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Socialism Extinguishes the American and Biblical Ideal The call for socialism, even so-called “democratic socialism,” is an attack on America itself. Rabbi Aryeh Spero

Posted By on March 8th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/07/socialism-extinguishes-the-american-and-biblical-ideal/

Those today pitching democratic socialism as a safe and benign form of socialism are hiding the truth about it. By nature, socialism disregards any aspect of democratic will when it is in conflict with its fixed social agenda and goal of economic leveling. Thus, democratic socialism is an oxymoron, a seductive syntax and play on words.

Socialist candidates running for office do not do so to offer greater liberty, income, opportunity, or greater speech rights, but to institute heavy social engineering aimed toward conformity and sameness. History shows how in the name of “fairness” socialist rulers and bureaucrats disregarded democracy, as well as citizens who do not accept the deprivations needed to bring about the “ideal state.”

Too many among our young assume that socialism will provide the same level of prosperity and easy consumption they currently enjoy, with an added feel-good patina. They see no downside. But current and past real examples prove that prosperity, abundance, and ease of purchase and opportunity, including free speech, dramatically decline with the advent of any form of socialism. Political and religious freedom is inexorably tied to economic freedom. There is no “right” type of socialism or a right time for it or even a right person to oversee it.

Today’s fashionable cultural Marxism puts in jeopardy even more freedoms than that of the economic Marxism of years ago. It attacks and severely diminishes freedom of speech, assembly, and religious freedoms. The intent of indicting “America as racist from top to bottom,” as do many on the Left, is to provide political license to tear down and rebuild America according to socialism’s leveling and confiscatory blueprint.

The Lie of American Socialists

ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Who’s Attacking Palestinian Christians? by Bassam Tawil

Posted By on March 8th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15690/attacking-palestinian-christians

The plight of Christians living under the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in the Gaza Strip is one that is often ignored by the international community and foreign journalists based in the Middle East.

It is worth noting that that the Christian population in the Bethlehem area has dropped from 86% in 1950 to less than 12% today. Across the West Bank, Christians now account for less than 2% of the population….

In the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, the situation of Christians is even worse.

Instead of raising their voices against the persecution of Christians by the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, these Christian leaders are busy trying to blame Israel. They want the world to believe that Christians are fleeing Bethlehem and the Gaza Strip because of Israeli security measures against terrorists, and not because of the brutalities perpetrated by the Palestinian authorities and Muslims in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. If their claim were true, why aren’t Muslims also fleeing as a result of the purported Israeli measures?

While Christian leaders are busy condemning Israel and spreading blood libels against it, Christians in Bethlehem are again being targeted by hoodlums and punks.

The latest victim of this anti-Christian violence is Dr. Salameh Qumsiyeh, a gynecologist from Bethlehem who was brutally attacked by unidentified thugs as he was driving his car in the center of the city on February 18.

Four masked assailants intercepted Qumsiyeh’s car, eyewitnesses said, and beat him with clubs and sharp tools before fleeing the scene. Qumsiyeh was rushed to hospital, where medics said that the wounds he had suffered were serious.

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Iran: The Train Hits Something Hard by Amir Taheri

Posted By on March 8th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15689/iran-train-hits

After weeks of debate, the outgoing Majlis had rejected the budget with a clear majority. The “Supreme Guide”, however, needed the budget to release funds for the various military and security organizations on which the regime is built not to mention stipends for Bashar al-Assad, Hassan Nasrallah, the Houthis, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Iraqi militias and kindred groups across the globe.

In other words, Trump’s policy has forced the Islamic Republic to assume its true identity as a typical “Third World” regime based on the military-security apparatus with a pseudo-theocratic façade.

The daily Kayhan, believed to reflect Khamenei’s views, claimed last Tuesday that, in a letter transmitted through the Swiss ambassador, Tehran had “indicated agreement” to return to a de facto recognition of “The Zionist regime”, disarming of the Lebanese branch of Hezbollah and end of support for Hamas

No longer enjoying access to massive amounts of easy money from oil exports, the Khomeinist leadership is growing daily more desperate to loosen the lasso thrown by the Trump administration. Always anxious not to lose face, it has modified aspects of its behavior, confirming the view that the Khomeinist train, which according to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had no reverse gear, would stop only if it hits something hard.

One of the arguments advanced by Democrat critics of US President Donald Trump’s “maximum pressure” policy towards Iran is that, far from persuading Tehran to change its behavior, it has helped marginalize the so-called “moderate faction” and propelled the “radicals” into an even more aggressive posture.

At first glance, the criticism may appear justified. In last month’s parliamentary election, the “moderate” faction, always the Cinderella of the system, was reduced to the status of a mouse in the Khomeinist kitchen.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Italy is locking down much of the north, its economic engine.

Posted By on March 8th, 2020

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/07/world/coronavirus-news.html?emc=edit_na_20200307&ref=cta&nl=breaking-news&campaign_id=60&instance_id=0&segment_id=21987&user_id=2dfc89bd6c52e6103e5ac62f916a8f0d&regi_id=2636639

Italy’s government is taking the extraordinary step of locking down entire sections of the country’s north to fight the virus.

Italy’s government is taking the extraordinary step of locking down entire sections of the country’s north, restricting movement for a quarter of the population in a sweeping effort to fight the coronavirus not seen outside of China.

“We are facing an emergency, a national emergency,” Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said in announcing the government decree in a news conference after 2 a.m.

The move is tantamount to sacrificing the Italian economy in the short term to save it from the ravages of the virus in the long term. The measures will turn stretches of Italy’s wealthy north — including the economic and cultural capital of Milan and landmark tourist destinations such as Venice — into quarantined red zones until at least April 3. They will prevent the free movement of roughly 16 million people.

Funerals and cultural events are all banned under the measures. The decree required distance of one meter, including in sporting events, bars and supermarkets.

The Italian outbreak, already the worst in Europe and the worst outside of Asia, has inflicted serious damage on one of the Continent’s most fragile economies and triggered the closing of Italy’s schools.

Italy’s cases more than doubled this week from about 2,500 infections on Wednesday to more than 5,800 on Saturday, according to Italian authorities and the World Health Organization. Deaths rose by 36 to 233.

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Danish prisons turn overwhelmingly Islamic; non-Muslim inmates abused and forced to participate in Islamic prayer By Arthur Lyons

Posted By on March 7th, 2020

https://voiceofeurope.com/2020/03/danish-prisons-turn-overwhelmingly-islamic-non-muslim-inmates-abused-and-forced-to-participate-in-islamic-prayer/

It’s not exactly breaking news that immigrants, particularly third world immigrants, are vastly over represented in Western Europe crime statistics. What hasn’t been seen, up until lately is that prisons that are filled primarily with Muslim inmates. 

The Danish Prison Federation has now raised the alarm about such conditions plaguing Danish prisons.

In the last survey on the populations of Danish prisons in November 2018, 50.5 percent of the inmates were foreigners or immigrants of the first of the second generation. In Copenhagen prisons, this number was 66.3 percent, Rights Norway reports.

Without a doubt, this has affected daily life in prisons.

Muslim prisoners are using their numbers to take control of the food other inmates are allowed to eat, and they are forcing them to participate in Islamic prayer. Reports have also surfaced about Muslim inmates pouring boiling oil with sugar on Danish prisoners.

The Prison Federation leader, Bo Yde Sørensen, says to newspaper Berlingske that the development is alarming.

Since being elected leader of the Prison Federation in 2007, he has sounded the alarm. However, the problems, he says, are only getting worse.

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Michel Gurfinkiel: Islamists Stand a “Very Good Chance” of Conquering France by Marilyn Stern

Posted By on March 7th, 2020

https://www.meforum.org/60539/islamists-very-good-chance-of-conquering-france

Michel Gurfinkiel, founder of the Paris-based Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute and a writing fellow at the Middle East Forum, spoke to Middle East Forum Radio host Gregg Roman on February 12 about the consequences of massive Muslim immigration into France.

Domestically, the past fifty years of steady immigration from Islamic countries into France is “transforming the fabric of French society” from within. Demographic and sociological surveys indicate that 10-15% of the French population is now of Muslim origin, including 20-30% of French citizens or residents under the age of 25. Some integrate successfully, but many align with the most radical and militant expression of the religion. Their rejection of France’s secular constitution is matched by resentment of the French military’s fight against global jihadism in Africa and the Middle East, seen as a “deliberate assault … on Islam.”

Whereas religious zeal is steadily increasing among French Muslims, Gurfinkiel said that “the classic national religion of France, Catholicism,” is declining, citing research found in The French Archipelago (L’archipel français) by French pollster, demographer and sociologist Jérôme Fourquet. Traditional family and marriage are “unraveling among the native French,” while birthrates drop.

Islamic groups observing this change respond in two ways: those who support jihad to take control of France and those who see the inevitable ascent of Islam through non-violent “dawah” (proselytism) as the answer to a society “ripe for change.” One way or another, according to Gurfinkiel, “Islam stands a very good chance to simply conquer … this country.”

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

FISA Reform and National Security By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on March 7th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/03/fisa-reform-and-national-security/Repealing vital national-security powers is not the right way to hold government officials responsible for abuse of power.

National security has become an afterthought in the latest national-security debate. The debate centers, instead, on what is called “FISA reform,” the imperative of which appears to be making foreign intelligence surveillance powers harder to use.

I’ve long been worried that this was the way the wind was blowing. That would be apparent to anyone who read Ball of Collusion, my book about the absurd political narrative that the Trump campaign conspired with Russia to steal the 2016 election from Democrats through cyber-espionage operations (mainly hacking), after which the new president was to become the Kremlin’s agent in the White House.

This narrative fueled a wide-ranging government investigation, launched by the Obama administration. Under the rubric of highly classified foreign counterintelligence operations, the investigation prominently featured FBI spying on the Trump campaign. (As I noted yesterday, the New York Times is back to describing the FBI’s covert monitoring as “spying,” so I’m assuming the era of garment rending at utterance of the dread s-word is over.)

In the course of that investigation, as catalogued by the Justice Department’s inspector general and highlighted by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the FBI serially abused its authority: providing misleading information to the FISC, falsifying a key document, running confidential informants at Trump campaign surrogates in the absence of a sound investigative predicate, making public statements that suggested the president was a criminal suspect (while privately telling him he was not), making private statements (dozens of them) that have convinced reasonable people that bureau decisions were influenced by political bias, and so on.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Anyone Notice That Trump’s Economy Keeps Beating Expectations? John Merline

Posted By on March 7th, 2020

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/03/07/anyone-notice-that-trumps-economy-keeps-beating-expectations/

February’s jobs report “smashed expectations.” That’s how one news site described the latest monthly employment numbers out of the Commerce Department, which showed the economy created 273,000 jobs last month. Smashing expectations has become a regular feature of the Trump economy. Anyone care to guess why?

Based on the consensus forecast of economists, the first two months of this year should have seen a total of 335,000 jobs created. The actual number was 63% higher: 546,000.

For the past four months, job growth has averaged 248,000, after the Bureau of Labor Statistics revised several previous months’ gains sharply upward. In the best year under President Barack Obama, job growth averaged 250,000 a month.

The current job growth is even more impressive given that it’s coming more than 10 years after the last recession ended, and long after the experts told us we were already at full employment.

There’s more. To get a full picture of how much better than expected the Trump economy is performing, take a look at the forecast put out by the Congressional Budget Office just as Trump was taking office in January 2017.

According to the CBO, which based its forecast on the assumption that the economic policies of the Obama administration remained in place, the economy should have created only 2 million new jobs by this point.

The actual number: 6.9 million.

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Germany: Left Party conference speaker talks about executing the rich by Arthur Lyons

Posted By on March 7th, 2020

https://voiceofeurope.com/2020/03/germany-left-party-conference-speaker-talks-about-executing-the-rich/

Germany’s ‘Die Link’ (The Left) party gathered over the weekend at its ‘Strategy Congress’ to talk politics and its own role in Germany.

During the gathering, one woman who gave a speech was caught on video saying that, once in power, they may need to execute the rich, Die Welt reports.

“An energy transition is necessary after a revolution as well. Once we have shot the one percent of the rich, we will still want to heat our homes and travel,” the woman says to applause.

After the woman finishes speaking, instead of directly pushing back against such a statement, Die Link’s party leader, Bernd Riexinger, replies to the woman, saying: “I would like to say, we won’t shoot her, we will use her for useful work.”

The crowd laughed and applauded at Riexinger’s comments.

After the video had been seen by scores of people on Twitter, Riexinger addressed the woman’s comments again, saying that they had been “taken completely out of context”. However, he did say that “It was and is unacceptable. I regret that I did not immediately reject him unequivocally.”

But it may be too little, too late. For many, statements like these only confirm what other German parties accuse Die Link of regularly, namely that they are not in favor of a democracy and that they would like to see the German system changed back to what it was under the GDR.

Markus Blume, the CSU party secretary, has called on Riexinger to step down in light of the scandal.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

I’ve Been Fired. If You Value Academic Freedom, That Should Worry You by Bo Weingarten

Posted By on March 7th, 2020

https://quillette.com/2020/03/06/ive-been-fired-if-you-value-academic-freedom-that-should-worry-you/

“I followed all of the protocols of academia. I published articles in peer-reviewed journals. I shared my ideas, always politely, on Twitter, and I encouraged people to debate me and to criticize my ideas. And I was fired. If it can happen to me, then it can happen to any academic who challenges the prevailing views of their discipline. You may disagree with everything I believe, say, and write, but it is in everyone’s interests that you support my freedom to believe, say, and write it.”

…….Until a week ago, I was a tenure-track assistant professor at a small college. Then I was fired. And although I am but one professor at one small college in one small town, I want to persuade you that, if you care about free speech and free inquiry in academia, you should be alarmed by my termination. My troubles began in October 2019 when I was invited to address an evolutionary group at the University of Alabama. I had decided that I would discuss human population variation, the hypothesis that human biological differences are at least partially produced by different environments selecting for different physical and psychological traits in their populations over time. I planned to defend this view as most consistent with a Darwinian understanding of the world.

My first day in Tuscaloosa was uneventful. On the second day, I visited a class and had an enjoyable discussion with students about various topics, including human evolution and social signaling. I was then supposed to meet professors and students for lunch, but instead my guide delivered me to an empty room where I received a number of texts from my host: The professors had found my RationalWiki entry, which accuses me—inter alia—of writing “racist bullshit for the right-wing online magazine Quillette.”

Notwithstanding its name, which indicates a commitment to thought and reason, RationalWiki is a highly partisan and tendentious site which its authors use to mock and defame their political opponents.