ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Gun Control: Another Progressive Power Grab When control costs human freedom. Bruce Thornton

Posted By on October 11th, 2017

The reaction after every mass shooting follows a predictable script written by progressives to serve their political agenda. No claim about the efficacy of gun control, no matter how many times repudiated by facts, can stop the Dems and their media spaniels from ritually invoking it to demonize conservatives.

Why should we be surprised? By now it should be clear that the “party of science” is interested not in truth and evidence, but in ideology and partisan advantage. Yet those with common sense and an awareness of the facts still have to restate the obvious, even though it will make no difference to partisans either ignorant of or indifferent to any reality that doesn’t serve their interests. For what is at stake is not just one right, but the foundations of our political freedom in self-evident, God-given rights.

We all know the worn-out ideas that the progressives predictably trot out after every massacre. And we know they are fallacious. More guns do not lead to more gun murder. Between 1993 and 2013, private gun ownership increased 56%, and gun homicides declined 49%. No, the point is not that more guns account for the declines, a straw-man correlation the media burns down to discredit this fact. The point is, the left’s call for more gun control after every mass shooting implies that fewer guns or more regulations would decrease murder rates. Not only is that idea false, the opposite is true: higher murder rates invariably follow more gun control.

“Common sense regulations” is another nostrum of the left. We’ve had several laboratories for testing this hypothesis––Chicago, D.C., Baltimore, and most blue-state big cities have strict controls on guns, at the same time they have some of the highest rates of gun deaths. That’s because regulations on firearms are effective only for law-abiding citizens who don’t need such restraints. But for criminals they are “parchment barriers” easily ignored. If such government regulations were effective, we wouldn’t still be waging a decades-long war on drugs, which hasn’t stopped any teenager in America from getting any drug he wants. It’s unclear how the most draconian restrictions on gun ownership would be any more effective than the numerous laws that have failed to keep drugs from pouring into our country and being widely distributed.

Most important, the left is indifferent to the fact that the Constitution explicitly states that citizens have the right to “keep and bear arms.” Like all the enumerated rights, this one is not a gift of government, but an “inalienable” right, like the right of self-defense, we possess by virtue of being a human being. The bar for restricting these rights is very high, as it is for the right to free speech.

But the left has always despised the notion of natural rights and consider them a relic of our more ignorant and superstitious past, not to mention a check on their desire to concentrate and expand the government’s power. Contrary to the belief that rights are gifts of “nature and nature’s God,” the progressives argue that a benevolent government should create rights compatible with the its alleged purpose to achieve “equality” and “social justice.” Hence Franklin Roosevelt’s “new bill of rights,” which was promulgated in his 1944 State of the Union address, and included a “useful and remunerative job” and “adequate medical care”––good things to have, but not rights properly understood. But if government can invent such “rights,” the government can also modify or eliminate those it now deems have become dangerous anachronisms or impediments to social improvement.

After the Las Vegas massacre, the Daily Kos gave a typical example of this sentiment:

America needs to declare total war on guns, and that means reinterpreting or repealing the Second Amendment. The latter would be best. There is no sane reason why you or I should be granted the sacred and inviolable right to bear pistols, shotguns, automatic rifles, submachine guns, machine guns, flamethrowers, grenade launchers, anti-tank guns, and other “hunting and self-defense tools.”

After pistols, of course, the rest of the weapons are already illegal or strictly controlled. But misinformation and exaggeration are necessary tactics for making this specious argument against natural rights.

The sentiment, however, is an old staple of the left. Last year Rolling Stone made this same argument, saying the “Founders were wrong” about a Second Amendment that is “outdated, a threat to liberty, and a suicide pact.” Hence “the Second Amendment is wrong for this country and needs to be jettisoned.” Like the progressives of a hundred years ago, the author argues that technological change has made the right to bear arms a dangerous anachronism.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Bring Down Leftist Foundations Like the Mafia Prosecute Soros and Ford for funding leftist violence. Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on October 11th, 2017

The Department of Justice has been investigating DisruptJ20, a “resistance” group that plotted to shut down President Trump’s inauguration. The DOJ has demanded the IP addresses of visitors, along with any emails, photos and names it can get. But the pipeline of Dj20 funding goes back to George Soros.

And not just Soros.

Money from the Global Justice Alliance went to Refuse Fascism, a group founded by members of the Revolutionary Communist Party, which staged violent protests. “Respectable” big money leftist groups like the Hill Snowdon Foundation and Ben and Jerry’s Foundation fund middlemen like the Alliance. And then the Alliance funds “direct action” groups that are willing to get their hands violently dirty.

The DOJ, better than anyone, should understand this model. It’s commonplace among criminals.

And when you go after criminals, you don’t stop with the street thugs. Instead you go after the bosses. The left’s funding pipelines launder money by moving it from respectable foundations to increasingly radical groups until they reach the thugs that mace, club and set fires. The multiple tiers buy their donors respectability and plausible deniability. But it’s nothing that the DOJ can’t easily penetrate.

It’s not all that different from the Castellano era in the Gambino crime family. And it needs to be treated the same way. Fiscal sponsorship of groups that engage in street violence is a crime. Prosecute it!

The Center for Community Change Action, another “direct action” group, recently had its donors exposed. They included Soros’ Open Society Foundation, the Ford Foundation and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. Approximately $7 million has gone from these big donors to the “direct action” group.

The CCCA has its own groups for which it’s acting as a “fiscal sponsor”. That’s how it works.

The Ford Foundation has become notorious for its backing of Black Lives Matter through the Black-Led Movement Fund whose goal was to raise over $100 million for the black nationalist racist hate group.

There is big money behind the street violence tearing apart America from Ferguson to Berkeley.

And there are big foundations behind the big money. The DOJ took down the big crime families. It’s time for it to take down the big leftist foundations.

Many of these foundations were born in sin. And they’ve only grown worse since.

Their bid for “campaign finance reform” shifted the axis of political finance from donations to political organizations to “outside” groups that matched their agendas. We all live in the cracks of the shadowy political system created by the Ford Foundation, George Soros, Carnegie and MacArthur. The lefty foundations spent over $100 million to make “campaign finance reform” a reality. And that gave them enormous power to control national politics through unaccountable networks and soft money.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

House Members Discuss Democrats’ IT Scandal and Lack of Proper Investigation By Debra Heine

Posted By on October 11th, 2017

Representatives Ron DeSantis (R-FL), Louie Gohmert (R-TX), Jim Jordan (R-OH), and Scott Perry (R-PA) on Tuesday hosted a caucus meeting on the Democrats’ IT scandal, which continues to be ignored by House leadership and the mainstream media.

Investigative reporter Luke Rosiak — who has done most of the investigative reporting on the story for The Daily Caller — was also at the meeting, as was Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton, who lamented the fact that there have been no House hearings yet on what appears to a humongous scandal. The Capitol Police and FBI investigation appears to be going nowhere, as well.

“A proper investigation into this series of events doesn’t seem to be taking place,” said Rep. Perry. “I think many Americans feel the same way.”

Rep. Gohmert said the purpose of the meeting was “to bring out information that might be of interest or assistance to members of Congress.”

Rep. Perry began by reciting a rundown of the facts in the case as discovered by the Office of the Inspector General.

“The OIG tracked the Awans’ network usage and found that a massive amount of data was flowing from the networks,” he said. “Over 5,700 logins by the five Awan associates were discovered on a single server within the House. The server of the Democratic Caucus chairman, then-Rep. Xavier Becerra of California — 5,400 appear unauthorized. He is now the attorney general of California. According to the reports, the Becerra server was actually housing the entirety of the servers of all the member offices that employed Imran or his associates — a clear violation of House policy. This means up to 40 or more members of Congress had all of their data moved out of their office server or out of their cloud storage system and onto the Becerra server without their knowledge or consent.”

Perry said that the OIG reported their findings to “the speaker’s office, Democratic leadership, and the House Administration Committee, as well as the House sergeant at arms and Capitol Police in late September and early October of 2016.” He said, “Capitol Police began a criminal investigation into Imran Awan and his associates at that time. Capitol Police determined that the image they required Imran to provide was falsified, likely with deliberate attempt to conceal the activities that they knew were against House policy and the law.”

“These facts, standing alone, indicate a substantial security threat at the least,” Perry said. “But the events don’t end there.”

The congressman also brought up Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s mysterious laptop, which was found in a phone booth in the Rayburn Office Building on April 6, 2017, along with several pieces of ID belonging to Imran Awan.

For nearly two hours, the group discussed some of the most disturbing aspects of the scandal — including a possible kick-back scheme that could implicate congressional Democrats and the possibility that Imran Awan may have stolen the identity of a House Intelligence staffer after his own House email address was shut down.

There’s also the question of the Awan brothers’ ridiculously high salaries:

Rep DeSantis said he noticed a double standard in how the DOJ enforces the law.

“Look at the Mueller investigation,” DeSantis said. “Picking Manifort’s lock in the middle of the night and drawing guns on him and his wife for some white-collar crap from three or four years ago — I mean, that’s like scorching the earth, but yet, with Hillary … Comey exonerated her two months before she was brought in for questioning.”

He continued: “My fear on this case is that the ferocity will not be where it needs to be because … on the FBI, U.S. attorney ,DOJ side — I think you can get answers to these questions, and I think you can break it open. I have not seen that as of yet.”

DeSantis asked if anyone on the panel had seen leaks about the investigation. “I mean, we see all these other leaks. … The initial indictme

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

ISIS in Ohio (Part One): The Terror Attack at Ohio State University By Patrick Poole

Posted By on October 11th, 2017

Ohio State students returning from their Thanksgiving break last November had their first day back on campus shattered by one of their fellow students, Abdul Razak Ali Artan. He drove his brother’s grey Honda Civic into a crowd gathered outside Watts Hall on campus, injuring a number of them. He then emerged from the wrecked vehicle with an eight-inch knife and began attacking bystanders, some of whom were already tending to the injured.

The Islamic State would hail Artan the very next day, calling him a “soldier” and praising him for responding to their call for Muslims living in the West to conduct terror attacks in its name.

Artan, however, isn’t the only Islamic State “soldier” from Ohio to answer the terror group’s call.

In fact, a growing number of ISIS supporters and operatives have emerged from the Buckeye State over the past two years. The ISIS-inspired terror attack at Ohio State on November 28, 2016, should have been a wake-up call to the escalating problem in the state, but that doesn’t appear to be the case. Rather, the terror incident is yet another example of how the problem has been buried while the threat has metastasized.

Buckeye Battle Cry: “Run, Hide, Fight”

The pageantry of a football game at Ohio Stadium is among the top spectacles in American college athletics, with 100,000-plus fans (usually) cheering their team on to victory. The bells ringing after a score. The “Skull Session” with the football team and the marching band prior to the game. And the band’s entry into the stadium at the beginning of the game, leading the crowd with Ohio State’s fight song, “Buckeye Battle Cry.”

But after Abdul Razak Artan’s terror attack last year, Ohio State has a new fight song, as do hundreds of other college campuses: “Run, Hide, Fight.”

Artan’s victims didn’t have much time to run and hide when his car jumped the curb and rammed into a crowd of students. Eleven people were injured, most by the car-ramming; two were slashed by Artan with his knife. One victim had a fractured skull. Artan was shot and killed by a campus police officer two minutes after the attack began.

It was the first semester for the Logistics Management third-year student at Ohio State’s Fisher College of Business, having graduated cum laude in May 2016 with an associate’s degree from Columbus State Community College.

On his first day on campus, Artan was interviewed by the Ohio State student newspaper, The Lantern. He whined to the reporter about the absence of places for Muslims to pray on campus (there is a dedicated room at the student union) and about misconceptions other students might have about him and Islam if he prayed in public. The reporter later related how quickly Artan was able to recite from memory the laundry list of Islamic grievances, and his perception that Muslims were under siege in America from pervasive Islamophobia.

Among the courses he was taking that first semester was a class on “microaggressions” called “Crossing Identity Borders,” where students are encouraged to “identify ways in which they can challenge or address systems of power and privilege.”

One might say that given Artan’s background, he had already been the beneficiary of privilege.

Born and raised in Somalia, he and his family lived as refugees in Pakistan from 2007 until 2014, at which time they moved to the U.S. and received legal permanent resident status. Among the stated reasons for his family moving to America was his mother’s concern that she didn’t want Abdul Razak and his siblings being recruited by the Somali terror group Al-Shabaab.

First landing in Dallas for a few weeks, they were resettled in Columbus — home of the second largest Somali community in the country. He apparently quickly enrolled at Columbus State, which has one of the largest Muslim student populations of any higher education institution in America.

Artan’s friends in Ohio and Pakistan claimed that he “loved America,” but that contrasts dramatically with the Facebook post he left just three minutes before his attack: CONTINUE AT SITE

POLITICS Comments turned off

Bob Corker, Scion of the Ruling Class By Mike Sabo

Posted By on October 11th, 2017

Donald Trump has an uncanny ability to find and root out even the most entrenched members of the ruling class.https://amgreatness.com/2017/10/10/bob-corker-scion-of-the-ruling-class/

Retiring Senator Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) is now exposed as the next in a long line of undistinguished establishment Republicans captured by the very interests they were elected to rebuff.

In what has become a worn out routine among members of the GOPe, over the weekend Corker ran to the New York Times—the very epicenter of liberalism—to unload on Trump. Corker, who seems to have more regard for the views and opinions of liberal elites than he does for the voters who put him into office (61 percent of voting Tennesseans went for Trump), riffed on his personal feelings about the president for over 25 minutes.

He called Trump’s presidency “a reality show” and said that the president’s reckless actions are putting the nation “on the path to World War III.” Corker stated that Trump needs to have his aides constantly available “to talk him down.” Trump, he maintained, is pure “chaos” and “has not yet been able to demonstrate the stability nor some of the competence that he needs to demonstrate in order to be successful.”

“He concerns me,” Corker declared. “He would have to concern anyone who cares about our nation.”

Later, Corker continued his tirade on Twitter:

All this from a man who was once considered as a possible VP pick and served as an informal foreign policy counselor to Trump during the 2016 campaign.

And this from a man who in September, when he was still considering a run for a third term in the Senate, thought enough of Trump to seek out a lengthy one-on-one talk with him. Corker’s spokeswoman called that meeting “wide ranging” and “extremely productive.” Downplaying any rift between himself and President Trump, Corker at the time maintained that “for people to try to act as if there is daylight between us as a result is just not true.”

So in a little more than half a month, Trump went from close friend and trusted adviser to tin-pot dictator possessed of an itchy trigger finger? To the members of the ruling class, this behavior is what counts as “normal” politics in our age. But to most observers recalling this series of events, one of these two parties appears petulant and given to indecision—and that party is not the president.

Glancing over the record of Corker’s two terms in the Senate, voters should be relieved that Trump did not involve him in the administration in any meaningful way.

In 2006, Corker promised the hard working people of Tennessee, ”You’re going to have a senator from Tennessee, not D.C.” Since then, Corker has reliably fallen right in line with the ways of the Beltway ruling class.

Corker voted for Wall Street bailouts and approved President Obama’s radical nominee Loretta Lynch for attorney general.

On foreign policy, he represents a continuation of the feckless policies of the Obama Administration. Corker allowed the Iran deal to go through by subverting the Senate’s power to ratify treaties under Article 2, Section 2 of the Constitution. Instead of insisting on the constitutionally required two-thirds of the Senate needed to approve a treaty, Corker issued a bill turning that provision on its head and making it necessary for two-thirds of the Senate to vote in favor of blocking the treaty. Senators would be required to register their negative assessment of President Obama’s deal rather than simply decline to vote for it.

As Andrew C. McCarthy noted back in 2015:

Under the Constitution, Obama’s Iran deal would not have a prayer. Under the Corker bill, it would sail through. And once again, it would be Republicans first ensuring that self-destruction is imposed on us, then striking the pose of dogged opponents by casting futile nay votes.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Does U.S. Media Help Russia Destabilize The United States? Le Smith

Posted By on October 11th, 2017

Last week leaders of the Senate intelligence committee, senators Richard Burr and Mark Warner, gave a press conference in which they announced they are eager to speak with Christopher Steele, the former British MI6 officer believed to have compiled the controversial dossier of allegations about President Trump’s connections to Russia. Steele reportedly spoke with special counselor Robert Mueller about the dossier, but the committee has yet to hear from the man who laid the foundations for the theory that Trump or his campaign team colluded with Russian officials to fix the 2016 presidential election for him.

One reporter, however, claims that the Senate intelligence committee has verified “some of the Steele dossier.” Ken Dilanian of NBC News told MSNBC Thursday morning that “Burr said they had been able to corroborate some aspects of it.”

But in the 40-minute-long press conference, neither Burr nor Warner suggested anything of the sort. Rather, Burr said “the committee cannot really decide the credibility of the dossier without understanding things like who paid for it, who are your sources and subsources?” Dilanian explained that “two sources told NBC News the committee has corroborated parts of the dossier.”

Dilanian did not explain to viewers what Burr was clearly hinting at—namely, that the Steele dossier is the paid product of a private information company called Fusion GPS, which has become notorious for inventing sleazy and often fact-free attacks on democratic whistleblowers and political figures and feeding them to journalists. Dilanian himself is no stranger to Fusion GPS.
Who Is Fusion GPS?

In summer 2016, Fusion GPS distributed the dossier under Steele’s name to a number of major news organizations. All refrained from publishing a document they couldn’t verify. It was finally published by BuzzFeed in January after CNN reported U.S. intelligence agencies had briefed outgoing president Barack Obama and his incoming successor Donald Trump on the existence of the dossier.

It was Fusion GPS that also spearheaded a campaign to dismantle the Magnitsky Act, the 2012 legislation that imposes sanctions on Russian officials and figures associated with the regime of Vladimir Putin who are known to have played a role in the 2009 death of Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky. Fusion GPS’ effort, according to William Browder, the driving force behind the Magnitsky Act and head of the Magnitsky Global Justice Campaign, included a smear campaign against him and his late friend and lawyer.

In his explosive July 27 testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Browder, the 53-year-old CEO and founder of Hermitage Capital Management, alleged Fusion GPS may have violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) by spreading Russian state propaganda. Washington DC journalists, Browder added, were in on the game—getting stories from the company that first tried to torque American law to benefit Putin and his cronies then spread the salacious Steele dossier.

“I suspect that a number of journalists,” Browder testified, “and one in particular here in Washington was operating so far outside the bounds of normal journalistic integrity that there must have been some incentive for them to be doing it coming from Fusion GPS.”

The journalist Browder alluded to is NBC News’ intelligence and national security reporter: Ken Dilanian. In extensive interviews, Browder alleged to me that a number of journalists, including Dilanian, were beholden to Fusion GPS and its principals, including former Wall Street Journal reporter Glenn Simpson, for supplying them with stories in the past. Reporters, Browder argued, were therefore reluctant to look too deeply into Fusion GPS’s smear campaign against him and Magnitsky. Multiple attempts to reach Dilanian for comment went unanswered.

To back up his assertion about NBC and Dilanian, Browder showed me documents that chronicled Dilanian’s reporting on the Magnitsky Act—reporting that Browder believes moved in tandem with Fusion GPS’s campaign to discredit both himself and Magnitsky in the hope of repealing the law and lifting sanctions against Russia.
Russia’s Target: Corrupting the American Press

What these records and other accompanying documents also suggest is that Russia’s attempt to “hack” the 2016 election was hardly just about the election, and that a main target and beneficiary of that effort—which is ongoing—is the American press.

In an email hacked from the account of a U.S. foreign service officer, Dilanian asked Sen. Ben Cardin’s office if the senior Democratic member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee wanted to comment on the story about Magnitsky that he was reporting. “There is no evidence he was beaten in prison, as Browder has alleged,” Dilanian declares:

and it’s clear from police and court records that he wasn’t detained because he blew the whistle on an alleged fraud scheme. He was detained over tax evasion by Browder’s companies. In fact, there are credible allegations in court documents that Browder and his associates are suspects in the fraud—and that Browder concocted the whistleblower story to cover that up.

We plan to publish something about this next week, and I wanted to give Sen. Cardin a chance to comment on it. He is not a large part of the story, and if these allegations are true, he is one of many smart and influential people who were misled, obviously.

Another email, hacked from the same cache, written by a Democratic staffer for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, dismisses Dilanian’s thesis: “There is overwhelming evidence that Sergei Magnitsky was beaten in prison”—after which the staffer makes his case clearly:

Photographs of his beaten body were available to us, which show physical evidence of him having been beaten. … We reviewed the detention center protocol, which reports that Magnitsky was beaten with rubber batons by guards on the evening of November 16, 2009—the night he died. … Magnitsky’s Death Certificate refers to a cerebral cranial injury. … The forensic postmortem conducted by Russian state experts refers to injuries on Magnitsky’s body consistent with the use of rubber batons.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Democratic IT scandal takes an interesting turn By Rick Moran

Posted By on October 11th, 2017

The “non-scandal” scandal involving a former I.T. aide to several Democratic congressmen, including Debbie Wasserman Schultz, took an interesting turn when the wife of the alleged hacker and fraudster Imran Awan showed up in court separate from her husband and had retained a separate attorney.

Imran Awan’s own wife, Hina Alvi, filed papers in a Pakistani court accusing her husband of fraud and of marrying another woman. The couple did not look at each other when they showed up in federal court on Friday.

Daily Caller:

The couple were in U.S. court to face bank fraud charges related to sending money to Pakistan around the time they learned they were under investigation for abuses related to their work managing IT for members of Congress. Awan was arrested at Dulles Airport in July attempting to board a flight to Pakistan.

Wasserman Schultz, former chair of the Democratic National Committee, and other House Democrats have vigorously defended Awan, claiming the Capitol Police might be drumming up charges out of Islamaphobia.

Alvi was arraigned Friday on four felony counts, and Awan, who has already been arraigned, requested that his GPS monitoring bracelet be taken off – citing the fact that his wife was in America as the reason he was not a flight risk.

Yet the couple entered and left the court separately, have different lawyers, and Awan’s lawyer told the judge that the husband and wife are staying “in a one-bedroom apartment and then also a house.”

Pakistani legal papers published by the news channel show Alvi recently accused Awan of illegally marrying another woman, and of fraud. “My husband Imran Awan son of Muhammad Ashraf Awan, committed fraud along with offence of polygamy,” she charges in the papers.

Hina’s U.S. lawyer, Nikki Lotze, did not dispute the account. “I don’t see how that’s newsworthy,” Lotze told The Daily Caller News Foundation. The Pakistani legal petition named as the second wife is a woman who records show told Virginia police she felt like Awan was keeping her “like a slave.”

Awan’s two brothers have also been implicated in the scheme, and the revelation that Awan’s second wife may also have been involved makes the circle of fraud and deceit even wider.

Although The Washington Post has reported that investigators found that Awan and his relatives made unauthorized access to a congressional server 5,400 times, Wasserman Schultz has said concern about the matter was the stuff of the “right-wing media circus fringe.”

Awan and Alvi have been charged with bank fraud involving moving money to Pakistan, but they have not been charged with crimes related to their work, and the other family members have not been charged at all. Awan’s attorney used Friday’s hearing to argue that he “very strongly” wanted to block prosecutors from using evidence they found in the Capitol Hill phone booth.

The Pakistani legal motion filed by Alvi states: “A few months ago I got apprised of the fact that my husband has contracted second marriage secretly, fraudulently and without my consent with Mst. Sumaira Shehzadi Alias Sumaira Siddique Daughter of Muhammad Akram r/o Township, Lahore. The second marriage of my husband is illegal, unlawful and without justification.”

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Middle East Studies Profs Gone Bad By Cinnamon Stillwell see note please

Posted By on October 11th, 2017

Middle East professors all belong to MESA (Middle East Studies Association) which is a cartel funded by Arab nations. The catch is that one cannot get a job in academia teaching Mideast studies without belonging to MESA…..rsk
‘m a professor!” So cried Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) professor Anila Daulatzai as she was forcibly removed from a Southwest Airlines flight for lying about having a life-threatening allergy to the two dogs in the cabin. Unable to provide the required medical certificate, Daulatzai, who had demanded that the dogs be removed, then refused to leave the plane. Daulatzai’s Muslim faith was the likely cause of her aversion to dogs, but it was her dishonesty and unwillingness to cooperate that ended in her arrest.

A former visiting assistant professor of Islamic studies at Harvard Divinity School, Daulatzai has joined the growing ranks of Middle East studies academics who run afoul of the law. Their misdeeds, which range from sexual harassment to domestic abuse and murder to terrorism, demonstrate that being “a professor” is no barrier to criminality.

Just last month, a professor in McGill University’s Institute of Islamic Studies whose name has not been released to the public was accused of “sexual violence” by way of stickers left in women’s restrooms on campus. The professor, who is up for tenure this semester, denies the charges, despite former students testifying to his “predatory” behavior. An open letter to Robert Wisnovsky, director of the Institute of Islamic Studies, from the World Islamic and Middle East Studies Student Association reiterated the allegations, recommending against tenure and concluding that “women are at a disadvantage within the Islamic Studies department.”

Likewise, it emerged in 2016 that two prominent professors, U.C. Berkeley’s Nezar AlSayyad and UCLA’s Gabriel Piterberg, had been sexually harassing female graduate students for years. AlSayyad, former chair of U.C. Berkeley’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and Piterberg, former director of UCLA’s Center for Near Eastern Studies, exploited their positions of power to take advantage of the young women entrusted to their care. Both universities’ perceived negligence and leniency in handling the cases led to student protests and loss of faith of the system.

Another kind of relationship between student and teacher underpinned a controversy earlier this year involving Rollins College professor Areeje Zufari. Zufari, a Muslim, resigned in April following a conflict with Christian student Marshall Polston, whom she had falsely accused of stalking after he challenged her anti-Christian, Islamist assertions. After a wrongful suspension and a disciplinary hearing, Polston was reinstated, while Zufari now teaches at Valencia College. Even more sordid is Zufari’s past, including numerous ties to Islamist associations and an affair with a married man under FBI investigation for terrorist activity.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

An Outrageous Prosecution Turkey convicts a Journal reporter of promoting terrorism.

Posted By on October 11th, 2017

Recep Tayyip Erdogan is right when he complains that Turkey is threatened by terrorists who kill innocent citizens and want to bring down his government. But when Turkish authorities tar innocent journalists for abetting terrorism, they confirm to the world that Turkey’s President has turned his country into an authoritarian state.

On Tuesday a Turkish court falsely convicted Wall Street Journal reporter Ayla Albayrak of propagandizing on behalf of an outlawed Kurdish terror group. The evidence for Ms. Albayrak’s “crime”: An Aug. 19, 2015, Wall Street Journal news story about the bitter fighting in a remote, Kurdish-majority, Turkish city called Silopi that borders Syria and Iraq. Turkish forces fought there with the outlawed PKK, or Kurdistan Workers’ Party.

Ms. Albayrak quoted some members of the Patriotic Revolutionary Youth Group, which Turkish authorities say is affiliated with the PKK. But she also quoted government officials, local residents and the mayor—and explicitly identified the PKK as designated by both Ankara and Washington as a terrorist outfit. Nowhere in her balanced dispatch did she praise either the PKK or the youth group, and everything she did to report this story as fairly and objectively as possible was within the bounds of good journalism and Turkish law.

The indictment noted that some Turkish-language websites lifted parts of her story and an accompanying video for their own purposes. But they used selective quotes, and none are affiliated with the Journal and none were authorized by either the Journal or Ms. Albayrak.

There is no evidence Mr. Erdogan initiated these charges against our reporter. Yet they are surely a consequence of the repressive atmosphere he has created in Turkey, especially after a failed military coup in 2016. The Turkish president has taken advantage of the state of emergency to solidify his hold on power by cracking down on anyone his government doesn’t like.

This repression is now extending to the foreign media, and even beyond Turkey’s borders. In February Deniz Yücel, a reporter for Germany’s Die Welt, was arrested in Istanbul and remains detained without charges. Amnesty International notes Turkey now has more journalists in jail than any other country.

Ms. Albayrak, a dual Turkish and Finnish national, is now in New York. But that doesn’t mean the conviction isn’t damaging. The Erdogan government has already abused Interpol, the international police network, by issuing “red notices” to have journalists and critics arrested in other countries until they can be extradited. In this way a system meant to target criminals is turned on good journalists like Ms. Albayrak and makes it dangerous for them to travel and do their jobs.

When any local Turkish official can create an international incident by freelancing a political prosecution, it underscores Turkey’s descent under Mr. Erdogan and creates unnecessary rifts with other countries. Ms. Albayrak plans to appeal, which gives Ankara a path out of this injustice. But it requires a Turkish judiciary willing to assert itself by standing up for the rule of law and tossing this shameful and dishonest prosecution.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Nevertheless, They Persisted Obama and the Clintons haven’t had much to say about their pal Harvey.By James Freeman

Posted By on October 11th, 2017

As the rape and sexual harassment accusations against movie mogul and Democratic donor Harvey Weinstein continue to aggregate, it becomes increasingly difficult to understand how Mr. Weinstein’s alleged offenses were not reported until the publication of a story last week in the New York Times . Even since the report, many of Mr. Weinstein’s associates are still reluctant to comment.

The website Mediaite takes note of an exchange this afternoon on CNN:

Hillary Clinton finally released a statement condemning Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, but CNN’s Dana Bash had to ask this afternoon, “Where are the Obamas?”

Weinstein was a big Democratic fundraiser, and gave money to both Clinton and Barack Obama (though Clinton’s statement does not mention the donations or whether she will be giving them away).

“Where is Michelle Obama? Where is President Obama?” Bash asked. “Harvey Weinstein was, and probably is, still a big supporter of them and certainly of…the President’s political efforts.”

Chris Cillizza brought up when the former First Lady praised Weinstein during a student film symposium at the White House, saying that the Obamas need to be speaking out now and it’s “odd” that they aren’t.

During the 2013 White House event, Michelle Obama called Mr. Weinstein “a wonderful human being, a good friend and just a powerhouse.”

Wonderful is not the word that comes to mind when reading a heartbreaking new report by Ronan Farrow in the New Yorker detailing three separate rape allegations against Mr. Weinstein. The piece also alleges other cases of harassment followed by career setbacks for the alleged victims:

Four actresses, including Mira Sorvino and Rosanna Arquette, told me they suspected that, after they rejected Weinstein’s advances or complained about them to company representatives, Weinstein had them removed from projects or dissuaded people from hiring them.

The Times has followed up with a report that Mr. Weinstein also allegedly harassed Angelina Jolie and Gwyneth Paltrow back when they were on their way to becoming movie stars. Among the saddest details of many of the recent accounts of alleged harassment and assaults by Mr. Weinstein involve the number of people who either ignored or even facilitated the movie mogul’s meetings alone with young women. Since the reports became public a number of actresses including Lena Dunham have also expressed disappointment in the silence of their male co-stars.

At least one guy in Hollywood seems to have been at least annoyed by one of Mr. Weinstein’s alleged offenses. The Times notes that at the time she was allegedly victimized, Ms. Paltrow was dating the actor Brad Pitt. According to the Times, “After she told Mr. Pitt about the episode, he approached Mr. Weinstein at a theater premiere and told him never to touch Ms. Paltrow again.”

Ms. Dunham for her part says the problem goes beyond Mr. Weinstein:

She condemns Weinstein as a “predator” and says he’s not the only one in Hollywood, detailing her own encounters with “everyday sexism” as a young, acclaimed indie-film director.

“His behavior, silently co-signed for decades by employees and collaborators, is a microcosm of what has been happening in Hollywood since always and of what workplace harassment looks like for women everywhere,” Dunham writes of Weinstein…

“The use of power to possess and silence women is as likely to occur in a fast-food restaurant as it is on a movie set, and Hollywood has yet another chance to make a noisy statement about what we should and should not condone as a society,” she writes.

Ms. Dunham’s fact-free smear against the fast-food industry aside, her comments raise the disturbing possibility that one of the reasons Mr. Weinstein got away with the alleged behavior for so long is that it’s not that rare in Hollywood. On Tuesday another accuser named Louisette Geiss came forward and held a press conference along with her attorney Gloria Allred. According to the Hollywood Reporter: CONTINUE AT SITE