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Ruth King

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‘Islamophobia’ Hysteria In Canada Offensive Holocaust comparisons have gone too far. Howard Rotberg

By on February 1st, 2018

Canada continues its submission to Islamism. My local paper, the Hamilton Spectator, ran an op-ed on January 26th from a local Muslim doctor under the headline, “Islamophobia is alive and well.” Dr. Raza Khan, writing about the tragic shooting a year ago by a lone individual in a Quebec City mosque killing 6 and injuring more, advocates that Canada should designate January 29th as a “National Day of Remembrance and Action on Islamophobia.” The doctor recites a few anti-Muslim actions by some fringe groups, and Quebec’s law that those wearing burkas or niqabs would not be eligible from offering or receiving public services, its legislature feeling that faces should be disclosed. From this he hectors us that “Racism is surging in Quebec” and that “the ugly face of hatred (is) here in Canada.”

He concludes his essay thus: “Never Again. For all.” Most of us know that “Never Again” is the term most often used in the hope that the Holocaust murdering 6 million Jews will never again happen. Dr. Khan however appropriates this expression for the purpose of drawing moral equivalence between acts of some isolated individuals and a considered legislative policy about how far hiding your face can go in a liberal democracy. This equivalency was run in the newspaper three days before International Holocaust Remembrance Day. This attempt to give another commemorative date to Muslims a few days before Holocaust Remembrance Day follows an attempt to bring a motion before Canada’s Parliament giving special attention to “Islamophobia” in a motion condemning racism.

Member of Parliament Iqra Khalid in her Motion 103 calls on the government to “condemn Islamophobia and all forms of systemic racism and religious discrimination,” asks the government to “recognize the need to quell the increasing public climate of hate and fear,” and request for the “Commons heritage committee to study how the government could develop a government-wide approach to reducing or eliminating systemic racism and religious discrimination, including Islamophobia, and collect data to provide context for hate crime reports and to conduct needs assessments for impacted communities. Findings are to be presented within eight months.” Khalid has been “unwilling to entertain any compromise on the specific wording” of Motion 103.

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Europe’s Failure to Exercise the Diplomacy of Truth The surrender to threats, economic opportunism, and hypocrisy. Fiamma Nirenstein

By on February 1st, 2018

The chilled relationship between Europe and Israel arises from a fundamental European misunderstanding and ignorance of Israeli national needs. In every critical political decision, whether supporting the Iran deal, condemning U.S. recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, supporting UNESCO dangerous revisionism of Jerusalem’s Jewish cultural history, or refusing to identify the true source of European anti-Semitism, Europe has consistently taken the antagonistic position towards Israel. Despite this, the general European conclusion is that the unfriendly relations are Israel’s fault due to its right-wing policies led by the nationalistic Netanyahu government. Pretending that the relationship is strained because of a right-wing Israel, allows Europe to shirk its own responsibility for the decline of EU popularity in Israel.

In Europe, a sympathetic automatic switch clicks on when the Muslim world is involved, especially when it came to the Iranian nuclear deal. This sympathy goes together with Europe’s incomprehension of Donald Trump’s personality and actions, seen as anti-liberal and extreme right-wing. Coherent criticisms of the Iranian deal are ignored. This allows Europe to avoid any honest discussion and to marginalize and personalize the review of the Iran deal that Trump advocates. Actually, the European Union’s position, instead of serving its real interests dangerously looks at the past. Business interests and political correctness must not be more important than enforcing anti-proliferation, no more serious than finally visiting Iranian military sites that hide the real secrets of Iran’s non-compliance, and most of all, considering the dangerous essence of the Iranian threat. All this poses a threat, first and foremost to the Middle East, and immediately after that, to Europe.

Instead of facing the real and present dangers of anti-Semitism, Europe is focused on fighting its past “ghosts” of anti-Semitism. Today, the “new Jew” – the Israeli, along with his proxies, the diaspora Jews – are condemned in a way that has nothing to do with the tradition of right-wing political parties. Today, the Jews are not seen in the same way, as they were 90 years ago. The face of anti-Semitism has changed, and therefore widespread right-wing anti-Semitism is quite improbable. The general perception of the Jew is no longer that of a cosmopolitan parasite and traitor of Western values, but quite the opposite. The Jews and Israel, in fact, wholeheartedly embrace Western values and customs, and this “original sin” is more likely to be readily employed by the European Left than by the Right.

The option of speaking the truth is the only way for Israel to establish a new relationship with Europe. European leaders showed that they could easily vote for the worst lies about Israel (in the General Assembly but also in other UN bodies). UNESCO, for instance, regularly votes on resolutions which deny any Jewish ties to the Western Wall and recognizes it as an Islamic heritage site. Their voting against Israel and choosing an absurd lie like denying Jerusalem ties to the Jewish People and Israel defy reason and history. And then the European leaders feign friendship to the Jewish state.

Why does Israel have a difficult relationship with Europe? Why is Europe so tough on Israel? And how do we find the way to correct this sour relationship?

Europe’s Politicized View of Israel

The respected Konrad Adenauer Stiftung (KAS) foundation issued a report in September 2017 entitled “Israel’s Views of Europe-Israeli Relations.”1 The study is based on a poll of 1,000 Israelis, but the analysis produced has the flavor of a very personal and political viewpoint.

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FBI’s War on the Memo The Bureau desperately tries to discredit the document — before its release in the coming days. Matthew Vadum

By on February 1st, 2018

The increasingly embattled Federal Bureau of Investigation launched a preemptive strike yesterday against the hotly anticipated foreign surveillance abuse memo in hopes of discrediting the document before it is released in coming days.

The public relations effort came as more evidence became available about the questionable behind-the-scenes conduct of fired FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, who allegedly tried to use his authority to undermine President Trump’s campaign.

The classified four-page memo, compiled by House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), was based on classified information supplied by the FBI and its parent agency, the U.S. Department of Justice. The two organizations “fought tooth and nail” to avoid handing over the relevant records to Congress, according to Fox News, citing an inside source. They produced the documents only after Nunes “threatened to move forward with contempt of Congress citations.”

The memo is said to provide evidence proving allegations that top officials in President Obama’s national security community abused their authority to obtain surveillance warrants against members of President Trump’s election campaign from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Its release could set in motion a process whereby bad actors in the government could go to prison. It may indicate that government officials relied on the tainted Fusion GPS dossier by former British spy Christopher Steele that is loaded with Kremlin-supplied misinformation to obtain the warrants. The dossier, as we now know, was paid for by Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, and was part of her bag of dirty tricks.

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Democrats’ Hatred of Trump Is Going to Bring Them Down Reflections on the State of the Union. David Horowitz

By on February 1st, 2018

Donald Trump’s State of the Union address was perfectly pitched for the political moment. He spoke to and for the American people – for all Americans of whatever race, color or creed. He spoke for the poorest and most vulnerable among us, who are the chief victims of the Democrats’ determination to welcome millions upon millions of illegal aliens, who are mainly low wage laborers and who include predatory criminals, to pour into our country; to defy federal law with their “sanctuary” states and cities, and to effectively declare our border and immigration policies null and void. Trump did not use the word “sedition” to describe the law-breaking and Constitution-negating actions of his Democratic predecessor or the Democrats assembled in the chamber of the House. He provided instead an opening to them to abandon their “resistance” – resistance to the expressed will of the American voting public which has led to a relentless sabotage of the democratic process. In sum, he offered a hand to his Democratic haters, and they slapped it away.

When Trump summarized the successes of his first year in office, he emphasized how the prosperity of his first twelve months impacted the lives and hopes of ordinary Americans, wage laborers and others whom the eight years of the Obama presidency had left behind. In doing so he exposed the Democrats in the most dramatic way imaginable. Under his policies, he boasted, black and Hispanic unemployment are record lows. As he said this and the Republican side of the house rose to its feet in applause the TV camera panned to the morose members of the Democrats’ Black Caucus, sitting on their hands and showing America that the last thing they care about is their black constituents. What they care about is their hatred for Trump, and about not disturbing the biggest lie of the political season: that the White House is the headquarters of a “white supremacy” movement intent on keeping black Americans down and making them suffer.

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By on February 1st, 2018

Let’s give them the award straight up: Worst Performance by a Minority Party at a State of the Union Address.

(Hey, it’s awards season, right?)

They broke the record. They get the prize with no runner-up for years to come.

Steny Hoyer and Nancy Pelosi watching Trump’s speech looked like a pair of sullen six-year olds on a sugar crash the day after Halloween. Bernie Sanders looked mummified. Schumer was slumped so deeply in his chair he was almost falling through the crack.

Other Democrats, even ones who should have known better or secretly felt otherwise, sat on their hands. You could see them glancing at each other, wondering whether they were allowed to applaud or stand up. What a bunch of cowards.

It was a disgraceful display of bad manners, but even more it was incredibly stupid because “the whole world was watching.” The camera was getting them all in close-up.

Who are these ungrateful corpses, middle America must have been asking. Good question. (Can you imagine how much money Pelosi has made in the stock market since Trump was elected? What does she have to be so upset about?)

More jobs? No applause. Higher wages? No applause. Lowest black unemployment in history? Crickets. ISIS disappearing? Zzzz…

What’s wrong with these people? Don’t they know nobody loves a sorehead? You think Colin Kaepernick could be elected president?

And why were they so depressed, you may ask? Easy. Here’s what they knew and what we all know. Trump is here to stay — for the next seven years. And they’re going to have to live with it.

Reason: Trump is an upper, like Reagan and JFK. All three were cheerleaders for America and made/make us feel good. That’s what wins. And why shouldn’t it? Optimism and pessimism are largely self-fulfilling prophecies. For today’s Democrats, it’s “Unhappy Days Are Here Again!”

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An Unaccountable FBI The bureau tries to tarnish a House memo before it’s released.

By on February 1st, 2018

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is making a last-ditch effort to block the release of a House Intelligence Committee memo detailing the bureau’s behavior during the 2016 election. This is all the more reason to let Americans see it.

In an unusual public statement Wednesday, the bureau objected that it had only “a limited opportunity to review” the memo the day before the House voted Monday to release it. The statement added that the FBI had “grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy.”

This is really something. The FBI knows what’s in the memo because it has long known what the House committee was seeking to examine. For months it refused to provide access to those documents until director Christopher Wray and the Justice Department faced a contempt of Congress vote. If they now object to the way the House construes the facts, they should have been more cooperative from the start.

Note the FBI’s language about “material omissions” rather than errors of fact. Until this statement the FBI was pleading damage to “national security.” Now that rationale has given way to the claim that the House is omitting key details to reach judgments that the FBI apparently disagrees with. If Mr. Wray wants to fill in those omissions, he can always ask President Trump to declassify more documents to provide a more complete record. We’d love to see them, and Mr. Trump should give that transparency a boost even if Mr. Wray doesn’t request it.

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Ritchie’s Boys and the Men from Zion By Matti Friedman

By on February 1st, 2018

Had you happened by a cave outside a certain kibbutz in British Palestine in late 1941, you would have been startled to find a small group of Nazi soldiers singing German songs by firelight under swastika flags. This wasn’t an advance unit of a Wehrmacht invasion force, though at the time the Afrika Korps wasn’t far away. It was the “German Section,” an outfit run by the British Special Operations Executive and the Palmach, the Jewish militia, and its members were German Jews who could pass for “Aryans.” Their job would be sabotage and subterfuge after the arrival of the German army in Palestine, which seemed imminent.

General Rommel and his Afrika Korps never got to Palestine, of course, so the German Section was never activated. But the image of those Jewish soldiers in Nazi uniform—young men forced from Germany because they weren’t Germans who then became useful because they were Germans—came back to me as I read Bruce Henderson’s Sons and Soldiers. Henderson tells the parallel story of a group of young Jews who barely escaped the Third Reich, reached a new homeland in America, and ended up putting their former identities and languages at the service of the U.S. Army as combat interrogators in Europe.

Before deploying as Americans to fight their former countrymen, Henderson writes, the soldiers passed through a U.S. Army intelligence installation in rural Maryland that included a mock German village and a theater for propaganda training, including staged Nazi rallies. Drawing their name from the strange base, Camp Ritchie, the soldiers became known—to the extent that they’re known (I’d never heard of them before reading this book)—as the Ritchie Boys.

Henderson introduces us to interrogators such as Werner Angress, who fled Germany as a scared teenager and returned from the sky with the 82nd Airborne. We meet Victor Brombert, whose family fled Germany for France after the rise of the Nazis and then had to keep running. He ended up returning to the Paris neighborhood of his youth in 1944 as a soldier in Patton’s army. When Brombert went looking for a girl he’d loved, he was told her fate in one word: Déportée.

With its population of soldiers of different nationalities preparing for the different battlefields of the world war, Camp Ritchie was a haven for Americans with strange backgrounds and accents, “a cacophony of foreign languages.” But military life wasn’t all friendly: Angress, for example, while still in a regular U.S. infantry regiment, spent time in something called an “alien detachment” because of his German identity, along with other foreigners denied weapons and relegated to cleaning latrines. “At night,” Henderson writes, “drunken soldiers coming back from town would curse loudly at them, calling them ‘Nazi pigs’ and worse.”

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Welcome to America, Terrorists! Right This Way for Student Visas! by Majid Rafizadeh

By on January 31st, 2018

“Foreign students have one of the highest rates of overstaying visas of any category — much higher even than tourist visas. It’s one of the favorite visas for terrorists to try to obtain, because it offers a longer duration of stay.” — Jessica M. Vaughan, the director of policy studies for the Center for Immigration Studies.

According to the Department of Homeland Security, there were approximately 739,000 immigrants who overstayed their visas last year alone. Roughly 80,000 of those were foreign students.

Worse, jihadists do not even need to obtain a university admission to set foot in the US. They can get a student visa by obtaining an admission from a school to learn English. Many of these Islamists can alter their area of study once they set foot in the US. An agent of the Iranian regime, for instance, may get a visa to study English in the US, but once he arrives, he can switch that major to study nuclear physics, to help his regime obtain nuclear weapons.

Recently, in the middle of a speech at a conference in Europe about the threats of radical jihadist groups, a young imam stood up and vehemently voiced his objection to my remarks. At the end of the conference, the imam and several of his followers came forward. The imam insisted that Americans should be educated about Sharia law.

One of the imam’s followers spoke up, his voice filled with excitement as he described how they had just entered Europe and their next destination was the US. When asked what their experience was like traveling to Europe, the man responded with a tone of gloating in his voice.

“It was very easy,” he said. “We came here on a student visa, and we will be in the US on another student visa!”

What the man claimed was tragically true. Many Islamists have become adept at manipulating the flaws in the immigration system and have found ways of taking advantage of any legal loopholes.

The breach should concern everyone: any prospective jihadists can easily abuse the immigration system by coming to the US on a student visa. All he needs to do is apply to some US universities, receive a letter of admission, then take it to the closest US embassy as a credible document for obtaining an F-1 student visa.

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Europe: Making Totalitarianism Great Again by Judith Bergman

By on January 31st, 2018

The European Union has programs in place that seek heavily to influence mainstream news outlets and journalists with its own agendas — such as that of continued mass-migration into Europe from Africa and the Middle East. For this purpose, the European Commission recently funded the publication of a handbook with guidelines for journalists on how to write about migrants and migration.

It is seemingly in the interest of these media representatives to label competition from alternative or new media, “fake news”.

A proposed French law would allow authorities to block websites during election seasons, a draconian measure to combat political opponents, which would place France in the same category as countries such as China and Iran that block websites that do not suit the agendas of the regime.

The European Union is intensifying its efforts to censor and marginalize voices that disagree with its policies, under the convenient euphemism of combating “fake news”.

“The Commission needs to look into the challenges the online platforms create for our democracies as regards the spreading of fake information and initiate a reflection on what would be needed at EU level to protect our citizens,” wrote Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the European Commission, in May 2017. How considerate that Juncker, in totalitarian fashion, wishes to protect EU citizens from news that does not fit the Commission’s narratives and agendas.

In October 2017, the European Commission announced its “fake news” policies and how it intends to “design solutions to address the spread of fake news”. According to the Commission, “Fake news consists of intentional disinformation spread via online social platforms, broadcast news media or traditional print”. Furthermore, according to the Commission, the EU’s fake news policy is guided by, among other things, “the freedom of expression, media pluralism, and the right of citizens to diverse and reliable information”.

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Memo Time Shock waves in the FBI’s – and Democrats’ – corridor. Matthew Vadum

By on January 31st, 2018

Divided on partisan lines, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence voted yesterday to make public a memo asserting the FBI relied on the discredited Trump-Russia dossier to obtain court-ordered foreign-intelligence wiretaps against U.S. citizens, a breathtaking abuse of power.

The document is already generating shock waves in Washington, even though few on Capitol Hill are said to have read it.

The FBI admits the Left’s electoral collusion conspiracy theory is unsubstantiated but still refuses to distance itself from the discredited Russia propaganda dossier Democrats paid Fusion GPS to create to undermine President Trump’s candidacy. And congressional Democrats, long sympathetic to Russia, have suddenly been transformed into strong defenders of the nation’s national security apparatus, implying that criticism of the long-troubled FBI is somehow treasonous or unpatriotic. It is a vicious smear calculated to redirect Americans’ attention, but par for the course for the Left.

Why anyone is even surprised at FBI corruption is unclear. Although the nation’s premier investigative agency is top-heavy with fine, ethical men and women, the FBI was born in corruption. Its founding director, J. Edgar Hoover, kept blackmail material on the powerful so he could stay in power for 50 years. The FBI needs a good housecleaning at the top.

It was a month ago that FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe reportedly refused to criticize the dossier at a closed-door hearing of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence chaired by Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.).

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