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After half a year of anti-government unrest, ‘800,000 marchers’ take to Hong Kong streets

Posted By on December 9th, 2019

https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics/article/3041172/after-half-year-anti-government-unrest-800000-marchers-take?utm_medium=email&utm_

Organisers claim another massive turnout, while police say it peaked at 183,000
Procession from Causeway Bay to Central largely peaceful until nightfall, when protesters hurled petrol bombs at court buildings

Hundreds of thousands flooded Hong Kong’s commercial heart on Sunday to mark six months of their fight against the government, saying that while city residents had become more united and won international support, officials still failed to meet their demands for greater democracy and accountability.

The march was largely peaceful until nightfall, when some radical protesters hurled petrol bombs at the entrance of the High Court and Court of Final Appeal. That came after 
police confiscated weapons The front, which had police approval to march until 10pm, called time on the action at about 8.15pm. Its leaders said they felt pressured by the large police presence, accusing the force of intimidating participants in Central, where small stand-offs between officers and protesters occurred.

 including knives and a Glock semi-automatic pistol in raids before the rally began.

Organiser the Civil Human Rights Front estimated 800,000 people marched from Victoria Park in Causeway Bay to Chater Road in Central. Police said turnout peaked at 183,000.

“The political message is clear. People are resilient and people are persistent with the five demands,” said Eric Lai Yan-ho, deputy convenor of the front, urging Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor to meet their requests, which include an independent inquiry into police use of force at protests.

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‘Deadly Delusions’: Europe’s Deradicalization Programs by Giulio Meotti

Posted By on December 9th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15257/europe-deradicalization-programs

The latest attack in London was a lethal mix of religious dissimulation and Western naïveté. It also, one hopes, buries all the British illusions of deradicalizing jihadists. As the Times reported, the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT), the so-called “nudge unit” formerly part of the Cabinet Office, had examined 33 deradicalization programs across the UK and found that only two were supposedly successful.

France had already tried it out. A bipartisan report in the French Senate had condemned the French deradicalization program as a “total fiasco”….

A recent UK government report warned that British imams in 48 Islamic schools have been promoting violence and intolerance. It is British society that must be deradicalized, not the jihadists.

Usman Khan apparently saw Jack Merritt and Saskia Jones as “unbelievers”, not as “rehabilitators”. If we do not change our rules of engagement, more of the same will follow.

It was a tragedy of good intentions. “Jack Merritt died in the London Bridge attack. Don’t forget what he stood for”, Emma Goldberg wrote in The New York Times. Merritt was one of the two victims of Usman Khan, an Islamic terrorist who struck on London Bridge on November 29. The other victim was Saskia Jones, a student at the conference targeted by the jihadist. They both dreamed of working to save and protect their murderer.

London had been hosting the fifth anniversary of Learning Together, an event in which ex-prisoners, staff members, students and criminology experts came from all over the country to celebrate the success of their initiative to deradicalize jihadists. Khan had been present as a model of the recovery program. In 2012, Khan was sentenced to prison for plotting to blow up first the London Stock Exchange, then London’s Mayor at the time, Boris Johnson, and then the London Eye ferris wheel. According to the Daily Telegraph, Learning Together used Khan as a “case study” on how reintegration programs in society work. He had even written a poem and a note of thanks to the organizers, on a computer made available to him by his tutors.

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Will the British Public Vote for Antisemitism on December 12? by Denis MacEoin

Posted By on December 9th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15261/britain-election-antisemitism

Although all the parties standing for election have delivered broad claims on key issues such as the economy, social care, health, and more, everybody knows that this election is, at heart, about Brexit.

Today’s Labour Party remains far behind the Tories in the polls. By mid-November, Labour stood at 28% while the Conservatives were at 39%.

“The claims that the [Labour] party is “doing everything” it reasonably can to tackle anti-Jewish racism and that it has “investigated every single case”, are a mendacious fiction. According to the Jewish Labour Movement, there are at least 130 outstanding cases before the party, some dating back years, and thousands more have been reported but remain unresolved.” — Ephraim Mirvis, Britain’s Chief Rabbi.

The political situation in the UK is in a state of near chaos. A General Election was called in October for 12 December. Whereas such elections are normally run between whichever party is in power (currently the Tory, or Conservative Party, with Boris Johnson as Prime Minister) and the loyal opposition (in this case the Labour Party), the carefully balanced routine that in the past has allowed conservative and socialist parties to come to power has now collapsed.

Among other things, this election is confused in a race between the Tories, Labour, the fast-growing anti-Brexit Liberal Democrats, the Scottish National Party (third-largest in the UK overall), and the newly formed Brexit Party.

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The Legacy of Low-Bar Impeachment Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on December 9th, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/12/08/the-legacy-of-low-bar-impeachment/

From now on, impeachment can be used against any first-term president with a record of success. It will be used solely as a political strategy by the opposition party that controls the House to weaken a president’s reelection chances. That’s the Democratic Party’s legacy and Democrats will live to rue it.

Since the embarrassing impeachment and failed conviction of President Andrew Johnson in 1868, Americans more or less had avoided that ultimate constitutional method of removing a chief executive from power. The Johnson impeachment had been so steeped in personal hatred, political rivalry, and post-war agendas that the failure by one vote in the Senate to remove the impeached Johnson more or less discredited the process for a century.

The 1974 Watergate impeachment inquiry saga was framed in opposition to the way Johnson had been impeached, inasmuch as anyone still remembered the particulars of that long-ago fiasco. That is, a special prosecutor, first Archibald Cox and then Leon Jaworski, was appointed to investigate the break-in and the so-called Watergate cover-up.

Democratic moderates like Representative Peter Rodino (D-N.J.) and Senator Sam Ervin (D-N.C.) gave the impeachment inquiries a patina of bipartisanship, both giving time for the targeted president’s defenders to produce witnesses and conduct cross-examinations. Neither released the phone records of their political counterparts on their respective committees. By the time a now-unpopular Richard Nixon resigned in August 1974 to avoid impeachment by an impending overwhelming vote, he had lost public support and gained bipartisan congressional opposition.

Bill Clinton, unlike Nixon, but like Johnson, was both impeached and acquitted in the Senate. Like Nixon, he had easily won a prior reelection (1996). But, unlike Nixon, Clinton was still reigning over a booming economy and enjoyed relatively high popularity—at least on poll questions other than character and morality. Independent counsel Ken Starr, like Leon Jaworski, found Clinton likely to have committed felonious acts. Indeed, he was impeached on grounds of obstructing justice and perjury by the full House on a mostly partisan vote, which nonetheless saw a handful of both Democrats and Republicans respectively cross party lines.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

An Open Letter to Administrators at McGill, York, and U Toronto Take back control of your universities. Richard L. Cravatts

Posted By on December 9th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/12/open-letter-administrators-mcgill-york-and-u-richard-l-cravatts/

As you are certainly aware, in recent weeks a series of troubling incidents has occurred on your respective campuses. While the events in question were distinct, they all shared a common impulse by a groups on your campuses who believe that they, and they alone, are able to set standards for free speech—in these particular cases, involving the debate about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and how Jewish students and other Israel supporters are treated as part of the university community.

As you well know, the notion that a vocal minority of self-important ideologues can determine what views may or may not be expressed on a particular campus is not only antithetical to the purpose of a university, but is vaguely fascistic by purposely or carelessly relinquishing power to a few to decide what can be said and what speech is allowed and what must be suppressed; it is what former Yale University president Bartlett Giamatti characterized as the “tyranny of group self-righteousness.”

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

While Snow Falls on California, Pelosi Fights Global Warming in Spain The rain in Spain falls on Pelosi’s brain.

Posted By on December 9th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/12/while-snow-falls-california-pelosi-fights-global-daniel-greenfield/

New Jersey is getting hammered with 12 inches of snow with 200 schools shut down. Upstate New York expects to be hit with 2 feet of snow. Most of Michigan may soon be snowed under. North Carolina has winter storm warnings in effect. As does Arizona. In Southern California, Disneyland had to close early to beat a winter storm, and even a fire in Santa Barbara was doused with Thanksgiving snow.

But California’s favorite daughter, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, jetted off to Spain to fight global warming.  

It was easier for her delegation, which included Democrats from New Jersey, Rhode Island, Minnesota, Illinois, and Michigan, to talk global warming in Madrid where temperatures hovered in the mild 50s. The rain in Spain fell lightly on the plains nearMadrid and mainly on the soggy swamps of Pelosi’s brain.

“By coming here we want to say to everyone we are still in, the United States is still in,” Speaker Pelosi told reporters.

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Stealth Newspapers and Posters Expose Jew Hatred on California Campuses Campus hate groups and their links to Islamic terror. Mon Dec 9, 2019 Sara Dogan

Posted By on December 9th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/12/stealth-newspapers-and-posters-expose-jew-hatred-sara-dogan/

In a stealth campaign to expose the malignant threat of Jew hatred that has invaded America’s college campuses, the David Horowitz Freedom Center distributed thousands of newspapers listing the “Top Ten Colleges that Promote Jew Hatred and Incite Terrorism” on three Southern California campuses this week. UCLA, UC-Irvine and Pitzer College were all targeted by the campaign.

All three campuses were named in the Freedom Center’s recent report “From Campus to Congress: Allied with Terror,” on the growing prevalence of Jew hatred and its ties to the Islamic terror organization Hamas.

“Jew hatred is no longer solely the purview of academic outliers, those institutions known for radical activism and absurdist teachings,” the report explains. “The Jew hatred promoted by Hamas through its front group Students for Justice in Palestine has now trickled down to infect less typically activist campuses in the heartland.”

The report also documents how the anti-Israel terror group Hamas funds the BDS movement on American campuses by funneling money to chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) through an intermediary organization named American Muslims for Palestine (AMP).

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Saudis, Airplanes, and the Pensacola Killings America doesn’t do retribution like it used to. Bruce Bawer

Posted By on December 9th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/12/saudis-airplanes-and-pensacola-killings-bruce-bawer/

I went through all of December 7 this year without thinking about the date, so it wasn’t until the morning of December 8, when I watched a video somebody had posted on Facebook, that I realized I had missed Pearl Harbor Day. The video showed the glee club of the Naval Academy singing the Navy Hymn, “Eternal Father, Strong to Save” (which, as it happens, was my mother’s favorite hymn), on December 7, 2016, the 75th anniversary of the Japanese attack. At one point the video cut away from the singers to black-and-white images of the devastation caused on December 7, 1941. It was deeply moving. And it was also thought-provoking. At the time of the attack on Hawaii, the Japanese had already conquered Korea, much of China, and Indonesia; within days after Pearl Harbor, they had taken Hong Kong, Thailand, Kiribati, and Wake Island, and within a few more months they had swallowed up what are now the countries of Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Burma, Timor-Leste, and Papua New Guinea, plus Guam.

Yet less than four years after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States, having just taken part in the utter destruction of Nazi Germany, brought Japan, too, to its knees. Not only did we beat their butts; we also crushed to bits the twisted set of beliefs, including a conviction that the Emperor himself was a god, that had been at the heart of the Japanese mentality for centuries. Having been told they were invincible, they were stunned to the core by the impact of the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Those bombings, and the subsequent occupation under General Douglas MacArthur, totally rewired their minds. In short, we humbled them and, in doing so, kicked off a sea change that would have been inconceivable before the war – the transformation of what had, for centuries, been a warlike empire populated by would-be kamikazes into a democratic Western-style nation and staunch U.S. ally whose people are preoccupied with the peaceful manufacture of electronics.

On September 11, 2001, the U.S. was the victim of another surprise attack, one even more horrific than the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The weapons were our own airplanes, and fifteen of the nineteen perpetrators were Saudis, several of whom had attended flight school in Florida. Last Friday, an atrocity at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida, revealed to the American public that Saudis, even now – eighteen years later – are being trained to fly by the U.S. military. The guilty party, Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani, 21, an aviation student and a second lieutenant in the Saudi Air Force, opened fire in a classroom building, murdering three and wounding twelve before being killed by two local sheriff’s deputies (raising the question, incidentally, of why county cops made it to the scene before armed personnel).

POLITICS Comments turned off

13 Reasons why Jews should Vote for Donald Trump Janet Levy

Posted By on December 9th, 2019

13 Reasons why Jews should Vote for Donald Trump
Janet Levy

1) Trump denounced antisemitism in two State of the Union addresses.
2) He moved the American Embassy to Israel from Tel Aviv to Israel’s eternal capital of Jerusalem.
3) He declared support for Israeli construction in Judea and Samaria.
4) Trump recognized Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, a major strategic asset that protects Israel from aggression from the northeast. He signed the document with Netanyahu at his side right before the Israeli elections.
5) He increased U.S. military aid to Israel and offered a mutual defense treaty between the U.S. and Israel to further the alliance between the two countries.
6) Trump defunded UNRWA, a so-called relief agency for Arab-Palestinians marked by corruption that has incited against Israel and worked with Hamas, even enabling the building of terror tunnels under its buildings.
7) Trump withdrew from UNESCO citing its anti-Israel bias after it designated Hebron and the Tomb of the Patriarchs (Abraham, Issac, Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca and Leah) as Arab-Palestinian world heritage sites. (Jews have had a 3800 year presence in Hebron, which is situated in Judea – “the land of the Jews.”
8) He appointed staunch Israel defenders Nikki Haley and Kelly Craft to the U.N.
9) He ended the nuclear appeasement of Iran by canceling Obama’s JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) or the Obama Bomb Deal.
10) Trump celebrated Hanukah at the White House and was the first sitting president to visit and pray at the Western Wall in Jerusalem.
11) He postponed the announcement of his Israel/Arab-Palestinian plan until after the elections in Israel.
12) At the Holocaust Museum on the Day of Remembrance, Trump said, “As president of the United States, I will always stand with the Jewish people and the State of Israel.” “We will confront antisemitism on university campuses, in public places and threats to Israel.” “Antisemitism is horrible and it has to stop.” “The State of Israel is an eternal monument to the undying strength of the Jewish people.”
13) Trump criticized Congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib for their hostility toward Israel.

The Democrats won’t recognize or challenge antisemitism in their party as this removes the option of criticizing Trump for antisemitism.

Jews on the Left fail to view BDS, the Hamas-inspired movement to destroy the only Jewish state, as a form of Jew hatred. Left-wing Jewish organizations such as the ADL are trying to stop efforts to outlaw BDS. The ADL issued the Mayors Compact to Combat Hate, Extremism and Bigotry,” which does NOT mention antisemitism or Islamic terrorism (despite the fact that Jews are the victims of the majority – 60% – of religious hate crimes in the U.S. (15% for Muslims)

MEDIA Comments turned off

Trump’s great economy can’t be hidden By Peter Skurkiss

Posted By on December 9th, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/12/trumps_great_economy_cant_be_hidden_.html

The wonders that President Trump is doing with the economy is getting impossible to hide or to ignore. November’s job report has been so good that even those poor souls encased in the liberal media’s bubble are learning about it. This is evidenced by a front page, above the fold, article in the New York Times titled “U.S. Job Growth Stays On Streak, Soothing Jitters.” 

The Times leads off this piece by informing its liberal reader base the following:

American’s job engine has again defied jittery stock traders, bearish forecasters, and blue-ribbon economists to deliver eye-catching gains and power an exceptionally resilient economy.
November’s outstanding employment report, released Friday by the Labor Department, featured payroll increases of 266,000 and offered a counterpoint to recent anxieties about an escalating trade war and weakening global economy.
“I think this report is a real blockbuster,” said Daniel Zhao, senior economist at the career site Glassdoor. “Payrolls smashed expectations.”

You have to savor the wording used here — “eye-catching,” “exceptionally resilient,” “blockbuster,” and “smashed expectations” — and pinch yourself to remember it is coming from the New York Times. The editors of the NYT would have loved to have written such words about the Obama economy, but that would have been too far a leap even for them. Instead, they tried to spin the Obama’s lackluster years as ‘the new normal.” That has now been shown to be more fake news.