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Gao Zhisheng Disappears The Chinese human-rights lawyer has vanished again.

Posted By on August 21st, 2017

The death of Nobel Laureate Liu Xiaobo in state custody last month briefly focused world attention on Chinese repression under President Xi Jinping. Now human-rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng has disappeared, perhaps into the state-security maw that presided over Mr. Liu’s death.

Family members in exile in the U.S., who talk to him regularly on the phone, say Mr. Gao disappeared from his home in remote Shaanxi province earlier this month. Mr. Gao has been living under house arrest since 2014, surveilled by Chinese security forces. Local police say they don’t know where he is.

Mr. Gao has been incarcerated, tortured and released several times since 2006, when he was charged for “inciting subversion” for defending such clients as Falun Gong worshippers and factory workers. Yet Mr. Gao remained unbowed, thanks in part to his Christian faith. He went public with gruesome details of his torture, called for the removal of the Communist Party and advocated for a democratic China.

Mr. Gao may have been detained because he recently gave an interview to a Hong Kong magazine reiterating his political beliefs. Or the regime could be rounding up dissidents before the Party Congress this fall to avoid dissent about corruption or the lack of freedom during what is supposed to be a celebration of Mr. Xi’s consolidation of power.

Human-rights lawyers like Mr. Gao have been a particular target of state suppression, perhaps because they make their case by citing the words of Chinese law that embarrass the regime’s claims to legitimacy. The world should keep shining a light on these Chinese patriots, not least during the Party Congress.

ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Hezbollah Is Running Rings Around U.N. Monitors in Lebanon The Security Council should expand the force’s mandate—and make sure they do their jobs. Danny Danon

Posted By on August 21st, 2017

Mr. Danon is Israel’s ambassador to the U.N.

Over the past year, I have given dozens of United Nations ambassadors tours of Israel’s border with Lebanon. During a recent visit with my American counterpart, Nikki Haley, Israel Defense Forces officers identified Hezbollah positions along our northern border. Our guests appropriately asked where the U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon was, and why nothing was being done to stop Hezbollah terrorists from blatantly violating numerous Security Council resolutions.

Our answer was simple. The Unifil force is there, but they are not effectively fulfilling their mandate. The good news is that when Unifil’s mandate comes before the Security Council later this month, there are practical steps that can be taken to ensure that this important U.N. force succeeds and another conflict with Hezbollah is avoided.

Unifil was established in 1978 with the goal of restoring “international peace and security” and assisting the Lebanese government in extending its authority over southern Lebanon. The force was altered in 1982 after the First Lebanon War and again in 2000 when Israel completed its withdrawal from Lebanese territory.

In August 2006, following the Second Lebanon War and the subsequent Security Council Resolution 1701, Unifil’s mandate expanded to include monitoring the cease-fire. Most importantly, Unifil was charged with ensuring that the territory south of the Litani River remained free of weapons and fighters other than the Lebanese army.

Unfortunately, these efforts have failed. Over the past year alone, we have shared with the Security Council new information detailing how border towns have become Hezbollah strongholds. One out of three buildings in the village of Shaqra is now being used to store arms or launch attacks on Israel. We also shared with the council intelligence revealing how the Iranians use civilian airlines to smuggle dangerous arms into southern Lebanon. When the Second Lebanon War ended, Hezbollah had around 7,000 rockets. Today, they have more than 100,000.

Hezbollah is lately stepping up its efforts to destabilize the region. In April its fighters posed for pictures with rocket-propelled-grenade launchers during a media “tour” of their positions along Israel’s border. Unifil forces did nothing to halt this live, televised violation of Security Council resolutions.

In June, Israel reported to the U.N. that Hezbollah has established a series of border outposts under the guise of an agricultural organization called Green Without Borders. Our intelligence services have determined that these positions are used regularly for reconnaissance operations against Israel. In this instance too, Unifil insisted on turning a blind eye, claiming that it lacked authority to investigate.

To rectify this situation, and avoid a new conflict, the Security Council must make real changes to Unifil’s mandate. In addition to generally improving Unifil’s performance, the council should insist on three vital steps.

First, Unifil must increase its presence in the territory. This includes meticulously inspecting the towns and villages of southern Lebanon. Hezbollah strongholds, like the one in Shaqra, must be dismantled, and other villages must be kept free of rockets and weapons aimed at Israeli population centers.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Mizzou Pays a Price for Appeasing the Left Enrollment is down more than 2,000. The campus has had to take seven dormitories out of service. By Jillian Kay Melchior

Posted By on August 21st, 2017

Timothy Vaughn dutifully cheered the University of Missouri for a decade, sitting in the stands with his swag, two hot dogs and a Diet Coke. He estimates he attended between 60 and 85 athletic events every year—football and basketball games and even tennis matches and gymnastics meets. But after the infamous protests of fall 2015, Missouri lost this die-hard fan.

“I pledge from this day forward NOT TO contribute to the [Tiger Scholarship Fund], buy any tickets to any University of Missouri athletic event, to attend any athletic event (even if free), to give away all my MU clothes (nearly my entire wardrobe) after I have removed any logos associated with the University of Missouri, and any cards/helmets/ice buckets/flags with the University of Missouri logo on it,” Mr. Vaughn told administrators in an email four semesters ago.

He was not alone. Thousands of pages of emails I obtained through the Missouri Freedom of Information Act show that many alumni and other supporters were disgusted with administrators’ feeble response to the disruptions. Like Mr. Vaughn, many promised they’d stop attending athletic events. Others vowed they’d never send their children or grandchildren to the university. It now appears many of them have made good on those promises.

The commotion began in October 2015, when student activists claiming that “racism lives here” sent administrators a lengthy list of demands. Among them: The president of the University of Missouri system should resign after delivering a handwritten apology acknowledging his “white male privilege”; the curriculum should include “comprehensive racial awareness and inclusion” training; and 10% of the faculty and staff should be black.

Two weeks later, a student announced he was going on a hunger strike, and the football team refused to practice or play until the university met the demands. As protesters occupied the quad, administrators bent over backward to accommodate them, even providing a power strip so they could charge phones and a generator so they could camp in comfort. A communications instructor, Melissa Click, appeared on viral video calling for “muscle” to remove a student reporter from the quad. By Nov. 9, both the president and the chancellor of Mizzou, as the flagship Columbia campus is known, had resigned.

Donors, parents, alumni, sports fans and prospective students raged against the administration’s caving in. “At breakfast this morning, my wife and I agreed that MU is NOT a school we would even consider for our three children,” wrote Victor Wirtz, a 1978 alum, adding that the university “has devolved into the Berkeley of the Midwest.”

As classes begin this week, freshmen enrollment is down 35% since the protests, according to the latest numbers the university has publicly released. Mizzou is beginning the year with the smallest incoming class since 1999. Overall enrollment is down by more than 2,000 students, to 33,200. The campus has taken seven dormitories out of service.

The plummeting support has also cost jobs. In May, Mizzou announced it would lay off as many as 100 people and eliminate 300 more positions through retirement and attrition. Last year the university reduced its library staff and cut 50 cleaning and maintenance jobs.

Mizzou’s 2016 football season drew almost 13,000 fewer attendees than in 2015, local media reported. During basketball games, one-third of the seats in the Mizzou Arena sat empty. CONTINUE AT SITE

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Steve Bannon Leaves the White House And a new phase of the war for America begins. August 20, 2017 David Horowitz and Matthew Vadum

Posted By on August 21st, 2017

After helping to elect Donald Trump and pilot his White House through the turbulence of its first seven months, Stephen K. Bannon has left the administration and returned to Breitbart News, the conservative online news giant he captained before joining Trump a year ago.

What distinguishes Steve Bannon from other GOP operatives and conservative politicians are two things: vision and guts. The left in this country, the progressive and Democratic Party left is now organized around the anti-American creed of “identity politics.” This is the idea that “people of color” in America are oppressed by white supremacists – by people who are not “of color” and only a general purge of white racists and suppression of their free speech will rectify the injustice. This is the new racism, which serves as the principal weapon in Democrat attacks not only on the Trump White House but on all Republicans and patriots who oppose them.

“The longer they talk about identity politics, I got ’em,” Steve Bannon told the American Prospect. “I want them to talk about racism every day. If the Left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”

You can probably count on one hand the number of Republican office-holders who think clearly and strategically like that. Or maybe one finger.

It is because Bannon understands the civil war which has now engulfed the political life of this nation that the secessionist left has focused its most vicious attacks on him, calling him a white nationalist, a white supremacist and an anti-Semite. Such attacks are transparently false, but they are in line with the left’s attacks on all their opponents as racists and fascists. These are the verbal equivalents of a nuclear option in political warfare and they reflect the existential nature of the conflict that is upon us. It is existential because the left has aimed at nothing less than the foundations of our democracy.

This was not a battle that could be fully engaged from the White House itself because so many people including the mainstream of the Republican Party are not yet awake to the nature of the conflict. They are too eager to seek approval from progressives who hate them.

Some on the right are concerned that without Bannon’s White House presence, Trump will become a prisoner of the globalist tendencies inside the administration and the appeasement instincts of the Republican in Congress. But they are wrong. Trump will still be Trump. He is not going to abandon the agendas or bury the instincts that made him endure the most hate-filled campaign in the history of American politics because he loves this country and wants to restore its greatness.

Although conservatives may thrill to the president’s frequent street fights with the Left, a president cannot be a relentless rebel. He has to put together a non-ideological majority and pick his fights shrewdly. Trump has already expressed his appreciation for the asset Bannon will be to him outside the White House. “Steve Bannon will be a tough and smart new voice at @BreitbartNews…maybe even better than ever before,” Trump tweeted Saturday. “Fake News needs the competition!” Yet, it’s more than fake news organizations that better look out when Bannon gets going.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

NY Times Eclipse Coverage Amounts to Puerile Preaching By Clay Waters

Posted By on August 21st, 2017

In Sunday’s New York Times, the paper’s most activist environmental reporter Justin Gillis, who has a knack for getting scary yet inaccurate stories on the paper’s front page, delivered a condescending lecture to the effect that if you believe an eclipse will occur on Monday, then you’d better believe everything “science” tells you about “climate change” as well, in “Should You Trust Climate Science? Maybe the Eclipse Is a Clue.” Of course, neither Gillis nor anyone else could tell you for certain whether there will be clouds blocking your view of the eclipse tomorrow, but they’ve got the weather for the next century locked in?https://www.newsbusters.org/author/clay-waters

It’s the latest climate change article from the Times evidently written for children.

Straight from the lead, you can see where Gillis is going:

Eclipse mania will peak on Monday, when millions of Americans will upend their lives in response to a scientific prediction.

….

Thanks to the work of scientists, people will know exactly what time to expect the eclipse. In less entertaining but more important ways, we respond to scientific predictions all the time, even though we have no independent capacity to verify the calculations. We tend to trust scientists.

For years now, atmospheric scientists have been handing us a set of predictions about the likely consequences of our emissions of industrial gases. These forecasts are critically important, because this group of experts sees grave risks to our civilization. And yet, when it comes to reacting to the warnings of climate science, we have done little.

….

Considering this most basic test of a scientific theory, the test of prediction, climate science has established its validity.

That does not mean it is perfect, nor that every single prediction is correct. While climate scientists have forecast the long-term rise of global temperatures pretty accurately, they have not been as good — yet — about predicting the short-term jitters.

In other fields, we do not demand absolute certainty from our scientists, because that is an impossible standard.

….

When your aging mother is found to have cancer, the recommended treatment will be rooted in a statistical model of how tumors respond to the available medicines. Your family is likely to follow that advice, even though you know the drugs are imperfect and may not save her.

We trust scientific expertise on many issues; it is, after all, the best advice we can get. Yet on climate change, we have largely ignored the scientists’ work. While it is true that we have started to spend money to clean up our emissions, the global response is in no way commensurate with the risks outlined by the experts. Why?

….But a bigger reason is that these changes threaten vested economic interests. Commodity companies benefit from exploiting forests. Fossil-fuel companies, to protect their profits, spent decades throwing up a smoke screen about the risks of climate change.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

IT staffers may have compromised sensitive data to foreign intelligence By Paul Sperry

Posted By on August 20th, 2017

Federal authorities are investigating whether sensitive data was stolen from congressional offices by several Pakistani-American tech staffers and sold to Pakistani or Russian intelligence, knowledgeable sources say.

What started out 16 months ago as a scandal involving the alleged theft of computer equipment from Congress has turned into a national-security investigation involving FBI surveillance of the suspects.

Investigators now suspect that sensitive US government data — possibly including classified information — could have been compromised and may have been sold to hostile foreign governments that could use it to blackmail members of Congress or even put their lives at risk.

“This is a massive, massive scandal,” a senior US official familiar with the widening probe told The Post.

Alarm bells went off in April 2016 when computer security officials in the House reported “irregularities” in computer equipment purchasing. An internal investigation revealed the theft of hundreds of thousands of dollars in government property, and evidence pointed to five IT staffers and the Democratic Congress members’ offices that employed them.

The evidence was turned over to the House inspector general, who found so much “smoke” that she recommended a criminal probe, sources say. The case was turned over to Capitol Police in October.

When the suspected IT workers couldn’t produce the missing invoiced equipment, sources say, they were removed from working on the computer network in early February.

During the probe, investigators found valuable government data that is believed to have been taken from the network and placed on offsite servers, setting off more alarms. Some 80 offices were potentially compromised.

Most lawmakers fired the alleged “ringleader” — longtime IT staffer Imran Awan — in February. But Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the former Democratic National Committee chief, kept Awan on her payroll until his arrest last month on seemingly unrelated charges of defrauding the congressional credit union.

For more than a decade, Awan, his wife, two relatives and a friend worked for 30 House Democrats. They included New York City pols Gregory Meeks, Joseph Crowley and Yvette Clarke and members of the sensitive Intelligence and Foreign Relations committees.

The Democrats who hired the five suspects apparently did a poor job vetting them. Awan’s brother Abid had a rap sheet with multiple offenses, including a conviction for DWI a month before he was hired, and filed for bankruptcy in 2012.

Most had relatively little IT experience. Yet they hauled in a combined $4 million-plus over the past decade. One, a former McDonald’s worker, was suddenly making as much as a chief of staff.

“These lawmakers allowed an insider threat to come into the House,” the official charged. “Computer equipment was stolen, taxpayers were robbed of hundreds of thousands of dollars and sensitive data was compromised and possibly sold overseas.”

On Thursday, a federal grand jury indicted Imran Awan on four seemingly unrelated felony counts including bank fraud, conspiracy and making false statements. They also indicted his wife, Hina Alvi. FBI agents seized hard drives and other evidence from their Virginia home.

The indictment says the couple wired close to $300,000 in fraudulently obtained funds to Pakistan in January, as the Capitol Police investigation heated up.

FBI agents last month collared Awan, 37, at the Dulles International Airport airport as he tried to board a flight to Pakistan. Alvi, 33, fled to Pakistan in March.

Now that prosecutors have Awan hung up on the fraud charges, they will try to squeeze him harder in the larger cyber-espionage investigation, according to the US official, who expects additional charges and arrests in the case.

Awan’s lawyer, Christopher Gowen, who has worked for Hillary Clinton’s campaigns as well as the Clinton Foundation, maintained that his client was only indicted “for working while Muslim.”

The investigation has touched Democratic leaders including Wasserman Schultz, who has been accused of protecting Awan. She stuck by her close aide, despite being briefed several months ago by House administrators and security officials about his “suspicious activities” on the Hill, sources say.

Wasserman Schultz attempted to downplay his alleged conduct, saying he was “transferring data outside the secure network, which I think amounted to use of apps that the House didn’t find compliant with our security requirements.” Such transfers though, could be a serious, potentially illegal, violation.

The US Attorney’s Office in Washington has taken possession of a laptop issued to Awan from Wasserman Schultz’s office, according to the sources, and she has reportedly retained counsel.

Earlier this year, she badgered the Capitol Police chief to return the laptop to her, even threatening him with “consequences.”

The congresswoman could not be reached for comment, but she recently told a local paper that scrutiny of her Muslim aide was motivated by “racial and ethnic profiling.”

Awan had access to Wasserman Schultz’s e-mails at both Congress and the DNC, where he had been given the password to her iPad. After DNC e-mails and research files were stolen during the presidential election, Wasserman Schultz reportedly refused to turn over the server to the FBI and instead called in a private firm to investigate and ID the hackers. The firm blamed the Russian government, while admitting, “We don’t have hard evidence.” The corrupted DNC server, held in storage, still has not been examined by the FBI.

Wasserman Schultz denies the DNC turned down the FBI’s assistance or that her congressional or DNC e-mails were compromised by Awan.

“This whole investigation pivots off Debbie Wasserman Schultz,” the official said.

“It’s clear that large bytes of data were moved off the secure network,” said another source close to the investigation, adding that Awan and the other four staffers under investigation had “full and complete access” to lawmakers’ e-mails, calendars, schedules, hearing notes, meeting notes and memos and other sensitive information.

Investigators are trying to determine if any classified information was compromised. Although the network that was breached is an unclassified system, it’s possible that members or staff cleared to handle classified information inadvertently sent such information in e-mails after getting classified briefings, sources believe.

“Logic dictates that sensitive data was compromised,” the senior official speculated. “An accused criminal with close ties to Pakistan had full and complete control over data that went out over the network.”

Paul Sperry is a former Hoover Institution media fellow and author of “Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives Have Penetrated Washington.”

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

MY SAY: ANTIFA EXPLAINED ON CNN

Posted By on August 20th, 2017

http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/14/us/what-is-antifa-trnd/

The group is known for causing damage to property during protests. In Berkeley, black-clad protesters wearing masks threw Molotov cocktails and smashed windows at the student union center where the Yiannopoulos event was to be held.

Crow, who was involved with Antifa for almost 30 years, said members use violence as a means of self-defense and they believe property destruction does not equate to violence.

“There is a place for violence. Is that the world that we want to live in? No. Is it the world we want to inhabit? No. Is it the world we want to create? No. But will we push back? Yes,” Crow said.

Levin said Antifa activists feel the need to partake in violence because “they believe that elites are controlling the government and the media. So they need to make a statement head-on against the people who they regard as racist.”

“There’s this ‘It’s going down’ mentality and this ‘Hit them with your boots’ mentality that goes back many decades to confrontations that took place, not only here in the American South, but also in places like Europe,” he added.

White nationalists and other members of the so-called alt-right have denounced members of Antifa, sometimes calling them the “alt-left.” Many white nationalists from the Charlottesville rallies claimed it was the Antifa groups that led the protests to turn violent.

Peter Cvjetanovic, a white nationalist who attended the Virginia protests over the weekend, said he believes the far left, including Antifa, are “just as dangerous, if not more dangerous than the right wing could ever be.”

“These are people who preach tolerance and love while at the same time threatening people with a different political ideology. We go to our rallies and they harass us and attack us but they held theirs and we ignore them. You don’t see right-wing protests get like this,” Cvjetanovic told CNN affiliate KRNV.

But Crow said the philosophy of Antifa is based on the idea of direct action. “The idea in Antifa is that we go where they (right-wingers) go. That hate speech is not free speech. That if you are endangering people with what you say and the actions that are behind them, then you do not have the right to do that.

“And so we go to cause conflict, to shut them down where they are, because we don’t believe that Nazis or fascists of any stripe should have a mouthpiece.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Treasury Secretary Mnuchin Rejects Calls to Resign, Defends President Trump ‘Some of these issues are far more complicated than we are led to believe by the mass media,’ Treasury chief says By Nick Timiraos

Posted By on August 20th, 2017

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin rejected calls for him to resign in protest of President Donald Trump’s response to violence at a white-nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., last weekend, and defended the president in a statement Saturday evening.

Mr. Mnuchin condemned the “actions of those filled with hate and with the intent to harm others.”

“While I find it hard to believe I should have to defend myself on this, or the president, I feel compelled to let you know that the president in no way, shape or form believes that neo-Nazi and other hate groups who endorse violence are equivalent to groups that demonstrate in peaceful and lawful ways,” Mr. Mnuchin said.

About 300 of Mr. Mnuchin’s classmates from the Yale University undergraduate class of 1985 posted a letter online Friday asking Mr. Mnuchin to resign in protest of Mr. Trump’s comments.

“It is your moral obligation,” they said. “We know you are better than this, and we are counting on you to do the right thing.”

One week ago, Mr. Trump endured a weekend of criticism for saying in his first reaction to violence at a Charlottesville rally of neo-Nazi and white nationalist groups that there were “many sides” to the unrest. On Monday, he more explicitly condemned white supremacists, including the driver who killed a 32-year-old woman when he plowed into a crowd protesting the white nationalists.

‘While I find it hard to believe I should have to defend myself on this, or the president, I feel compelled to let you know that the president in no way, shape or form believes that neo-Nazi and other hate groups who endorse violence are equivalent to groups that demonstrate in peaceful and lawful ways.’
—Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin

But at a combative press conference in New York on Tuesday, Mr. Trump defended his initial response, saying both sides were to blame for the clashes. “You had a group on one side that was bad and you had a group on the other side that was also very violent,” Mr. Trump said, with Mr. Mnuchin standing next to him. There were “very fine people on both sides,” the president said.

Mr. Trump faced an intense backlash, including criticism from members of his own party for what elected officials and business leaders said was a failure to provide moral leadership. Two CEO councils created by the White House disbanded, and the administration abandoned plans for a third panel on infrastructure.

The White House on Thursday issued a statement to deny rumors that Gary Cohn, Mr. Trump’s economic policy director, would leave the administration over the president’s remarks. Mr. Cohn was also at the Tuesday news conference. Messrs. Cohn and Mnuchin are both Jewish.

Mr. Mnuchin served as Mr. Trump’s campaign finance chairman before being named as Treasury secretary and has a close personal relationship with the president.

In his statement Saturday, Mr. Mnuchin implied that Mr. Trump’s political opponents, including Republican rivals in last year’s primary campaign, were unfairly seizing on the Charlottesville uproar to “distract the administration” from policy issues.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trump Accurately Blames Both Sides for Charlottesville Mayhem The Trump-hating press hammered Trump’s factual ‘blame on both sides’ statement. By Deroy Murdock

Posted By on August 20th, 2017

How dare he?

President Donald J. Trump stood before journalists on Tuesday and said the unsayable: “I think there is blame on both sides.”

Rather than denounce only the execrable white supremacists and swastika-wielding neo-Nazis who organized Saturday’s hate-o-rama in Charlottesville, Va., Trump observed that there was violence coming from the KKK side and from extreme leftists who opposed them with force — not with tranquility, as did those at a peaceful vigil Wednesday night.

The reaction to Trump’s comments was vitriolic:

“We can truly say his words have absolutely emboldened white supremacists,” said CNN anchor Anderson Cooper.

The Chicago Sun-Times called Trump “America’s bigot in chief.”

“This is not my president,” declared Senator Brian Schatz (D., Hawaii).

But if these and other Trump haters were outraged at Trump’s comments, where was their anger when the reliably liberal ACLU described the situation as it unfolded? “Not sure who provoked first. Both sides were hitting each other at Justice Park before police arrived,” the ACLU of Virginia declared via Twitter on Saturday afternoon. The group identified both factions in a video of an open-air brawl on Charlottesville’s streets. “The guy on the ground is a Unite the Right protester. Those in black and red are #Antifa protesters,” referring to far-left “anti-fascist” thugs. The ACLU labeled another violent snippet, “Clash between protesters and counter protesters.”

There was no angst when Reuters reported that “Many of the rally participants were seen carrying firearms, sticks and shields. Some also wore helmets. Counter-protesters likewise came equipped with sticks, helmets and shields.” Reuters correspondents Amanda Becker and Jeff Mason added, “The two sides clashed in scattered street brawls before a car plowed into the rally opponents, killing one woman and injuring 19 others.”

This AP photo from #CharlottesvilleVA is incredible pic.twitter.com/9YZ8SLHnPj
— don (@donswaynos) August 12, 2017

The fury was absent when NBC Nightly News’ Gabe Gutierrez explained that “witnesses say both sides came prepared for a fight.”

The Trumpophobes left their spleens unvented when the Associated Press published this headline, “View from the street: Police stood by as adversaries fought.”

And there was no venom when Charlottesville Police Chief Al Thomas said: “We did have mutually combative individuals in the crowd.”

ABC-TV affiliate WRIC reported that police nabbed eight people tied to this melee. While some clearly were white-power extremists, others were anything but. These include Troy Dunigan, 21, of Tennessee. “He was arrested Saturday for throwing objects at ‘Nazi protesters,’ according to court documents.” Beth Foster, director of the Mercy Junction Justice and Peace Center, told

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

When Feminists Join Islamist Terrorists by Majid Rafizadeh

Posted By on August 20th, 2017

The fact is that these supposed feminists not only turn a blind eye to those atrocities, but their presence at these events actively endorses and legitimizes the rule of these dictators.

When the subject turns to the specific cases of millions of oppressed women around the world — such as Asia Bibi, a Christian mother on death row in Pakistan for seven years for taking a drink of water; or the 19-year-old who, this year, was raped by her cousin at gunpoint and then sentenced to death by stoning for “adultery”; or women who were forced to marry their rapists; or child marriages at 12,000 a day; or women who are beaten by their husbands or who have acid thrown in their faces; or women used as suicide bombers.

When Mogherini smiles in her hijab in Iran, she is delivering a strong blow to women rights movements that attempt to remove the compulsion of the obligatory hijab and grant women equal autonomy, education and freedom. She is empowering suppression.

The social democrats and so-called feminists have been raising their voices for all to hear. They boast about advocating gender equality, individual rights, and advancing women’s rights. They argue that these values are universal; that every person, especially every woman, everywhere in the world, is entitled to these “inalienable” rights. Speeches are given, fundraisers are held, and an army of champions charges toward the cause.

Everyone is equal, and everyone deserves these rights. The chants, the inspirational lectures, the determination that echoes through television interviews, and is spread across the pages of magazines, all fill their followers with enthusiasm. But what is the reality?

Alongside other social democrats, Federica Mogherini, the current High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, recently visited the Islamist state of Iran to attend the official endorsement and inauguration of the regime’s president, Hassan Rouhani. Instead of enforcing the standards she professes — such as the strong support for women — she folded in with those around her. Others who accepted Iran’s invitation were North Koreans, members of Hezbollah, and leaders of Hamas. All three of these groups are known for cruelty, especially against women, and crimes against humanity.

The presence of such people makes the issue of despotism more complicated than it needs to be. By attending these kinds of events, social democrats such as her repeatedly endorse and give legitimacy to repressive states that implement Islamic law, Sharia. As Mogherini rubs elbows with men who have ordered the deaths of thousands of women (and men), she toes the line of their expectations. Instead of evolving their mindset, she allowed all of the women she claims to represent, to remain oppressed, as they have been for so very long.

Mogherini took the problem even a step even farther. Instead of attempting to appear as if she were working toward progressive thinking among these violent Islamist leaders, she acted as if they were friends. She appeared proud to snap selfies with the representatives of this repressive regime. The story came under the international spotlight. Some of the deputies used their selfies with Mogherini to project their legitimacy to the international community while others created self-promotional posters of themselves with Mogherini wearing the mandatory hijab. Mogherini, a social democrat Italian politician who speaks of women’s rights and was once a member of the Italian Communist Party, delightedly agreed to follow the Islamist rule of wearing a mandatory hijab. This act of compliance sends a brutal and unshakeable message. Women in these Islamist societies are controlled by laws which proclaim they must be hidden, or treated as their husband’s property. The hijab has become a symbol of this. Conversely, when Iranian leaders visit Mogherini’s country, they do not follow Italy’s rules. Instead, Italy follows the regime’s Islamist rules by offering appeasements such as covering up nude statues and not serving wine.