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Zimbabwe’s Coup by Any Other Name Mugabe may be out, but his party will remain to plunder the economy.

Posted By on November 16th, 2017

Zimbabwe was once Rhodesia-called the “breadbasket of Africa”- the most productive nation with an infrastructure, judicial system, and gifted with natural beauty, thriving agriculture and a growing middle class of White and Black citizens. Post-colonial independence brought corruption, destruction, epidemics, and a loss of all basic human rights…..It appears that nothing will change for the better….rsk
Zimbabwe’s generals swear what they started doing in the early hours of Wednesday morning isn’t a coup, but it sure looks like one. By the end of the day, long-time strongman Robert Mugabe was under house arrest, his wife Grace was rumored to have fled the country, and state media and the main airport were under military control.

It would be nice to think the military is belatedly punishing the Mugabe regime for the economic and political misery it has inflicted on Zimbabwe’s people for the 37 years the Old Man has been in power. But the coup’s motives are more venal and arise from a power struggle within the ruling Zanu-PF party.

The generals who have long been silent partners in the Zanu-PF government worried that the 93-year-old Mr. Mugabe’s moves to position his 52-year-old wife as his successor imperiled their own influence. The main goal of the coup may be to push Mr. Mugabe out before he could realize his dynastic ambitions. To that end, the military might bring back recently deposed Vice President Emmerson Mnangagwa, whom Mr. Mugabe fired last week for becoming an alternate center of power within the party.

As gratifying as it is to watch the scorpions fight, the victims as always will be Zimbabwe’s people. Mr. Mugabe’s misrule has left them lurching from one bout of starvation, disease and hyperinflation to another, while the country’s rulers enrich themselves.

This coup offers little hope of immediate improvement. After the crisis in Harare dies down, the government still will be focused mainly on patronage politics coupled with often violent suppression of political dissent. Mr. Mnangagwa allegedly was responsible for his share of the repression as Mr. Mugabe’s security chief in the 1980s.

Zimbabwe may escape one trap by avoiding a ruling family dynasty, and that’s a precondition for the political and economic reforms Zimbabwe needs to have any shot at prosperity. But the country that once was Africa’s bread basket needs a total overhaul of its governance, not merely a coup, and that day is not here.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Number One U.S. Hatemonger: The Southern Poverty Law Center

Posted By on November 16th, 2017

The Southern Poverty Law Center has established itself as the nation’s most vocal and prominent hate-group watchdog in the nation.

The organization was founded in 1971 by Morris Dees Jr. in Montgomery, Alabama. Before co-founding the SPLC, Dees was a law partner and serial entrepreneur with Millard Fuller. Still in their twenties, they became millionaires. Fuller then went his own way, dedicating his life to helping the poor, ultimately founding Habit for Humanity in 1976.

Morris Dees went another direction. He and another law partner, Joseph J. Levin Jr., created the Southern Poverty Law Center to counter racial discrimination in the South and finish off the Ku Klux Klan. And the SPLC had some remarkable successes in its first several decades, implementing a legal strategy of using civil lawsuits to secure court judgments against targeted organizations and then having the courts seize assets to cripple them or force their closure.

A marketing wizard, Dees has grown the SPLC into an organization with a staff of 250 in four states. It has a shiny and sleek headquarters building in Montgomery and a net worth in 2015 of $350 million, of which a considerable portion is held in offshore accounts. The media often parrots its point of view uncritically, as it labels more than 1,000 organizations across the nation as hate groups. Using sophisticated marketing methods, it is the recipient of tens of millions of dollars annually from individual and corporate donors, most of whom believe they are helping to counter “hate groups.”

But tragically, Dees and the SPLC are now fueled by the same passionate animus that fueled the Klan and white supremacists. The alleged “hate groups” that the SPLC targets now are often Christian organizations which follow the same doctrines and beliefs that the church has followed for the past two millennia. Critics of Islamic extremism are labelled as anti-Muslim extremists. Politicians who support traditional marriage such as Ben Carson are called out as “extremists.” Several examples of the pain and damage that the SPLC has inspired are illustrative.

Earlier this year, James Hodgkinson, who liked the SPLC on his Facebook page, shot House of Representatives Whip Steve Scalise and four other Republicans while they were at a baseball practice early one morning in Washington. Another fan of the SPLC, Floyd Lee Corkins II, shot a security guard at the offices of Family Research Council in Washington in 2012. Family Research Council, one of the nation’s most respected conservative think tanks, was labelled a “hate group” by the SPLC because it supported traditional Christian morality in regard to sexuality and marriage.

Another illustration comes from Middlebury College, the elite Vermont school where tuition runs $61,000 a year. In March, a student mob prevented American Enterprise Institute Fellow Charles Murray from speaking. Later the mob attacked the Middlebury political science professor accompanying him, Allison Stanger, causing her to be taken to the emergency room of a nearby hospital with a neck injury and a concussion after being thrown to the ground. Mr. Murray is a highly distinguished political scientist, sociologist, and author. The SPLC on its website had labeled him a “white nationalist” — a false and even absurd claim as Mr. Murray has multi-racial children. Gullible students, armed with the hatred spewed out by SPLC, showed the depth of the ideological civil war in the United States, as the left-wing fascists at Middlebury shut down free speech in a manner reminiscent of the book burners in Nazi Germany.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

We Don’t Need a Special Counsel to Investigate the Clinton Foundation What we need is a credible prosecutor. By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on November 15th, 2017

Republicans, whether in the White House or on Capitol Hill, do not seem to appreciate how much they may be undermining what they say they want — a serious investigation of the Clinton Foundation and such related matters as the Uranium One transaction, the interplay between the foundation and the operation of the State Department during Secretary Clinton’s tenure, and the question of whether that interplay explains the use of the improper private email system and the destruction of tens of thousands of emails.

The president has been railing about his own Justice Department’s apparent inaction (after signaling, post-election, that he did not want to see the Clintons further investigated and prosecuted). A group of House Republicans has taken up this cause and is pushing for the appointment of a special counsel. In essence, it is a tit-for-tat maneuver: There is a special-counsel probing Trump ties to Russia, they reason, so why not a special-counsel to probe Clinton ties to Russia?

This suggests a basic misunderstanding about what triggers a special-counsel investigation: There must be potential offenses that warrant investigation as to which the Justice Department has a conflict of interest that would make its conducting the investigation inappropriate.

Preliminarily, we should note that there is no such thing as an independent counsel. In our constitutional system, prosecution is an executive power, so even special counsels ultimately report to the Justice Department’s leadership. That being the case, we should never have a special counsel unless one is absolutely necessary. It is pernicious to have a prosecutor who is assigned to make a case on a single target (or set of targets). These prosecutors are insulated from the pressures of an ordinary prosecutor’s office, where cases have to compete for resources and only the meritorious ones are pursued. Thus, the sorry history of the special counsel (and its predecessors — the “special prosecutor” and “independent counsel”) is empire-building, investigations that go on for years, and cases involving trivial charges often far removed from the suspected offense that was the original rationale for appointing the special counsel.

MEDIA Comments turned off

CNN Makes Compelling Case Why It Shouldn’t Exist Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on November 15th, 2017

CNN has had some really dumb stories about President Trump. There was CNN’s claim that he was afraid of stairs.And that he had two scoops of ice cream.But CNN has really outdone itself.

CNN, like the rest of the media, spends a lot of time complaining about being under attack by the White House. And then making lots of noises about the First Amendment. No one doubts that CNN has a First Amendment right to run “Trump’s face found in a dog’s ear “.

But maybe at this point shutting down CNN would be doing it a favor. Not in a punitive sort of way, but just as an intervention.

CNN, like the rest of the media, can’t quit Trump. Its Trump Derangement Syndrome just leads it to humiliate itself with utterly insane broadcasts like this.

Trump doesn’t have to convince anyone that CNN is fake news. CNN does that all on its own.

Forget the fake part. I’m not too sure CNN can even convince anyone it does any kind of news.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Hillary To Get Her Own Special Prosecutor? The Mueller probe expands to cover Clinton’s relationship with Russia. Matthew Vadum

Posted By on November 15th, 2017

Senior federal prosecutors are investigating Hillary Clinton, the sale of Uranium One, and the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, a move that may lead to the appointment of another independent prosecutor, Fox News reports.

Under Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the Department of Justice ordered prosecutors to examine “certain issues” raised by congressional Republicans, according to a letter Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd sent to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) and other committee members, who have been demanding a special counsel be assigned to probe Clinton.

Former FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III was appointed in May as a special counsel to investigate the Russia-Trump campaign electoral collusion conspiracy theory peddled by the Left to undermine the Trump administration. Since then former Trump campaign aides Paul J. Manafort Jr. and Richard W. Gates III have been indicted by Mueller’s fishing expedition for wrongdoings like tax evasion that are unrelated to the campaign.

Mueller has also been investigating Tony Podesta and the Podesta Group for their Russian entanglements. Podesta is the brother of Clinton campaign chairman and Center for American Progress founder John Podesta. “The Podesta Group, a longtime K Street fixture … will reportedly shut down by year’s end as the firm’s involvement in a lobbying campaign on behalf of pro-Russia forces in the Ukrainian government has fallen under scrutiny from both the press and Robert Mueller,” the Washington Examiner reports.

The Podesta Group lobbied for Uranium One, the Canadian-based energy company. In 2010, the Obama administration allowed Uranium One to be acquired by Russia’s Rosatom, which gave the company control over one-fifth of U.S. uranium-mining capacity to Russia, despite an ongoing FBI probe into a Rosatom subsidiary allegedly involved in racketeering. The Uranium One deal was approved by Hillary Clinton’s Department of State acting as one of nine institutional members of an inter-agency review board called the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. The approval came around the time her husband received the suspiciously large sum of $500,000 for a single speech from Russian sources. Donations from Russians and others hoping to cash in on a prospective Hillary Clinton presidency reportedly flooded the coffers of the corrupt, now-embattled Clinton Foundation.

Boyd wrote in the letter that “[t]hese senior prosecutors will report directly to the Attorney General and the Deputy Attorney General [Rod Rosenstein], as appropriate, and will make recommendations as to whether any matters not currently under investigation should be opened, whether any matters currently under investigation require further resources, or whether any matters merit the appointment of a Special Counsel.”

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

PINING FOR FIG LEAVES Obama partisans fret as Saudi Arabia, Israel and the US confront reality on Iran. Caroline Glick

Posted By on November 15th, 2017

Friday, long-time US diplomats and Middle East experts Aaron David Miller and Richard Sokolsky published an article in Foreign Policy expressing “buyers’ remorse” over Saudi Arabia’s newfound willingness to take the lead in regional affairs.

Titled, “Donald Trump has unleashed the Saudi Arabia we always wanted – and feared,” Miller and Sokolsky note that for generations, US policymakers wanted the Saudis to take a lead in determining the future of the region.
In their words, “During decades of service at the State Department, we longed for the day when riskaverse Saudi leaders would take greater ownership in solving their domestic and regional security problems and reduce their dependence on the United States.”

But now, they argue, under the leadership of King Salman and his son, 32-year-old Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudis are going too far.

Domestically, Miller and Sokolsky accuse Salman and Mohammed of upsetting the traditional power sharing arrangements among the various princes in order to concentrate unprecedented power in Mohammed’s hands. This, they insist, harms the status of human rights in the kingdom, although they acknowledge that Mohammed has taken steps to liberalize the practice of Islam in the kingdom to the benefit of women and others.

While upset at the purge of princes, ministers and businessmen, Miller and Sokolsky are much more concerned about the foreign policy initiatives Mohammed and Salman have undertaken with everything related to countering Iran’s rise as a regional hegemon.

In their words, “Abroad, the Saudis are engaged in a cold war with an opportunistic Iran that’s exploiting their missteps in Yemen and Qatar.”

Miller and Sokolsky note that Mohammed’s campaign to defeat the Iranian-backed Houthi regime in Yemen has been bogged down. His effort – backed by US President Donald Trump – to force Qatar to abandon its policy of supporting the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran has similarly come up short.

They continue, “The latest Saudi gambit – pressuring the Sunni Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri to resign in an effort to expose an Iranian- and Hezbollah- dominated Lebanon – is perhaps too clever by half. What are the Saudis going to do, given their Shiite adversaries’ advantages in Syria and Lebanon, when the Lebanese find themselves plunged into domestic crisis or a conflict between Israel and Hezbollah?” The veteran diplomats conclude their missive by urging Trump to implement his predecessor Barack Obama’s Saudi policy. In their words, Trump needs to place heavy pressure “on the king and his son to de-escalate this conflict and restore equilibrium to America’s relations with Saudi Arabia and Iran.”

“Because make no mistake,” they warn, “Saudi independence is illusory. Riyadh desperately wants us to back them – and bail them out when they get in over their heads with Iran. If Washington is not careful, the Saudis will sandbag America into standing up to Tehran while the Saudis hide behind its skirt.”

As if synchronized, Robert Malley, Obama’s former Middle East adviser, makes a similar argument in an article in The Atlantic. Malley took a lead role in expanding the US’s ties with the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Iran and Hezbollah during the Obama years.

There are several problems with these policymakers’ claims. The first is that in criticizing the Saudis they deliberately ignore the Obama administration’s central role in engendering the current situation in which the Saudi regime feels compelled to take the actions it is taking.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

France: Muslims In, Jews Out by Giulio Meotti

Posted By on November 15th, 2017

Suburbs have become transformed into one of the most visible signs of the Islamization of France. Anti-Semitism is devouring the French Republic.

While Jewish symbols disappear from France, Islamic symbols proliferate, from burkinis on the beaches to veils in the workplace. Jews who have not fled France are trying to become “invisible”.

France’s suburbs are rapidly becoming apartheid societies. Hatred of Jews has become the gateway to “la France soumise” — the submission of France.

Suburbs (“banlieues”) — distant from the affluent boulevards and bistros of Paris — form the “other France”. They are the “peripheral France”, (“La France Périphérique”) as the geographer Christophe Guilluy calls them in an important book. They are where “living together” between communities has really been tested.

In the last 20 years, these French suburbs have not only become “concentrations of poverty and social isolation”, but have gone from being some of France’s most densely-populated Jewish areas to “lost territories of the Republic”, according to the great historian Georges Bensoussan, in his book, Les territoires perdus de la République.

These suburbs have become transformed into one of the most visible signs of the Islamization of France.

Anti-Semitism has returned as one of Europe’s worst diseases. France hosts Europe’s largest Jewish community, and Jews have been fleeing the suburbs to either emigrate or move to gentrified districts of the cities, where they feel more protected. What happens to the Jews will have a seismic impact on the entire continent.

In the Parisian suburb of Bagneux, someone recently vandalized the memorial plaque for Ilan Halimi, a young Jew who was kidnapped, tortured and murdered by a “barbarian gang” in 2006, just for being a Jew. At the time, it was France’s first case of murderous anti-Semitism in many years. After it, Islamists murdered Jews at a school in Toulouse and a kosher supermarket in Paris.

As Le Monde reported in a chilling new inquiry, anti-Semitism now knocks daily at the doors of the French Jews. It has been creating a serious migratory trend: French Jews have become “internal refugees”.

French Jews are now not only threatened in their synagogues and schools, but in their homes. A Jewish family was recently held hostage, beaten and robbed in their home in the suburb of Seine Saint-Denis. Before that, a retired Jewish doctor and schoolteacher, Sarah Halimi, was beaten and thrown to her death from her balcony, in the Belleville district of Paris. The man who murdered her, while yelling “Allahu Akbar” (“Allah is Greater”), was a Muslim neighbor. Two Jewish brothers were recently attacked on a Paris street by men wielding a hacksaw and shouting “You dirty Jews! You are going to die”.

ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Europe’s Collusion in Palestinian Illegal Land Grab by Ruthie Blum

Posted By on November 15th, 2017

It takes particular gall for European Union representatives to express “humanitarian” outrage at Israel for razing illegal structures in the West Bank — while the EU is in league with Palestinian criminals who have been brazenly stealing Arab-owned land.

There has been massive “behind-the-scenes” Palestinian construction, the goal of which is “to create irreversible facts on the ground,” and completely encircle Jerusalem. Once the buildings – which “do not meet even the most minimum standards required by engineers, architects and housing planners” – are erected, the apartments are sold cheaply ($25,000-$50,000), to guarantee they are purchased and populated quickly.

If there is any debt to pay here, it is not Israel’s to Europe, but the other way around. Belgium and the rest of the EU should be embracing its natural ally, the democratic Jewish state, against all forces that support and perpetrate violence, while rejecting peace.

In what is being called an “unprecedented move,” eight European countries — members of an initiative called the West Bank Protection Consortium — recently announced that they had drafted a formal letter to the Israeli government, demanding the reimbursement of €30,000. According to Belgium, France, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Luxembourg, Ireland and Denmark, this was the sum spent by the Consortium on materials provided for two structures (modular classrooms equipped with solar panels) erected for Palestinians and Bedouin in the West Bank, and dismantled by Israel at the end of August.

What these EU countries failed to mention, however, is that the structures were illegal, and therefore should not have been built in the first place. Instead, in its letter, the Consortium accused Israel of causing “suffering to Palestinian civilians,” through its “practice of coercive measures such as demolitions and confiscations of humanitarian supplies as well as infrastructure for schools,” and of “contradict[ing] Israel’s engagement according to the international point of view…”

This is worse than disingenuous. Under the 1993 Oslo Accords, signed on the White House lawn between Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, in the presence of US President Bill Clinton, Area C of the West Bank is under Israeli military and civil jurisdiction, and only Israel has the authority to build or approve building there.

Oslo II, which created the Palestinian Authority (PA), divides the West Bank into three geographical sections – Area A, Area B and Area C — and specifies which government controls each. Area C is under the military and civil jurisdiction of Israel alone.

This is something that the EU acknowledged, as recently as last year, in a statement on its official website:

“Israel retains almost exclusive control over law enforcement, planning and construction in Area C.

“In line with the recommendations of the EU Foreign Affairs Council Conclusions, the European Union works in Area C on two fronts: humanitarian assistance and development.

“The EU provides humanitarian assistance to communities in need in Area C in accordance with the humanitarian imperative. At the same time, the EU works with the Palestinian Authority to develop Area C and support Palestinian presence there…”

Yet, for years, there has been non-stop building in Area C, on land between Israel and Jordan as far south as Gush Etzion, in a transparent effort to populate Area C with Arabs by building “irreversible facts on the ground.”

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Free speech professor fired from UCLA warns: No one is safe Mark Mcgreal

Posted By on November 15th, 2017

A former UCLA communications professor known for his staunch defense of free speech who was recently fired by the university offered a sobering message to a room full of conservative- and libertarian-leaning students enrolled there.

“If they can get rid of a professor like me for speaking his mind, what is stopping them from doing the same thing to all of you,” Keith Fink asked the Bruin Republicans.

“We are in the middle of another Red Scare,” said Fink, an attorney and longtime lecturer who was terminated by the university earlier this year despite his popularity among students. His classes, which focused on free speech rights, often garnered waiting lists with 200-plus students.

He made the comments during his speech Wednesday for the GOP campus club. During his talk, called “UCLA’s Dirty Tricks Against Conservatives,” Fink said of UCLA’s leadership: “They twist the rules, they distort the rules, they ignore the rules.”

As for his performance review, Fink said he was told to submit two lists to the administration for peer evaluations: one list with names of individuals he felt were biased against him and another set of individuals he felt could accurately critique his class. Ultimately, no one from Fink’s list of accurate critiquers was chosen, he said.

Greg Bryant, the communication department’s vice department chair, was asked to critique the class. Fink said he did not believe that Bryant was qualified to evaluate his class because he “is not a litigator. He teaches a class about communicating with dolphins!”

Bryant wrote a two-page evaluation of the class that attacked Fink and his teaching style, calling Fink’s class “unwelcoming.” However, Thomas Miller, a UCLA communications professor, was also sitting in the class and wrote a five-page report applauding the class, Fink told the students.

Fink also wrote a 48-page response to Bryant’s evaluation, a response he said “tore Bryant’s paper to shreds.” Bryant’s evaluation was later thrown out and not mentioned by the administration after Fink’s response, he said

Fink was fired over the summer after he did not pass a performance review, one he said was biased against him. He told students the current communications department chair, Kerri Johnson, “despised” him and wanted him gone.

He called Johnson “very far to the left,” putting her in direct contrast with Fink, who said he doesn’t believe in “safe spaces or microaggressions.”

Fink acknowledged to students that his classes did get intense from time to time. He said that the socratic dialogue was inherently confrontational, and, as someone who mocks safe spaces, being politically correct was never a goal of Fink’s. Fink said that if students didn’t want to be challenged then they should “go take the dolphin class.”

Asked if he would ever come back to UCLA, he said: “I could teach many, many places. I want to teach here.”

After Johnson took over as department chair, Fink said his classes were targeted. First, she capped enrollment into his popular classes, leaving dozens of empty seats and frustrating many students, he said.

EDUCATION, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Newly obtained documents show anti-Israel professors ‘covertly’ took over major academic group: lawsuit Matthew Stein

Posted By on November 15th, 2017

Including the infamous Steven Salaita and Jasbir Puarhttps://www.thecollegefix.com/post/38942/

After four professors beat back the American Studies Association’s attempt to get their lawsuit dismissed this spring, they discovered a trove of evidence that confirmed their fears about the power and reach of the anti-Israel boycott, divestment and sanctions movement.

Nearly 17,000 documents belatedly turned over by current and former ASA leaders show that BDS supporters waged a campaign to “covertly” take control of the ASA and use it to support the BDS movement, according to a revised version of the lawsuit submitted Thursday.

The plaintiffs – current and former ASA members – told the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia they have new claims for breach of contract and “acts in violation of specific [ASA] bylaws,” and have added “discrete counts and detailed factual allegations” in response to the court’s March ruling.

They also added four new defendants who serve on the “Organizing Committee and/or Advisory Committee” of the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, known as USACBI.

Two have national reputations: Steven Salaita (inset), who was ousted by the University of Illinois before he was formally hired owing to his “venomous” anti-Israel tweets, including one that “liked” an offhand death threat to a Jewish journalist; and Jasbir Puar, a Rutgers University “queer theory” professor who has accused Israel of conducting scientific experiments on Palestinians and harvesting their organs.

“This case is about the illegal, hostile takeover of a non-profit, academic association by leaders of an anti-Israel group,” said plaintiffs’ attorney Jennifer Gross of the Brandeis Center for Human Rights under Law, whose mission is to fight antisemitism on college campuses.

She said in a Thursday press release that the USACBI activists violated ASA’s own rules to get and abuse “positions of trust” so they could “exploit the assets of the ASA to advance the agenda of the BDS movement.”