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Ruth King

BOOKS, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

A ‘Higher Loyalty’ to Their Inflated Sense of Virtue By Roger Kimball

By on March 20th, 2018

Some portion of the reading public is eagerly awaiting A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership, the aptly titled exercise in self-serving historical revisionism by James Comey, the disgraced former FBI director who was fired last May by President Trump.

The reading material in which I am most interested at the moment is the report by Michael Horowitz, the Obama-appointed inspector general of the Department of Justice who has been toiling away for the last year investigating the DOJ and the FBI for its handling of the Hillary Clinton email scandal.

Comey’s aria, currently swaddled with embargoes, is due out April 17. Horowitz has said he aims to release his report “in the March, April time period.”

So there is a lot to look forward to. Chris Swecker, a former FBI assistant director, said that the report will contain “some pure TNT.” I have no doubt that’s true.

Adventures in “Ethical Leadership”
On Saturday, in the aftermath of former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s sacking, Comey tweeted:

James Comey
✔ @Comey
Mr. President, the American people will hear my story very soon. And they can judge for themselves who is honorable and who is not.

Well, yes. Comey’s Twitter profile informs the world that these days he is “writing and speaking about ethical leadership.” It also notes that he is “taller and funnier in person.” I hope so.

As for “ethical leadership,” we needn’t even wait for his book to understand exactly how he embodies ethical leadership. When the College of William and Mary announced last month that Comey would be coming to teach a class on the subject, the announcement was accompanied by a statement from Comey. “Ethical leaders,” he said, “lead by seeing above the short term, above the urgent or the partisan, and with a higher loyalty to lasting values, most importantly the truth.” The Wall Street Journal, digesting this declaration, published a useful classroom aid for students struggling with the question of ethical leadership.

Week One case study: The FBI is investigating a presidential candidate for mishandling classified emails as Secretary of State. The director decides on his own to violate Justice Department rules and exonerate that candidate in a public statement to the media, letting an aide replace the legally potent phrase “grossly negligent” in a draft of his statement with “extremely careless” in the final version.

Possible test question: When and under what circumstance may a federal official decide that the rules that bind others do not apply to him?

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Liz Peek: Hillary’s latest excuse: Stepford wives cost me the election

By on March 20th, 2018

Great news! Hillary Clinton has finally figured out What Happened! It wasn’t, after all, James Comey or racism or Vladimir Putin or sexism or the hostile media that torpedoed her bid for the White House. Instead, it was…(drumroll please…) millions of Stepford wives, voting the way their husbands told them to.

In her insatiable thirst for redemption Hillary casts an ever-wider net, trying to scoop up those responsible for her defeat. Speaking in India recently, she again revisited her stinging 2016 election loss, this time hauling in white women, who vote the way “your husband, your boss, your son, whoever, believes you should.”

What an offense to the millions of women who didn’t trust Hillary, didn’t like Hillary, and didn’t think she had earned the right to be our first female president. And what an embarrassment to her party, some of whom have disavowed her comments. Senator Claire McCaskill, for instance, who is battling to be reelected in red state Missouri, criticized Hillary’s remarks; nonetheless, the Republican opponent hoping to dislodge McCaskill wasted no time tying her to Clinton, whom she previously had endorsed.

Republicans hope Hillary will hang around, reminding Trump voters how delighted they are that she isn’t president. More and more Democrats would like her to disappear Stage Left, for good.

According to one survey, 61 percent of white women without a college degree voted for Donald Trump as did 45 percent of white women who graduated from college. Did all those tens of millions of females simply do as they were told by the men in their lives? Please, women are not that compliant or that stupid.

The irony is, of course, that Hillary would never have been a candidate for president but for the men in her life. It was husband Bill who pushed her forward from the start and, against all odds, became a beloved leader of the Democratic Party. And she would never have come close to cracking the glass ceiling but for the dogged efforts of President Obama, who saw her as willing to carry on his legacy.

Democrats who put gender ahead of the economy, or jobs, or national security, or who think that their dogmatic positions on abortion or equal pay are the only key to winning elections, are insulting women.

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EDUCATION, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Silencing History: U.S. University Publishers Shun Book “Ending the Deir Yassin Myth”

By on March 20th, 2018

Why have American academic presses rejected a book manuscript by Dr. Eliezer Tauber, a former dean and highly-regarded Israeli history professor at Bar-Ilan University’s Department of Middle Eastern Studies?

Tauber is an award-winning and prolific expert on the early phases of the Arab-Israeli conflict. By all accounts, his latest book about the April 9, 1948 battle in the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin has “many strengths” and provides the most comprehensive investigation to date of what was both a seminal event in Israel’s War of Independence and in the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem.

A book of this caliber and importance should really be of great interest to American publishers.

But so far—after three years of trying to convince an American university press to publish his book—none have agreed to give Tauber a contract for the English-language version of Deir Yassin: The End of a Myth.

Academic publishing is a tough business, and even first-rate manuscripts can be passed over if the scholarship isn’t a perfect fit for a publisher’s list or on account of a bottleneck in the pipeline—which isn’t uncommon for elite presses.

But something else, very damaging to academia, is going on here.

That’s because the U.S. university presses which Tauber approached reportedly rejected his book on the say-so of anti-Israel faculty reviewers and members of their editorial boards. Apparently, these faculty are worried that Deir Yassin: The End of a Myth could upend the way a lot of American and English-language readers assess the Palestinian narrative of 1948, so they’re advising acquisition editors not to adopt it.

If that’s true, then it’s a scandal of mega proportions.

Basically, it would be another indication that the virulently anti-Israel perspective which currently dominates in many disciplines in the Humanities and soft Social Sciences, especially Middle Eastern Studies, is truly having a corrosive impact on American higher education by undermining viewpoint diversity and hindering the growth of knowledge.

I missed this – stunning: US publishers worry about their reputation if they published new scholarly study showing that the Deir Yassin “massacre” is a myth. http://jewishjournal.com/rosnersdomain/231367/truth-deir-yassin/ …

— Petra Marquardt-Bigman (@WarpedMirrorPMB) 12:08 PM – Mar 16, 2018

Below I provide an overview of the existing scholarship on Deir Yassin. I review what reputable scholars have claimed really happened when this Arab village, located on the western edge of Jerusalem, was attacked by Jewish fighters affiliated with Israel’s pre-state underground forces.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

What Went Wrong at the FBI After 9/11, the bureau lost its law-enforcement ethos as it tried to become more of an intelligence agency. By Thomas J. Baker see note please

By on March 20th, 2018

What went wrong is corruption, political bias and the agency sank into the swamp….rsk

Mr. Baker is a retired FBI special agent and legal attaché.

Americans have grown increasingly skeptical since 2016 of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, an institution they once regarded as the world’s greatest law-enforcement agency. I spent 33 years in a variety of positions with the FBI, and I am troubled by this loss of faith. Many lapses have come to light, and each has been thoroughly covered. But why did they happen? The answer is a cultural change that occurred in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

For reasons that seemed justified at the time, the bureau set out to become an “intelligence driven” organization. That had unintended consequences. The FBI’s culture had been rooted in law enforcement. A law-enforcement agency deals in facts, to which agents may have to swear in court. That is why “lack of candor” has always been a firing offense. An intelligence agency deals in estimates and best guesses. Guesses are not allowed in court. Intelligence agencies often bend a rule, or shade the truth, to please their political masters. In the FBI, as a result, there now is politicization, polarization, and no sense of the bright line that separates the legal from the extralegal.

Part of making the FBI more like an intelligence agency was the centralization of case management at headquarters in Washington, rather than the field offices around the country. With this came the placing of operational decisions in the hands of more “politically sensitive” individuals at headquarters.

The 9/11 investigations and related matters were the first to be moved from the field to headquarters. But the trend culminated with the investigations into Hillary Clinton’s emails and Russian election interference—both run from headquarters as well. Levels of review—and independent judgment—were eliminated. Thus, we learn that Peter Strzok —who held the relatively high rank of deputy assistant director of counterintelligence—was himself conducting interviews in both politically sensitive investigations. CONTINUE AT SITE

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Saudis Take On Radical Islam By Adel Al-Toraifi see note please

By on March 20th, 2018

The crown prince charts a course toward moderation, which ​prevailed before the 1979 attack on Mecca.

One can welcome reforms without air-brushing the harsh, sharia driven rule of his predecessors. rsk
The year 1979 was a watershed for the Middle East. Iranian revolutionaries overthrew the shah, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, and Sunni Islamic extremists tried to take over the Grand Mosque of Mecca in Saudi Arabia, Islam’s holiest shrine. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman hadn’t been born, but he is fighting the ghosts of 1979 as he dramatically reforms the kingdom.

The attempted takeover of Mecca was a defining event in my country, mainly because of what happened next. Saudi rulers, fearing Iran’s revolutionary example, decided to give more space to the Salafi clerical establishment in hope of countering the radicals. Traditional Salafi preachers are neither violent nor political, but they hold a rigid view of Islam. Their legal rulings and attempts to police morals made the kingdom increasingly intolerant, setting back the gradual opening up that had occurred in the 1960s and ’70s.

In Saudi schools, education was largely in the hands of foreign nationals, many with Muslim Brotherhood backgrounds. In the 1960s and ’70s, Saudi Arabia was more concerned with Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Arab nationalism than with Islamist radicalism. Thus the Muslim Brotherhood wasn’t much of a worry. But the combination of the brotherhood’s political outlook and the rigid Salafi doctrine injected a virus into the Saudi education system. That virus allowed Osama bin Laden to recruit 15 Saudis to take part in that terrible deed on Sept. 11, 2001. We Saudis failed those young men, and that failure had global implications.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Kurdish Afrin Falls to Turkey Turkish Government Official: “Europe Will be Muslim” by Uzay Bulut

By on March 19th, 2018

Turkey Islamized northern Cyprus through a military invasion in 1974. To Islamize the much more powerful European continent, however, Turkey has been promoting demographic, rather than military, jihad.

“The places where you work and live are your homelands and new countries now… Drive the best cars. Live in the most beautiful houses. Make five children — not just three. For you are the future of Europe.” — Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, 2017.

Yesterday, while many Europeans are still pilloried for viewing mass migration from Muslim-majority countries as a threat to Western culture — and are still accused of “xenophobia,” “Islamophobia” and “fear-mongering” — the city of Afrin, in the Kurdish area of Syria, fell to Turkey.

At the same time, a prominent Turkish government official has been openly and proudly declaring that the demography of Europe is changing in favor of Muslims.

MP Alparslan Kavaklıoğlu, a member of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and the head of the parliament’s Security and Intelligence Commission, recently stated:

“The fortune and wealth of the world is moving from the West to the East. Europe is going through a time that is out of the ordinary. Its population is declining and aging. It has a very old population. So, people coming from outside get the jobs there. But Europe has this problem. All of the newcomers are Muslim. From Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey. Those who come from these places are Muslim. It is now at such a level that the most popular name in Brussels, Belgium is Mohammed. The second most popular name is Melih [Malih] and the third one is Ayşe [Aisha].”

According to Kavaklıoğlu, if this trend continues,

“the Muslim population will outnumber the Christian population in Europe. This… has increased the nationalistic, xenophobic and anti-Islam rhetoric there. Hence, marginal, small parties have started to get large numbers of votes… But there is no remedy for it. Europe will be Muslim. We will be effective there, Allah willing. I am sure of that.”

Kavaklıoğlu is not the first Turkish official to stress the importance of population growth. In 2009, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who was prime minister at the time, called on the public to have at least three children per family. The greater our numbers, he said, “the stronger we will be.” Since then, Erdoğan has been trying to encourage Turkish nationals to multiply. In 2013, he reiterated his plea:

“We need a young and dynamic population… Right now, the West is in trouble. But we do not want to put Turkey in the same trouble. I am calling on my country through mothers: Do not take this sensitivity of ours lightly. We need to make this widespread, in waves. We need to make this happen. The [value] of this cannot be measured with money or any other physical wealth.”

In 2017, Erdoğan called on Turks residing in Europe to have even more children:

“The places where you work and live are your homelands and new countries now. Lay a tight claim to those places. Open more businesses and enroll your children in better schools. Live with your families in better neighborhoods. Drive the best cars. Live in the most beautiful houses. Make five children — not just three. For you are the future of Europe.”

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

France: Toward Total Submission to Islam, Destruction of Free Speech by Guy Millière

By on March 19th, 2018

The French government and the French justice system claim to treat all religions equally, but they treat Islam as if it were “more equal than others” — able to enjoy special privileges. Those who criticize Islam — or who just show the results of Islamic terrorism — are victims of fierce prosecution, while hate-filled, racist organizations are never touched.

“Who has the right to say that in thirty to forty years, France will not be a Muslim country? No one in this country has the right to extinguish our right to hope for a society that is globally faithful to Islam “. — Marwan Muhammad, spokesman of the “Collective against Islamophobia in France”.

President Macron recently said he wants a law against “fake news”. If the law is adopted, all online magazines in France that do not broadcast what the government defines as “true news” could be subject to immediate government suspension. If they are located outside France, access to them would be blocked. Islamic online magazines and websites are not on the list of “fake news” providers. What online magazines and websites top the list? Those that question Islam.

After the murders of much of the staff at the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris on January 7, 2015, the hostage-taking and slaughter at a kosher supermarket two days later confirmed what was already obvious: France was a target of Islamic terrorism. A huge demonstration, organized in Paris on January 11, brought together a million and a half people, with politicians from around the world in attendance.

For a brief moment, France seemed to be the country where the multitudes were ready to stand up for freedom of speech, and the government was ready to fight for Western values.

Unfortunately, that impression did not last long.

For years, freedom of speech in France has been in the process of being crushed, particularly regarding Islam and Islamic terrorism. Journalists who said that Islam often did not look much like a religion of peace but more like a religion of war were systematically and harshly prosecuted. Charlie Hebdo’s new director and editor-in-chief were also not spared: they were sued as early as 2006, the year the magazine republished the Danish Mohammed cartoons. They were sued again in 2007, 2012 and 2013. The writer Michel Houellebecq was summoned to court in 2010 for saying that Islam is a “stupid” religion. The first judicial sentence against the polemist Éric Zemmour dates from 2011. The website Riposte Laïque was established in 2007 to fight censorship, defend secularism, and preserve the right to criticize Islam. Lawsuits against its founder, Pierre Cassen, immediately became overwhelming.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, MEDIA, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Geoffrey Luck An Over-egged Easter Island Fable

By on March 19th, 2018

There is a perverse reassurance in knowing Australia’s media class is not alone in casting every unpleasant or unexpected natural event as yet further ‘proof’ of Gaia’s revenge on our carbon-spewing species. When it comes to global warming, the New York Times is just as silly as Fairfax and the ABC.

Kiribati, the Marshall Islands and the Maldives, having failed to sink beneath the waves of rising sea levels, the New York Times has now revealed an existential threat to those strange stone men of Easter Island. The newspaper sent its Colombian correspondent, Nicholas Casey, and photographer Josh Haner 2,200 miles (3520 kms) out into mid-Pacific to document the coming cataclysm. Haner, with forethought, took with him a drone, with which he was able to photograph parts of the island from new perspectives. On its website the newspaper was able to run those moving aerial images underneath its moving text:

Easter Island is critically vulnerable to rising ocean levels, and Waves are beginning to reach statues and platforms built by an ancient civilization, plus The island risks losing its cultural heritage. Again.

Ah, not exactly.

The intrepid Casey found an islander, Hetereki Huke, who showed him some bones on the shoreline. Mr Huke, an architect, said they were the remains of his ancestors who had been buried in platform tombs, now being exposed by the sea. At that point in the text, there is an embedded link to a 2016 UNESCO report, World Heritage and Tourism in a Changing Climate, as authority for the doomsday article.

Rapa Nui National Park (Easter Island) is covered only in a brief sketch in that report, one of eighteen summaries supplementing twelve fully referenced case studies of more important heritage sites. What it says is this: “With climate change, the greater wave heights and increased energy of the waves hitting the ahu’s (platforms’) vertical basalt slab walls, the ahu are expected to undergo worsening damage and the moai (statues) that sit on top of them could topple.” No mention of rising sea levels. [Notably, in the sketch on Rock Islands, Southern Lagoon, Palau, regarded as one of the world’s best diving sites, there is ample warning of rising temperatures, coral bleaching, and ocean acidification, but again no sea level reference.]

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BOOKS, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Thou Shalt Innovate How Israeli ingenuity repairs the world. Joseph Puder

By on March 19th, 2018

Avi Jorisch and I met at the AIPAC conference. He was a panelist at an exciting forum titled “The Israeli Ethos,” dealing with Israeli technologies, entrepreneurship, and innovation. Jorisch is a Senior Fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council, and author of Thou Shalt Innovate. We discussed what is it about Israel that nurtures entrepreneurship and innovation — and how Israeli innovation has impacted the world.

Thou Shalt Innovate: How Israeli Ingenuity Repairs the World

Thou Shalt Innovate: How Israeli Ingenuity Repairs the World
Mar 1, 2018
by Avi Jorisch

Joseph Puder (JP): Tell our readers where you come from and what motivated you to write Thou Shalt Innovate?

Avi Jorisch (AJ): I was born into a family of Holocaust survivors and raised primarily in New York City. But I also lived in Israel for long stretches of my childhood, through my teenage years and into adulthood, because of my family’s cultural, historical, and religious ties there.

My interest in Israeli technology was kindled during the summer of 2014, when my family and I lived through Operation Protective Edge, in large part going in and out of bomb shelters. My family, like the rest of Israel, found comfort in the Iron Dome. I marveled at this invention. It kept Israel from descending into the chaos and carnage that was engulfing the rest of the Middle East.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Campus Cops Crack Down on Questions about Islam Audience members at Golden West’s “Islam 101” event forced to step outside and warned about asking unacceptable questions. Gary Fouse

By on March 19th, 2018

On March 14, I attended a public presentation entitled Islam 101 at Golden West College in Huntington Beach, California. The presenter was Nicole Bovey, a convert to Islam and public information officer at the Islamic Institute of Orange County in Anaheim. Bovey also works with the Muslim Speakers Bureau in Orange County (an arm of the Islamic Networks Group). The presentation was sponsored by GWC professors Kaine Fini (Anthropology) and Communications Professor Kristine Clancy (most of the audience members were her students, and this was part of her class.) The event had been advertised publicly, hence was open to the public. Altogether, there were approximately 50 people present. I videotaped the entire proceeding. The event was scheduled to run from 6:45-9:30 pm. As it was, it was cut off at about 8:30 by one of the professors (more about that later.) During the event, Professor Clancy called in campus police and she admonished a couple of the people in the audience who had asked pointed questions.

Ms. Bovey’s presentation was a very basic and very vanilla presentation of Islam, explaining what Islam is, what it means, who Muslims are, Muslims’ worldwide demographic breakdown etc. Bovey’s lesson plan, consisting of slides posted on the walls, was about subjects like the 5 pillars of Islam, daily prayers etc. She stated at the outset that she was there to clear up misconceptions about Islam. In fact, the first image on the wall was of a masked man representing a terrorist. Yet, it was clear later into the presentation that she was not going to get into areas like terrorism or Sharia law. She invited the audience members to raise their hands to ask questions at any point.

Bovey was doing fine handling soft, non-controversial questions, but plainly could not handle pointed, uncomfortable questions from a few members of the audience, including myself. One audience member identified himself as a former Muslim from Egypt, who left Islam and became a Christian pastor. When he began to contradict statements by Bovey, she became uncomfortable. Subsequently, he was approached by Prof. Clancy who asked him to step outside. He returned a few minutes later. While Bovey was discussing Zakat (Islamic charity giving), another audience member asked her about the categories of Zakat and whether any of them allowed giving to non-Muslims. She was unable to answer the question. Another man in the audience, a Muslim, stated that there was a separate channel of giving other than Zakat that could be directed to non-Muslims.

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