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Ruth King

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From One Frenzy to the Next By Victor Davis Hanson

By on November 15th, 2017

America is in another of its Salem moments. Frenzy is almost a living, breathing monster. It moves from host to host, fueled by rumor, gossip, and self-righteous furor.

The Greeks knew well of the transitory nature of these mass panics. They claimed such fits were inspired by the Maniae, the three daughters of Night who were the goddesses of insanity, madness, and crazed frenzy. We’ve seen all three of them in action throughout the past year.

Collusion Everywhere and Nowhere
For about six months, cable news shows, the internet, and the major newspapers ginned up the charge of “Russian collusion”—as a means of explaining the otherwise inexplicable and unacceptable defeat of Hillary Clinton by someone without either political or military experience.

Pundits and talking heads without evidence echoed each other with ever more preposterous charges. Voting machines supposedly had been rigged by a monstrous man who later had stooped to remove the Martin Luther King bust from the West Wing. We were also told that all good souls of the Electoral College clearly should have vitiated their constitutional duties and denied Trump the presidency.

We were lectured at the height of the collusion frenzy that Trump would be 1) impeached, 2) removed by the emoluments clause, 3) forced to resign under the 25th Amendment, or 4) simply quit in shame.

If not, how many ways could (or should) one kill Trump? Hanging? Decapitation? Dismemberment? Combustion? Shooting? Stabbing? Jet crash? As the madness grew, no obscenity from Stephen Colbert or physical threat from Robert DeNiro or Johnny Depp or Kathy Griffin or even Snoop Dogg seemed to suffice to express hatred of Trump.

The font of this 24/7 hysteria was the Clinton campaign’s purchase of a leaked smear job from an opposition research firm, which in turn had hired a disreputable former British intelligence agent, who had paid for concocted Russian slanders designed to disrupt an election. The Fusion GPS/Steele dossier was peddled to U.S. intelligence agencies, some of whom may have seen it as valuable political fodder and thus used it as an excuse to surveille members of the Trump campaign and in turn, unmask the names of American citizens and allow them to be leaked to the press. “Collusion” may turn out to have been sired, grown, and spread from a single, fake, and partisan document.

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We Were Soldiers by Mark Steyn

By on November 14th, 2017

On “Fox & Friends” this morning, reacting to the live footage of President Trump in Hanoi, I talked about the Vietnam war’s domestic impact on the American psyche. It took many decades for that to change, and this Veterans Day movie pick is one of the cultural artifacts of that evolution in perception – a film about soldiering that wears its allegiance in its very title. It was released about six months after 9/11, in the spring of 2002, and in that sense is a movie about an old war seen through the lens of a new one.

The best thing about We Were Soldiers is how bad it is. I don’t mean “bad” in the sense that it’s written and directed by Randall Wallace, screenwriter of Braveheart (which won Oscars for pretty much everything except its screenplay, which was not overlooked without reason) and Pearl Harbor (whose plonking dialogue has been dwelt on previously in this space). Mr Wallace is as reliably uninspired as you can get. And yet it serves him well here. Pearl Harbor was terrible, but it was professionally terrible, its lame dialogue and cookie-cutter characters and butt-numbingly obvious emotional manipulation skillfully woven together into state-of-the-art Hollywood product. By contrast, in its best moments, We Were Soldiers feels very unHollywoody, as if it’s a film not just about soldiers, but made by soldiers – or at any rate by someone who cares more about capturing the spirit of soldiery than about making a cool movie. It’s the very opposite of Steven Spielberg’s fluid ballet of carnage in Saving Private Ryan, and yet, in its stiffness and squareness, it manages to be moving and dignified in the way that real veterans of hellish battles often are.

This is all the more remarkable considering that it’s about the first big engagement of the Vietnam war, in the Ia Drang valley for three days and nights of November 1965. In those days, the word “Vietnam” had barely registered with the American public and the US participation still came under the evasive heading of “advisors”. In essence, the 1st Batallion of the 7th Cavalry walked – or helicoptered – into an ambush and, despite being outnumbered five to one by the enemy, managed to extricate themselves. Colonel Hal Moore, the commanding officer of the AirCav hotshots, and Joe Galloway, a UPI reporter who was in the thick of the battle for two days, later wrote a book – a terrific read. That’s the source material from which Wallace has made his movie, with Mel Gibson as Moore and Barry Pepper as Galloway.

We Were Soldiers opens with a brisk, unsparing prelude – a massacre of French forces in the very same valley, 11 years earlier. Then we’re off to Fort Benning, Georgia a decade later, where Colonel Moore and his grizzled old Sergeant-Major, Basil Plumley (Sam Elliott), are training youngsters for a new kind of cavalry. “We will ride into battle and this will be our horse,” announces Moore, as a chopper flies past on cue. Basil Plumley, incidentally, is not in the least bit plummy or Basil-esque. He’s the hard-case to Moore’s Harvard man, a fairly predictable social tension, at least to those BBC comedy fans who treasure the “Dad’s Army” inversion, with lower middle-class Arthur Lowe and his posh sergeant John LeMesurier.

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An Immigration-Enforcement Fairy Tale from the New York Times The Gray Lady’s latest argument against stricter enforcement doesn’t pass the smell test. By Jessica Vaughan & Steven Camarota

By on November 14th, 2017

The New York Times recently highlighted a new analysis of immigration-enforcement data that is sure to be used in the coming months to undermine the initiatives of the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress. The Times article, by staff writer Eduardo Porter, argues that years of “tough” enforcement under Obama failed to improve conditions for working Americans. Been there, done that, as it were, in response to President Trump’s call for tougher enforcement.

This analysis is deeply flawed, for two reasons. First, it uses inappropriate, incomplete, and doctored enforcement statistics to present a misleading picture of recent enforcement trends. Second, Porter relies heavily on a working paper and a forthcoming analysis by pro-immigration economist Giovanni Peri of the University of California, Davis, to argue that enforcing immigration laws does not help natives and in fact harms the economy.

Let’s examine the arguments on enforcement first. Porter states that “President Barack Obama went on a deportation spree in his first term.” To illustrate this “deportation spree,” he includes a bar graph labeled “Immigration Shock.” It claims to show annual interior apprehensions by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the leading interior enforcement agency, from the period 2000 to 2015. The graph depicts a distinct “surge” beginning in 2008 and accelerating in 2009 before dropping off in 2013. This is meant to show that enforcement was ramped up considerably in the Obama administration:

The first problem with this is that Porter chooses apprehensions, or arrests, as a metric to illustrate a deportation spree. But an arrest is not the same as a deportation, and is not by itself an ideal metric for measuring the effectiveness of enforcement. Not all those arrested for immigration violations are deported. Why not just show deportations, since those statistics also are available?

Further, especially under Obama’s “prosecutorial discretion” policy, a significant number of the aliens arrested by ICE officers were released after only a short time in custody. Some of these individuals had their charges dropped or thrown out of immigration court; others were let out of custody on bond or under “supervision,” but skipped out on their hearings and melted back into the illegal population. In fact, according to our calculations, the number of interior deportations over the period 2009–2015 (1.15 million) is only 63 percent of the number of interior apprehensions (1.84 million), illustrating that a very large number of those apprehended by ICE in the interior during this time were never deported from the country. If illegal immigrants who are arrested at some point nonetheless remain in the country, then so does their labor-market impact, undermining the enforcement-does-not-help-native-born-workers argument advanced by Porter’s piece.

It gets worse. These statistics aren’t just an unsatisfactory measure of enforcement; they are also inexplicably doctored, in a way that changes the timing and shape of the enforcement surge. The apprehension totals in the bar graph, which are sourced to the Department of Homeland Security and to Peri, do not match the official statistics published on the DHS website. We asked Peri about the discrepancy, and he told us that the Times had made adjustments to the numbers. Specifically, he said, the Times had subtracted from the annual totals any cases where the apprehension location was not specified, which are collectively labeled “Unknown” in the DHS statistical tables. Peri said that the Times wanted to count only interior arrests. But the DHS table makes clear that all arrests it attributes to ICE are interior arrests (as opposed to arrests made by Customs and Border Protection officers, including the Border Patrol). It is not clear what innocent explanation there could be for subtracting these “unknown” cases.

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Let Down at the Top Our Baby Boomer elites, mired in excess and safe in their enclaves, have overseen the decay of our core cultural institutions. By Victor Davis Hanson

By on November 14th, 2017

Since the Trojan War, generations have always trashed their own age in comparison to ages past. The idea of fated decadence and decline was a specialty of 19th-century German philosophy.

So we have to be careful in calibrating generations, especially when our own has reached a level of technology and science never before dreamed of (and it is not a given that material or ethical progress is always linear).

Nonetheless, the so-called Baby Boomers have a lot to account for — given the sorry state of entertainment, sports, the media, and universities.

The Harvey Weinstein episode revealed two generational truths about Hollywood culture.

One, the generation that gave us the free-love and the anything-goes morals of Woodstock discovered that hook-up sex was “contrary to nature.” Sexual congress anywhere, any time, anyhow, with anyone — near strangers included — is not really liberating and can often be deeply imbedded within harassment and ultimately the male degradation of women.

Somehow a demented Harvey Weinstein got into his head that the fantasy women in his movies who were customarily portrayed as edgy temptresses and promiscuous sirens were reflections of the way women really were in Los Angeles and New York — or the way that he thought they should be. It was almost as if Weinstein sought to become as physically repulsive and uncouth as possible — all the better to humiliate (through beauty-and-the-beast asymmetry) the vulnerable and attractive women he coerced.

Two, Weinstein reminded us, especially in his eleventh-hour medieval appeals for clemency by way of PC attacks on the NRA and Donald Trump, that mixing politics with art was, as our betters warned, always a self-destructive idea.

Hollywood ran out of original thought about three decades ago, and the people noticed and so keep avoiding the theaters. How many times can a good-looking, young, green progressive crusader expose a corporate pollution plot, or battle a deranged band of southern-twangy Neanderthals, South African racists, or Russian tattooed thugs, or a deep-state CIA cabal in sunglasses and shiny suits? How many times can the nth remake of a comic-book hero be justified by updating him into a caped social-justice warrior from L.A.? Ars gratia politicorum is suicide.

The ruling generation in Hollywood is out of creative ideas mostly because it invested in political melodrama rather than human tragedy. It cannot make a Western, not just because Santa Monica’s young men long ago lost the ability to sound or act like Texans in 1880, but because its politics have no patience with the real world of noble people who are often doomed, or flawed individuals who are nevertheless defined by their best rather than worst traits, or well-meaning souls who can cause havoc, or courageous men who fight for bad causes.

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The Clintons, Obama, Kerry and their pedophile pals. Daniel Greenfield

By on November 14th, 2017

It was the cackle that cost her an election.

The time was the 80s and the First Lady of Arkansas was chatting with Roy Reed. Reed was a New York Times bigwig, a civil rights hero and is currently a speaker for the Clinton School of Public Service.

Back then, Reed was working on a profile of the Clintons for Esquire. The profile was never published. The tapes of the interviews were stowed at the University of Arkansas until they were dug up in ’14.

And there’s Hillary Clinton laughing on tape about how she saved a 12-year-old girl’s rapist.

Kathy Shelton had been raped and beaten into a coma when she was twelve years old. Her rapist wanted a “woman lawyer.” Hillary Clinton took his case as a favor and used every dirty trick to get him off. Even though she admits on the tape that she knew her client was guilty, she accused his victim of being “emotionally unstable” and fantasizing about older men. And she used the little girl’s bloody underwear as the pivot of a blatant lie that got her client off with less than a year in prison.

All of that is bad enough.

It reminds us that there is nothing that Hillary Clinton won’t do to win whether it’s accusing an abused child of being a mentally ill slut or accusing her election opponent of cavorting with urinating Russian prostitutes. And that despite her best efforts to appear human, she has nothing resembling a soul.

But there’s the Clinton cackle. You can hear it throughout the tape. Even years later in the governor’s mansion, Hillary thought that getting a 12-year-old girl’s rapist off the hook was the funniest thing ever.

Roy Reed, the great media hero of the civil rights movement, never wrote about it. There were no outraged stories in the New York Times or Esquire. Just like Harvey Weinstein’s associates. They knew.

They knew and they said nothing.

Hillary Clinton wasn’t the last Democrat presidential candidate to have deeply troubling links to pedophiles.

Her husband was much worse.

Bill Clinton took dozens of rides on Jeffrey Epstein’s Lolita Express. The top Democrat donor’s plane earned its nickname because of its association with the abuse of young girls. Like Hillary’s client, the tastes of Bill’s bosom buddy allegedly ran to twelve year old girls. An FBI investigation found 40 victims.

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Celebrating Islam across North America From Mississippi to Ontario, adults and children alike are being fed the most grotesque of lies. Bruce Bawer

By on November 14th, 2017

It’s happening all over North America – including places you might think were too remote to even conceive of such activities. Take Missoula, Montana, where the local newspaper, the Missoula Current, reported last April on a group called Standing Alongside America’s Muslims (SALAM), formed a year earlier “to push back against a rising tide of Islamophobia.” The Current report on SALAM, as it happened, appeared two weeks to the day after the deadly suicide bombing in the St. Petersburg, Russia, Metro, by an affiliate of Al-Qaeda. (You already forgot that one, didn’t you?) The Current also brought the news that the Missoula City Council, in an effort to address supposed “waves of anti-Muslim sentiment,” had designated April 24-30 as “Celebrate Religious Freedom Week” to coincide with SALAM’s own “Celebrate Islam Week.”

What is SALAM all about? A tour of its Facebook page indicates that it’s especially focused on the fount of evil that is Donald Trump and on his satanic attempt to establish a “Muslim ban.” The page contains graphs and charts illustrating how few Muslims live in the U.S. and how few Americans die from jihad terror compared to other causes. (There are no charts showing the recent surge in both the population and deadliness of European Muslims.) One evening in September, SALAM sponsored a quiz about Islamic culture, containing such questions as: “What spice do Syrians like in their coffee? How do you say ‘delicious’ in Arabic? What stringed instrument do Iraqis play?” (Presumably there were no questions about the several different types of female genital mutilation, the Islamic penalty for apostasy, the punishments for homosexuality prescribed by various Islamic theological traditions, or the age of Muhammed’s wife Aisha at the time of their marriage.)

While delicately avoiding any mention of jihadist attacks, moreover, SALAM’s Facebook page does a great job of compiling stories about, for example, women who claim to have been called names for wearing hijab. It has also reprinted such garbage as a Foreign Policy article whitewashing Jonathan Brown, the head of Georgetown University’s Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, who has defended Muslim slavery, child rape, and execution of gays.

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The Real Victims of “Islamophobia” by Judith Bergman

By on November 14th, 2017

Local authorities, police, teachers and MPs have all been working with MEND even though the organization “meets the government’s own definition of extremism” and “has regularly hosted illiberal, intolerant and extremist Islamist speakers… has openly sought to undermine counter-terrorism legislation and counter-extremism efforts, in addition to having its own links to extremists…”
Despite meeting the government’s definition of an extremist group, MEND is nevertheless organizing a number of events for “Islamophobia Awareness Month” at British universities.
One can think of other issues that are more deserving of an “awareness month” in the UK, especially because many of the people affected by those issues have suffered the consequences of the British obsession with “Islamophobia”.

In Britain, Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, along with Liberal Democrats leader Vince Cable, are the poster boys for this year’s “Islamophobia Awareness Month” a yearly campaign, which has been running under the leadership of Islamist group Muslim Engagement and Development (MEND), since 2012.

“We have to drive out racism in any form in our society,” said Corbyn – whose own Labour party has never been more anti-Semitic and who considers Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists his “friends”. The message came wrapped in a propaganda video he stars in for the campaign. “Islamophobia,” he continued, “is a terrible thing, causes terrible hurt and terrible pain”.

“I greatly welcome the contribution that MEND is making to raise awareness of this issue and mobilise people in the political world and elsewhere to fight Islamophobia”, Cable adds in the video.

Here are two leaders of British political opposition parties, virtually genuflecting to MEND, a group that was recently described, as “Islamists masquerading as civil libertarians”.

Corbyn and Cable are not, however, the only ones to eager for the company of Islamic supremacists. Local authorities, police, teachers and MPs have all been working with MEND even though the organization “meets the government’s own definition of extremism” (“Vocal or active opposition to fundamental British values, including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs.”) and “has regularly hosted illiberal, intolerant and extremist Islamist speakers… has openly sought to undermine counter-terrorism legislation and counter-extremism efforts, in addition to having its own links to extremists…”

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Lebanon’s Fall Would Be Iran’s Gain by John R. Bolton

By on November 14th, 2017

Almost unnoticed in the coverage of President Trump’s Asia trip, Lebanon is slipping under Iran’s control. On November 3, Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri, a Sunni Muslim, resigned, citing fears of assassination by Hezbollah, the Shia Muslim terrorist group funded and controlled by Iran. No one can say Hariri’s fears are unjustified since his father, former Prime Minister Rafic Hariri, was murdered in 2005 — almost certainly at Syrian or Iranian direction.

While the full ramifications of Saad Hariri’s resignation remain to be seen, Tehran’s ayatollahs have now significantly extended their malign reach in the Middle East. This is bad for the people of Lebanon; bad for Israel, with which Lebanon shares a common border and a contentious history; bad for Arab states like Jordan and the oil-producing Arabian Peninsula monarchies; and bad for America and its vital national interests in this critical region.

Sadly, Iran’s progress was foreseeable from the inception of Barack Obama’s strategy of using Iraqi military forces and Shia militia units as critical elements in the campaign to eradicate the ISIS caliphate in Syria and Iraq. The Baghdad government is effectively Iran’s satellite. Accordingly, Obama’s decision to provide that regime with military assistance and advice strengthened Iran’s hand even further and materially contributed to its efforts to establish dominance in Iraq’s Shia regions.

Moreover, Iran itself, supported by Russian forces in Syria, aided and directed the Bashar Assad regime in fighting against both ISIS and the Syrian opposition. Iran also ordered Hezbollah to deploy from Lebanon into Syria, thus effectively creating a Shia-dominated arc of control from Iran itself to the Mediterranean.

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Israel to Poland: ‘Act Against the Organizers’ of ‘Dangerous’ March with Anti-Semitic see note pleaseMessages By Bridget Johnson

By on November 14th, 2017

The ADL’s response: “alarming that white supremacist rally in Poland today drew 1000s of young Europeans who, like those who marched in #Charlottesville, believe in ‘ethnic purity’ and target immigrants, Muslims and Jews for #hate,” is stupid and duplicitous as usual. The Charlottesville event had at most a hundred bigots who were bused in to disrupt a protest against removal of Confederate statues. In Poland, with its sordid history of collaboration with Nazis in roundup of Jews, a march drawing thousands is truly alarming…rsk
Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has called on the Polish government to take action against anti-Semitism after a weekend nationalist march included demonstrators calling for a country free of Jews.

Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Emmanuel Nahshon told the Associated Press that the event was “a dangerous march of extreme and racist elements.”

“We hope that Polish authorities will act against the organizers,” Nahshon said. “History teaches us that expressions of racist hate must be dealt with swiftly and decisively.”

The rally of some 60,000 Poles included chants of “Pure Poland, white Poland!” and “Jews out of Poland,” and banners with slogans such as “white Europe of brotherly nations” and “pray for Islamic Holocaust.”

Interior Minister Mariusz Blaszczak called the demonstration “a beautiful sight,” adding that “we are proud that so many Poles have decided to take part in a celebration connected to the Independence Day holiday.”

The American Jewish Committee said chants at the march also included “clean blood, lucid mind,” “Sieg Heil” and “Ku Klux Klan.”

“While the joyous 99th anniversary of Polish Independence was appropriately celebrated in ceremonies led by President Duda, the day was seriously marred by hateful, far-right throngs that threaten the core values of Poland and its standing abroad,” said Agnieszka Markiewicz, director of AJC’s Warsaw-based Central Europe office. “The growth of xenophobic nationalism in Poland is becoming more dangerous, and we urge the government to condemn unequivocally the phenomenon and take appropriate action to counter it.”

“The apparent tolerance shown for these purveyors of hate — and, let’s be clear, that’s exactly what they are — by some Polish government officials is particularly troubling,” Markiewicz added.

“Alarming that white supremacist rally in Poland today drew 1000s of young Europeans who, like those who marched in #Charlottesville, believe in ‘ethnic purity’ and target immigrants, Muslims and Jews for #hate,” tweeted Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt.

The European Jewish Congress warned at the end of August that “there has been a distinct normalization of antisemitism, racism and xenophobia in Poland recently.”

EJC president Moshe Kantor said that anti-Semitic incidents including a proliferation of “fascist slogans,” banners and commentaries “appear to have coincided with the Polish government closing its communications with the official representatives of the Jewish community.”

A University of Warsaw Centre for Research on Prejudice study released in January found 37 percent of Poles surveyed voicing negative attitudes towards Jews in 2016, up 32 percent from 2015 — sentiment especially driven by young Poles.

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Mall of America Stabber Identified as Mahad Abdiaziz Abdirahaman By Debra Heine

By on November 14th, 2017

Police have named the man accused of stabbing two people in the dressing room area of Macy’s at the Mall of America on Sunday.

Officials identified the 20-year-old suspect as Mahad Abdiaziz Abdirahaman of Minneapolis. Police are calling this incident a botched theft attempt.

According to Bloomington Police Chief Jeff Potts, Abdirahaman went into a dressing room in the men’s department and attempted to steal some property.

The victim was stabbed after finding the suspect pawing through his belongings in the dressing room. When family members rushed in to help, a second victim was slashed. Potts said family members were able to disarm the suspect, and judging by his mug shot, they managed to rough him up a bit too.

The melee and ensuing police response alarmed nearby shoppers, who were waiting in line with their kids to see Santa Claus.

Officers quickly arrived at the scene and took Abdirahaman into custody.

Via KARE 11:

Potts said two adult male victims were brought to the hospital. Alexander Sanchez, 19, suffered serious but non-life-threatening injuries to his face and upper body, and remains at HCMC, according to police.

John Sanchez, 25, was treated for stab wounds to his upper body and has been released from HCMC, Bloomington police say.

Potts said the suspect had “minor, superficial wounds” and was transported to jail.

Abdirahaman is being held on two counts of probable cause first-degree assault.

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