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Ruth King

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At The UN War Is Peace By Herbert London

By on September 20th, 2016

As part of United Nations Week in New York there is a much heralded Day of Peace. This day has been announced at the moment weapons are converted into plowshares. The problem, however, is no one mentioned this to militant Palestinians. These people welcomed the week with four terror attacks: two stabbings, one car ramming, and an incident in which rocks and glass bottles were thrown at an Israeli bus.

More than 300 terror attacks have taken place in Israel this year, killing 40 and wounding more than 500. A spokesman for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas reacted to the attacks by condemning Israeli soldiers for shooting the attackers. P.A.’s criticism of Israeli self-defense raises obvious questions about everything from real motivation to any commitment to stability. Abbas has consistently refused to condemn terror attacks. In fact, he has visited the families of terrorists and told one group of mothers, “your sons are martyrs.”

Despite a movement afoot among several member states in the Security Council to reorganize an independent state of Palestine in Samaria and Judea, normalization is routinely condemned by P.A. leaders and those who advocate peace are denounced as traitors. Even though the Oslo Accords “called for the end of incitement and the encouragement of a process of normalization,” it has been ignored in practice by Abbas and his followers. Any overture at reconciliation has been rebuked.

Alas, the Palestinians are held hostage by the militants. Children are educated to hate Jews and Arab cities in the West Bank have become centers for destructive plots against Israel. Hamas extremists intimidate any overtures for moderation, despite their hatred of the P.A. For the extremists there is only one solution, a Palestinian state from the Jordan to the Mediterranean.

Recently the Israeli Defense Force, recognizing the stockpiling of 150,000 missiles in Lebanon, issued a report indicating that as many as 10,000 missiles could evade anti-missile defenses killing as many as 400 Israelis citizens. Should Hamas, Hezbollah and Fatah attack simultaneously dozens of missiles could strike Tel Aviv, notwithstanding David’s Sling and other sophisticated anti-missile defenses.

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The Mulish Stupidity of Clinton-Obama Counterterrorism By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on September 20th, 2016

As Rich notes, Hillary Clinton is essentially accusing Donald Trump of treason on the theory that his rhetoric aids and abets ISIS in recruiting Muslims because it affirms their narrative of a war between Islam and non-Muslims. This is as stupid as would be a claim that Mrs. Clinton is guilty of treason — as opposed to mere idiocy — because, by refusing to acknowledge the Islamic doctrinal roots of jihadist terror, she and her policymaking cohort blind us to the motivation, objectives, and strategies of our terrorist enemies.

As I have previously recounted, when I prosecuted the Blind Sheikh’s terrorist cell in the mid Nineties, the defense lawyers for the jihadists – who sounded just like today’s anti-anti-terrorist progressives – claimed that their clients had been lured into terrorist activity by U.S. government policy and by the enticements of a government informant who spouted Islam-against-the-world rhetoric. In response to this fatuous contention, we put a very simple question to the jury: “What would it take to turn you into a mass-murderer?” What policy could be so bad, what rhetorical us-against-them flourishes so inspiring, that a person would join the terrorist cause and commit acts of barbarism?

When a person with a modicum of common sense considers such a question, he or she knows that there could be no such policy. There is no controversial policy or figure that could cause a person to become a terrorist – not Gitmo, not harsh interrogation tactics, not Bosnia, not Abu Ghaib, not torched Korans, not anti-Muslim videos, not Donald Trump . . . or George Bush . . . or Dick Cheney . . . or Bill Clinton . . . or Pope John Paul II (the latter two of whom jihadists plotted to kill in the mid-Nineties).

Of course, all of these policies and people are exploited pretextually by jihadists in order to justify themselves and to play the West like a fiddle. But it’s all a side show. A person joins the jihad only if the person adopts jihadist ideology. A person is moved to commit mass-murder – an act that requires depraved indifference to the lives and the humanity of his targets – because there is no ideology as powerful as religious ideology, as the notion that God Himself has commanded the aggression because the infidels offend Him by their infidelity.

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In the safe spaces on campus, no Jews allowed By Anthony Berteaux

By on September 19th, 2016

This article is excerpted from a longer piece in the Tower.

When Arielle Mokhtarzadeh arrived at University of California, Berkeley, to attend the annual Students of Color Conference, she had no way of knowing that she would be leaving as a victim of anti-Semitism.

The conference has maintained a reputation for 27 years as being a “safe space” where students of color, as well as white progressive allies, can discuss issues of structural and cultural inequality on college campuses.

For Mokhtarzadeh, an Iranian Jew at UCLA, her freshman year was punctuated by incidents of anti-Semitism that were both personal and met with national controversy. She was shocked during her first quarter in school, when students entered the Bruin Cafe to see the phrase “Hitler did nothing wrong” etched into a table. Months later, Mokhtarzadeh’s friend Rachel Beyda was temporarily denied a student government leadership position based solely on her Jewish identity, an event that made news nationwide.

The campus was supposed to be her new home, her new safe space — so why didn’t she feel that way? She went to the conference hoping for some answers.

[So you’re a Jew and you’re starting college? Prepare for anti-Zionism.]

But on the first day there, she was horrified when the discussion became an attack on Israel — and soon devolved into attacks on the Jews.

“Over the course of what was probably no longer than an hour, my history was denied, the murder of my people was justified, and a movement whose sole purpose is the destruction of the Jewish homeland was glorified. Statements were made justifying the ruthless murder of innocent Israeli civilians, blatantly denying Jewish indigeneity in the land, and denying the Holocaust in which six million Jews were murdered,” she said. “Why anyone in their right mind would accept these slanders as truths baffles me. But they did. These statements, and others, were met with endless snaps and cheers. I was taken aback.”

Mokhtarzadeh walked out on the verge of tears. “It was in that moment, during that conference, that I realized that every identity and every intersection of identity was to be welcomed and championed in progressive spaces — except mine.”

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Would You Hide a Nazi From a Jew? By Marilyn Penn

By on September 19th, 2016

In his ongoing blindness towards the reasons for reluctance to allow mass immigration of Muslim refugees to the U.S., Nicholas Kristof inverts them in his article titled “Would You Hide A Jew From the Nazis?” (NYT 9/18/16) During the thirties, Jews were victims of increasingly harsh and restrictive laws imposed on them in Nazi Germany and once the war began, they became dead men walking throughout Europe until 6 million of them were finally exterminated. The comparison of this unique genocide with the situation of Syrian refugees is preposterous. Despite the epidemic of Muslim terrorism throughout the world, the current refugees have been accepted into many countries in Europe as well as the U.S. There are numerous refugee camps that have been created for them in Turkey as well as neighboring Arab countries which share their language, religion and culture. The outcome of this generous in-gathering as well as previous welcoming immigration, has proved profoundly problematic and tragic for European countries where the incidence of rape, assault, murder and massacre has altered the lives of all these populations. In post 9/11 America, we are experiencing similar outbreaks of terrorism and wholesale murder by stabbing, shooting and bombing innocent men, women and children. Today’s news reports several bombings in the tri-state area as well as serial stabbings in Minnesota; the bombs were similar to those used in the Boston Marathon.

It has frequently been argued that not all Germans were Nazis – estimates of how many actually were vary but hover around less than 10%. That low number didn’t prevent the killings of over 60 million people in WW II, the deadliest war in history. So the fact that their numbers were “tiny” didn’t impede Nazis from fomenting mass destruction, just as the “tiny” fraction of Muslims dedicated to the idea of dominion over a world caliphate is meaningless as protection against their determined war of aggression. They are most specifically intent on harming and killing Jews, despite the fact that Muslim Arabs live side by side with Jews in Israel, vote, serve in the Knesset and work as teachers, doctors, lawyers and judges at a higher compensation level than in any Muslim country. Similarly, in the United States, contrary to charges of our Islamophobia, we have a thriving Muslim population that enjoys exactly the same benefits as any American of any other religion.

So the issue is not lack of compassion for Muslim casualties of civil- war but whether it is in the best interest of our national security to invite tens of thousands of people who cannot be properly vetted with the unlikely hope of weeding out that “tiny” fraction who are radical Islamists. Do these refugees have other options? Absolutely. They are not fleeing to avoid death as the Jews were attempting immediately prior to and during World War II. Syrians have several other options for sanctuary though admission to the U.S. may be the most comfortable. In that respect, they are no different from illegal immigrants from Mexico or Central America, some of the other millions of people who would prefer to live freely here than in their own despotic countries. But Nicholas Kristof isn’t suggesting that failure to expand our quotas for legal admission to our country is the same as failure to hide a Jew from a Nazi.

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It’s Time We Faced the Facts about the Muslim World Islam has a serious problem. America needs to start acting accordingly. By David French

By on September 19th, 2016

Here is a plain, inarguable truth: A series of Muslim immigrants and “visitors” are responsible for killing more Americans on American soil than the combined militaries of Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany. Two more attacks over the weekend left 38 Americans wounded, and it appears that both were carried out by Muslim immigrants.

In Saint Cloud, Minn., Dahir Adan’s family identified him as the man who stabbed eight people in a mall before being shot and killed by an armed civilian, an off-duty police officer named Jason Falconer. Adan’s family said he was born in Kenya. In New York, police arrested an Aghan-American named Ahmad Khan Rahami after a shootout. He’s a “person of interest” in bombings in both New York and New Jersey that injured 29.

Despite making up a tiny fraction of the American population, Muslims are responsible for exponentially more terror deaths than any other meaningful American community. Even if you use the Left’s utterly ridiculous standard of “terror deaths since 9/11” (why exclude America’s worst terror attack when calculating the terror threat?), Muslim terrorists have killed almost twice as many people as every other American faction or demographic combined.

Yet when any politician or pundit suggests restrictions or even special scrutiny applied to Muslim immigrants — especially Muslim immigrants or visitors from jihadist conflict zones — entire sectors of the Left (and some on the right) recoil in shock and horror. Whenever there’s a terror attack, there’s an almost palpable desperation to determine that the attacker was not Muslim and the attack had “no connection” to international terror, in spite of the fact that it is now ISIS and al-Qaeda strategy to inspire lone wolves.

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The Response to This Weekend’s Terror Attacks Showed Willful Blindness in Real Time The ideology behind the attacks in New York, New Jersey, and Minnesota must be confronted forthrightly. By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on September 19th, 2016

In the all too familiar pattern, things are going boom, Americans are under attack, and the American political class is already busy playing the “See No Jihad” minuet.

In a rational world, where our highest imperative would be to understand the threat that confronts us rather than to find the least offensive way of describing it, it would be patently, undeniably obvious that we are targets of international terrorism fueled by Islamic supremacist ideology. Nevertheless, the political class can only bring itself to say this kicking and screaming, and only if there is no other plausible alternative — which basically means a terrorist caught in the act while wearing an ISIS T-shirt.

That is because Islamic supremacism is a mainstream interpretation of Islam. The political class has convinced itself that uttering the plain truth would be condemning all of Islam, meaning all Muslims — notwithstanding that no one sensible claims Islamic supremacism is the only way of interpreting Islam, and, in fact, jihadist battalions kill more Muslims than non-Muslims.

Speaking forthrightly would also undermine a fiction the political class inanely believes is essential to social cohesion: The notion, oft-repeated by President Obama and Hillary Clinton, that Islam is part of the fabric of American life, as native in our history as apple pie and Judeo-Christian culture.

Islam, of course, is an alien belief system. That doesn’t make it bad per se. Our society is a melting pot and many things alien to it have blended their way in, making us more vibrant, dynamic, innovative, and successful. Clearly, though, not everything alien is benign and welcome.

Many Muslims embrace the Western culture of reason, liberty, and equality, and they flourish in our society, to which they are a real asset. Nevertheless, nothing is more alien and hostile to our society than Islamic supremacism — which, at its core, is sharia supremacism. Its adherents resist assimilation and seek to impose a totalitarian system that suppresses liberty and is systematically discriminatory against non-Muslims, women, apostates from Islam, homosexuals, and other groups.

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Trump shatters GOP records with small donors ‘He’s the Republican Obama,’ one operative says as Trump monetizes his Republican supporters. By Shane Goldmacher

By on September 19th, 2016

Donald Trump has unleashed an unprecedented deluge of small-dollar donations for the GOP, one that Republican Party elders have dreamed about finding for much of the past decade as they’ve watched a succession of Democrats — Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders and, to a lesser extent, Hillary Clinton — develop formidable fundraising operations $5, $10 and $20 at a time.

Trump has been actively soliciting cash for only a few months, but when he reveals his campaign’s financials later this week they will show he has crushed the total haul from small-dollar donors to the past two Republican nominees, John McCain and Mitt Romney — during the entirety of their campaigns.

All told, Trump is approaching, or may have already passed, $100 million from donors who have given $200 or less, according to an analysis of available Federal Election Commission filings, the campaign’s public statements and people familiar with his fundraising operation. It is a threshold no other Republican has ever achieved in a single campaign. And Trump has done so less than three months after signing his first email solicitation for donors on June 21 — a staggering speed to collect such a vast sum.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” said a senior Republican operative who has worked closely with the campaign’s small-dollar fundraising operation. “He’s the Republican Obama in terms of online fundraising.”

Clinton counted 2.3 million donors as of the end of August, the result of decades of campaigning, a previous presidential bid and allies who painstakingly built her an email file of supporters even before she formally announced her second run. But Trump had zoomed to 2.1 million donors in the past three months alone, his campaign has said.

The question now is what the gusher means for the GOP. The Republican National Committee, through a deal struck with Trump in May, is getting 20 percent of the proceeds from its small-donor operation for Trump plus access to this invaluable new donor and email file. But can Trump’s candidacy help close the Republican Party’s small-donor divide in one fell swoop? Will these donors — 2.1 million and counting — give to other Republicans? Will they drag the Republican Party in Trump’s direction for years to come? Or, if he loses, will they simply vanish?

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Trump’s Marshall Plan for Inner-City Kids School choice is the most important civil rights cause since Martin Luther King. September 19, 2016 Matthew Vadum

By on September 19th, 2016

Eleven days ago Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump gave a revolutionary speech in Cleveland about public education that should have changed the face of American politics forever. Unfortunately few people know about this compassionate blueprint for desperately needed change. That is because the Sept. 8 address came the day after Trump’s strong performance at the Commander In Chief Forum hosted by Matt Lauer. Pundits’ tongues were still wagging furiously over what happened at that event as the thought that Trump could actually win in November began to sink in.

But it’s not just the fault of talking heads and the rest of the mainstream media. Trump did himself no favors during what was touted as a major speech focusing on education and lifting up America’s inner cities. Instead of diving right in, he devoted the first 18 minutes to attacks on Hillary Clinton over national security issues and the war on the Islamic State that had nothing to do with America’s inner cities and the decades that corrupt big city Democrats have spent oppressing inner-city children.

In short Trump’s revolutionary call to arms against the public school monopoly was effectively buried by the candidate’s lack of discipline. Consequently, few people are aware of Trump’s unprecedented proposal for a $130 billion plan to bail poor inner-city kids out of schools that don’t teach them, who are thus condemned to lives of grinding poverty.

The speech that unveiled a modern-day Marshall Plan to rescue poor kids in low-income neighborhoods from failing public schools barely caused a ripple. But if the lives of the poor in our inner cities are to change, Americans need to know about Trump’s plan.

What’s especially refreshing about the Trump proposal is that it is not half-hearted or drawn up in a way to placate Democrats, who now are not going to relinquish their control of the failed urban public school system. Republican politicians have in the past advocated relatively timid, innocuous-sounding school choice proposals but Trump’s plan is a blazing thunderbolt hurled at the education establishment that puts previous school choice proposals to shame.

Trump’s plan, which he laid out at Cleveland Arts and Social Sciences Academy, an inner-city charter school, drives home the point that Democrats are the true enemies of inner-city residents. They have a monopoly control of America’s major inner cities that goes back 50 to 100 years. Democrats want poor blacks and other inner-city inhabitants to stay exactly where they are – and keep on voting Democrat until the end of time.

Everyone with eyes knows that the urban public school system in America is a travesty. Over decades the Left took a basically good system that churned out good citizens, entrepreneurs, and employees, and transformed it into a jobs program for adults, especially Democratic Party supporters and labor bosses. It amounts to a gigantic partisan slush fund that everyone who pays taxes in America is forced to support. And no matter how much money gets spent, things never seem to improve.

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Historic’ in the Worst Way By Elliott Abrams

By on September 19th, 2016

President Obama and his defenders are trumpeting the new aid agreement with Israel as proof that he is the best friend Israel ever had in the White House. In fact, it’s a bad deal and should be treated the same way Obama treated prior agreements he didn’t like: It should be forgotten by the next president. The White House may be saying this is the greatest deal ever, but in Israel many observers are saying that Obama did no favors for the Jewish state. That’s the conclusion Israeli journalists have all reached. They’re right.

The current aid agreement is for $3.1 billion a year. The new one is for $3.8 billion, but the increase is almost entirely illusory. Congress already appropriates hundreds of millions of dollars beyond the base $3.1 billion level for Israel’s missile defense, so the current aid level is actually about $3.5 billion. That means the total increase is roughly $300 million a year. But given inflation in the costs of military items, and the greater threat to Israel due to Obama’s Iran nuclear deal, the net result is at best continuation of the current aid agreement.

But Obama imposed two additional conditions that had never existed before and are absent in the aid agreement George W. Bush made with Israel in 2007. First, Israel must spend every dime in the United States after a phase-in period, meaning it cannot use the funds to purchase any military equipment made in Israel. Second, Israel has agreed that it will not go to Congress to seek additional funding under any circumstances.

The latter condition is a big deal and is why Sen. Lindsey Graham is so opposed to what Obama has wrought. It’s “not binding on the Congress,” he said this week. “I’m offended that the administration would try to take over the appropriations process. If they don’t like what I’m doing, they can veto the bill. We can’t have the executive branch dictating what the legislative branch will do for a decade based on an agreement we are not a party to.” And Speaker Paul Ryan’s spokeswoman said, “We will continue to appropriate the funds that we determine are necessary to meet the needs of our shared security interests in the Middle East.”

There is another condition in this agreement that is more absurd, and belies Obama’s claims of deepest friendship for the Jewish state. As the price for concluding the deal, Obama forced Israel to agree that if Congress appropriates additional funds in 2017 or 2018, Israel will not accept the aid and will return the money. This is a first in American history and constitutes a deliberate undermining of the constitutional power of Congress to determine foreign aid levels.

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A New York Times Editorial Calls for Cutting US Aid to Israeli Military : Ira Stoll

By on September 19th, 2016

Just how far out of the American political mainstream is the anti-Israel editorial position of the New York Times?

The latest outrage from the newspaper is an unsigned staff editorial criticizing as excessive the 10-year, $38 billion aid agreement signed last week between Israel and the United States. That deal was approved by President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry, and praised by Hillary Clinton. Congressional Republicans, if anything, want to make it bigger.

Standing outside that bipartisan consensus, the Times editorial, representing the paper’s official, institutional opinion, asserts, “It is worth asking whether the ever-increasing aid levels make sense, especially in the face of America’s other pressing domestic and overseas obligations.” The editorial even goes beyond that, not just “asking” but answering in the negative: “In truth, the aid package is already too big.”

One sign of the anti-Israel bias of the Times is that it uses a different standard to measure military aid to Israel than it uses to measure spending on other things. The Times’ characterization of the aid as “ever-increasing” fails to take into account inflation. The White House fact sheet on the deal states that the money, covering 2019 to 2028, “will be disbursed in equal increments of $3.3 billion in FMF and $500 million in missile defense funding each year for the duration of the understanding.”

When congressional Republicans try to constrain the growth of welfare or entitlement spending programs like food stamps or Medicare by holding spending growth to less than the inflation rate, let alone level in nominal terms, the Times editorialists and columnists work themselves into a furor denouncing “cuts.” Yet when it comes to Israel’s aid, somehow only nominal dollar figures get mentioned, with no adjustment or understanding of the idea that $3 billion in 2007, when the last memorandum of understanding was signed, is worth something different than $3.3 billion in 2028, which will be the final year of aid covered under the new memorandum.

If the Times editorial writers have trouble understanding this point, let them perform a thought experiment with keeping their own salaries constant every year for 10 years straight, without any increase for inflation. Do you think they’d describe that as “ever-increasing”? Or let them imagine a federal budget for college financial aid, or for health care for the poor, or some other favored Times cause, that featured an amount locked in at a constant number for 10 years straight, with no increase or adjustment for inflation from year to year. Why, the Times’ own single-copy newsstand price in New York City has skyrocketed to $2.50 today from the 60 cents it cost in 1999. Home-delivery prices have also steadily climbed. Would the Times commit to a decade-long subscription price freeze?

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