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January 2023

Three Muslim Knife Attacks on NYPD Officers in 8 Years Daniel Greenfield

https://www.danielgreenfield.org/?utm_source=MadMimi&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Daniel+Greenfield+Article%3A+Three+Muslim+Knife+Attacks+on+NYPD+Officers+in+8+Years&

At 9:30 PM, partygoers in Times Square wearing purple Planet Fitness hats heard a bang.

The ball hadn’t dropped, another Jihadi had. Along with three cops.

Trevor Bickford, 19, had taken the train down from Wells, Maine: a town of less than 10,000 souls. The born-again Jihadi had turned to Islam after his father’s drug overdose. He urged his mother and brothers to join him in serving Allah or they would perish in “hellfire”.

Maine isn’t a big hub of Islamic terrorism so the local teens who convert to Islam have to go to more exciting places to kill infidels in the name of Allah and earn their fellow 72 virgins.

In November, Xavier Pelkey, 19, of Waterville, Maine, a city of 15,000, was indicted for joining ISIS and plotting to kill some Shiites at a mosque in Chicago.

Pelkey and three other Jihadists intended to “enter the Shia mosque and separate the adults from the children, then murder the adults”. Then they planned to move on to a synagogue.

The plot to massacre Muslims in a mosque (never mind Jews) received virtually no coverage in the media because while Xavier is white, he’s a Muslim who had changed his name to Abdullah or ‘Servant of Allah’. Xavier’s two other pals, an unnamed 15-year-old in Chicago and a 17-year-old in Kentucky, had assembled hand painted ISIS flags and homemade bombs.

Xavier told them he wanted to be a martyr “and die while fighting in the cause of Allah”.

Trevor might have been jealous that Xavier/Abdullah beat him out by a month as the first ISIS terrorist out of Maine and took the train to New York City for what must have seemed like the biggest and juiciest target: the massive crowds gathered in Times Square to cheer the ball drop.

Muslim terrorists had previously hit public celebrations. And while Trevor was only armed with a machete, in a crowd that big, he probably figured that he couldn’t fail to kill someone.

Turkey’s ‘Crimes against Humanity’ and Illegal Occupation of Cyprus by Uzay Bulut

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19290/cyprus-turkey-crimes-against-humanity

[T]he invading Turkish forces [in 1974] murdered innocent civilians, raped women and children, and plundered northern Cyprus. They forcibly displaced around 170,000 Greek Cypriots, or a third of the total population of the Republic of Cyprus….

“The widespread or systematic practice of enforced disappearance constitutes a crime against humanity as defined in applicable international law and shall attract the consequences provided for under such applicable international law.” — United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner, International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, 2006.

According to the statistics, the highest number of complaints to the European Court of Human Rights, after Russia, involved Turkey…. In 2021, Turkey topped the list for the number of ECtHR judgments that found violations of freedom of expression.

“[T]here has been a collective decades-long failure to uphold the rule of law in an adequate manner befitting the post-1945 legal order.” — Dr. Klearchos A. Kyriakides, “The Search for Security via Answers to Questions on Law, Criminal Justice and Impunity,” forum.agora-dialogue.com, June 17, 2017

Dr. Kyriakides also notes the failure of Turkey to become a state party to more than 70 instruments of international law.

For criminal justice to be served in Cyprus, Kyriakides recommends that a new independent international criminal tribunal in the lines of the tribunals established by the victorious Allies in Nuremberg or by the UN Security Council in relation to the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda should be established concerning the crimes Turkey and its agents committed in Cyprus.

“[C]ontrary to international humanitarian law, the United Nations shoulders at least some of the responsibility for fostering a culture of impunity. The United Nations has never established any independent international criminal tribunal for the Republic of Cyprus along the lines of the precedents established….” — Dr. Klearchos A. Kyriakides, “The Search for Security via Answers to Questions on Law, Criminal Justice and Impunity,” published in connection with the “Conference on Cyprus” in Geneva, on June 28, 2017.

Investigations could warrant an independent Nuremberg-style or Hague-style tribunal to deal with the war crimes committed.

On August 15, 1974, Pavlos Solomi, 42, and his son, Solomis Pavlou Solomi, 17, were arrested by Turks at their home in the Cypriot village of Komi Kepir during the second phase of Turkey’s military invasion of Cyprus.

Panagiota Pavlou Solomi spent the remainder of her life trying to find her missing husband and son. Finally, 43 years after their abduction, in 2017, their remains were found in Galatia Lake by the Committee on Missing Persons in Cyprus (CMP), which exhumed what was left of them. A funeral was held for the murdered father and son in March 2018, but not in their beloved village of Komi Kepir. That village is still illegally occupied by Turkey. The family buried the corpses in the free region of the Republic of Cyprus, where they currently reside.

The Equity Paradox Equal opportunity rewards excellence. Equal outcomes require tyranny and are indifferent to excellence.  By Edward Ring

https://amgreatness.com/2023/01/03/the-equity-paradox/

If a society strives to achieve “equity” for every citizen merely by providing equal opportunity, it would need to accept unequal outcomes. If a society does not accept unequal outcomes, it would need to provide unequal opportunities. That is a circle that cannot be squared. Societies must choose one or the other.

Every major institution in America denies this paradox. Implicit in that denial is the fantasy that designing a society to favor certain groups in order to achieve equality of outcome will not fatally undermine the cohesion and vitality of the overall society. Theoretically, it might have worked several decades ago when “disadvantaged” groups constituted a minute percentage of the American population. Offering special benefits and privileges to a small fraction of the population might have been a manageable burden. But today, the vast majority of Americans belong to a “protected status group.”

The magnitude of this shift in just six decades bears enumeration. In 1960, at the dawn of the modern civil rights movement, the population of the United States was 89 percent white. The social justice programs that were launched at that time, affirmative action and the war on poverty, had a limited impact. If affirmative action released unqualified students into elite universities or unqualified engineers and executives into upper management, it only represented at most a 10 percent displacement. If welfare and other programs initiated by the war on poverty destroyed the work ethic and broke up the families of the so-called beneficiaries, at least only 10 percent of the U.S. population was so victimized.

Today, almost everyone belongs to a protected status group. Social justice advocates now demand proportional representation be extended to include not only blacks but all nonwhites, as well as all women. They demand this “equity” be applied to all university admissions, all hiring and promotions, all government contracts, and even in the number of criminal prosecutions and prison populations. 

The New House Majority Must Impeach DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas By: Jonathan S. Tobin

https://thefederalist.com/2023/01/03/the-new-house-majority-must-impeach-dhs-secretary-alejandro-mayorkas/

Impeaching Mayorkas is the only option for those who understand that playing by the conventional rules of Washington simply isn’t good enough.

As the new House Republican majority gets sworn in this week, they have no choice but to use the only mechanism at their disposal to highlight the emergency unfolding at the border: impeaching Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. His acts of nonfeasance include acting on the president’s orders and presiding over a situation in which the border is, for all intents and purposes, being erased.

GOP moderates — many of whom are members in good standing of the Washington uniparty — think they are obligated to pursue “governance.” This sets up a conflict in which anything the new majority does that is aimed more at exposing the administration’s catastrophic policies will be skewered as mere obstructionism and proof that Republicans are incapable of governing.

But they can — and must — ignore those criticisms given the almost complete breakdown of efforts to prevent illegal immigration in the last two years.

GOP moderates may be inclined to ignore the security dilemma and simply move to grant a path to citizenship to people who were brought into the country illegally as children — the so-called “Dreamers.” But the vast majority of conservatives as well as independents and many border state Democrats understand that anything, however well-meaning, that is done to encourage further illegal immigration, as almost certainly would be the case for action on the Dreamers, is unacceptable. The Democrats’ effort to secure a new, broader amnesty is at the heart of the current crisis.

Mayorkas will not be thrown out of office since the Democratic Senate will never convict him even if the GOP’s narrow House majority impeaches him, and it will be labeled as grandstanding and a colossal waste of time. But stunts like that and the hearings in which they can finally bring the various elements of this catastrophe before the public in a way that has not been done before. It is the only option available to those who understand that the consequences of what is happening at the border are so serious that business as usual or playing by the conventional rules of Washington politics simply isn’t good enough.

In Iran, Crowds Chant: ‘Death to the IRGC, Death to the Entire System’! Grief began these protests, but fury keeps them going. by Hugh Fitzgerald

https://www.frontpagemag.com/in-iran-crowds-chant-death-to-the-irgc-death-to-the-entire-system/

In Iran, the protests against the regime have still not been suppressed, despite the regime throwing everything it has into the effort. More than 500 protesters have been murdered in the 100 days of protests that have passed since the killing of Mahsa Amini by the morality police on September 16, but instead of scaring others into submission, these killings by the regime’s enforcers have only served to bring tens of thousands of new protesters out onto the streets in more than 90 cities across the country. In Shi’a Islam, as in other traditions, the mourning period for the dead lasts for 40 days. And now, 40 days after the death of protesters, Iranian crowds make that fatidic date the occasion to appear at their gravesites to honor the martyred dead. More on these events can be found here: “Iranians mourn murdered protesters, chant ‘death to Khamenei!,’” by Tzvi Joffre, Jerusalem Post, December 29, 2022:

Crowds of Iranian demonstrators gathered on Thursday [Dec. 29] at the graves of protesters murdered by Iranian security forces during the anti-government protests that continue to sweep Iran, to mark 40 days since their murder on Thursday.

A large crowd of protesters gathered at the grave of Hamidreza Rouhi at the Behesht-e Zahra Cemetery in Tehran on Dec. 29 to mark the 40th anniversary since his death. Rouhi, a university student who also had a modeling career since childhood, was shot dead near his home in the Shahr-e Ziba neighborhood in the west of the capital on November 18. Thursday was the 40th day after his death, when Iranians hold a memorial.

Later, protesters began chanting against Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who they believe has ordered the killing of protesters. “Down with the Dictator”was chanted, and then a new slogan was heard: “This homeland will not thrive before he [Khamenei] is wrapped in a shroud.”

The Falsehood of ‘White Privilege’ The hollowness of an accusation. by Alan Joseph Bauer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-falsehood-of-white-privilege/

One of the Left’s favorite ways of attacking Whites in general and men in particular is to accuse them of benefiting from white privilege. Their only goal in doing so is the attainment of more power for themselves.

During the past few years, the concept of “white privilege” has taken hold of the Democratic Party and those on the Left. The idea is that all White people have enjoyed and still enjoy privileges and advantages by virtue of their being white, and this state of affairs leaves “people of color” at a structural disadvantage in almost all human endeavors—bringing up a family, getting into college, succeeding in work or business, buying a home and more. The concept of white privilege is used as a cudgel against the Left’s opponents, not to help Black people or others but rather to concentrate power in the hands of politicians, college administrators, woke corporate professionals, entertainers and the like. White privilege is a falsehood in more ways than one.

At the most basic level, the United States has such a mixed and diverse population that there is unfortunately no shortage of poor Whites, whether in Appalachia or in towns where the jobs moved out and fentanyl moved in. Additionally, there are many “people of color” who are wealthy or super-wealthy. Who has privilege—a millionaire Black businessman who grew up in a middle class family or a poor White man whose family has been barely getting by in coal country for generations? Beyond the fact that there are many Americans who do not fit into the patently false narrative of specifically white privilege, the concept itself is based on a falsehood antithetical to the “American Way.”

In the past, when America was a more religious country, one realized that his or her task in this world was to take whatever was given and make the most out of it in a lifetime. If one was born into wealth, then more was expected by society as well as by the person himself.

Deterring More Illegal Immigration What the House Republican Majority must do. by Joseph Klein

https://www.frontpagemag.com/deterring-more-illegal-immigration/

Millions of illegal immigrants have poured into the United States and have been promptly released under President Biden’s catch-and-release policy. The use of Title 42’s health emergency authority to immediately expel illegal immigrants without any hearing on their asylum claims is on its last legs. But President Biden could not be bothered. He refused to even visit the border when he was in Arizona for a photo-op recently, claiming that he had more important things to do.

Congressional Republicans need to show some backbone fast during the new session of Congress to push back hard against the Biden administration’s open border policies. The alternative is a continuation of the catastrophic invasion of illegal immigrants and deadly fentanyl smuggled into the United States by the Mexican cartels.

Unfortunately, the new House Republican majority was dealt a bad hand by 18 cowardly Senate Republicans at the end of the last session of Congress that concluded its business just before Christmas. These renegades, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, voted with the Democrats to approve a reckless $1.7 trillion omnibus spending bill that funds the federal government through September 2023. By allowing this spending monstrosity to pass, they took away appropriations leverage that the incoming House Republican majority would have had in the new Congress to move real border security measures over the finish line.

The omnibus spending bill, which President Biden signed into law as the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2023, designates only $60 million to hire 125 Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers. But it lavishes $410 million towards border security for Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Tunisia, and Oman. And it appropriates enough money to hire or contract for 87,000 new IRS agents!

Yet 18 Republican senators voted in favor of these twisted priorities.

Outgoing speaker Pelosi hails her Democrats as ‘the greatest collection of intellect, integrity and imagination assembled’ By Monica Showalter

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/01/outgoing_speaker_pelosi_hails_her_democrats_as_the_greatest_collection_of_intellect_integrity_and_imagination_assembled.html

Who needs nausea when we’ve got Nancy Pelosi?

The outgoing House speaker wrote a farewell letter to her fellow Democrats, with this load of pearl of Pelosi wisdom:

 One final thought that I wanted to leave with you is my belief that the House Democratic Caucus is the greatest collection of intellect, integrity and imagination assembled for the good of the American people.

Breitbart News first spotted that letter and noted it here.

Which is a rather surreal thing to say, given the animal farm menagerie the Democrats have become on her watch, going from a party of moderates and ward heel politicians, to a woke socialist echo chamber where dissent is not permitted.

Is Pelosi really saying that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who condemned cauliflower as racist, expressed amazement about garbage disposals, got caught with her hand in the till on accepting gifts, deceiving voters on a fundraiser, and paying her boyfriend as staff, was a paragon of intelligence and integrity? The woman does her makeup on Instagram. She claimed that “facts don’t matter” when you’re “morally right” when she was caught making up some of them. Is she the best the Democrats can do? That’s what counts as intellect and integrity?

How about Rep Ilhan Omar, who, evidence suggests, married her brother for immigration purposes and has repeatedly been caught spewing anti-Semitic statements?

Let’s move on to some other of these paragons of integrity cited by Pelosi, such as Rep. Adam Schiff who repeatedly lied about the evidence he had regarding his grand show trial of President Trump called impeachment — which ended up amounting to nothing? Let’s also not forget that Mr. Integrity has yet to return those campaign donations he got from convicted pervert and Democrat donor Ed Buck. That’s some intelligence and integrity.

Two Years to Fortify American Elections The goal is to fix voting snafus before 2024. Yes, you, Pennsylvania.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/two-years-to-fortify-american-elections-pennsylvania-mail-ballots-georgia-wisconsin-11672354420?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

State lawmakers convening in 2023 have an opportunity—some might say a duty—to improve their voting laws to head off trouble in the 2024 presidential election. Perhaps nowhere needs action more than Pennsylvania. During the recent midterms, according to new state data, 16,100 mail ballots were rejected because the voter wrote an incorrect date, or because the date, signature or secrecy envelope was missing.

That figure is larger than President Biden’s 2020 vote margin in two states, Georgia (11,779) and Arizona (10,457), and in a 2024 recount at least some of those Pennsylvania ballots would end up in court. Last year the federal Third Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Pennsylvania was legally required to count ballots with missing dates, if they arrived on time. The Supreme Court vacated that judgment as moot. Then the Pennsylvania Supreme Court split 3-3 on the question. Next year, who knows?

Ambiguity about ballot validity is poison to public confidence in elections, and perhaps the Legislature can help by streamlining the requirements. State law also says local officials in Pennsylvania can’t start processing mail votes until 7 a.m. on Election Day, which means waiting and waiting for results in close races. Allowing pre-processing, a common practice in other states, ought to be a no-brainer.

Lawmakers elsewhere would also be wise to examine their election codes for hangups exposed over the past two years. Mail ballots in Wisconsin need a witness address, but the law doesn’t define “address.” What if voters in small towns put down only house numbers and street names, say, 155 Flapjack Boulevard, no city or ZIP Code? Smells like a candidate lawsuit.

The Paul Ehrlich Apocalypse Is Back His predictions have been famously wrong, but doom springs eternal.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-paul-ehrlich-apocalypse-is-back-cbs-60-minutes-human-extinction-11672784525?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

We’ll say this for Paul Ehrlich—at least he’s consistent. In 1968 the Stanford biologist famously declared that “the battle to feed all humanity is over,” at a time when the earth’s population was about 3.5 billion. Today we have a population of eight billion (better fed than ever), yet there was Mr. Ehrlich, on CBS’s “60 Minutes” Sunday night, still predicting that “humanity is very busily sitting on a limb that we’re sawing off.”

The CBS narrator acknowledged that the green revolution in agriculture disproved Mr. Ehrlich’s prediction of mass famine. But the show went on to suggest that Mr. Ehrlich’s repackaged gloom about melting icecaps and the rate of extinction may finally prove him right in saying we are still heading the way of the dinosaurs.

As with Thomas Malthus, the father of doom-and-gloomers, the repeated failures of Mr. Ehrlich’s predictions of catastrophe to materialize never seem to discourage those who believe human beings are breeding and consuming our way to destruction.

The reason these dire prophecies fail is that they ignore the most decisive variable: human ingenuity. In the years since Mr. Ehrlich first forecast apocalypse, human beings have found untold new ways to improve life on earth—e.g., by reclaiming arable land, inventing new medicines, increasing food production, making clean water more available and lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty.