Turkey: Building Mosques, Erasing Christianity by Uzay Bulut

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13063/turkey-mosques-christianity

While Turkey’s latest mosque is being inaugurated in Germany, the greatest Christian Orthodox theological school has remained closed for almost 50 years by the order of the Turkish government. Moreover, less than a kilometer away from the shuttered Christian seminary, a major new center of Islamic studies spanning a total area of 200 acres is scheduled to be built.
The Greeks of Turkey — the remnants of the once great Byzantine Empire — are a severely persecuted and even almost completely exterminated people. They have been exposed, among other crimes against humanity, to a genocide, pogroms and forced deportations at the hands of multiple Turkish governments. As a result, there are only around 1,300 Greeks left in Istanbul. But in spite of its tiny size, the dying Greek community still suffers from discrimination and violations of its rights.
The Turkish government, which keeps the country’s greatest Christian theological school closed, is spending a large portion of its annual budget on the worldwide construction of mosques.

The Turkish government spends hundreds of millions of dollars building mosques as part of a long-term effort to promote Islam around the world. Many Muslims hope that new mosques throughout Europe will advance and facilitate their wish to spread Islam to non-Islamic countries and persuade the Christian “infidels” to abandon their faith in favor of Islam.

On September 29, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan inaugurated Turkey’s latest European mosque, “The Cologne Central Mosque,” located in the Cologne, Germany.

Noam Chomsky, Yanis Varoufakis, Ken Loach, Brian Eno, Des Freedman, Justin Schlosberg and 21 others defend Jeremy Corbyn

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/

‘We believe that significant parts of the UK media have failed their audiences by producing flawed reports that have contributed to an undeserved witch-hunt against the Labour leader [Jeremy Corbyn] and misdirected public attention away from antisemitism elsewhere.’

Flawed reporting on antisemitism claims against the Labour party Noam Chomsky, Yanis Varoufakis, Ken Loach, Brian Eno, Des Freedman, Justin Schlosberg and 21 others write about a recent report by the Media Reform Coalition.”We have long had serious concerns about the lack of due impartiality and accuracy in the reporting of allegations of antisemitism against Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour party. The recent report by the Media Reform Coalition examining coverage of Labour’s revised code of conduct on antisemitism shows that we are right to be concerned.”

With the Kavanaugh Fight, Political Warfare Escalates By Roger Kimball

https://amgreatness.com/2018/10/01/with-the-kavanaugh

Scorched earth. That’s the tactic the Democrats and their enablers in the media and George Soros-funded hit squads are employing against Brett Kavanaugh. We all know it. We all experienced that sharp intake of breath when it was first reported that Dianne Feinstein had a letter from some anonymous female accusing Kavanaugh of having engaged in sexual misconduct with her when he was in high school. Depending on your estimate of Judge Kavanaugh’s character, you focused either on “sexual misconduct” (“Now we’ve got ’em matey!”) or on “high school” (“Really? You’re going after a guy with a sterling record because he may have hit on a girl at a party in high school?”)

I belong firmly in the latter camp. But of course that was just the beginning of an extraordinary, and orchestrated (I want to emphasize that) effort to destroy a man of exceptional ability and exceptional integrity.

Eventually, we learned the name of his accuser: Dr. Christine Blasey Ford. Almost three weeks after she went public, we still don’t know much about her. Before her accusation became public, she took great care to scrub her activities from social media and the internet. But have no fear. Even as I write, many people, outraged at her totally unsupported allegations, are piecing together a portrait of a rambunctious party girl who grew up to be an anti-Trump activist. I look forward to inspecting the portrait when it is finished.

Initially, the curious thing was how the letter—sent, Feinstein insisted, in confidence—was leaked. I believe I am correct in saying that only three sets of people had it: Ford’s lawyers (why did she engage left-wing anti-Trump lawyers just before this became public? Who is paying for them?), her local congresswoman, and Senator Feinstein’s office. I am glad that President Trump has asked the FBI to look into who leaked the letter. I’d like to know.

At first, I inclined to the idea that this obviously damaged person (I say that after having sat through her artfully incoherent, wounded-little-girl testimony) was just collateral damage in the Democrats’ effort to destroy Donald Trump’s nominee. She really did, I thought, want anonymity and was terrified at testifying before all those big meanies in the Senate.

Of course, she was treated with fawning obsequiousness. Every Democrat began his panegyric with praise of her “bravery” and “courage” in coming forward to retail her “credible” accusations.

Abbas’ Deceit Evading peace and negotiation. Joseph Puder

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271456/abbas-deceit-joseph-puder

Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority, has denied U.S. claims that the Palestinians have refused to enter peace talks with Israel according to the Associated Press (September 21, 2018). This is the same Mahmoud Abbas, who like his predecessor Yasser Arafat, walked out of peace negotiations with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in 2008. Mahmoud Abbas has done nothing but evade bilateral negotiations with Israel while incessantly repeating the longstanding irredentist demands.

Palestinians, it seems, have much greater concerns to attend to than worry about President Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Mahmoud Abbas’ (Abu Mazen) leadership has been less than an inspiring. His presidency of the Palestinian Authority (PA) ended in January, 2009, and he has not called for elections since. January, 2019 will mark the 10th year that Abbas has held the office of President of the PA without a mandate from the people. Worse yet, Abbas’ Fatah party was kicked out of the Gaza Strip in 2007 by Hamas, which won a parliamentary majority in 2006. The autocratic Abbas, in the words of Palestinian civil and human rights activist, Bassem Eid, “represents only his wife and three sons.”

Mahmoud Abbas is responsible for failing to accept the generous peace deal offered to him in 2008 by the dovish Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. In a New York Times article (June 11, 2011), former PM Olmert said that he and Abbas were very close to a peace deal two years earlier. Abbas however hesitated, and Olmert was then beset by legal troubles, as well as the Gaza war between Hamas and Israel, all which caused their talks to end.

In his memoirs published by Israel’s daily Yediot Ahronot, and in an interview with the New York Times, Olmert revealed that the two sides had agreed on key principles: the state of Palestine would have no military; an American-led international security force, not Israeli soldiers, would be stationed on its border with Jordan; Jerusalem would be shared, with the holy sites overseen by a multinational committee; and a limited number of Palestinian refugees would be permitted back into what is now Israel, while the rest would be generously compensated. The two agreed that Israel would keep some land in the West Bank on which settlements had been built, but disagreed on how much. Abbas failed to grab the best possible deal he was offered to make peace and establish a Palestinian state.

Are We a Nation of Snowflakes? What’s at stake for our country in the Kavanaugh confirmation. Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271483/are-we-nation-snowflakes-bruce-thornton

For ten days now, we have been obsessing over something that may have happened to a psychology professor 36 years ago when she was fifteen. According to Christine Ford, Judge Brett Kavanaugh pushed her into a room, groped her, tried to disrobe her, and put his hand over her mouth. Ford is vague on details like when and where, has named witnesses who contradict her, and lacks any other corroborating evidence. Rachel Mitchell, the prosecutor invited to cross-examine Ford and Kavanaugh last week, said she couldn’t have even obtained a search warrant to investigate this charge if it had been made at the time, let alone 36 years later.

Welcome to the snowflake nation, where unsubstantiated and unprovable charges of an attempted “rape” that allegedly took place years ago are reported with hyperbolic emotional rhetoric seldom seen for actual rape or murder. Given the confirmed, devastating brutal abuse of women taking place every minute across the globe, including in the U.S., this obsession over an unsubstantiated claim just shows how spoiled and entitled many Americans are.

Of course, the obvious reason for the hysteria on display throughout the confirmation process is amoral politics. The progressive Dems know that their most powerful weapon is a Supreme Court that dismisses the Constitution as an archaic document that must be adapted to the conditions of modernity. If Kavanaugh is confirmed, they will lose that weapon for decades, and their program of creating a technocratic oligarchy that erodes individual and state freedom will be stopped.

More specifically, the attack on Kavanaugh is about Roe v. Wade, which the new justice is allegedly itching to overturn. On-demand legal abortion has become the most important achievement both for feminists and for progressives who politicize the Supreme Court in order to reject the Constitution and its Judeo-Christian foundations. The Roe v. Wade decision attacked the notion of natural rights beyond the power of the state by inventing a new “right to privacy” unmentioned in the Bill of Rights. It also weakened the critical components of the separation of powers. It usurped Article One’s investment of legislative power in Congress, and weakened the idea of federalism that reserved for the sovereign states those law-making powers beyond the few originally reserved for Congress. The assault on Kavanaugh has focused so passionately on Roe v. Wade and abortion in order to defend the victories won by the “living Constitution.”

The hidden agenda behind ‘climate change’ By John Eidson

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/10/the_hidden_agenda_behind_climate_change.html

In comments that laid bare the hidden agenda behind global warming alarmism, Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, let slip during a February 2015 press conference in Brussels that the U.N.’s real purpose in pushing climate hysteria is to end capitalism throughout the world:

This is the first time in human history that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally changing [getting rid of] the economic development model that has reigned since the Industrial Revolution.

The economic model to which she referred is free-market capitalism. A year earlier, Figueres revealed what capitalism must be replaced with when she complained that America’s two-party constitutional system is hampering the U.N.’s climate objectives. She went on to cite China’s communist system as the kind of government America must have if the U.N. is to impose its environmental will on the world’s most free and prosperous capitalist nation. In other words, for the U.N. to have its way, America must somehow be transformed into a communist nation.

Let that sink in for a moment.

Figueres is not alone. Another senior U.N. official had comments of his own about the true agenda behind “climate change.” If you’re among those who still believe climate alarmists when they say all they’re trying to do is save the planet, what Dr. Ottmar Edenhofer had to say will leave your jaw on the floor.

In a Nov. 14, 2010 interview with the Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Edenhofer, co-chair of the U.N. IPCC’s Working Group III, made this shocking admission:

One must free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. [What we’re doing] has almost nothing to do with the climate. We must state clearly that we use climate policy to redistribute de facto the world’s wealth.

Believe the Women? By Rael Jean Isaac

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/10/believe_the_women.html

As Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court has been disrupted by the #Me Two Movement’s chant “Believe the Women,” it is worth recalling the origins of this slogan — and the huge damage it wreaked in its first incarnation. It is also worth considering what light the earlier Believe the Women movement can throw on the current allegations.

I described its origin in 2001 in The Women’s Quarterly. I noted it could be traced to a single moment in history, April 17, 1971, when the New York Radical Feminists, a group that at its height boasted no more than 400 members, held a groundbreaking conference on rape, a subject long considered taboo. The event produced an unlikely star, Florence Rush, a middle-aged social worker who had never been raped. It was the conclusion to her speech that electrified the audience. “The family itself is an instrument of sexual and other forms of child abuse… permitted because it is an unspoken but prominent factor in socializing and preparing the female to accept a subordinate role… In short the sexual abuse of female children is a process of education that prepares them to become the wives and mothers of America.” A participant, Susan Brownmiller, who would go on to write a book on rape, recalled: “I have been to many feminist meetings, but never before, and not since, have I seen an entire audience rise to its feet in acclaim. We clapped. We cheered.”

Feminist writers would begin to outdo each other in their estimates of incest victims. Catherine MacKinnon, the law professor who helped develop the legal definitions of sexual harassment, announced that 4.5% of all women are victims of incest by their father and if brothers, stepfathers, uncles and family friends were thrown in, the figure rose to 40 percent. Harvard psychiatrist Judith Herman dedicated her 1981 book Father-Daughter Incest, to the women “estimated by us to be in the millions, who have personally experienced incestuous abuse.”

At the time of the 1971 conference psychiatric textbooks estimated the rate of father-daughter incest at one to two for every million women in the United States. If that figure was accurate, it was not surprising that incest attracted little public attention. On the other hand, if, in fact, fathers were sexually abusing millions of daughters, why did no one know of it?

UN Secretary-General: Tobacco Use Causing Climate Change By Bridget Johnson see note please

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/un-secretary-general-tobacco-use-causing-climate-change/
I think all the hot air coming from the UN is the real contributor to climate change….rsk
Using tobacco contributes to climate change and human-rights abuses, UN Secretary-General António Guterres said in a message to the Conference of the Parties to the World Health Organization (WHO) Framework Convention on Tobacco Control in Geneva today.

The treaty was adopted in 2003, and the United States is one of six countries that signed it but never ratified the pact. Another nine nations never signed the FCTC.

The agreement put forth minimum regulations for the sale and distribution of tobacco products, as well as production and taxation. Member states are encouraged to make their own tobacco rules even tougher than the base standards in the treaty.

Guterres noted that with “7 million people dying annually due to tobacco, this treaty is central to improving global health.”

“It is also essential for the achievement of Sustainable Development Goal 3, which calls on us to ensure healthy lives and promote well‑being for all,” he said. “Significant achievements have been made in implementing the Convention. The new Protocol to Eliminate Illicit Trade in Tobacco Products has also advanced tobacco control globally.”

“But tobacco use harms much more than our health. It contributes to climate change and deforestation, and to human rights abuses across the supply chain. The Convention Framework provides tools to tackle these problems, contributing to sustainable development more broadly.”

The secretary-general said the work of the convention “requires a holistic approach that goes beyond health and embraces all areas in which tobacco has an impact.”

Dr. Vera Luiza da Costa e Silva, head said at the conference that the body had “stimulated the establishment of observatories to monitor the deceiving strategies of the tobacco industry in a number of countries with the aim to have a global platform containing real-time information.” CONTINUE AT SITE

Hezbollah South of the Border: A Rare U.S. Government Update By Todd Bensman

https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/hezbollah-south-of-the-border-a-rare-u-s-government-update/

As a working journalist in 2007, I traveled to Nicaragua to find out why Iran had just set up shop in the country after the election of U.S nemesis President Daniel Ortega. In Managua, I found the Iranian compound in a posh neighborhood, guarded by a coterie of Nicaraguan troops. For about three days, I episodically knocked on the tall metal gates asking to interview the new Iranian ambassador. “Soon, very soon, but not today,” a polite aide always told me.

Frustrated that all I was getting to see was the peak of a limp Iranian national flag jutting up over the tall gates, I clambered up to the roof of a tall neighboring building and shot some photos of the compound’s interior, spy-like, then went off to interview Sandinista leaders and regular citizens about the Iranians encamped in their country.

Then, just as now, there was good reason for public interest and inquiry. What Iran and its terrorist proxy Hezbollah were doing at that time in Venezuela, Bolivia, and the Tri-Border Area of South America mattered on several American security and foreign policy counts. For one thing, as the 1992 and 1994 Hezbollah bombings of Jewish facilities in Argentina demonstrated, Iran and Hezbollah in America’s backyard projected a credible threat of physical retaliation against American interests and allies should saber-rattling ever go military over Iran’s nuclear program. That’s no less true today, as President Trump and various Iranian leaders trade war cries over sanctions and nukes. A U.S.-Mexico border, meanwhile, beckons just a few countries away.

For years, the main source of updated reporting about Hezbollah south of our border came from think tanks and some media, sometimes citing sources of unknown provenance. Certainly, not much ever came from the U.S. government or American intelligence agencies tracking the situation because that stuff is kind of secret.

However, an update of sorts on Hezbollah in Latin America is available from an official government source. The U.S. State Department released its annual “Country Reports on Terrorism” last month, looking back on the year 2017. The information about Hezbollah in Latin America had to be stitched together from tidbits here and there in its 340 pages (the entirety of which can be read here). What gives this information more gravitas than other sources about Hezbollah in Latin America is that State Department analysts put it in, and it survived internal review processes. Decent intelligence probably backs it up.

For starters, Hezbollah has indeed “maintained an interest in the region” through 2017, primarily “in financial and fundraising activities.” The report also hints at darker Hezbollah pursuits in the region. Countries where Hezbollah has been active in recent years include Brazil, Paraguay, Peru, Panama, Bolivia, and Argentina. CONTINUE AT SITE

United States is Doing More to Fight Yemen’s Humanitarian Crisis than the Press Knows by Ahmed Charai

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13058/yemen-crisis-united-states

Despite hard fighting and air strikes from Saudi and United Arab Emirates warplanes, the Houthis still control about one-quarter of Yemen’s sprawling desert lands, including its capital city, Sana’a.

The UAE Red Crescent Society recently distributed food aid in Southern Yemen, temporarily sparing some 1,000 families the horror of starvation. Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Deputy Supreme Commander of the UAE Armed Forces, directed the emergency response project.

Meanwhile, the Trump Administration, has quietly met the challenge. The U.S. has shipped more than $854 million in aid since the start of fiscal year 2017. The good news about the bad news is that the U.S. in engaged and helping.

“The world’s worst humanitarian crisis,” said U.N. World Food Program Executive Director David Beasley, is in Yemen.

He is not exaggerating. More than 75% of the country needs humanitarian aid—a greater percentage than any other nation on Earth, according to the U.S. Department of State

Some 18 million Yemenis (out of a total population of 22 million) are hungry, homeless and increasingly hopeless.

Civil war has driven them from their homes, burned their schools and bombed their hospitals. In the markets, the shelves are empty as few trucks arrive from sea ports and rebel roadblocks menace the few deliverymen that dare to take the roads into the sun-scorched interior. As a result, mothers, some too hungry to nurse their children, have flooded into refugee centers, overwhelming

international aid workers. The men, those who have not been murdered or maimed by war, wait in the shade of U.N. tents for food and medicine that too often is not enough.