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Ruth King

Will the FBI Come Clean? Lawmakers demand the truth about the origin of the 2016 Trump investigation. Kimberley Strassel

https://www.wsj.com/articles/will-the-fbi-come-clean-1530833315

In the trench war between congressional Republicans and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, we have arrived at a crucial battle. A House resolution sets Friday as the deadline for the Justice Department to come clean on the beginning of its investigation into the Trump campaign. We’ll find out if the FBI has been lying to the public.

That is, if the department complies. It has flouted so many subpoenas, and played so many games with redactions and deadlines, that the entire House GOP united last week to vote for the resolution demanding submission to Congress’s requests for documents. The vote was an order but also a warning—that this is the last chance to comply, and the next step will be to hold officials in contempt. It is a measure of the stakes that even that threat doesn’t guarantee cooperation.

At issue is the FBI’s “origin story,” in which it claims its full-fledged investigation into a presidential campaign was conducted, as it were, by the book. According to this narrative, the FBI did not launch its probe until July 31, 2016, only after Australia tipped it to a conversation junior Trump aide George Papadopoulos had with Australian diplomat Alexander Downer in the spring of 2016 in London. Only after this formal commencement of a counterintelligence probe—Crossfire Hurricane—did the FBI begin to target U.S. citizens with spying, wiretapping and other tools usually reserved for foreign infiltrators. Or so the story goes.

This account, relayed by the New York Times in December 2017, has proved highly convenient for the FBI. The Australian “government” connection allowed the bureau to infuse the meaningless Papadopoulos conversation with significance, justifying the probe. The origin story suggested the FBI had followed procedure. Mostly, it countered the growing suspicion that the bureau had been snooping on a presidential campaign on the basis of truly disreputable info—a dossier of salacious information compiled by an opposition research firm working for the rival campaign. CONTINUE AT SITE

A Social-Justice Mob Takes Montreal A theater yields to the philistines and shuts down a critically acclaimed musical about slavery. By Elliot Kaufman

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-social-justice-mob-takes-montreal-1530914174?cx_testId=16&cx_testVariant=cx&cx_artPos=3&cx_tag=collabctx&cx_navSource=newsReel#cxrecs_s

Betty Bonifassi has spent 18 years researching, reworking and performing slave songs. In “SLĀV,” the hit new play on the same topic, she is the lead singer—or was. The Montreal International Jazz Festival canceled “SLĀV” on Wednesday: “We would like to apologize to those who were hurt.” Why the pain? Because Ms. Bonifassi and director Robert Lepage are white. Two of the seven cast members were black, but they won’t be performing either.

“SLĀV” sold out its first five shows and was booked for 11 more at Montreal’s Théâtre du Nouveau Monde. It also received glowing reviews in the Quebecois press. One critic wrote that the show reminds him of the “need to overcome” and makes him feel “ashamed” of his own “insane non-activism.” A writer at Le Journal de Montréal credits it with “demonstrating the absurdity of racism.”

Ms. Bonifassi, whose mother is Serbian and who sings the play’s first slave songs in Bulgarian, has said that because of her own heritage, she feels “touched by slavery.” “SLĀV” makes its way from the Balkans through Ireland and Quebec before reaching the U.S., where it not only confronts slavery but depicts a present-day black American jogger arrested for no reason.

Marquette’s Black Eye A professor’s victory for contracts and academic freedom.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/marquettes-black-eye-1530916646

Wisconsin’s Supreme Court has given Marquette University a bracing refresher on contracts and academic freedom. In a decision overturning a lower court’s dismissal of the case, the court on Friday ruled that Marquette breached its contract with political science professor John McAdams when it disciplined him “for exercising his contractually protected right of academic freedom.”

The case stems from a blog post by Mr. McAdams about a graduate instructor who had told a Marquette student that opinions against same-sex marriage would not be tolerated in her ethics class. The university says Mr. McAdams proved himself unfit by naming the graduate instructor, Cheryl Abbate, and linking to her publicly available website in his post on the encounter, so it suspended him. Even after losing the case Friday, the university continues to accuse Mr. McAdams of having used his blog to intentionally expose “her name and contact information to a hostile audience that sent her vile and threatening messages.”

The court is categorical in rejecting this argument. “Our review of the blog post,” reads the majority opinion, “reveals that it makes no ad hominem attack on Instructor Abbate, nor does it invite readers to be uncivil to her, either explicitly or implicitly.”

Terror, Excitement — It Goes with the Territory :Diana West

http://dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/3757/Terror-Excitement-It-Goes-with-the

A couple of weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal published a short interview dating back to 2011 with convicted Communist agent Morton Sobell, now 101 years old. As a member of the Rosenberg spy ring in the 1940s, Sobell passed US ballistic missile secrets to the USSR — secrets, the paper reminds readers fleetingly, that were “used against America in both Korea and Vietnam.”

Just to de-antisepticize things, “America” translates into grandfathers, fathers, husbands, brothers and sons who were sent to fight communists on the brutal battlefields of Asia in the 1950s and 1960s, after other communists had “occupied” our own government in the 1930s — the early Deep State — and managed to help Stalin seize massive territories in Europe and Asia in the 1940s. Unbelievably, we still believe that the free world, and not just another totalitarian death machine (USSR), really won World War II.

This long-hidden history couldn’t be more relevant today. Without seeing the continuity of subversion over the previous century, it’s hard to appreciate what is unfolding as the Deep State today, triggered by Trump, panics and exposes itself. This is why “court historian” efforts to enage in Soviet-style disinformation against fuller accountings are so darn incriminating.

Viktor Orban and Anti-Semitism: David Goldman

https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2018/07/the-real-modern-anti-semitism

Brezhnev-era joke asked whether it was a crime to say that the party chairman was an idiot. The answer was yes, because it’s a state secret. For those who miss Soviet-era humor, French President Emmanuel Macron has provided some consolation, by firing the French ambassador to Budapest for observing in a private memorandum that the president of Hungary is not an anti-Semite. Evidently that is a state secret in France.

In a June 18 dispatch, Eric Fournier, the French ambassador to Hungary, reported that the alleged anti-Semitism of Hungarian President Viktor Orban was “a fantasy of the foreign press.” He added that the allegation diverted attention from the “real modern anti-Semitism,” whose source is “Muslims in France and Germany.” The private memorandum was leaked by the left-wing website Mediapart and reported widely in the French press. Hungary’s “management of illegal immigration” might be a model for France, Fournier added.

The French president denounced the memo as “contrary to the French official position,” saying that if it were shown that Fournier’s views had been made in public, he would be removed. The memo was private, but Macron fired him anyway. Fournier’s memo had struck a raw nerve. On April 18, 250 French notables, including former president Nicolas Sarkozy, had denounced the “new anti-Semitism” arising from “Islamic radicalization,” declaring: “We demand that the fight against this democratic failure that is anti-Semitism becomes a national cause before it’s too late. Before France is no longer France.” Nearly a tenth of France’s half-million Jews have emigrated in the past decade in response to Muslim violence against Jews.

British government plans inquiry into incitement in Palestinian textbooks

https://www.jns.org/british-government-plans-inquiry-into-incitement-in-palestinian-textbooks/

“It is grotesque that U.K. taxpayers’ money is helping to support the teaching of a curriculum which incites violence and terrorism and spreads anti-Semitism,” said Parliament member Joan Ryan.

The British government is set to review the Palestinian Authority’s educational curriculum over growing concerns that British taxpayers are paying for the Palestinians to teach children incitement and anti-Semitism.

In a letter to Labour Friends of Israel (LFI), Parliament members Joan Ryan and Ian Austin, and Middle East Minister Alistair Burt “brought forward a planned assessment of the Palestinian curriculum, which will involve a rigorous and independent review of the pilot PA textbook,” the U.K. Jewish News reported.

The United Kingdom pays more than £20million ($26 million) per year for Palestinian schools. LFI has been pushing for a review of P.A. curriculum for several months.

Trump, Merkel and Brexit Daniel Johnson

http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/7222/full

Our cover picture for this summer double issue is inspired by a memorable image of the Quebec G7 summit, showing Angela Merkel confronting Donald Trump. This snapshot was actually a brilliant piece of propaganda from Berlin, taken by an official photographer and intended to depict a German chancellor dictating terms to the American president. Leni Riefenstahl could not have done better. But Mr Trump’s look of defiance is no less striking. In our version, by Michael Daley, he is flanked by his formidable National Security Advisor John Bolton, while Prime Minister Abe of Japan looks quizzically at Mrs Merkel. Sic transit gloria mundi.

At the time of writing it is she, rather than Mr Trump, whose authority is falling away. The insubordination of her Interior Minister Horst Seehofer is undisguised: “I cannot work with that woman,” he tells colleagues. Rubbing salt in the wounds inflicted by her own colleague, President Trump tweets that “the people of Germany are turning against their leadership as migration is rocking the already tenuous Berlin coalition”. Undiplomatic, certainly, but true.

Having bought herself time to seek concessions from her EU partners, Mrs Merkel may yet survive, as she has done so often before. But Mr Seehofer’s threat to close the borders to most asylum-seekers is very popular — and not only in his stronghold of Bavaria, the migrants’ first port of call. A tough line on migration represents the consensus among Germany’s southern and eastern neighbours. For them, the war is over. They are less afraid of Nazi aggression than of anti-Nazi Angst — because the latter implies an open border and demographic disorder.

From a British perspective, there is a certain Schadenfreude at the prospect of Mrs Merkel being hoist by her own petard. Years ago, when David Cameron repeatedly sent alarm signals to the Chancellery in Berlin about unsustainable levels of migration from Eastern Europe, they went unanswered. Freedom of movement was non-negotiable. She threw Cameron overboard, as the tidal wave of Brexit approached. As border anxiety began to grip Europe too, Mrs Merkel opened the floodgates, thereby undermining allies at home and abroad. Her counterparts in London, Paris, Rome, Vienna, Prague and Madrid have all fallen, mostly replaced by leaders who take a harder line on migration. Mrs Merkel is Europe’s last woman standing. She may survive, but only by demanding for Germany what she refused Cameron: a restoration of national sovereignty to allow an emergency brake on uncontrolled freedom of movement.

Is Tariq Ramadan a Victim of French Justice? by Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12647/tariq-ramadan-french-justice

Then, of course, comes the trump card: all the accusers are supposedly Islamophobes.

The next hearing has been set in July, in which Ramadan may well be slapped with that third indictment, for one, or several of, the nine rapes Ms Rabbouj accuses him of during 2013-2014. Ramadan denies the allegations.

Oborne’s rather spectacular pile of tendentious inaccuracies ends by referencing a petition supporting Ramadan. It was started by Ramadan’s usual Paris acolytes of the hard-left investigative website Médiapart and a handful of British academics who supported Ramadan’s elevation to a teaching post at Oxford, and may feel they need to protect their investment. They should cut their losses.

French-bashing is one of the few pleasures still allowed in Europe nowadays, and it seems a bit unkind to deprive you of it. Sadly, a recent piece, by Peter Oborne, accuses the entire French justice system of treating Tariq Ramadan, the sometime academic, stealth Islamist, serial liar and alleged rapist, like a latter-day hero from Les Misérables, supposedly “rotting” in a French jail as a victim of the complete “abandonment of due process”. Not quite.

Ramadan, the grandson of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan Al-Banna, pretends to be “moderate”. Yet he has recently argued that FGM, for instance, is a cultural tradition of Muslims, or that corporal punishments including stoning of adulterous women in Islam ought to be the object of a “moratorium” to examine their implications (rather than banned). British Prime Minister Tony Blair apparently bought into the fiction that here was the kind of westernised Muslim he needed on an advisory board to his government; and Ramadan got a Qatar-financed chair of sorts at Oxford.

Early in 2018, Ramadan got caught in a #MeToo tsunami, with woman after woman coming forward to explain in strikingly similar terms how he used them for rough sex and threatened them afterwards should they dare to talk about it. (He denies the rough part; he has admitted to having sex with at least five of these women; and he has also admitted in judicial hearings that he has forked out €27,000 in hush money to his Belgian accuser.)

The Surprising Jewish Story Behind a Traditional Spanish Bullfight Janine Stein

http://blog.nli.org.il/en/bullfight_poster/

THANKS TO:https://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/2018/07/republican-spains-bullfight-in-honor-of-maimonides/?utm_source=daily&utm_medium=

In 1935, the city of Cordoba held a bullfight “in commemoration of the eighth centenary of the great Cordoban philosopher Maimonides.” The towering talmudist, philosopher, and theologian was born in that city in 1135, although thirteen years later his family fled to Morocco and from there relocated to Egypt, where he lived for the rest of his life.

Read the story behind a poster advertising a bullfight in honor of the great Jewish philosopher, Maimonides.

Take a look at the rather unique poster below from the National Library of Israel’s European Ephemera Collection. What makes it extraordinary is not the illustration of a black bull hurtling towards the matador’s red cape, nor is it the elegance of his stance opposing the power of the bull’s massive body. It is one word above the names of the two bullfighters that makes this poster so extraordinary. That word, written in small font close to the bottom of the poster is Maimonides- the name of one of the greatest Jewish writers of the last two thousand years.

Leftist Malice And lack of ethics. Rabbi Aryeh Spero *****

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270617/leftist-malice-rabbi-aryeh-spero

There is a never ending blitzkrieg from the media to topple President Trump. Based on what we’ve observed during the last two years, there’s no doubt that the “Separation of Families” barrage that began a couple of weeks ago was an effort orchestrated by the media. It brought together the Four Horsemen for a Trump Apocalypse: the Democrat Party; the Deep State; the Never-Trumpers; and leftwing organizations, especially those purporting to speak in the name of religion.

One: Nancy Pelosi, the face of the Democrat party, accused Jeff Sessions and other conservatives of being “religious hypocrites” for not allowing open borders and easy and swift entry for all families and children wishing to reside in America. I have no doubt that Mr. Sessions and Mr. Trump do care about families. Indeed, as conservatives they are far less inclined than liberals to take children from parents and place them in the custody of the “enlightened” state, as those on the Left often propose.

What about families? Even Nancy Pelosi should know that government’s first duty is to protect and defend America’s existing families. And today that means seriously checking, at the borders, all who may possibly be a member of MS-13, a jihadi terrorist, a criminal or drug dealer, or carrier of infectious diseases, all of which have already threatened American families. We rely on the government to do this for us. Mr. Trump and Sessions are not “religious hypocrites”, but men living up to their oath and doing their duty of keeping Americans safe. They are acting as those who take their responsibility seriously.

In contrast to the prevailing liberal ideology, American families indeed count. That’s all part of what we mean when we proclaim: America First. Compassion is not only for those outside but those within, for those regular, law abiding millions not part of any momentary preference group.