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A Grim Portrayal of Syria at War by Amir Taheri

Posted By on September 3rd, 2017

The blurb of Destroying a Nation: The Civil War in Syria presents the author, Nikolas Van Dam, as an experienced Dutch diplomat with a direct knowledge of the Middle East.

Having served as Holland’s Ambassador to Egypt, Turkey and Iraq, Van Dam also had a stint (in 2015-16) as his country’s Special Envoy for Syria. In that last assignment Van Dam monitored the situation from a base in neighboring Turkey.

Van Dam’s diplomatic background is clear throughout his book as he desperately tries, not always with success, to be fair to “all sides” which means taking no sides, while weaving arguments around the old cliché of “the only way out is through dialogue”.

Thus he is critical of Western democracies, which according to him, deceived the Syrian opposition by making promises to it, including military intervention, which they had no intention of delivering. He is especially critical of former US President Barack Obama who launched the mantra “Assad must go” and set “red line” which the Syrian despot ended up by crossing with impunity.

The first half of the book consists of a fast-paced narrative of Syrian history before the popular uprising started in the spring of 2011. The picture that emerges is that of a Syria in the throes of instability and frequent outburst of violence including sectarian conflict. Van Dam then juxtaposes that with Syria as it was reshaped under President Hafez al-Assad, who seized power in 1970, and his son and successor Bashar al-Assad.

“Under Hafez and Bashar, Syria experienced more internal security and stability than ever before since independence,” Van Dam asserts.

But isn’t Van Dam confusing terror with security and stagnation with stability?

Leaving aside the past six years that, according to Van Dam, have claimed almost half a million Syrian lives, the previous four decades of rule by the two Assads were anything but a model of security and stability. In all those years, Syria lived under Emergency Rules while thousands were imprisoned and/or tortured and executed. The absence of genuine security and stability meant that the Ba’athist regime was unable to build the durable institutions of a modern state. That’s why Syrian society at large saw its creative energies stifled, something that none of the previous dictators, from Hosni a-Zaim onwards, had managed or, perhaps, even intended to do.

In other words, contrary to Van Dam’s assertion, the two Assads destroyed chances of Syria building the political, not to mention the ethical, infrastructure of genuine security and stability.

Van Dam tries to portray Syria as a society that had always been ridden by sectarian violence, and frequently refers to “the killing of Alawites” by Arab Sunni Muslims. However, the only example he cites is that of the mass murder of Alawite military cadets in Aleppo which took place during Hafez al-Assad’s rule. The biggest “mass killing” of that epoch was the week-long carnage of unarmed civilians by Assad’s troops in Hama in 1982 which, according to Van Dam, claimed up to 25,000 lives, almost all of them Arab Sunni Muslims.

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It Wasn’t Comey’s Decision to Exonerate Hillary – It Was Obama’s By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on September 3rd, 2017

The thing to understand, what has always been the most important thing to understand, is that Jim Comey was out in front, but he was not calling the shots.

On the right, the commentariat is in full-throttle outrage over the revelation that former FBI Director Comey began drafting his statement exonerating Hillary Clinton in April 2016 – more than two months before he delivered the statement at his now famous July 5 press conference.

The news appears in a letter written to new FBI Director Christopher Wray by two senior Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans, Chairman Chuck Grassley and Senator Lindsey Graham. Pundits and the Trump administration are shrieking because this indicates the decision to give the Democrats’ nominee a pass was clearly made long before the investigation was over, and even long before key witnesses, including Clinton herself, were interviewed.

It shows, they cry, that the fix was in!

News Flash: This is not news.

Let’s think about what else was going on in April 2016. I’ve written about it a number of times over the last year-plus, such as in a column a few months back:

On April 10, 2016, President Obama publicly stated that Hillary Clinton had shown “carelessness” in using a private e-mail server to handle classified information, but he insisted that she had not intended to endanger national security (which is not an element of the [criminal statutes relevant to her e-mail scandal]). The president acknowledged that classified information had been transmitted via Secretary Clinton’s server, but he suggested that, in the greater scheme of things, its importance had been vastly overstated.

This is precisely the reasoning that Comey relied on in ultimately absolving Clinton, as I recounted in the same column:

On July 5, 2016, FBI director James Comey publicly stated that Clinton had been “extremely careless” in using a private email server to handle classified information, but he insisted that she had not intended to endanger national security (which is not an element of the relevant criminal statute). The director acknowledged that classified information had been transmitted via Secretary Clinton’s server, but he suggested that, in the greater scheme of things, it was just a small percentage of the emails involved.

Obama’s April statements are the significant ones. They told us how this was going to go. The rest is just details.

In his April 10 comments, Obama made the obvious explicit: He did not want the certain Democratic nominee, the candidate he was backing to succeed him, to be indicted. Conveniently, his remarks (inevitably echoed by Comey) did not mention that an intent to endanger national security was not an element of the criminal offenses Clinton was suspected of committing – in classic Obama fashion, he was urging her innocence of a strawman crime while dodging any discussion of the crimes she had actually committed.

As we also now know – but as Obama knew at the time – the president himself had communicated with Clinton over her non-secure, private communications system, using an alias. The Obama administration refused to disclose these several e-mail exchanges because they undoubtedly involve classified conversations between the president and his secretary of state. It would not have been possible to prosecute Mrs. Clinton for mishandling classified information without its being clear that President Obama had engaged in the same conduct. The administration was never, ever going to allow that to happen.

What else was going on in May 2016, while Comey was drafting his findings (even though several of the things he would purportedly “base” them on hadn’t actually happened yet)? Well, as I explained in real time (in a column entitled “Clinton E-mails: Is the Fix In?”), the Obama Justice Department was leaking to the Washington Post that Clinton probably would not be charged – and that her top aide, Cheryl Mills, was considered a cooperating witness rather than a coconspirator.

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Joe Patrice calls for Amy Wax’s firing By Ben Cohen

Posted By on September 3rd, 2017

For those who doubted that political correctness posed a threat to free speech on campus, Above the Law contributor Joe Patrice just gave you reason to believe. Patrice called for the firing of two tenured professors who coauthored an op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer calling for a return to “bourgeois values.”

Patrice characterized the article as racist and sexist, “This dynamic duo of dumb spend the op-ed concocting a theory as terrifying as it is bereft of factual support when they posit that all of America’s woes really do stem from failing to live up to the ideals of an era when (white) men were men and everyone else kept their goddamned mouths shut.”

Amy Wax and Larry Alexander began their op-ed with a clear statement of purpose, “Too few Americans are qualified for the jobs available. Male working-age labor-force participation is at Depression-era lows. Opioid abuse is widespread. Homicidal violence plagues inner cities. Almost half of all children are born out of wedlock, and even more are raised by single mothers. Many college students lack basic skills, and high school students rank below those from two dozen other countries.”

Wax and Alexander argue that the breakdown of what they call “bourgeois values,” contributed to all of these problems. They defined these “bourgeois values” as, “Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.”

Wax and Alexander credit these social norms for boosting prosperity, reducing crime, and increasing social cohesion. It is difficult to see how Wax and Alexander’s innocuous paean to conventional wisdom and middle-class norms could be considered racist. The substance of the article is indistinguishable from what one might hear in a black church on a Sunday morning.

Strangely, Wax and Alexander’s critics seem to associate “non-whites,” with laziness, promiscuity, and irresponsibility. A view that the Charlottesville deplorables would not disagree with.

Racism is not the reason Joe Patrice provides for firing Wax and Alexander. Rather, Patrice writes, “Neither Wax nor Alexander should be fired for holding unpopular opinions. They should be fired for being bad scholars.”

“An op-ed isn’t an academic journal, of course, but belching out so many lies and half-truths while draped in the imprimatur of the credibility that the law school’s name brings is an institutional embarrassment. It undermines that credibility with students and peers. Op-eds for local newspapers may not be held to the strict standards of a scholarly journal, but that doesn’t absolve professors of the need to conduct themselves as scholars for the good of the institution that employs them.”

It would have been more honest for Patrice to say he wants them fired because he disagrees with what they have to say. To paraphrase Voltaire, I disagree with what you say and will ensure that you get fired for your offensive opinion.

Becoming a tenured professor requires around a decade of hard work, from the time you graduate college to the time you receive tenure. In Patrice’s view a single poorly sourced (according to him) newspaper op-ed should be enough to take that away. Regardless of your lengthy and impressive publication record, your stellar teaching evaluations, a substandard op-ed or ill-considered letter to the editor makes you unfit for academic employment.

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CAIR Forms an Outpost at Georgetown U By Andrew Harrod

Posted By on September 3rd, 2017

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) “will always hold a very, very special place in my heart until the day I die,” declared Arsalan Iftikhar on April 1 at CAIR-Oklahoma’s annual awards banquet in Oklahoma City. The commentator’s affection for the Hamas-derived, Islamist CAIR has now landed him a position at Georgetown University’s fount of Islamist propaganda, the anti-“Islamophobia” Bridge Initiative.

Iftikhar will fit right in at Bridge, a “multi-year research project” of Georgetown’s Saudi-funded Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU). Bridge’s claim “to fulfill Thomas Jefferson’s dream of a ‘well-informed citizenry'” is laughable to anyone familiar with ACMCU’s Potemkin village of academic integrity. Past ACMCU speakers have included 9/11 Truthers, while the center disinvited an Egyptian neo-Nazi only after public outcry.

With Iftikhar’s hire, Bridge/ACMCU becomes effectively a branch of CAIR, as this self-proclaimed “Muslim Guy” worked with CAIR beginning in 2000 while in law school and then served as CAIR’s national legal director until 2007. At CAIR he formed relationships with other organizational leaders, including his fellow banquet speaker and “dear brother” Hassan Shibly, a radical Israel-hater and Hamas- and Hezb’allah-supporter. Such are the less than pacific associations of Iftikhar, a “proud American Muslim pacifist.”

Reminiscent of the Soviet Union’s savvy spokesman Vladimer Pozner, Iftikhar has functioned as an Islamism apologist whose sophistic excuses mask threats with a benign visage. He strains to suggest that disproportionate attention to terrorism exaggerates jihadist violence, which he claims are merely isolated acts. There is a “double standard that exists today where terrorism only applies to when brown Muslim men commit an act of mass murder,” he stated at a 2016 Newseum panel in Washington, D.C.

Thus, Iftikhar asserted without evidence that Robert Dear, a bizarre man who killed three in a 2015 assault on a Colorado Planned Parenthood clinic and was later declared incompetent at trial, had a “Christianist ideology.” Iftikhar himself had earlier written that Dear was “deranged,” even while wondering why his crime “was never called Christian terrorism or domestic terrorism.” Similarly, following the 2015 Paris Charlie Hebdo jihadist massacre, Iftikhar, speaking to CNN’s Don Lemon, employed the canard that the Ku Klux Klan is a “Christianist organization.” He also falsely claimed that 2011 Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik described himself in his deranged 15,000-word manifesto as a “soldier of Christianity” while omitting that Breivik hoped to enlist “Christian atheists” in his cause.

By contrast, Iftikhar sought to disabuse Lemon of any association of Islam with the Charlie Hebdo killings, stating that “bringing religion into it at all is actually serving the purposes of the terrorists.” Despite numerous worldwide precedents of lethal Islamic blasphemy doctrines, he laughably claimed that the killings were “against any normative, mainstream teaching of Islam” and involved “irreligious criminals.” Iftikhar maintained that Islam’s seventh-century prophet Muhammad “was attacked and defamed many times in his life and there was not one time that he told people to take retribution,” notwithstanding contrary Islamic accounts.

Iftikhar’s whitewashes extend beyond Charlie Hebdo. To Lemon’s citation of a surveyed sixteen percent of French citizens sympathizing with the genocidal Islamic State, Iftikhar contradictorily claimed that “you can have sympathy for an ideology and not support the mass murder of people.” He has previously praised the radical Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi as “one of the most famous Muslim scholars in Cairo, Egypt” while denying his documented support for suicide bombing.

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Self-Radicalization is a Leftist Oxymoron by Linda Goudsmit

Posted By on September 3rd, 2017

Self-radicalization is a Leftist oxymoron – it simply does not exist. Radicalization is an interactive social phenomenon. Radicalization happens socially in mosques. Radicalization happens socially in cultural centers. Radicalization happens socially in prisons. Radicalization happens socially in schools. Radicalization happens socially in homes. Radicalization happens socially on social media. Radicalization is not a monologue – it is a dialogue with Islam and there are no lone wolves. Like the bogus Benghazi video, the lone wolf chimera is pure Leftist fiction created to quell public fear and deflect attention away from the clear and present danger of the spread of Islam in America.

Islam is an expansionist socio-political movement with a religious wing created 1400 years ago. Islam then and Islam now seeks world dominion – the establishment of a worldwide Islamic caliphate ruled by Islamic sharia law. The global spread of Islam has the immutable goal of world domination. Its tactics and strategies vary depending on the fluctuating economies that support the movement and the social forces that oppose the movement. The discovery of oil in the Arabian peninsula was a bonanza for the spread of Islam.

Western demand for oil and the spread of Islam increased in parallel trajectories. Islam went on a buying spree. Oil wealth purchased excessive power and influence in politics, academia, and the media. The Islamic expansion strategy was to target the three spheres of influence necessary to rebrand Islam as benign and dupe the gullible West into accepting Islam as a religion like any other. The greedy West was playing checkers – Islam was playing chess.

The Islamic radicalization most feared by the West is barbaric jihadi terrorism. Terrorism is arguably the most terrifying element of the spread of Islam but it is not the greatest threat to the West. The insidious indoctrination of the West toward Islam and away from its native Judeo-Christian traditions is the most dangerous and destabilizing. The pundits and politicians continue to ask the wrong questions. They keep asking about self-radicalization and lone wolves when the extreme threat is the ideological acceptance of religious supremacist Islamic sharia law in the West.

Vetting is not a matter of being Muslim – it is a matter of following sharia law. Any individual who embraces sharia law is an enemy of the state because sharia law is supremacist and does not recognize any law but sharia. The United States is a country governed by the tolerance and freedoms codified in our Constitution. Islam is a worldwide movement governed by the intolerance and supremacism codified in the Sharia.

Sharia law is diametrically opposed to Western secular law. Like any orthodoxy sharia provides strict and comprehensive rules for acceptable behavior and punishments for unacceptable behavior. The problem is that the behaviors sharia endorses include murder, rape, child abuse, pedophilia, homophobia, misogyny, slavery – these behaviors are crimes in the West but supported by sharia. Muslims who embrace sharia do not recognize the secular laws of the West so there is no possibility of living together in multicultural peace.

Peace for Islam is when the whole world is Islamic. Leftists who naively insist that Islam is a religion of peace do not understand this – they have been indoctrinated to believe in the rebranded version of Islam and are too arrogant to understand that Islam is Islam.

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Bordering on the unknown Yoav Limor

Posted By on September 3rd, 2017

While the world is focused on the horrendous terrorist attacks carried out by the Islamic State group and on the international campaign being waged against the organization in Iraq and Syria, the IDF is maintaining two intensive sectors opposite the group, in the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights.

The majority of operations in both sectors is clandestine and is held as part of the IDF’s doctrine of the “campaign between the wars,” a title that encompasses a host of covert and low-intensity military and intelligence efforts to prevent enemy states and terrorist organizations from becoming stronger and thwart their offensive activity. Arab media reports about drone strikes in Sinai or the elimination of terrorist operatives on the Golan Heights usually receive only a casual mention, if that, in the Israeli and international media. The reason for that is simple: Barring a terrorist attack, there’s only minor media interest.

Keeping things on the down low involves intensive operational and intelligence activity seeking to ensure that Israel does not find itself in Islamic State’s crosshairs. The reason that the IDF has, until now, preferred to spare the public the details of its operations in these two sectors is two-pronged: the natural clandestine nature of things and the desire to keep a low profile vis-a-vis ISIS.

While the balance of power in the two sectors is clear to all, Israel has no interest in seeing ISIS operatives in Sinai or the Golan Heights train their sights on its territory. The fact that Wilayat Sinai‎, Islamic State’s proxy in the south, and the Khalid ibn al-Walid Army, an ISIS-affiliate group based in the Syrian Golan Heights, are engaged in internal wars rather than fighting us, is very convenient for Israel.

This week, the IDF gave Israel Hayom an exclusive glimpse into the intensive, nightly counterterrorism operation against ISIS on the northern border, which aims to foil threats and ensure that the civil war raging in Syria and the parallel battles taking place in Sinai do not spill over into Israel.

No-man’s-land no more

The security fence in the southern part of the Golan Heights does not overlap with the border. For operational and topographical reasons, the IDF chose to place it in dominant areas across the ridgeline rather than adhering to the border itself. As a result, small “no-man’s-land” enclaves were formed between the border and the security fence. These enclaves — stretching up to 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) deep in some areas and merely dozens of meters in others — are separated from Israel by the security fence, but nothing separates them from enemy territory.

In the summer of 2006, Hezbollah used one of those enclaves, which the IDF refrains from operating in so not to risk breaching Lebanese territory, to abduct IDF soldiers Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, triggering the Second Lebanon War. As part of the war’s lessons, the IDF decided to no longer leave the enclaves be, and then-GOC Northern Command Gadi Eizenkot ordered intensive activity in all of them, up to the very last inch.

The rationale was political — preserving Israel’s sovereignty over the entire territory; operational — removing the threat; and also psychological — shifting the balance of power back in the IDF’s favor by again positioning it as the party taking operational initiative.

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CLIMATE CULT EXPLOITS HARVEY

Posted By on September 2nd, 2017

Shortly before Donald Trump’s inauguration in January, meteorologist and climate writer Eric Holthaus unleashed a Twitter torrent confessing his depression about the new president. Holthaus admitted he was seeing a counselor due to his “climate despair” and whimpered that it was difficult to work or do much of anything.

“We don’t deserve this planet,” Holthaus tweeted. “There are (many) days when I think it would be better off without us.”

But Hurricane Harvey has apparently boosted Holthaus’ spirits. He is working at a feverish pace now, churning out a number of “I-told-you-so” articles and interviews. By Monday, Holthaus had already penned an overwrought article for Politico, where he wags a literary finger at us:

We knew this would happen, decades ago. We knew this would happen, and we didn’t care. Now is the time to say it as loudly as possible: Harvey is what climate change looks like. More specifically, Harvey is what climate change looks like in a world that has decided, over and over, that it doesn’t want to take climate change seriously.

There was more back-patting: “If we don’t talk about the climate context of Harvey, we won’t be able to prevent future disasters and get to work on that better future. Those of us who know this need to say it loudly.”

Nothing like a devastating Category 4 hurricane to cure those climate blues!

Of course, Holthaus is not alone. Before the first raindrops started to fall in Houston, climate activists and their propagandists in the media were already blaming Harvey on man-made global warming. But that wasn’t enough. President Trump, his voters, and the Republican Congress are also culpable. Oliver Willis, a writer for the anti-Trump website Shareblue, suggested via several tweets Sunday morning that the hurricane could have been avoided had we listened to Al Gore, honored the Paris Climate Accord, and elected Hillary Clinton:

Even though some cooler heads in the scientific community cautioned against politicizing the hurricane while people were losing their lives, homes, and every possession, activists and the media would hear nothing of it. They persisted. Pope Francis even got in on the action, calling for a world day of prayer for the care of creation: “We appeal to those who have influential roles to listen to the cry of the Earth and the cry of the poor, who suffer the most from ecological imbalance.”

It’s impossible to catalog all the ridiculous comments and accusations made over the past week, so a few highlights will have to suffice. In a CNN.com article, Jeffrey Sachs, a Columbia University professor and regular climate scold, demanded the resignation of Texas Governor Greg Abbott over the hurricane: “Once the immediate crisis ends, the governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, should resign with an apology to his state and his country. Then the Texas delegation in Congress should make a public confession. They have lied to their constituents for too long, expecting the rest of America to keep bailing them out.” Sachs called Texas a “moral hazard state” (he must have missed all the amazing videos of Texans helping each other regardless of color or political persuasion) because “Houston is an oil town, and the American oil industry has been enemy No. 1 of climate truth and climate preparedness.” Despicable.

Some cheered the devastation. George Monbiot, a particularly noxious climate writer for The Guardian, implied Houston deserved what it got:

The storm ripped through the oil fields, forcing rigs and refineries to shut down, including those owned by some of the 25 companies that have produced more than half the greenhouse gas emissions humans have released since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Hurricane Harvey has devastated a place in which climate breakdown is generated, and in which the policies that prevent it from being addressed are formulated.

Cenk Uyger, co-host of a YouTube news roundtable called “The Young Turks” (he’s not so young, as it happens), best represented the unintellectual and unscientific view of the climate cult when he said this on Monday:

So, if you’re one of those snowflakes who is going to get triggered when I say this has to do with climate change, go ahead and cry right now. If you’re gonna say it’s too say it’s too soon, I’m gonna say it’s too late. It’s not too soon to talk about climate change, we should have talked about it a long time ago so these storms wouldn’t be this severe. If you are a knucklehead who doesn’t understand science, and you say, oh well we used to have storms like this before, that doesn’t answer anything.

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Inebriates of virtue On iconoclasm and the restriction of free speech. Roger Kimball

Posted By on September 2nd, 2017

Welcome back to The New Criterion. We hope that our readers enjoyed a pleasant and productive period of aestivation. It was not, we regret to report, a good summer for free speech and one of its key enablers, historical truthfulness.

Let us start with an apparently frivolous example. At Yale, where censorship never sleeps, the Committee of Public Safety—no, wait, that was Robespierre’s plaything. Yale’s new bureaucracy is called the “Committee on Art in Public Spaces.” Its charge? To police works of art on campus, to make sure that images offensive to favored populations are covered over or removed. At the residential college formerly known as Calhoun, for example, the Committee has removed stained glass windows depicting slaves and other historical scenes of Southern life. Statues and other representations of John C. Calhoun—a distinguished statesman but also an apologist for slavery—have likewise been slotted for the oubliette.

But impermissible attitudes and images are never in short supply once the itch to stamp out heresy gets going. Yesterday, it was Calhoun and representations of the Antebellum South. Today it is a carving at an entrance to Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library depicting an Indian and a Puritan. The Puritan, if you can believe it, was holding a musket—a gun! Quoth Susan Gibbons, one of Yale’s librarian-censors: its “presence at a major entrance to Sterling was not appropriate.” Why not? Never mind. Solution? Cover over the musket with a cowpat of stone. (But leave the Indian’s bow and arrow alone!)

Impermissible attitudes and images are never in short supply.

Actually, we just learned that the removable cowpat of stone was only a stopgap. The outcry against the decision struck a chord with Peter Salovey, Yale’s President. “Such alteration,” he noted, “represents an erasure of history, which is entirely inappropriate at a university.” He’s right about that. But wait! Instead of merely altering the image, Salovey announced that Yale would go full Taliban, removing the offending stonework altogether. In the bad old days, librarians and college presidents were people who sought to protect the past, that vast storehouse of offensive attitudes and behavior. In these more enlightened times, they collude in its effacement.

You might say, Who cares what violence a super-rich bastion of privilege and unaccountability like Yale perpetrates on its patrimony? Well, you should care. Institutions like Yale (and Harvard, Stanford, and the rest of the elite educational aeries) are the chief petri dishes for the “progressive” hostility to free expression and other politically correct attitudes that have insinuated themselves like a fever-causing virus into the bloodstream of public life.

This summer, Douglas Koziol, an anguished employee at an independent bookstore near Boston, took to the publishing website “The Millions” to exhibit the fine grain of his caring, sharing sensitivity by airing his “moral objection” to J. D. Vance’s bestseller Hillbilly Elegy. What is a right-thinking (i.e., left-leaning) bookseller to do when customers clamor for a book with the poisonous message that hard work and individual initiative are important factors in escaping poverty? The urge to hide the book is strong, strong. But Koziol decided he would merely badger (“start conversations” with) the unenlightened masses who ask for books like Hillbilly Elegy (to say nothing of those wanting Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, anything by William F. Buckley Jr., or the works of the “tech vampire” Peter Thiel; the house of left-wing disapproval is large, and contains many mansions).

Spiriting away stonework in the Ivy League, and the residue of the attitudes that stand behind such iconoclastic activities in the parlors of left-leaning bookshops, may seem mostly comical. (As, we suppose, was the case of poor Robert Lee, the Asian sports announcer who, a week after the deadly melee at Charlottesville, was removed from calling a University of Virginia football game because of “the coincidence” of his unfortunate name.)

But there is a straight line from those nuggets of morally-fired intolerance to other, decidedly less comical examples of puritanical censure. Consider the case of James Damore, the (former) Google engineer who wrote an internal memo outlining the company’s cult-like “echo chamber” of political correctness and ham-handed efforts to nurture “diversity” in hiring and promotion. When the memo was publicized, it first precipitated controversy and then provided Google ceo Sundar Pichai a high horse upon which to perch, declare that Damore’s memo was “offensive and not OK,” and then fire him. For expressing his opinion on a company discussion forum designed to encourage free expression (so long as it toes the politically correct line).

There is a straight line to other, less comical examples of puritanical censure.

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New NGO Racket: Smuggling, Inc. by Douglas Murray

Posted By on September 2nd, 2017

Although the European Union successfully bribed Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan last year — inducing him to slow the flow of migrants heading through Turkey into Greece — Italy has received almost 100,000 people so far this year.

This summer, even more than in previous years, it has become plain that some of the NGOs working in the Mediterranean are acting as something more than intermediaries. Many have in fact been acting as facilitators. This makes the NGOs effectively no more than the benign face of the smuggling networks. Undercover workers have also discovered NGOs handing vessels back to the smugglers’ networks, effectively helping them to continue their criminal enterprise indefinitely.

A group that which seeks to oppose Europe’s current self-destructive insane trajectory can now not even source independent financial support. Groups, however, that continue to push Europe along its current trajectory continue to get all the official support they need. In the difference in reaction to these two groups lies a significant part of the story of the ruin of a continent.

Sometimes it is in the gap between things that the truth emerges.

In recent years Europe has been on the receiving end of one of the most significant migrant crises in history. In 2015, in just a single year, countries such as Germany and Sweden found themselves adding 2% to their respective populations. Although much of the public continue to labour under the misapprehension that those still coming are fleeing the Syrian civil war; in fact, the majority of those now entering Europe are from Africa, particularly from sub-Saharan Africa.

Although the European Union successfully bribed Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan last year — inducing him to slow the flow of migrants heading through Turkey into Greece — Italy has received almost 100,000 people so far this year. Spain — which had ducked much of the movement of recent years — now finds itself receiving thousands of people who are sometimes (as in this memorable footage from earlier this month) simply landing on the country’s beaches and running straight into the country. In doing so, they are not only breaking into Europe in a fashion that is illegal, but flouting all the asylum protocols, and other protocols, however inadequate, that are meant to exist.

In reaction to such events, the Spanish authorities have done something extraordinary. They have gone the way of the Italian authorities and made more efforts to intercept boats heading towards the country. Not in order to turn them around or block them, but in order to “rescue” them. In merely one day last week, the Spanish coastguards “rescued” 600 migrants. The purpose of the quotation marks around “rescue” is because its use in this context is highly contestable. Somebody may be rescued from a burning car, or rescued from a sinking boat. But if thousands of people intentionally head across narrow stretches of water, it can hardly be said that each and every one of them has been “rescued’.

What have they been rescued from? They may be rescued from war. Or they may be rescued from poverty. Or slightly less rosy economic prospects than someone born in Spain. Most of these people have simply been rescued from Africa or whatever their country of origin. This situation leads to the questions which European politicians even now refuse to address — which is whether Europe should indeed be “rescuing” anyone who ends up in a boat near Europe.

Whenever they are polled, the public in Europe consistently say that they want the migration to slow down or stop. This is a majority opinion in every European country. Across the EU as a whole, a recent survey found that 76% of the European public think that the European Union’s handling of the whole crisis has been poor. But it is in the gap between the treatment of two actors in this crisis that we can discern a terrible fact about the fate of Europe.

Throughout the crisis of recent years — and especially since the height of the crisis in 2015 — the official vessels operated by the European states have been joined by members of non-governmental organsations (NGOs), either on the vessels or running vessels of their own. A significant amount of the “rescue” part of the migrant crisis (finding boats and transferring those onboard onto safe vessels or guiding their vessels into port) has been done by NGOs. Organisations such as Save the Children and Médecins sans Frontières have been invited to do this by European government agencies, and many of them receive significant levels of government funding as well as charitable giving from the public.

Yet, this summer, even more than in previous years, it has become plain that some of the NGOs working in the Mediterranean are acting as something more than intermediaries. Many have in fact been acting as facilitators. Agents who have infiltrated the NGO groups have found collusion between the NGOs and the smugglers networks, including coordination with these brutal and mercenary organisations. Investigations have found NGOs to have been breaking their own agreed operating rules by coordinating locations to meet and pick up vessels sent out by the smugglers. This makes the NGOs effectively no more than the benign face of the smuggling networks. Undercover workers have also discovered NGOs handing vessels back to the smugglers’ networks, effectively helping them to continue their criminal enterprise indefinitely.

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Price’s War on Mental Illness Instead of using ‘mental health’ as a catch-all, spending should focus on those with serious mental illnesses By D. J. Jaffe

Posted By on September 2nd, 2017

The abysmal failure of the U.S. mental-health system to serve the seriously ill is apparent to everyone except those who work in it. As I documented in Insane Consequences: How the Mental Health Industry Fails the Mentally Ill, in spite of throwing $150 billion at mental health annually, there are 140,000 seriously mentally ill homeless and almost 400,000 behind bars. One-third of the seriously mentally ill get zero treatment. Families are being torn apart. The public has become inured to the steady flow of “mentally ill killer goes on rampage” headlines. Meanwhile advocates and the industry propose mental-health spending plans that have nothing to do with solving these problems, so the seriously ill continue to suffer.

Yesterday, Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price delivered a brilliant speech urging mental-health leaders to bring this insanity to an end. He did so while convening the inaugural meeting of the Interdepartmental Serious Mental Illness Coordinating Committee (ISMICC). The committee was the brainchild of Representatives Tim Murphy (R., Pa.) and Eddie Bernice Johnson (D., Texas). It is composed of members from the top federal agencies and advocates and is charged with developing recommendations for Congress on serious mental illness.

Secretary Price distilled the problem down to its essence by instructing committee members to focus on the “ten, ten, ten problem”: Ten million people have serious mental illness, they die ten years earlier than others, and “ten times more Americans with serious mental illness are in prison than in psychiatric hospitals. . . . We replaced an imperfect and sometimes cruel system of institutionalization with a system that is in many cases even more cruel.” Bingo!

The problem is largely one of mission creep. For example, under the misleadership of director Paolo Del Vecchio, the Center for Mental Health Services (CMHS) unit within the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) has largely refused to focus on the seriously mentally ill. It has encouraged other agencies and the states to divert their own resources away from the seriously mentally ill and toward the pseudoscience and pop psychology that CMHS regularly promotes. CMHS encourages mental-health agencies to wrap poverty, divorce, bad grades, unemployment, and gender misidentity in a mental-health narrative — “trauma” — and use their state and local mental-health funds to solve those problems. Reducing homelessness, arrest, incarceration, violence, and victimization among the seriously mentally ill are not on the CMHS radar.

After Dr. Price left the room, certain committee members ignored his direction and trotted out their usual array of spending initiatives that do not reduce the homelessness, arrest, incarceration, and hospitalization of the seriously mentally ill. Some called for expanding prevention initiatives, in spite of the established fact that the serious mental illnesses that the committee is supposed to focus on, including schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, cannot be prevented. Others wanted to focus on “stigma,” which is far behind cost and lack of services in explaining why the seriously ill don’t get treatment. Someone proposed focusing suicide-eradication efforts on those under 24, who are the least likely to commit suicide. Reducing violence by the mentally ill? It did not even get a mention until the public-comments session, when one caller (myself) asked why.

At that point, several committee members pulled out the industry platitude that “the mentally ill are no more violent than others” — which is true. But the seriously mentally ill who go untreated, the group Secretary Price asked them to focus on, are more violent than others. Denial is not a solution.