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Ruth King

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Bernie Sanders’s Legacy After 87 months of Obama, why are young liberals asking for ‘change’? Dan Henninger

By on April 21st, 2016

With Hillary Clinton and the party machinery back on track to a now-tarnished coronation, it’s worth assessing what Bernie Sanders’s campaign accomplished. I still can’t take the Vermont Socialist himself seriously, not with Larry David as his doppelgänger. But the Sanders phenomenon—embraced by a strong majority of liberals between the ages of 17 and 50—deserves attention.

Reporters have exhaustively plumbed the habitats and mental states of “the Trump voter.” Sen. Sanders’s supporters, by contrast, have floated through the primaries in a mist of keywords—millennials, college students, young professionals, actresses, “white people.”

One has to ask: Are they all actually socialists? I doubt it.

It’s no surprise Donald Trump in his New York victory speech about the “corrupt” Republican Party called Sen. Sanders a fellow “outsider.” The two great disrupters are remarkably similar, a kind of Tweedledon and Tweedleburn on trade and a “system” that’s “broken” and “failing” their supporters.

If one word attaches to the Sanders camp, it is “change.” But change what?

This isn’t meant to deride their desire for change, which is undoubtedly authentic, but only to ask how it’s possible that so many under-50 liberals have settled on Bernie Sanders as a change agent after living daily through more than 87 straight months of a Democratic president elected on a platform of “Hope and Change”?

As to Mrs. Clinton, President Obama’s presumed heir, The Wall Street Journal poll this week finds “just 22% of registered voters give her high marks for being able to bring real change to the country.”

What, exactly, is Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton or even Bernie Sanders supposed to deliver that an infinity of politicians and public officials before them haven’t already delivered?

If change has any concrete meaning for Sen. Sanders’s supporters, it must have something to do with what the government or public sector does. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Kevin Donnelly The Rainbow Blackboard

By on April 21st, 2016

Did you know that ‘Romeo and Juliet’ is to be condemned for ‘promoting an oppressive binary structure for organising the social and cultural practices of adolescent boys and girls’? If not, thanks to Big Chalk’s gender agenda, your kids sure will
At the same time the Andrews government is removing religious instruction from the school curriculum there can be no doubt that it is pushing a radical cultural-left agenda about sexuality and gender on Victoria’s school children.

This shouldn’t surprise, as Premier Andrews is a key member of the ALP’s Socialist-Left faction and Labor’s policy, taken to the 2014 election, states an incoming government must “improve the health and safety of same-sex attracted and gender-questioning (SSAGQ) students by ensuring schools and health services effectively address homophobia, including content of sexuality education”. While all accept that bullying and unfair discrimination are wrong, the reality is that what Premier Andrews supports is more about advocating a radical lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex (LGBTQI) lifestyle than actually making schools safer. The Safe Schools Coalition program the Andrew’s government is making compulsory next year, while sold as an anti-bullying iniative, is more about indoctrinating children.

gender fairy coverSchool children are told that gender is fluid and limitless, that they can decide what they want to be. The Gender Fairy storybook, designed for children as young as four, suggests being transgender is normal and it’s OK not to identify as male or female.

The Safe Schools Do Better booklet tells students that about 16% of children are same-sex attracted, gender-diverse, trans- or intersex, even though a random survey of over 19,000 Australian men and women discovered that 98% identified as heterosexual.

Worse, children are taught that anyone who suggests “normal” relationships involve men and women are to be condemned as “heteronormative”, “homophobic” and/or ss schools tips“transphobic”. At right, for instance, is Safe Schools Do Better’s advice on taking offence and reporting teachers perceived to have the “wrong” attitude. Such are the concerns about the lack of objectivity and the fact that the Safe Schools material is not age appropriate that a recent review commissioned by the Commonwealth government called for significant changes. These included schools needing to get parental approval before teaching the program, which is not to be used in primary schools, and giving parents the right to opt-out. As expected, in addition to making the Safe Schools program compulsory, Andrews has refused to have a word changed.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Don’t Apologize for Hiroshima By Lawrence J. Haas

By on April 21st, 2016

The president musn’t express guilt over U.S. use of nuclear weapons during World War II.

“I think the president would like to do it,” John Roos, President Barack Obama’s former ambassador to Tokyo, said the other day about a possible Obama visit to Hiroshima when he attends the Group of Seven Summit next month in Japan. “He is a person who bends over backwards to show respect to history, and it does advance his agenda.”

That a visit to Hiroshima, on which President Harry Truman dropped the world’s first deployed atomic bomb, would advance Obama’s agenda is clear. He has long envisioned a world without nuclear weapons, announced steps to pursue it in a high-profile speech in Prague in April of 2009, and continues to push for U.S.-Russian cuts in nuclear arsenals and global efforts to secure loose nuclear materials.

That Obama “bends over backwards to show respect for history” is less clear. Just a day before speaking in Prague in 2009, he dismissed American “exceptionalism” – America’s unique historical role in promoting freedom and democracy and, since World War II, ensuring global stability – as no more special than the “exceptionalism” that Brits, Greeks, and others feel about their own nations.

The debate over an Obama visit to Hiroshima – which would make him the first president to visit while in office – has focused almost exclusively on whether he would or should apologize for the bombing. That Obama would be tempted seems obvious, for he hasn’t shied away from publicly scolding America for its faults, from its toppling of Iran’s government in 1953 to its ongoing struggle with race at home.

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Social Media Emerges as a Valuable Terrorist Fundraising Tool by Abha Shankar

By on April 21st, 2016

Social media has emerged as a valuable and effective fundraising tool for terrorist groups. The Internet’s easy access and relative anonymity allows terrorist groups to solicit online donations from both supporters and unsuspecting donors who believe they are supporting a humanitarian or charitable activity.

On March 22, for example, the Nafir al Aqsa (Mobilizing for Al-Aqsa) Campaign “to equip the mujahidin of Beit al Maqdis [Jerusalem],” posted (and suspended in the past day) a solicitation for funding under the Twitter handle @Nafeer_aqsa100. It cites a hadith – a saying attributed to Islam’s prophet Muhammad – that giving money to those waging jihad is as good as doing it yourself.

Translation:

Nafir al Aqsa Campaign

To equip the Mujahdin of Beit al Maqdis

Equip a Mujahid

2,500 Dollars

Kalashnikov

Ammunition vest

Military clothing

Ammunition

Military boots

The Messenger of God (May God bless him and grant him peace) said: “Whoever equips a warrior in the way of God has himself fought, and he who supplies the needs of the family of a warrior has himself fought.”

The post lists a Telegram account “Nafeeraq” and email Nafeeraq@tutanota.de to contact the campaign.

Another post from March 23 (also suspended in the past day) solicits funds for jihad, listing the prices of a sniper weapon ($6,000), a grenade thrower RPG ($3,000), and PK machine gun ($5,500).

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The Measure of a Man – A Review By Marilyn Penn

By on April 21st, 2016

“The Measure of a Man,” a film whose French title translates as “market law,’ is a condemnation of an economic system that treats its workers as disposable objects regardless of how diligently they have performed or how long they have been employed. Thierry, the protagonist played by Vincent Lindon in an award winning tour de force, is an everyman who has lost his job and been put through several retraining programs that were exercises in futility, never leading to an actual job. We see his frustration in dealing with the bureaucracy that sends people jumping through meaningless hoops only to be turned down time and again. We see him interviewed on Skype by a callow employer who whittles him down to the humiliating admission that he would welcome working for less money at a position lower than expected – only to be told that he has less than a 1% chance of getting the job – though it’s not impossible.

In the most moving part of the this film, we see him at home with a severely disabled son who is treated with dignity and acceptance by him and his wife. In one scene, the parents put on music and begin to dance together, eventually including the son and having Thierry step aside and beam as his son dances with his mother. These are scenes showing all three characters accepting their fate and moving on without self-pity as best they can. Thierry undergoes all sorts of duress : a version of group therapy in which his trial interview is critiqued by his peers; a lecture by an employment counselor who urges him to sell his house and buy life insurance; a patronizing speech by his son’s school director who now doubts that the boy can achieve his dream of going to college and a disappointment by a potential buyer of his mobile home who agreed to a price on the phone but tries to bargain him down after he sees it. His life is a series of reality bites which lead to his taking a job as a security officer at a large supermarket.

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Turning American Law Upside Down for the Transgendered By David French

By on April 20th, 2016

Our nation’s centuries-old commitment to free speech and religious liberty was already under threat. But it took men wanting to use women’s bathrooms and vice versa for the Left to truly show its hand, plainly and unequivocally declaring that American legal traditions should be set ablaze.

Yesterday, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights published a “Statement Condemning Recent State Laws and Pending Proposals Targeting the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Community” — a statement motivated by new Mississippi laws protecting religious freedom and by North Carolina’s much-discussed “bathroom law.” The Commission claims that any law requiring men and women to use bathrooms that correspond to their biological sex “jeopardizes not only the dignity, but also the actual physical safety, of transgender people whose appearances may not match societal expectations of the sex specified on their identification documents.”

While this is standard leftist rhetoric — notice it omits any concern for women and girls who will be exposed to male nudity and could be rendered more vulnerable to sexual predators — what follows is perhaps the clearest and most unequivocal statement of radical progressive legal philosophy I’ve ever read. It articulates three principles that, taken together, would render religious liberty permanently subordinate to the interests and demands of LGBT activists:

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BOOKS Comments turned off

Where UNESCO and ISIS Converge War crimes courtesy of the United Nations. April 20, 2016 Caroline Glick

By on April 20th, 2016

Last month, UNESCO’s director general Irina Bokova issued a statement congratulating Russian- backed Syrian forces for liberating the ancient city of Palmyra from Islamic State (ISIS).

Bokova said Palmyra “carries the memory of the Syrian people, and the values of cultural diversity, tolerance and openness that have made this region a cradle of civilization.”

Bokova added, “The deliberate destruction of heritage is a war crime, and UNESCO will do everything in its power to document the damage so that these crimes do not go unpunished. I wish to remind all parties present of the absolute necessity to preserve this unique heritage as an essential condition for peace and the future of the region.”

Last week, UNESCO’s executive board passed a resolution unanimously outlining the steps the organization would take to rebuild the devastated site, whose major monuments were destroyed or damaged during the city’s 10 months under ISIS rule.

All of this, is all very well and nice.

The problem is that UNESCO commits the very crimes for which it condemns ISIS. Indeed, it committed the crime of seeking to wipe out history, whose preservation is “an essential condition for peace and the future of the region,” the day it passed its resolution on Palmyra.

Right after UNESCO’s board unanimously passed its resolution on Palmyra, it also passed a resolution whose goal is to erase Jewish history in the land of Israel.

The resolution, titled merely “Occupied Palestine,” (a country that doesn’t even exist), defined the Temple Mount, Judaism’s most sacred site, as an exclusively Muslim site. Jews who visit it were referred to derisively as “right wing extremists.”

The Western Wall, Judaism’s second holiest site, was similarly referred to as an exclusively Islamic site.

The resolution reinstated a previous resolution’s false claim that the tombs of the patriarchs and matriarchs of the Jewish people in Hebron and Bethlehem are mosques. The resolution, like the one from last week, was also a war crime, where UNESCO acted with malice to destroy the historical record.

In another act of cultural aggression, whose goal is to destroy the historical record, in last week’s resolution UNESCO falsely and maliciously referred to Jewish cemeteries as “fake graves,” in “Muslim cemeteries.”

And if that weren’t enough, UNESCO denounced Israel for the “conversion of many Islamic and Byzantine remains into so-called Jewish ritual baths or into Jewish prayer places.”

UNESCO’s acts are not the ravings of lunatic extremists or genocidal imperialists shouting about caliphates, crucifying and enslaving innocents. The latest resolution was sponsored by supposedly moderate Islamic countries, two of which – Jordan and Egypt – have peace treaties with Israel.

Support for the resolution wasn’t limited to Islamic countries voting as a bloc. France, Spain, Sweden, Slovenia, India, Russia and Argentina were among the nations who voted in favor of a decision that referred to the Western Wall in scare quotes.

The US sits on UNESCO’s executive board despite its open anti-Semitism. By doing so, the US grants legitimacy to a body which is waging a culture war against Israel no less determined – and arguably no less criminal– than ISIS’s war against all vestiges of non-jihadist culture in Syria, Iraq and throughout the world.

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Singaporean PM Thanks Israel for Helping “At Our Time of Great Need”

By on April 20th, 2016

In the first-ever visit by a Singaporean prime minister to Israel, the city-state’s current premier thanked Israel for “[helping] us and [standing] by us at our time of great need,” The Jerusalem Post reported on Monday.

Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong made his remarks as he received an honorary doctorate at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The specific reference was to Israel’s assistance in the creation of the Singapore Armed Forces after the island nation unexpectedly achieved independence in August 1965. “We asked a number of countries, but only Israel responded to us, and it did so very promptly,” Lee explained. “Without the IDF, the SAF could not have grown its capabilities, deterred threats, defended our island, and reassured Singaporeans and investors that Singapore was secure and had a future.”

Lee was accompanied by his wife Ho Ching and a 60-person delegation, which included two government ministers.

Israel and Singapore established diplomatic ties in 1969, and the two have become significant trading partners since. Trade between the two nations reached $1.35 billion in 2015, which was greater than trade between Israel and most European Union nations individually.

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The Holocaust, the Left, and the Return of Hate The European Left is struggling to combat anti-Semitism in its midst. Jamie Palmer

By on April 20th, 2016

Alex Chalmers, the co-chair of the Oxford University Labour Club, resigned on February 17, citing widespread anti-Semitism and hostility to Jews among its members. His statement and a subsequent press release by the Oxford University Jewish Society make for sobering reading, not least because this is not an isolated case.

In early March, the British Labour Party was forced to explain why it allowed Gerry Downing, who had written about the need to “address the Jewish Question,” and Vicki Kirbyi, who once tweeted that Adolf Hitler might be the “Zionist God,” to be readmitted to the party following their suspension for anti-Semitism. Kirby had been nothing less than a parliamentary candidate, and upon her return was appointed vice-chair of her local party executive committee.

Over the past few years, a palpable sense of alarm has been quietly growing amongst Jews on the European Left. At the heart of an often-fraught relationship lies the following dilemma: The vast majority of Jews are Zionist, and the vast majority of Left-wing opinion is not.

But the problem goes beyond the question of Israel itself. It also involves a general sense that the Left is unconcerned with Jewish interests and unwilling to take the matter of rising anti-Semitism seriously, preferring instead to dismiss it as a consequence of Israeli policies or a censorious attempt to close down discussion of the same. The horror with which many Jews greeted the election of Jeremy Corbyn to the leadership of the Labour Party was outstripped only by the realization that his supporters felt that his fondness for the company of anti-Semites was unworthy of their concern.

This is a complex subject, with roots that stretch back to the beginning of the last century. I have attempted to outline in necessarily broad fashion some of the trends of thought that have informed the relationship between Jews and the Left, as well as the shifting attitudes towards Israel in particular. In doing so, I hope to shed some light on their implications.

The key question facing the European Left is whether or not it can change in such a way that Jews can once again feel part of the Left’s political family. Unfortunately, for the foreseeable future the answer to that question appears to be no.

Jews and Europeans drew different lessons about nationalism from the experience of World War II. On a continent disfigured by the mayhem of conquest, occupation, collaboration, and genocide, Nazism and fascism were perceived to have been nationalism’s logical endgame. As chauvinism and self-glorification gave way to introspection and self-doubt, a new universalism and internationalism emerged from the rubble—the establishment of the United Nations, the adoption by its General Assembly of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and a rise in anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist feeling that eventually led Western democracies to dismantle their empires.

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Farewell to Democracy The price of politics in a society without virtue. Daniel Greenfield

By on April 20th, 2016

In the closing minutes of the film Moscow on the Hudson, Vladimir Ivanoff, a Soviet defector, sits in a New York coffee shop trying to make sense of the country he has come to. It is a free country, but the nature of its freedom appears both bewildering and destructive. The America he lives in has freedom, but no purpose. It often appears to be open to all the wrong things and none of the right ones. A place free of religion, of morality and of meaning, that offers mercantilism and hedonism, that allows individuals to lose themselves in a system that echoes with a freedom that is so vast as to be inhuman.

People from around the world are drawn to America by the idea of freedom. It is not difficult to envision what freedom is when you live under a dictatorship. Freedom becomes the opposite of tyranny. But the more complex question is what is freedom without the constant of tyranny? What happens when freedom is cheapened and when the founding principles of a nation are forgotten?

Those are among the subjects that author Alexander Maistrovoy explores in his book, Agony of Hercules or a Farewell to Democracy (Notes of a Stranger). Alexander Maistrovoy is no stranger to tyranny. But he finds himself a stranger in a West which has turned its back on its values and appears to be nihilistically embracing its own destruction at the hands of Islam and the radical left.

The world that Alexander Maistrovoy discovers is descending into totalitarianism, gripped by a senseless madness it abandons its values, forgets its past and embraces a chaotic hedonism that can never be equal to the full measure of its unhappiness. It is a world where human rights means tyranny and the tyranny of Islamic law means freedom, where dictators are heroes and democracy is a shell game.

As Maistrovoy writes, “The words ‘democracy,’ human rights,’ ‘social justice,’ ‘liberal values,’ ‘humanism,’ ‘freedom’ and ‘equality’ rain down from all sides… they are repeated like a spell, a magic mantra, a prayer.” But the magic spell means nothing. Those using the words do not understand their meanings. Instead the invocation of lost principles becomes a cargo cult ritual that licenses destructive impulses. There is no mantra or spell that will transform Islamic law or leftist tyranny into liberal democracy. Instead the rituals and word games mask the scale and steepness of the descent.

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