities.

I asked Billingsley some questions about his new short book for FrontPage Mag.

Mark Tapson: Lloyd, you open with a quote from Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire about the conscience going silent in the “middle state between self-illusion and voluntary fraud.” Do you think the leftist deception you recount in the book stems more from self-delusion, outright fraud, or a combination? In other words, have leftists simply normalized and justified their deceit in their own minds?

Lloyd Billingsley: It’s a combination and a process. Self-delusion can remain a personal problem until the person deploys it to deceive others. That requires the deluded party to silence the conscience in the progression to outright fraud. For example, no harm if Elizabeth Warren fancies herself a Cherokee, but it takes some doing to make that claim the basis of a career, more so to maintain it after the fraud has been exposed beyond any doubt. That’s what Gibbon was on about.

Britain Commits Suicide to Avoid Being Called Racist A case study in how “Islamophobia” charges destroy lives. Robert Spencer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/01/britain-commits-su

The UK’s Mailonline reported Friday that according to a “damning” new report, “sex attacks on young girls by Asian grooming gangs were ignored by police fear of stoking racial tensions, a damning report has ruled.” “Asian” is British media code for “Muslim.”

The Mail added that “a chief inspector from Rotherham was found to have admitted South Yorkshire Police force turned a blind eye to the harrowing cases of abuse…The unnamed senior police officer said: ‘With it being Asians, we can’t afford for this to come out.’” The father of one of the victims recounted: “She’d been missing for weeks and he [the chief inspector] was talking as though she was an adult doing it of her own free will. He said it had been going on for 30 years and that in his day they used to call them ‘P*** shaggers’. I told him she was a child and this was child abuse.”

Indeed it was. But Muslims were a protected class in Britain, and could break laws with impunity, as authorities were too worried about charges of “racism” and “Islamophobia” to go after them.

In just one city, Rotherham, British officials “described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought as racist; others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so.”

Whitewashing the Swedish Nightmare Sometimes libertarianism is the enemy of liberty. Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/01/whitewashing-swedish-nightmare-bruce-bawer/

Poking around YouTube the other day, I stumbled across a 2018 documentary that was written and hosted by Johan Norberg, a 46-year-old Swedish economist who is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, the libertarian think tank in Washington, and who is one of his country’s leading boosters of free trade and free markets. This was hardly Norberg’s first venture into the documentary form: in 2003, Britain’s Channel 4 aired Globalisation is Good, in which Norberg celebrated the prosperity created in Taiwan and Vietnam through the outsourcing of factory jobs from the U.S. – but neglected to breathe a word about the catastrophic impact of that outsourcing on millions of American workers.

Norberg’s 2018 documentary is entitled Sweden: Lessons for America? In it, he traces Sweden’s economic ups and downs over the last couple of centuries: once a dirt-poor land in the grip of guilds and regulations, Sweden embraced the free market and low taxes – resulting in a century of burgeoning prosperity – only to “screw it up” in the 1960s by introducing a big-government welfare state that charged Pippi Longstocking author Astrid Lindgren a 102% income rate and Ingmar Bergman 139%. (He fled to Germany.) From 1976 to 1995, Sweden went downhill; interest rates hit 500%; IKEA moved its headquarters abroad. But the story, as Norberg tells it, has a happy ending: the 1990s brought reforms – deregulation, lower taxes, school vouchers, widespread privatization of public services, no minimum wage – that resulted in a first-rate climate for entrepreneurship and innovation and a “very productive private economy” that yields enough wealth to fund generous welfare benefits and pensions. America, we’re urged in Norberg’s conclusion, should look to Sweden as a model.

Trump To Take On Birth Tourism Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2020/01/trump-take-birth-tourism-daniel-greenfield/

Immigration abuse isn’t a single problem. It’s really a series of problems, sometimes overlapping, but not necessarily.

It’s not just, “These guys are crossing the border illegally”, though that’s obviously a big problem. Birth tourism is one of the more obscure and infuriating problems that comes about as a consequence of the terrible idea that anyone who is born in the United States (unless they’re the children of a foreign diplomat) are automatically Americans. Or, birthright citizenship.

There’s no serious basis that just being born in America, regardless of the legal status of your parents, should immediately convey citizenship. It’s an aberration, internationally, where things just don’t work this way. (Much like voting without any ID.)

And the industry of birth tourism has sprung up around the birthright citizenship loophole with, often, Chinese nationals coming to the United States to give birth, and coming away with instant citizenship for their son or daughter.

The Women’s March Goes From ‘Hundreds of Thousands’ to ‘Hundreds’ The snow defeats the snowflakes. Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/01/womens-march-goes-hundreds-thousands-hundreds-daniel-greenfield/

Three years ago, the Women’s March brought a million anti-Trump protesters to Washington D.C.

This year, 25,000 people signed up online. That was unrealistically optimistic because organizers had only obtained a permit for up to 10,000 protesters. And they only ended up with thousands.

Impeachment should have encouraged a bigger turnout, but the snowflakes couldn’t handle the snow.

The first person quoted in D.C.’s WUSA9 report explained that she couldn’t come because, “it’s supposed to be really cold and snowy and that is definitely a factor for me.”

There were few pink hats among those who did show up and a lot of black and brown winter gear. Among the few march attendees to wear pink was a bedraggled dog in a pink halter, pinks slacks, white socks and Mary Janes, while her owner waved a sign reading, “Public Cervix Announcement.”

The Hole in the Impeachment Case By Andrew C. McCarthy

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/01/trump-impeachment-trial-charges-lack-indictable-offense/

Something is missing from the charges against Trump: An impeachable offense.

Thought experiment No. 1: Suppose Bob Mueller’s probe actually proves that Donald Trump is under Vladimir Putin’s thumb. Fill in the rest of the blanks with your favorite corruption fantasy: The Kremlin has video of the mogul-turned-president debauching himself in a Moscow hotel; the Kremlin has a bulging file of real-estate transfers through which Trump laundered racketeering proceeds for Putin’s favored mobsters and oligarchs; or Trump is recorded cutting a deal to drop Obama-era sanctions against Putin’s regime if Russian spies hack Democratic accounts.

Thought experiment No. 2: Adam Schiff is not a demagogue. (Remember, this is fantasy.) At the very first televised hearing, when he alleged that President Trump told Ukrainian president Zelensky, “I want you to make up dirt on my political opponent . . . lots of it,” Schiff was not defrauding the public. Instead, impeachment’s Inspector Clouseau can actually prove that Trump was asking a foreign government to manufacture out of whole cloth evidence that Vice President Biden and his son were cashing in on the former’s political influence (as opposed to asking that Ukraine look into an arrangement so objectively sleazy that the Obama administration itself agitated over what to do about it).

What do these two scenarios have in common, besides being fictional? Answer: If either of them were real, we’d already be talking about President Pence’s upcoming State of the Union address.