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February 2020

Fanning the Flames By Marilyn Penn

http://politicalmavens.com/

In a country reeling from the uptick in violence such as school shootings, cop-killings, anti-semitic, anti-Christian and racist massacres, not to mention the daily news reports of random street and subway stabbings, slashings and shootings – the NYTimes chose to offer this as its front page article on the impeachment :
(2/2/20): “Ralph Waldo Emerson seemed to foresee the lesson of the Senate impeachment trial of President Trump. ‘When you strike at a king,’ Emerson said, ‘ you must kill him.” This advice, quoted by the Times Chief White House Correspondent Peter Baker sounds very similar to that issued by various Islamic religious leaders who have urged their followers to kills Jews anywhere they find them, using any implements at their disposal, particularly knives and large trucks Unfortunately, it resembles some of what Black Lives Matter urges on its followers with signs hailing “Kill the Pigs.”

The quote was originally a response to Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s request to Emerson to critique the paper he was writing about Plato for the course he was taking as a Harvard undergraduate Emerson, obviously concerned about the loose ends Holmes had left in the paper, gave the young student some strong metaphoric advice: Plato was the king and though Holmes had struck him, he had not successfully completed his arguments against him.

Seen in the newspaper which has blamed most of the divisiveness in our society on Trump’s “racist rhetoric,” this little known quote, completely out of context, can be seen as an inflammatory invitation to the deranged malcontents in a lawless and dangerous society, one which also increasingly has trouble parsing the meaning and intent of metaphor.

Remembering the Great Jewish Historian Gertrude Himmelfarb by Edward Alexander

https://www.algemeiner.com/2020/02/02/remembering-the-great-jewish-historian-ge

Gertrude Himmelfarb, prolific historian of the Victorian period, professor emeritus of history at City University of New York, graduate of New Utrecht High School in Brooklyn and Brooklyn College, student at both University of Chicago and Cambridge, and powerful voice for moral and political conservatism, died in December at her home in Washington, DC. She was 97 years old.

She belonged to one of the first families of American conservatism, broadly defined: She was the sister of Milton Himmelfarb, long a brilliant contributing editor at Commentary and the widow of conservative thinker Irving Kristol — with whom she had formed a husband-wife team to equal Lionel and Diana Trilling. Their son, William Kristol, was the influential editor of the now defunct Weekly Standard.

Himmelfarb also belonged to that remarkable knot of New York Jews who were the children of immigrants yet chose to relocate themselves imaginatively within a European culture: Irvin Ehrenpreis from Manhattan became the biographer of and supreme authority on Jonathan Swift; Lionel Trilling, from the Bronx, became the biographer of Matthew Arnold; and Brooklynite Himmelfarb became the biographer of statesman Lord Acton (not only English but Catholic).

Unlike Ehrenpreis and Trilling, Himmelfarb did not distance herself from her Jewish roots. Quite the contrary. She found and celebrated Jewish values that were deeply rooted within Victorian values, firm ideas of right and wrong, the recognition that “thou shalt not” predominates over “thou shalt.” It was that link which brought her to the attention of Margaret Thatcher, who had been derided by her “progressive” political opponents for embracing Victorian values as the foundation stone of British greatness.

TRUMP- ALINSKY RULES AND IMPEACHMENT BLOWBACK

www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/02/alinskys_revenge_haunts_the_democrats_as_they_turn_to_billionaire_bloomberg.html

Alinsky’s revenge haunts the Democrats as they turn to billionaire Bloomberg
Thomas Lifson

The oldest political party in the world is on the verge of implosion. While a lot can happen in nine months (ask any obstetrician), the tectonic plates of American politics are shifting, and the Democrats’ political edifice is built on top of a gigantic set of fault lines. Were Saul Alinsky still alive, instead of spending quality time with the entity to whom he dedicated Rules for Radicals, he would be laughing his head off over the mess the party that claims the mantle of advancing the poor has made of its election prospects.

I have long suspected that Donald J. Trump has absorbed Alinsky, for he is a skillful practitioner of most, if not all of Alinsky’s rules. Keep them in mind the next time you watch a Trump Rally on TV or in person (if you can squeeze in):

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/02/impeachment_blowback_trump_supporters_feeling_good.html

Impeachment blowback: Trump supporters feeling good By Karin McQuillan

President Trump’s voters have been on a slow burn ever since the Russia hoax was launched to frame him.  We got angrier as it dragged on for two endless years, dirtying the president up with baseless investigations, and suppressing his approval ratings.  When the rigged investigation flopped, and the responsible Obama officials came under investigation by the DOJ, we thought it was behind us.  The respite was brief.  The Ukraine Hoax rolled out, the sham impeachment was launched, and Trump supporters entered a stage of cold, implacable rage and the determination to win. Dems have no interest in and no idea of the impact of their antics on normal Americans. We deplorables don’t count as people to them.  Dems have no idea that millions of Americans deeply love and understand the American Constitution.  That we see precisely the ugly relationship between Marxist activists, self-serving pols, preening liberals and a corrupt press that is the new Democrat power base. 

Shock: Release of Famed Iowa Poll Cancelled at the last Minute After Buttigieg Campaign Complains Debra Heine

https://amgreatness.com/2020/02/01/shock-release-of-famed-iowa-poll-cancelled-at-the-last-minute-after-buttigieg-campaign-complains/

The final Des Moines Register/CNN/Mediacom poll of likely Iowa Democratic caucus-goers was pulled Saturday night shortly before it was to be released, supposedly because of a complaint that a name was left off the list of choices. As a result, the historically accurate, 76-year-old Iowa poll will not be released before Iowa voters caucus on Monday.

CNN had planned an hour-long show to cover the results of the poll live and had to cancel at the last minute.

The announcement stunned the political world and led to widespread speculation that the real reason the poll was spiked was because they didn’t like the results.

According to The New York Times, Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s campaign complained that his name was left off the list of candidates in one call interview.

The poll is conducted by telephone from a call center, where operators read from a prepared script of candidates’ names to determine who a voter plans to support. One operator had apparently enlarged the font size on their computer screen, perhaps cutting off Mr. Buttigieg’s name from the list of options, according to two people familiar with the incident who did not have permission to speak about it publicly.
After every phone call, the list of candidates’ names is randomly reordered, so Mr. Buttigieg may not have been uniquely affected by the error, one of the people said. But the poll’s overseers were unable to determine if the mistake was an isolated incident.

‘Walls Are Closing In’ on the Democrats Buy stock in popcorn companies in anticipation of the entertainment to come. Roger Kimball

https://amgreatness.com/2020/02/01/walls-closing-in-on-the-democrats/

On Friday, as I and about 456,874 other people predicted, the Senate voted against calling yet more witnesses in the make-believe, 100 percent certified partisan impeachment fiasco run by the Democrats and their media cheerleaders.

That vote brought this lucrative entertainment to an end, de facto if not de jure. The official, signed-sealed-and-delivered end will come Wednesday, we’re told, when the Senate will vote on whether to acquit the president of the two charges on which he was impeached by the House. Spoiler alert: They will.

A quick refresher. Those two charges were “abuse of power” and “obstruction of Congress.”

Let’s take them in order. The alleged abuse of power charge stemmed from President Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Zelinsky. Trump was keen to have Zelinsky look into alleged Ukrainian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. He was also keen to have him look into allegations that Hunter Biden, the son of Joe Biden, who is campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination, was knee-deep in corrupt activities.

“There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son,” President Trump said, “that [Joe] Biden stopped the prosecution [of Burisma, the corrupt company on whose Board Hunter sat and from which he collected more than $50,000 a month] and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the attorney general would be great.”

Manuel Quezon: Little-known savior of Jews By Michael Curtis

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/02/manuel_quezon_littleknown_savior_of_jews.html

A new film debuted around the world last month, an account of events during World War II in Manila: Quezon’s Game directed by Matthew Rosen, a filmmaker who began in London and lives in the Philippines. 

The film provides, using three languages, a version of a little- known story, of which there is no definite official statement and a lack of historical manuscripts, of the rescue organized by President Manuel L. Quezon starting in 1938 of 1200 German and Austrian Jews, coincidentally the same number of Jews saved by the well-known Oskar Schindler, who found shelter from the Holocaust in the Philippines.  Quezon had proposed an “Open Door policy,” one that would admit up to 10,000 Jews, but only 1280 made it. The ambitious and generous plan failed because of events in World War II and the Japanese invasion of the Philippines.

The context of the story is that the country, which by the Treaty of Paris 1898 that ended the Spanish-American war was ceded to the U.S as a territory, was trying to get full independence from the U.S. which it finally obtained on July 4, 1946. Until then the country was a protectorate of the U.S.  The Commonwealth of the Philippines from 1935 to 1946 was the administrative body governing the country, preparing for a transition to full independence, controlled visas for entry.

Manuel Quezon in October 1935 won the first national presidential election, gaining 68% of the vote. As president he was determined to allow Jewish immigrants from Europe into the country but has to contend with internal critics and American policy on the issue.  Suffering from tuberculosis, he was fluent in English, a gifted pianist, brilliant lawyer, card player of poker and bridge, and had been a playboy who shaved off his moustache because it tickled the girls too much.  Quezon was a compassionate individual, a light of morality, and his story deserved to be better known.

Wuhan Revisited By Marion DS Dreyfus

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/02/wuhan_revisited.html

For a number of years in the 20-aughts, I worked in Wuhan, Hubei Province, People’s Republic of China.

China being China, and Wuhan being a provincial outpost of old China, an amalgamation of three towns incorporated under the one name, observations of life there then might be of interest now, given the tumult over the mushrooming conflagration of the coronavirus.

Because I lived on the outskirts of town, near a squealing pig farm, many buffalo in the fields, goats occasioning the streets, wild dogs inoffensively wandering about most of the open-air eateries not presumptuous enough to call themselves restaurants — a few plastic chairs and unwashed PVC tables scattered near a rough kitchen, basically — I was faced daily with the critical choice: Shall I risk whatever microbes or bacteria or whatever we might ‘catch’ or go along with the locals, who ate whatever was on offer without much of a tremor or fret.

Most of the time, frankly, I was hungry, and my colleagues and I trusted to Providence to keep us out of what the local Wuhanites called the doctor’s office, or the uncontemporary places they called hospitals, where  if you were unlucky enough to be in one of the stalls, your relatives brought you food, bed linens, and whatever else you needed that was outside the pill regimen or ‘treatment’ you were being accorded.

At night, because my brand- new apartment had been completed with a living room, a bedroom and a marble-floored Western bathroom, a major prize considering everyone else having a squat toilet, even at work, but no kitchen at all, I would  do my work, try to fight off the plagues of mosquitoes that bedeviled me every single night. Despite my burning Citronella candles as an encircling talismanic circle around my work-desk in a vain attempt to discourage the fierce buggers, every morning I’d have a field of itching bites up and down any exposed flesh.

Man Arrested in Arizona Accused of Being a Leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq By Rick Moran

https://pjmedia.com/trending/man-arrested-in-arizona-accused-of-being-a-leader-of-al-qaeda-in-iraq/

Information is sketchy, but what we know so far is that a man was arrested in Arizona on Friday at the request of the Iraqi government which claims he is a leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq and is being accused of murdering two Iraqi policemen in Fallujah in 2006.

Ali Yousif Ahmed Al-Nouri, 42, was arrested in the Phoenix area after a warrant was issued by the Justice Department on Thursday.

Fox News:

“According to the information provided by the Government of Iraq in support of its extradition request, Ahmed served as the leader of a group of Al-Qaeda terrorists in Al-Fallujah, Iraq, which planned operations targeting Iraqi police,” Arizona federal prosecutors said in a news release.

“Ahmed and other members of the Al-Qaeda group allegedly shot and killed a first lieutenant in the Fallujah Police Directorate and a police officer in the Fallujah Police Directorate, on or about June 1, 2006, and October 3, 2006, respectively.”

It’s unknown how long Ahmed al-Nouri has been in the U.S. or how he got here. Nor is it known how long he lived in Arizona — a state not unfamiliar with terrorists being infiltrated into the U.S.

Al-Nouri is apparently a significant catch.

Google Is Cloaking Monopoly Power in the Guise of Virtue to Gain More Control Over Users’ Data By Drew Johnson

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/google-is-cloaking-monopoly-power-in-the-guise-of-virtue-to-gain-more-control-over-users-data/

The tech world was rocked by Google’s recent announcement regarding its internet browser, Chrome. Over the next few years, the search engine company will begin banning third-party cookies from its platform. The change will prohibit companies unaffiliated with Google from tracking the data of Chrome users.

Google heralded the move as a victory for internet privacy, declaring, “Users are demanding greater privacy… and it’s clear the web ecosystem needs to evolve to meet those demands.”

Unfortunately for Google’s public relations team, reality doesn’t quite conform to their slick messaging strategy. The tech giant may claim that their rationale for eliminating third-party cookies is an altruistic pursuit of security and privacy, but the truth is something different entirely. Google is merely looking to strengthen its monopoly power over the tech industry. And it is using the guise of virtue to cloak its ambitions.

The troubling reality lying behind Google’s claims of virtue is hiding in plain sight. Google is banning solely third-party cookies. In other words, Google is banning its competition.

A Global Catastrophe: “260 Million Christians Experience High Levels of Persecution” by Raymond Ibrahim

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15507/christians-persecution-global-catastrophe

Dictatorial paranoia continues to make North Korea (#1) the worst nation. “If North Korean Christians are discovered, they are deported to labor camps as political criminals or even killed on the spot.” — World Watch List 2020, Open Doors.

Otherwise, as has been the case in all statistics and reports on the global persecution of Christians, not only does “Islamic oppression” remain the chief “source of persecution” faced by Christians in seven of the absolute ten worst nations, but 38 of the 50 nations composing the list are either Muslim majority or have a sizeable Muslim population.

The targeting of Christians around the world has become more widespread than ever. Part of this is because “persecution against Christians has taken a technological turn.” ….in India (#10) — where “Hindu radicals often attack Christians with little to no consequences” — “the government plans to introduce a national facial recognition system. Similarly, China (#23)….” — World Watch List 2020, Open Doors.

Perhaps the most disturbing trend is that the number of persecuted Christians continues to grow year after year….

Will this trend ever stop and reverse, or will it continue to get worse — and possibly even spill into those nations that, for now, enjoy religious freedom and equality?

 

The global persecution of Christians has reached unprecedented levels: “260 million Christians experience high levels of persecution” around the world, notes the recently published Open Doors World Watch List 2020, an annual report that ranks the top 50 countries where Christians are most persecuted for their faith.