RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Senator admits the law has been disastrous for Democrats.

Now that 28—soon probably 29—of the 60 Senate Democrats who voted for ObamaCare are out of office, one of the surviving believers is confessing a crisis of faith. New York Senator Chuck Schumer’s striking remarks on Tuesday suggest that the church of ObamaCare is losing congregants even in the front pews.

Speaking at the National Press Club, the influential Senate leader identified the decline of middle-class incomes as the defining challenge of the age. Democrats can only win elections, Mr. Schumer said, as “the pro-government party”—and ObamaCare is undermining that larger political project.

The Senator called the law a distraction from the “middle-class-oriented programs” his party should have pursued after 2008: “Unfortunately, Democrats blew the opportunity the American people gave them. We took their mandate and put all of our focus on the wrong problem: health-care reform.”

Mr. Schumer said he still supported the entitlement’s goals, but “it wasn’t the change we were hired to make. Americans were crying out for the end to the recession, for better wages and more jobs.” We’re glad he’s finally taking our advice from 2009-2010.

This mea culpa is especially notable because it suggests the wall of implacable liberal opposition to reopening the health-care debate is starting to crack. Democrats have heretofore refused to acknowledge any failing in the law beyond the website rollout fiasco. Endangered Democratic incumbents tried to hold that line this year, and five of them will soon be unemployed.

The Netherlands, that country that so bravely pioneered movements such as gay marriage and the legalization of marijuana, seems on the brink of pioneering yet another: the official Islamization of Europe’s Parliaments.

That, anyway, would seem to be the wish of Tunahan Kuzu and Seleuk Ozturk, the founders of the country’s newest political party, which they established only a few days ago after splitting from the Partij van de Arbeid (PvdA), or Labor Party, in a dispute over Dutch Turkish organizations and the Dutch Turkish community at large. Although their party, Group Kuzu/Ozturk, has not yet been entirely defined, its creators describe it in sweeping terms as “the party the Netherlands longs for,” aimed at promoting “a society in which everyone is treated equally.”

Except that does not seem to be what they actually have in mind.

According to observations of former PvdA colleagues in local media reports , both Ozturk and Kuzu have shown clear antagonism towards women — ignoring even intimidating their female colleagues. More significantly, the two have also held tightly to their Turkish roots and Islamic faith, demanding, among other things, Islamic prayer spaces in the Parliament building – a clear violation of separation between church and state. (Those demands, it should be noted, were refused.)

And Ozturk, reported the national daily, Telegraaf, has regularly demonstrated a stronger allegiance to Turkey and to Islam than to the secular Dutch state he was elected to represent. On at least one occasion, for instance, he skipped a day of parliamentary voting, and explained his absence only the following day with the casual remark that, “Yesterday was a Muslim holiday.”

Ozturk, who defended the Turkish government’s violent backlash against protesters during the 2013 Gezi riots, has also demonstrated particularly strong support for Turkey’s Islamist president (and former prime minister) Recep Tayyip Erdogan – again indicating a greater solidarity with Turkey – and its current regime – than with The Netherlands.

This should probably come as no great surprise: the Dutch Parliamentarian also holds ties to the Diyanet, Turkey’s office of religious affairs, (which, the Telegraaf reports, also provides funding for most of The Netherlands’ Turkish mosques). In fact, it was PvdA Social Affairs minister Lodewijk Asscher’s proposal to investigate the Dutch Diyanet connection (along with the activities of other Turkish conservative religious organizations in the Netherlands) that precipitated Ozturk’s and Kuzu’s defection from the party.

The Supreme Court’s ruling is eerily similar to an international blasphemy law being promoted by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, a bloc of 57 Muslim countries dedicated to implementing a worldwide ban on “negative stereotyping of Islam.”

Firasat’s lawyers say that they have presented the court with irrefutable evidence that the charges against Firasat were fabricated by Indonesian authorities, but that this evidence has been ignored by a judiciary that is under political pressure from the Spanish government to get rid of Firasat once and for all.

“Even if Indonesians do not punish me for death, how will I be protected from Muslims who consider me a blasphemer and an apostate? Will I be able to get a fair trial when the judges, prosecution, fake witnesses and lawyers, everybody will be a Muslim?” — Imran Firasat

Firasat said it was never his intention to provoke the Spanish government, but that he felt it was his duty to “warn of the dangers of not understanding or stopping what is known as Jihad.”

A Spanish court is deliberating the fate of Imran Firasat, an ex-Muslim from Pakistan who faces imminent deportation because the Spanish government has deemed his criticism of Islam to be a threat to national security.

“If the Jews left Palestine to us, would we start loving them? Of course not. The Jews are infidels not because I say so but because Allah does… They aren’t our enemies because they occupy Palestine; they would be our enemies even if they had not occupied anything.” — Muhammad Hussein Ya’qub, Egyptian cleric.

Muslim extremists trust that time is in their side, in part because they are on the threshold of acquiring nuclear weapons. Once Iran and other Muslim countries have this capability, they will have the military means to blackmail their oil-rich neighbors, destroy Israel and threaten Europe.

What makes negotiations with Iran, ISIS, Hamas or any other Islamist group impossible is that their leaders believe they are acting according to the immutable word of God. America, Israel, other Muslims with whom they disagree, cannot do anything to satisfy them except “submit” (the Arabic word “Islam” means “submission”). As Egyptian cleric Muhammad Hussein Ya’qub said in a televised sermon in 2009, “If the Jews left Palestine to us, would we start loving them? Of course not. The Jews are infidels not because I say so but because Allah does… They aren’t our enemies because they occupy Palestine; they would be our enemies even if they had not occupied anything.”

Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and other terror groups do not conceal their intentions. The Hamas covenant explicitly calls for Israel’s destruction and does not distinguish between Israelis and Jews:

Our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious… It strives to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine… It is one of the links in the chain of the struggle against the Zionist invaders…

The administration thinks a nuclear Iran is inevitable—but lacks the courage to say it.

Does it matter what sort of deal—or further extension, or non-deal—ultimately emerges from the endless parleys over Iran’s nuclear program? Probably not. Iran came to the table cheating on its nuclear commitments. It continued to cheat on them throughout the interim agreement it agreed to last year. And it will cheat on any undertakings it signs.

We knew this, know it and will come to know it all over again. But what’s at stake in these negotiations isn’t their outcome, assuming there ever is an outcome. It’s the extent to which the outcome facilitates, or obstructs, our willingness to continue to fool ourselves about the consequences of an Iran with a nuclear weapon.

The latest confirmation of the obvious comes to us courtesy of a Nov. 17 report from David Albright and his team at the scrupulously nonpartisan Institute for Science and International Security. The ISIS study, based on findings from the International Atomic Energy Agency, concluded that Iran was stonewalling U.N. inspectors on the military dimensions of its program. It noted that Tehran had tested a model for an advanced centrifuge, in violation of the 2013 interim agreement. And it cited Iran for trying to conceal evidence of nuclear-weapons development at a military facility called Parchin.

“By failing to address the IAEA’s concerns, Iran is complicating, and even threatening, the achievement of a long term nuclear deal,” the report notes dryly.

These are only Iran’s most recent evasions, piled atop two decades of documented nuclear deception. Nothing new there. But what are we to make of an American administration that is intent on providing cover for Iran’s coverups? “The IAEA has verified that Iran has complied with its commitments,” Wendy Sherman, the top U.S. nuclear negotiator, testified in July to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “It has done what it promised to do.” John Kerry went one better, telling reporters Monday that “Iran has lived up” to its commitments.

Homicide is the leading cause of death among young black men, and 90% of black murder victims are killed by other blacks.

We now know that Michael Brown was much more of a menace than a martyr, but that won’t stop liberals from pushing an anti-police narrative that harms the black poor in the name of helping them.

The black teen in Ferguson, Mo., robbed a store, attacked a white police officer and was shot dead while resisting arrest. That was the conclusion of a St. Louis County grand jury that brought no charges against the officer after considering all the physical evidence, along with eyewitness accounts from blacks in the vicinity of the confrontation.

Not that any amount of evidence would have stopped the hooligans in Ferguson Monday night who were determined use Brown’s death as a pretext for more bad behavior. Nor will evidence thwart liberals who are bent on making excuses for black criminality and pretending that police shootings are responsible for America’s high black body count.

According to the FBI, homicide is the leading cause of death among young black men, who are 10 times more likely than their white counterparts to be murdered. And while you’d never know it watching MSNBC, the police are not to blame. Blacks are just 13% of the population but responsible for a majority of all murders in the U.S., and more than 90% of black murder victims are killed by other blacks. Liberals like to point out that most whites are killed by other whites, too. That’s true but beside the point given that the white crime rate is so much lower than the black rate.

Blacks commit violent crimes at 7 to 10 times the rate that whites do. The fact that their victims tend to be of the same race suggests that young black men in the ghetto live in danger of being shot by each other, not cops. Nor is this a function of “over-policing” certain neighborhoods to juice black arrest rates. Research has long shown that the rate at which blacks are arrested is nearly identical to the rate at which crime victims identify blacks as their assailants. The police are in these communities because that’s where the emergency calls originate, and they spend much of their time trying to stop residents of the same race from harming one another.

If Utopia last century was populated by Soviet Man, he has been superseded this century by Green Person with eerily similar yearnings – this time for a ‘sustainable’ world free of ‘inequity’. All the developed world needs to do is fill the pockets of the Third’s kleptocrats and sustainable joy will reign supreme .

To understand the impetus for last week’s ‘unique development in the U.S.-China relationship’ – and its implications for Australia – suspend disbelief, hold your nose, enter that rarefied repository of atmospheric alarmism, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, and take a closer look at its most ambitious creation, the Green Climate Fund (GCF). In climate politics (and science), the devil is indeed in the detail – and dollars.

“The Green Climate Fund is to become the main instrument for multilateral climate finance in the future. It will channel a significant share of international climate finance needed to keep global temperature increases to below 2° Celsius.” – GCF statement, Bonn, September 9, 2014

Paragraph 19 of the G20 Brisbane Summit Communiqué reads:

“We support strong and effective action to address climate change. Consistent with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and its agreed outcomes, our actions will support sustainable development, economic growth, and certainty for business and investment. We will work together to adopt successfully a protocol, another legal instrument or an agreed outcome with legal force under the UNFCCC that is applicable to all parties at the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP21) in Paris in 2015. We encourage parties that are ready to communicate their intended nationally determined contributions well in advance of COP21 (by the first quarter of 2015 for those parties ready to do so). We reaffirm our support for mobilising finance for adaptation and mitigation, such as the Green Climate Fund.”

Despite the media excitement, there was little new. UNFCCC’s search for ‘another legal instrument or an agreed outcome with legal force’ for ‘mobilising’ developed world finance has been going on – with increasing urgency – since the 2009 Copenhagen debacle. How did we get to this point? The latest saga in the UN climate-protection racket began four years ago in Mexico, where we must revisit the Moon Palace Golf and Spa Resort, Cancun, and the 15,000+ delegates dancing to the COP-16 theme song, “Let’s put the CAN in Cancun!”

It was here that UNFCCC’s new Costa Rican executive secretary, Christian Figueres, first warned that “the environmental stakes are high, because we are quickly running out of time to safeguard our future.”

Jean-Pascal van Ypersele reckons global warming will kill Prince William, and that is only one of his many unhinged prophecies. A man who strikes many as an all-round cad and thoroughly deplorable fellow, he trades in schemes and slurs to silence sceptics. Oh, and one other thing: He aims to head the IPCC

Brussels BS-erPlease don’t tell Kate Middleton! We don’t want to upset her, but a leading IPCC scientist has predicted that in 2039, her bloke, King William V, will die at 57 from the West Nile virus as a result of the planet’s IPCC-predicted global warming.

The scientist is Belgium’s Professor Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, and he made the forecast in a tract written for Greenpeace in 2004. At the time, he was Vice-Chair of the IPCC’s Working Group 11 for the 2007 Fourth Report. He has since risen to Vice-Chair of the IPCC itself, one of three Vice-Chairs directly below IPCC Chair Rajendra Pachauri. (The other two are from South Korea and that powerhouse of climate-change science, Sudan).

But wait, there’s more! Ypersele is the first to put up his hand to be elected the next IPCC chair when that position is up for grabs late next year. He has the full and proud backing of the Belgian government. In a year he could be the most influential scientist on the planet!

Find it odd for a supposedly impartial IPCC boffin to be writing reports for Greenpeace? (And did he get paid, by the way?). No, it’s not at all odd. Chair Pachauri himself wrote doom-laden intros for Greenpeace tracts in 2007 and 2008. The IPCC’s writing team for the Fifth Report included various Greenpeace alumni[i], and IPCC reports cheerfully cite Greenpeace among their sources.[ii]

Apart from killing off our future king in 2039, Ypersele’s 40-year forecast for 2044 is a catalogue of horrors extreme even by the standards of his catastropharian peers. Even Tim “No More Rain” Flannery, who fancied Perth as a drought-denuded ghost town, seems almost sane by comparison. According to the ambitious alarmist from Brussels, here are the high-temperature torments the world has coming:
•Belgian irrigation drying up with the river Meuse
•Farmers suiciding outside the Prime Minister’s office
•The Paris-Berlin high-speed train departing its buckled rail tracks and killing 52 passengers
•Heat-death corpses stacked in the improvised morgue of Antwerp’s cold stores
•Desperate Egyptians flooding Belgium as they flee the rising Mediterranean
•Belgian workers inundate Norway in quest of somewhere to cool down, then refuse to return
•Turkey and Syria are at war over water access
•The female US President — Hilary Clinton, perhaps, finally fulfilling her ambition at the age of 96? – dispatches a dozen submarines to seed the Southern Ocean with iron powder in a desperate bid to increase its CO2 absorption capacity.

“The “Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming” meme was launched by James Hansen in his address to the US Senate in June 1988. Despite the predictions of the IPCC modelling and the mewling of the catastrophists, there has been no warming trend for the last 18 of those 26 years and the world is presently cooler than it was in 1998.
How does this blatant fraud survive?”

Put the ABC business editor, John Hewson, Ross Garnaut and a couple of other coal-phobic gabblers on the same stage and what do you get? Why, that fabled “elephant in the room” — and a jumbo-size load of alarmist droppings to mark its effect on otherwise intelligent souls

On Monday, November 17, the school of Business and Economics at the University of Melbourne convened a panel devoted to the proposition that fossil fuel-infected “stranded assets” might cause the next global financial crisis. If you’re not up to speed with the latest enviro-disaster greenspeak lingo, know that a stranded asset is an investment in some or other carbon-spewing industry or portfolio, and that the true believers consider it likely that it will be rendered near-worthless when the world switches abruptly to those “sustainable” sources we keep hearing are just around the corner.

You might think that the business faculty at one of Australia’s most august tertiary institutions would begin by considering just how likely such a sudden transition might be, then progress to a reasoned and logical examination of all the associated risks and rewards associated with what participants kept calling the “carbon bubble”. You would, alas, be hopelessly wrong.

The introduction on the university’s website:

“If coal, oil and gas companies are permitted to exploit all the resources they have currently discovered, the world’s climate will warm well beyond the 2C limit governments have agreed is necessary to avoid the worst effects of climate change.

An HSBC study found that removing the ‘stranded assets’ from the balance sheets of fossil fuel companies would halve their sharemarket value. Aggregating these losses is in the realm of $2 trillion: a greater impact on global sharemarkets than the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (GFC). Reports by Citibank, Standard & Poors, Bloomberg, the Bank of England, Oxford University, London School of Economics and others support the seriousness of the carbon bubble threat.

Meanwhile, the scientific evidence of climate change continues to pile up, the likelihood of a post-Kyoto global political agreement is increasing, and the divestment movement gathers momentum.

Campus Anti-Semitism: Where Are The Christians?

The Brownshirts are back on campus, speaking Arabic. But where are the Christians who grew up in the land of the free?

First, a confession. I hated school. Teachers frightened me and I still get nightmares thinking of our principal, Mr. Webster.

I got a case of the willies from the moment I got up in the morning. I’d walk to school with one black eye from yesterday and get back home with another black eye from today. Win or lose, you had to fight back. The schoolyard itself was just as tough. Montreal was a tough town.

But these were skirmishes and scuffles, a rite of passages from boyhood to manhood.

You were being taught that life in and around the schoolyard was a sample of what it’s going to be like later on – and you had friends.

Doodie and Moishe and Tevee…we were always there for one another. We could count on the Cohens and the Goldbergs.

We could also count on the Smiths and the Pattersons. Jews, Christians, we were in it together.

So where are the Christians today? From campus to campus, Jewish students are hurting. Waiting for them are armies of trained specialists, Arabs who are ready to pounce on them by use of Beer Hall tactics and Brownshirt thuggery. They have been sent over here, and funded, by their sheiks and imams to intimidate and to radicalize and they appear to be succeeding.

Of course a respectable number of Arab students are just that, students and legitimate, but that makes the burden on Jewish kids no easier.