Sally Yates: Much Ado about Nothing New Democrats used yesterday’s subcommittee hearing to air a lot of partisan innuendo, but they couldn’t make anything substantive stick. By Andrew C. McCarthy

If ever there were an example of why a congressional committee is a terrible vehicle for investigating misconduct with alleged criminal or national-security implications, it was Monday’s Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing. The session, a probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election, featured the much-anticipated testimony of Democratic diva Sally Yates, the former acting Attorney General fired for insubordination by President Trump in the early days of his administration. You’ll be shocked, I’m sure, to learn that the proceedings were heavy on politically charged innuendo and light on substance.

If you were looking for hard evidence of Trump collusion in a Russian influence operation, there was none to be found. And if you were hoping for insight into the only known crime to have been committed in this escapade — namely, the leaking of classified information to the media — the hearing chaired by Senator Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) was a disappointment.

What we mainly heard was that the Obama administration really does not like Michael Flynn. Not exactly the late-breaking news.

President Obama fired Flynn after making him head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Flynn was a naysayer on Obama’s foreign policy, particularly with respect to the Middle East — especially Iran and radical Islam. Flynn also made enemies throughout the so-called “community” of U.S. intelligence agencies because he called out our spooks on politicizing their analyses to paper over Obama’s policy failures. How surprising that many of these officials have no use for him either.

Thus, the schadenfreude runneth over in the Obama camp, which is clearly enjoying the general’s fall from grace. And one can hardly blame them for bursting into “I told you so” mode over lapses in judgment by President Trump’s original (and short-lived) national-security adviser — e.g., taking money in his post-military security-consulting career from enterprises tied to the murderous Putin regime and the government of Turkey’s Islamist thug, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Flynn defenders will get only so far observing that the autocratic Erdogan was beloved of the Obama and Bush administrations, too, and that the haul from Flynn’s Russian speaking gigs was a bare fraction of the cool $500,000 Bill Clinton got from a Kremlin-tied investment bank shortly before his wife, then-secretary of state Hillary Clinton, signed off on a government ruling that gave Russia control of one-fifth of U.S. uranium supplies. I myself have pointed out that Flynn (with co-author Michael Ledeen) wrote a bestselling book, The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War against Radical Islam and Its Allies, in which he describes the Putin regime as a determined enemy bent on America’s destruction, and radical Islam as the ideology that animates the terrorist threat against our country. Given the general’s awareness of these facts, if he couldn’t perceive the unseemliness of profiting off the Russian and Turkish despots, then Democrats surely can’t be faulted for questioning his fitness, or Trump’s judgment in retaining him. Such critiques can hardly be dismissed as baseless, even if they are hypocritical, motivated by politics rather than security concerns, and grossly incomplete in the portrait they paint of Flynn’s distinguished military career.

Europe’s Death Wish: Edward Cline

“Nothing is creepier than Islam. Challenge Islamic racism, misogyny genocide, and so on.” I thought it would be just desserts to begin by paraphrasing Linda Sarsour and just turn back on her her statement that “Nothing is creepier than Zionism,” which has made the rounds on Twitter and national news. This groomed, but bag-headed, glib, taqiyya-fluent, BDS-champion, and stealth jihadist, has a loud mouth and is a publicity hound and resolutely anti-Trump. She was one of the organizers of the Women’s March in Washington. She has pulled lots of wool over the eyes of the liberal clueless.

But one prominent blogger and spokesman for the West, Bruce Bower, scratched his head and asked, following the dismally concluded French election of May 7th, in his PJMedia article, “What Happened in France?”:

How could Marine Le Pen have lost in a landslide?

Why, after the Brits chose Brexit, and Americans chose Trump, did the Dutch fail Wilders, and the French fail Le Pen?

How could a country that has been hit by several major terrorist attacks in recent years, and that has undergone a more profound social transformation owing to Islamic immigration, vote for business as usual?

… But if you’ve witnessed the reality of Islamization in cities like Rotterdam and Paris and Stockholm, you may well wonder: what, in heaven’s name, will it take for these people to save their own societies, their own freedoms, for their own children and grandchildren?

Bawer reviews the common rationale is that Europeans are still feeling guilty:

One way of trying to answer it is to look at countries one by one. For example, the Brits and French feel guilty about their imperial histories, and hence find it difficult to rein in the descendants of subject peoples. The Germans feel guilty about their Nazi past – and the Swedes feel guilty about cozying up to Nazis – and thus feel compelled to lay out the welcome mat for, well, just about anybody. The Dutch, similarly, are intensely aware that during the Nazi occupation they helped ship off a larger percentage of their Jews to the death camps than any other Western European country, and feel a deep need to atone.

Is it a matter of self-flagellation in the spirit of atonement? “Bible (Exodus 20:5-6; 34:6-7; Numbers 14:18) portray God as “visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children.” Still another part of the Bible (Jeremiah 31:29; Ezekiel 18:2; Job 21:19) rejects this and teach that “sons [shall not] be put to death for their fathers.” The Bible is rich in such bipolar maxims.

I do not subscribe to the moral philosophy of inherited guilt or generational responsibility. Most imperial history should not be apologized for, especially where and when it concerns “the descendants of subject peoples” not to mention the descendants of people who also weren’t even alive during imperial depredations. Some of that history if awful, particularly the Belgian experience in the Congo.

However, were it not for imperial colonial policies, much of the known world would still be in the very Dark Ages, “brutish, nasty, and short.” In fact, where the West retreated and left indigenous populations at the mercy of their murderous tribalist leaders and masters, those people have largely reverted to that condition. (Look at Zimbabwe, formerly Rhodesia.)The West introduced technology, medicine, literacy, law, longer longevity, higher standards of living, and even the concept of freedom. Much of that is now disappearing. Pick any country on the African continent and it’s the same story, with remaining Westerners under attack, their property confiscated, and explicitly threatened with mass murder and genocidal extinction.

Every time I read some Third World complaint about Western colonialism, I can’t help but hark back to that gem of a Monty Python scene in The Life of Brian, and think, “What has the West given the complainers?”

Dublin Council flies Palestinian flag over city hall in ‘gesture of solidarity’

Dublin City Council, in Ireland’s capital, has voted to fly the Palestinian flag over city hall until the end of the month “as a gesture of our solidarity with the people of Palestine.”

The motion, passed Monday, was proposed by left-wing People Before Profit Councillor John Lyons, who said the move would support communities living under a form of “apartheid, worse than South Africa.” It was carried with the support of Sinn Féin and left-wing parties by 42 to 11, with seven abstentions. Center-right parties Fine Gael and Fine Fail opposed the motion.

The motion stated that the city council will fly the flag “as a gesture of our solidarity with the people of Palestine living under occupation in the West Bank and Gaza, with the Palestinian citizens of Israel denied basic democratic rights and with the over 7 million displaced Palestinians denied the right of return to their homeland.”

Writing on Facebook, Sinn Fein Councillor Larry O’Toole said he was “proud to speak in favor of and support the Palestinian flag flying over City Hall.”

‘Nakba Day,’ also known as ‘Day of Catastrophe,’ sees Palestinians commemorate their expulsion from their homeland between 1947 and 1949. This year will also mark the 50th anniversary of the Six Day War and Israeli occupation of the West Bank.
The Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign (IPSC) welcomed the announcement on Facebook, with Chairperson Fatin Al-Tamimi saying she was “speechless” as she thanked the Irish people for their support.

“The refugees created during this ethnic cleansing and their descendants now number in the millions, and all are shamefully still denied their internationally mandated Right of Return to their homeland,” she added.

In an letter to councilors ahead of the vote, Israeli Ambassador to Ireland Ze’ev Boker, said that flying the flag would be“highly politically charged,” adding that “some members of the Irish Jewish community are concerned by the negative message that the flying of the flag promotes.”

Sligo County Council, on Ireland’s west coast, also voted to fly the flag at its council building from May 15 until the end of the month.

Failing Those Who Served Us By Janet Levy

Three years after the 2014 Veterans Health Administration scandal erupted in headlines, outrage, investigations, and the resignation of then-secretary of veterans’ affairs Eric Shinseki, veterans still must contend with an agency that provides less than stellar service.

A government report issued in February found that the VA’s shift to using more private-sector care for veterans has its own problems. They include cumbersome authorization and scheduling procedures, inadequate provider networks, and the potential for veterans having to pay their own treatment costs. Plus wait times for care, the heart of the 2014 scandal, are still long: an average of 45 days for 53% of veterans.

Problematic health care, as well as the descent into homelessness for a growing number of our nation’s veterans, belies our posture of national pride in our troops. We label them heroes, and then we fail to properly provide for them.

The problems of inadequate health care began to surface in 2012 and 2013, when two doctors at the Phoenix VA Health Care System voiced concerns. The whistleblowers said they had witnessed substandard care, that VA officials had falsified health service wait times, and that 40 veterans died while waiting for health care. These claims were later verified by the Veterans Administration, and investigations began nationwide.

A 2014 General Accounting Office audit of 731 VA medical centers and outpatient clinics reported that roughly 100,000 veterans nationwide were experiencing long wait times for health care. Another VA report detailed specific techniques used to falsify wait times.

Still other allegations of mismanagement surfaced in 2014, when a congressional committee revealed that more than $380,000 in bonuses were awarded to directors and top executives of 38 VA facilities where falsification of records and delays in care were being examined. The money was part of $2.7 million in extra pay given in 2013 to top-ranking VA officials.

Further, a 2015 VA report found that the VA had such sloppy record keeping that 307,000 veterans out of 867,000 pending cases on the VA’s list of electronic records were actually deceased. VA officials could not conclude if the veterans had received care, were still waiting for care, or had even applied for care. Nonetheless, some concluded that those veterans had died while waiting for medical help.

What Free Speech Isn’t The government cannot punish you for offensive speech, but your boss can fire you. By Karol Markowicz

Two hundred and forty-one years since America’s birth and 226 years since the adoption of the Bill of Rights protecting our freedom of speech, Americans seem to be confused about what free speech actually means. We need a refresher course in what is not free speech, and what it is that speech is free from.

As a free society, we must protect speech in the public square. That’s why the Westboro Church lunatics are accompanied by a sizable police force when they protest military funerals. It is our job as a society to permit speech, even and especially speech we find repugnant, and to protect the speaker from violent reactions to that speech. Additionally, speakers must not face repercussions from the government for what they say. If Donald Trump doesn’t like it when Saturday Night Live makes fun of him, he can tweet about it. He can’t send a police force to arrest Alec Baldwin.

This does not, however, mean that speech comes without consequences. If Westboro Church leader Fred Phelps applied for a job at your company, you would be fully within your rights to turn him down because he is a vile, hateful person whom you do not wish to employ. This general distinction has been difficult for people to grasp in the wake of several recent high-profile incidents.

Last week, Tomi Lahren settled a lawsuit with her previous employer, the conservative network The Blaze. Lahren was fired after an appearance on The View in which she told the audience that she was pro-choice. She had previously proclaimed herself pro-life; her position on abortion is one that matters to both her audience and her (now former) employer. Speaking to Joy Behar and other View co-hosts, she explained:

I’m pro-choice, and here’s why: I am a constitutional — y’know, someone that loves the Constitution. . . . I can’t sit here and be a hypocrite and say I’m for limited government, but I think the government should decide what women do with their bodies.

Of course, her viewers at The Blaze also consider themselves “constitutionals” (if that were a real word), believe in limited government, and yet are pro-life. She called her own audience hypocrites — and then she was fired for it.

The Pre-Existing Lie We’re talking about a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the population. By Rich Lowry

If you’ve only followed coverage of the Republican health-care bill loosely in the media, you might believe that House Republicans, after much effort, passed legislation to deny people with pre-existing conditions health insurance.

The issue of pre-existing conditions has dominated the debate over the GOP health-care bill out of all proportion to the relatively modest provision in the legislation, which is being distorted — often willfully, sometimes ignorantly — into a threat to all that is good and true in America.

The perversity of it all is that the legislation is properly understood as doing more to preserve the Obamacare regulation on pre-existing conditions than to undermine it. The legislation maintains a federal baseline of protection in such cases, and says only that states can apply for a waiver from it, provided that they abide by certain conditions meant to ensure that no one is left out in the cold.

Since these provisions only involve the individual insurance market, a small slice of the overall insurance picture (about 18 million are on the individual market), and merely make possible state waivers, they are inherently limited.

You’re not affected if you get insurance through your employer (155 million people), or through Medicaid or Medicare. You’re not affected if you live in a state that doesn’t request the waiver, a category that will certainly include every blue state and most red states, too. Even if you buy insurance on the individual market and live in a state that gets a waiver, you’re not affected if you’ve maintained insurance coverage continuously and not had a gap in coverage longer than 63 days.

By this point, we’re talking about a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the population. If you do have a pre-existing condition in a waiver state and haven’t had continuous coverage, you can be charged more by your insurer only the first year. The state will have access to $8 billion in federal funds explicitly to ease the cost of your insurance, and the state must further have a high-risk pool or similar program to mitigate insurance costs for the sick.

Clearly, if Republicans set out to recklessly endanger the well-being of people with pre-existing conditions, they didn’t do a very good job of it. The purpose of these provisions isn’t to punish people who are sick, but to create an incentive for people to buy insurance while they are healthy. (The Obamacare exchanges are failing because the law’s tangle of regulations drove up costs and made insurance economically unappealing to the young and healthy.)

How to Blow an Election — in Five Easy Steps Counting the ways, and Comey is not among them. By Victor Davis Hanson

Hillary Clinton recently took “full responsibility” for her 2016 loss. Only she didn’t. Instead of explaining what the historian Thucydides once called the “truest causes” (aitiai), she went on to list at least three pretexts (prophases) for her defeat: sexism, FBI director James Comey, and the purported Russian hacking of her unsecured e-mail server and the John Podesta e-mail trove.

Clinton’s accusations also raise the larger question of why a presidential candidate wins or loses an election.

In general, there seem to be five hinges of fate: personality, positions on the issues, the general political atmosphere of the era, the quality of the campaign, and sudden and unforeseen outside events such as depression, scandal, or war. Even a biased media or lots of money pales in comparison.

The Pretexts

We can fairly dismiss Clinton’s pretexts.

Take sexism. Hillary Clinton found her sex an advantage in being elected to the U.S. Senate from New York. For a generation, among the most powerful and successful figures in U.S. politics were three progressive, multimillionaire, Bay Area women who, in a most non-diverse fashion, lived within 50 miles of one another: Barbara Boxer, Diane Feinstein, and Nancy Pelosi.

From 1997 to 2013 women of both parties were in charge of U.S. foreign policy as secretary of state, for twelve out of 16 years. One could make the argument that “the first female president” was an advantageous campaigning point, not a drawback; it was certainly designed to bookend Barack Obama’s successful trumpeting of being the first African-American president.

Blaming a deer-in-the-headlights FBI director James Comey is equally problematic. His passive-aggressive pronouncements irrationally first exonerated her, then did not, then did again. Faulting the FBI for her own likely felonious behavior of sending and receiving classified communications on an unsecured server (or of Bill Clinton’s trying to leverage Attorney General Loretta Lynch on an airport tarmac) is sort of like blaming the defeat at Pearl Harbor on the Japanese — true, but hardly the whole story given America’s responsibility for its own unpreparedness.

In similar fashion, had Donald Trump lost, he might have faulted the Washington Post for airing the decade-old Access Hollywood tape that nearly destroyed his campaign, as if the clear ill will and partisanship of Jeff Bezos’s Post were not empowered by Trump’s own private, hot-mic — but nonetheless crude — statements. The Germans claimed that harsh snows and the last-minute campaign in the Balkans had delayed and thus doomed their 1941 Russian offensive, as if the Red Army did not have a say or as if Germans were a tropical people.

A Slap in the Face to Democracy: Canada’s “Anti-Islamophobia” Motion by Ruthie Blum

“While the NCCM’s open letter does not directly call for Sharia law or the criminalization of criticism of Islam, it does advance the notion that the famously tolerant nation of Canada must set up anti-racism directorates in each province to track instances of Islamophobia, institute a mandatory course on systemic racism for Canadian high school students, and train its police officers to use bias-neutral policing.” — Josh Lieblein, The Daily Caller.

“Now that Islamophobia has been condemned, this is not the end, but rather the beginning… so that condemnation is followed by comprehensive policies,” wrote Samer Majzoub, a Muslim Brotherhood affiliate of the Canadian Muslim Forum — presumably meaning that the next steps are to make it binding.

“The objective of Jihad… warrants that one must struggle against Kufr (disbelief) and Shirk (polytheism) and the worship of falsehood in all its forms. Jihad has to continue until this objective is achieved.” — ICNA Canada website.

Growing concern in Canada over liberal policies benefitting Muslim extremists sheds light on why an “anti-Islamophobia” bill — proposed in the wake of the deadly January 17 Quebec City mosque attack and approved by parliament on March 23 — spurred such heated controversy there.

Motion 103, tabled by Liberal Party MP Iqra Khalid, a Muslim representing Mississauga-Erin Mills, calls on the Canadian government to “develop a whole-of-government approach to reducing or eliminating systemic racism and religious discrimination including Islamophobia.” Because the bill makes no mention of any other religious group targeted by bigots, it was opposed by most Conservative Party politicians and a majority of the public.

Ahead of what would turn out to be a 201-91 vote in favor of the motion, a petition was circulated asking MPs not to support it. According to the petition, Motion 103 would “lay the groundwork for imposing what is essentially a Sharia anti-blasphemy law on all of Canada.”

The petition further stated:

“…criticism of Islam would constitute a speech crime in Canada.

“This motion uses the term ‘islamophobia’ without defining it, and without substantiating that there is in fact any such widespread problem in Canada.

“This will lead to ideologically-driven overreach and enforcement against alternative points of view—including mature, reasoned criticisms of Islam.

“Criticism of the treatment of women in Islamic-majority Middle Eastern countries could be criminalized;
“It could be a punishable offense to speak out against the Mustlim Brotherhood, or to denounce radical Imams who want to enact Sharia law in Canada;
“Criticism or depiction of Muhammad could be punishable by law;
“Schools that teach the history of Islam’s violent conquests could be fined—or worse.

“That kind of content-based, viewpoint-discriminatory censorship is unacceptable in a Western liberal democracy.”

Erdogan’s Crimes against Humanity Turkey Bombs Yazidi Homeland by Uzay Bulut

While Yazidis are still suffering from these atrocities, Turkey, evidently still no friend of non-Muslims, has attacked them yet again.

Turkish officials say they consider these groups “terrorists.” The general staff of the Turkish armed forces issued a statement concerning the airstrikes, saying that “operations will continue until the terrorists have completely been eliminated.”

“Denying the genocide is not only saying ‘we didn’t do it.’ It’s much, much worse…. It is declaring murderers as heroes. It is honoring the genocide’s perpetrators… [and] saying to the grandchildren of genocide victims, ‘Murderers of your grandfathers and grandmothers are our heroes; they did it well, God bless them. If necessary, we would do it again.'” — Istanbul Branch of the Human Rights Association, Commemoration of the 102nd Anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, April 24, 2017.

Just a few hours after the commemoration of the 102nd anniversary of the Armenian Genocide on April 24, 2017, Turkish warplanes dropped bombs on the Yazidi homeland of Sinjar (Shingal) on April 25, at around 2 AM local time, according to reports from the region.

The strikes reportedly killed at least 70 people in the area, with one bomb hitting a Kurdish peshmerga post in Sinjar, killing at least five and severely wounding several more.

Yazidis say they have been subjected to 72 genocidal massacres. The latest genocide, committed by ISIS, is the 73rd and is still going on. Tens of thousands of Yazidis have been displaced and are refugees in several countries. Hundreds of Yazidi girls and women are still bought, sold and raped by ISIS terrorists — the same men who murdered their husbands and fathers.

While Yazidis are still suffering from these atrocities, Turkey, evidently still no friend of non-Muslims, has attacked them yet again.

On August 3, 2014, Islamic State terrorists invaded Sinjar, the homeland of the Yazidis in Iraq, and started slaughtering the Yazidis; many survivors fled up Mount Sinjar.

In his speech to the U.S. Congress, Mirza Ismail, founder and chairman of the Yezidi Human Rights Organization-International, described the genocide in Sinjar and pled for help:

“The entire Yezidi population was displaced in less than one day on August 3, 2014! The Yezidis and Chaldo-Assyrian Christians face this genocide together. Why? Because we are not Muslims, and because our path is the path of peace. For this, we are being burned alive. For living as men and women of peace.”

Segregation at Harvard: Blacks-Only Grad Ceremony To combat the “legacy of slavery and colonization at Harvard.”

Black students at Harvard University are holding their own graduation ceremony away from white students in what BET says is “the first of its kind” and “took nearly a year to plan.”

One of the graduates who helped plan the blacks-only graduation, Michael Huggins, said, “This is an opportunity to celebrate Harvard’s Black excellence and Black brilliance. It’s an event where we can see each other and our parents and family can see us as a collective, whole group. A community.”

However, Huggins ensures this segregated event is anything but segregation:

“This is not about segregation. It’s about fellowship and building a community. This is a chance to reaffirm for each other that we enter the work world with a network of supporters standing with us. We are all partners.”

The BET notes that Harvard reports a 96% graduation rate for its black students “who remain in school for an average of six years.” This ceremony is modeled after blacks-only ceremonies held at Stanford, Temple, and Columbia.

Another black graduate, Courtney Woods, told The Root, “Harvard’s institutional foundation is in direct conflict with the needs of black students. There is a legacy of slavery, epistemic racism and colonization at Harvard, which was an institution founded to train rising imperialist leaders. This is a history that we are reclaiming.”

Over 125 graduate students are registered for the ceremony and were able to raise $27,000 to cover the costs and a reception. The Root notes:

The ceremony, which will focus on graduate students, comes at a time when the experiences of many black students, undergraduate and grad, on college campuses in America have been marked by incidents of overt racism, microaggressions, passive racist comments, and the marginalization of minority experiences in both reading assignments and learning materials.

Remember, kids, there is no “overt racism” in segregating as long as it’s not a whites-only ceremony.