WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

How New is the New Hamas Charter? by Denis MacEoin

Posted By on April 24th, 2017

The Arab states that reject Israel today forget that they themselves would not exist without the Mandate system – a point seldom if ever acknowledged in public forums where the legitimacy of Israel is debated.

If there is any Palestinian desire for a two-state solution, it is questionable: according to current maps of “Palestine,” and the New Hamas Charter, it is supposed to be on its neighbouring state, Israel; not next to it. The wish of Palestinian leaders to have a Palestinian state is never realized solely due to the unending rejection of their Jewish neighbour.

Article 19 of the New Charter repeats that there will never be peace so long as Israel still exists. It declares: “We do not leave any part of the Palestinians’ land, under any circumstances, conditions or pressure, as long as the occupation remains. Hamas refuses any alternative which is not the whole liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea.”

Anyone with a serious interest in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians will be familiar with the oft-cited Charter (or Covenant [mithaq]) of the terrorist group currently ruling the Gaza Strip, Hamas. The Charter (in Arabic here) was published on 18 August 1988. Its proper title is “The Charter/Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement ‘Hamas’ Palestine”, Hamas being an acronym for “the Islamic Resistance Movement”.

This April, the Lebanese news site al-Mayadeen leaked a draft version of a much-revised version of the 1988 Charter, due to be released “in the coming days”. The anti-Israel website Mondoweiss subsequently provided an English translation of the draft, made by someone from the Ayda refugee camp in the West Bank. So far, I have been unable to find the Arabic text of the draft online, even though it has been discussed many times in the wider Arabic media. We shall turn to it later, but it is obviously sensible to look first at the 1988 version as a basis of comparison. And even before that, we need to see how the Hamas Covenant differed from, and resembled, the PLO Covenants of 1964 and 1968.

The full title of the movement is crucial to an understanding of the document and its aims. Hamas had been founded in 1987 as an intransigent extension of the Palestinian Mujamma linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, and was explicitly hardline and neo-Salafi in its religious orientation. This was in conspicuous contrast to its rival Palestinian movement, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), founded by the Arab League in 1964 as an overtly secular and nationalist entity. The two PLO National Covenants of 1964 and 1968 exclude religion as a basis for the anti-Israel struggle.[1]

But in those versions, that secular nationalism takes two distinct forms. The 1964 PLO Charter is based on the concept of pan-Arabism as inspired by the Arab League and Egypt’s president at the time, Gamal Abdel Nasser. Palestinians are simply Arabs among millions of Arabs, and their struggle for liberation was carried out with little emphasis on the creation of a Palestinian state. This view changed, however, after 1967, when the Six-Day War showed the powerlessness of the Arab states to resolve the Palestinian issue. When Egypt and Jordan attacked Israel (Egypt’s closing the Strait of Tiran was a legitimate casus belli, cause for war), Israel repelled them and ended up sitting on land — Gaza, the Sinai Peninsula, Judaea and Samaria — which it immediately offered to return in exchange for recognition and peace. That offer was rejected in a matter of weeks at the Khartoum Conference.

During and after the “peace process” and the Oslo Accords of the 1990s, the Palestinian leadership promised that it would delete the most offensive and anti-peace clauses of the 1968 Charter. Many years later, nothing has been done, and the existing Charter remains unchanged.

Nationalism is not an Islamic concept. Even pan-Arabism falls outside the remit of Islamic ideology and practice. Almost from the beginning, Islam has been predicated on the idea of a global community (the umma), which embraces all Muslims and Islamic regions, allegedly since the beginning of time, with a promise of eventual Islamic control over the Earth. According to a sound tradition in the canonical collection by al-Bukhari, among the five things given to Muhammad that had not been given to any previous prophet was that, “Every Prophet used to be sent to his nation only but I have been sent to all mankind.”[2] In another version, he is recorded as saying: “I have been sent to all mankind and the line of prophets is closed with me.”[3]

This sense of global scale has characterized the Islamic world from its beginning in the form of empires. These started with the Umayyads (661-750) and ended with the Ottomans (1299-1922). The long history of Islamic imperialism had two imperishable effects: it prevented the development of nation-state polity and imposed the theory of religious rule. Self-identification for imperial citizens functioned only through the family, clan, tribe, village or town or city; or according to religious affiliations of various kinds. Everywhere, the only true citizens were orthodox Muslims; subjugated minorities such as Jews and Christians were kept strictly as inferiors, with a separate set of harsh laws and a special tax, the jizya, to pay for “protection”.

This legacy of Islamic dominance, of jihad as a legitimate and regular policy towards non-Muslim Europe, African regions, Central Asia and India, combined with the illegitimacy and unacceptability of Jewish, Christian or secular rule over Islamic territory, has left a deep mark on the Palestinian sense of identity. Formerly subjects of the Ottoman Empire in Syria, almost overnight in the 1920s the Arab Palestinians found themselves adrift in a sea of international rules and regulations concerning territory and national identity. This was the never-acknowledged pivot around which the growing conflict with the Jewish Palestinians revolved — and still revolves.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

China Deploys Floating Nuclear Power Plant to South China Sea by Debalina Ghoshal

Posted By on April 24th, 2017

A nuclear power plant on the sea would ensure a continuous supply of water as coolant — a necessity for any reactor.

China’s motive for building the nuclear reactors is clear: to exert its dominance and influence throughout the area.

In April 2016, reports began coming in that China has plans to build floating nuclear power plants in the South China Sea. A floating nuclear power plant consists of one or more nuclear reactors, located on a platform at sea. China apparently plans to “speed up the commercial development” of the South China Sea and views the nuclear power plants as part of that plan. [1]

Final assembly of the reactor is reported to start in coastal city of Huludao, in Liaoning province, and will be built by Bohai Shipbuilding Heavy Industry Co Ltd, a unit of China Shipbuilding Industry Corp (CSIC).[2]

China’s 2016 nuclear plan, a component of the China’s 13th five-year plan, is evidently to complete 58 nuclear reactors by 2020 and build another 100 gigawatt-sized reactors by 2030. These would make China the largest nuclear power producer in the world. China’s floating nuclear reactor initiative seems to be a component of this nuclear plan.
Reasons for such reactors

China’s stated reasons for venturing into such technologies include providing an inexpensive source of electricity and fresh water for both military and economic gains, as well as ensuring China’s strategic dominance in the South China Sea. Nuclear power plants could not only provide cheap electricity to defense facilities but also to desalination plants. Normally, the defense facilities such as airports and harbors depend on oil or coal for power generation. A nuclear power plant on the sea would ensure a continuous supply of water as coolant — a necessity for any reactor.

A 60 MWe reactor is said to be beneficial for supplying electricity, heat and desalination, and could be used on islands and on coastal areas or for offshore oil and gas exploration.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Vicious antisemitic sharia advocate to give CUNY commencement speech By Pamela Geller

Posted By on April 24th, 2017

The mainstreaming of evil leads to an unimaginable end. My colleagues and I have been demonized, marginalized and defamed by enemedia and cultural elites, while terrorists and their promoters enjoy promotion by these same quislings. Anyone who doesn’t think academia is aligned with jihad force is deluded. Stop taxpayer funding of these hotbeds of radical inculcation.

Adolph Hitler and his violent, antisemitic political party the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei – DAP (German Socialist Workers’ Party) were on the outer fringe of German society until he was invited to join mainstream parties in opposition to the Versailles Treaty. Inviting Hitler to join mainstream political parties in supporting the German referendum of 1929 was key, as it gained the Nazi Party recognition and credibility it could never have hoped to have gained on its own. Influential German businessman and politician Alfred Hugenberg made a coalition with Hitler, which gave Hitler huge legitimacy. After failing at the ballot box, Hitler, like Islamic supremacists in the West, came to understand that that power was to be achieved not through revolution outside of the government, but rather through legal means, within the confines of the democratic system.

Sarsour says: “It just doesn’t make any sense for someone to say, ‘Is there room for people who support the state of Israel and do not criticize it in the movement?’ There can’t be in feminism. You either stand up for the rights of all women, including Palestinians, or none. There’s just no way around it.”

Remember: the woman saying this is an open supporter of sharia. She claims that “Palestinian” women are being oppressed by Israel, but doesn’t have a word to say about the genuine oppression that Muslim women suffer because of sharia, which sanctions wife-beating, allows for polygamy, and opens the door to female genital mutilation and honor killing. That’s oppression. But Sarsour, as the new leader of the feminist movement, is never going to say a word about that.

The media adores the Islamic supremacist bigot and rabid anti-Semite, Linda Sarsour, who wields her religion like a club. The Times did a puff piece on this annihilationist some time ago — what they’re puffing is anyone’s guess.

Robert Spencer wrote, “Linda Sarsour is an energetic purveyor of the ‘Islamophobia’ myth, and has hysterically claimed that ‘Muslim kids’ are being ‘executed’ in the United States. She was instrumental in prevailing upon de Blasio to end legal and necessary surveillance in Muslim communities in New York. She is also a frequent visitor to the Obama White House, and has claimed that the jihad underwear bomber was a CIA agent — part of what she claims is a U.S. war against Islam. She is a practiced exploiter of the ‘hate’ smear against foes of jihad terror and Islamic supremacism, and has never apologized for using the Islamic honor murder of Shaima Alawadi to spread lies about the prevalence of hate crimes against Muslims in America. She is also an enthusiastic supporter of the ‘Palestinian’ jihad against Israel. Given the general support for that jihad among Leftists, and the hard-Left tilt of the de Blasio regime in New York, it is not surprising that her hate-filled endeavors are taxpayer funded. But it is scandalous nonetheless: a grim sign of the times.”
ANTI-ISRAEL SHARIA ADVOCATE TO GIVE CUNY COMMENCEMENT SPEECH
ANTI-ZIONIST WHO PRAISED TERRORIST MURDERER, HAILED STONE THROWERS AS ‘COURAGEOUS’ TAPPED TO GIVE COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS AT PUBLIC NY COLLEGE.

A radical left-wing activist and advocate for Sharia law in the United States has been selected as this year’s commencement speaker at a branch of the City University of New York.

Linda Sarsour, 37, who helped organize the Women’s March in Washington in January and was arrested protesting outside of Trump Hotel in New York, was tapped by the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy to address this year’s graduating class.

An aide to the school’s dean confirmed in a statement that Sarsour had been chosen to speak at the commencement, The Daily Caller reported.

“I am delighted to confirm that Linda Sarsour will indeed speak at our June 1 commencement at the Apollo Theater,” said Barbara Aaron, chief of staff to the school’s dean, Ayman El-Mohandes.

Aside from her history of far-left activism, Sarsour has drawn criticism in the past for her advocacy of Sharia law in the United States and her attacks on prominent anti-Sharia figures.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

US Citizenship test requires understanding of only 64 words By Ed Straker (Appalling!!! rsk)

Posted By on April 24th, 2017

The US citizenship or naturalization test consists of two components, the civics test and the language test. The government has a preparatory website which has a list of vocabulary words needed for the language test. There are only 64 words or phrases needed to be learned to become an American.

With many of the words being proper names like “George Washington” and “Flag Day” and still more of the words being prepositions like “of” and “in” and “on”, it is very easy for someone to study for this test, pass easily, and yet lack the vocabulary to even understand “See Spot Run.”

There’s even a helpful guide to phrases the government interviewer may say that are not on the 64 word list:

Come! Sit!

Even doggies don’t need this helpful guide.

But immigrants who only learn the 64 words needed to pass the exam will be clueless when an inteviewer waves to them with their hand and asks them to come with them, unless they have this guide, or a well trained cocker spaniel to interpret hand gestures for them.

To pass the test, all you have to do is to correctly read aloud one out of three sentences, and write one out of three sentences correctly. That’s right, if you read or write two out of three easy sentences incorrectly, you can still become a citizen!

It’s no wonder the test has an over 90% pass rate.

But if that’s still too difficult, don’t worry, there are some exceptions for people over the age of 50 and people who can claim they are mentally challenged. They may not have to take the test at all!

I always wondered why ballots have to be in Spanish and other languages. If a person becomes a citizen, shouldn’t the citizen be able to read the ballot in English? Now I know why. Unless the ballot says things like “Where George Washington on Independence Day?” or “Abraham Lincoln has many senators”, immigrants may not understand it.

What key words in English do you think immigrants should understand?

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, POLITICS Comments turned off

Who Is Obama? By David Solway

Posted By on April 24th, 2017

Ex-President Barack Obama is the mystery man of American politics. Given the absence of a viable paper trail, nobody can say for sure who he is. He manifests for us as a figure of multiple identities: a Christian, a Muslim, a secularist, a socialist, a humanist, an intellectual, a man of the people. His lack of definable substance, his inner absence, has been an important political advantage. As Obama himself confessed (or boasted) in The Audacity of Hope, this layering of anonymities enabled him to “serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.”

Obama’s enigmatic personae and antecedents are an issue most people are reluctant to pursue, whether out of mere indifference, partisan allegiance or fear of ridicule. Even though he represents one of the most pivotal moments in American history, which saw a polarizing cipher with a neo-Marxist blueprint reduce the country to a social, political and economic shambles, Obama doesn’t get much traction in the news these days. Few wish to investigate his shadowy heritage, to confront the ongoing implications of the debacle he was instrumental in causing or to pursue its resolution. The unwillingness to grapple with what Obama signifies — in fact, personifies — is a sign of the failure of political will, a tendency to allow a crucial feature of national existence to subside beneath the welter of current events. “Nothing to see here,” seems to be the consensus, “time to move on.”

But there is more to see than meets the eye. The question that may exercise future historians is how a man so obviously unfit for the presidency and so patently inimical to the well-being of the nation could have been elected—twice. Was the race card in itself sufficiently instrumental to persuade a nation to embrace eight years of mayhem? Could a voting majority have been swept up in an access of reparation euphoria? Did John Dewey’s “progressivist” education gradually work to dumb down a significant portion of the electorate, rendering it ultimately susceptible to socialist manipulation? Was the influence of the Frankfurt School and its leftist agenda powerful enough to subvert the academy, the press, the entertainment industry and the culture at large, and thus to transform a free democratic society into a nascent authoritarian state? All these elements were certainly in play, but likely could not have borne their tainted fruit had Obama not appeared on the scene, like a diabolus ex machina. He acted as both catalyst and embodiment of a looming catastrophe.

The fact that there was little in the way of reliable biographical and formative data — vital records were (and are) either disputed or inaccessible — was not the liability one might have imagined. Rather, it may have been the critical factor in determining Obama’s electoral triumphs and the malign consequences that inevitably followed.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, POLITICS Comments turned off

Trump vs. Obama: A Study in Contrasts By Roger Kimball

Posted By on April 24th, 2017

A full recitation of the differences between Barack Obama and Donald Trump would fill a book.

Since this is a blog, not a book, I won’t assay that gargantuan task. But I wanted to say a word about two of the things that have repeatedly struck me about the differences between the two men.

I am going to leave to one side what might be the largest difference: that Obama was above all a man of lofty-sounding rhetoric, at once pragmatic in tone and utopian in aspiration, while Trump is a man of demotic and sometimes involuted rhetoric but decisive, almost impatient action.

An example on everyone’s mind is Syria. Obama had his red line, rendered inert (Whew!) by the as-it-turns-out-false assurance that “100 percent” of Syrias’s chemical weapons had been removed. Trump saw footage of the results of Assad’s early April sarin gas attack and responded a couple of days later with with 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles against the air base from which the attack originated.

Red line and inaction vs. infraction and response.

Many more examples of that sort could be adduced, but I wanted to call attention to two things that are more modest.

One concerns the character of their more personal interventions. Again, I am going to leave one large category out of consideration: everything that has to do with race. Instead, I would simply ask you to think about some of Obama’s signal actions with respect to race: his support of Eric Holder, the most patently racialist attorney general in history, his intervention while president into local controversies like the Skip-Gates-Cambrdige-Policeman episode or the “If-I-Had-A-Son-He–Would-Look-Like-Trayvon-Martin” wheeze. Such things, I believe, tell us a lot about Obama’s unspoken Weltanschauung: the value-laden background of assumptions out of which his immaculately accoutered pronouncements were uttered.

There is not, so far as I have been able to determine, anything similar in Donald Trump’s makeup. His approach to problems, to events generally, is less ideological than pragmatic. “What’s the right thing to do in this particular case?” That seems to be his cynosure. You might not like the answers he gives, but it is easy to see that they come not from a previously adopted program or ideology but from an ad hoc response to the case at hand. Critics call that “confusion” or “inconsistency” or “contradiction.” I’m not sure those categories have much purchase in this context.

In any event, this difference between Obama and Trump results in some striking contrasts between the two men. In 2014, Obama made headlines when he traded five senior Taliban leaders held captive in Guantanamo Bay for the release of Bowe Robert Bergdahl, the Army solider who deserted his post while on guard duty in June 2009 after announcing his loathing for America and hatred of the Army. “I am ashamed to be an American,” he wrote in an email to his parents. “And the title of US soldier is just the lie of fools. . . . The horror that is America is disgusting.” Who can forget the spectacle of Bergdahl’s parents, who came to the White House and praised Allah for the release of their son?

Donald Trump, through diplomatic intervention with Egyptian President al-Sisi when he visited Washington earlier this month, quietly secured the release of the Egyptian-American charity worker Aya Hijazi, her Egyptian husband, and four other humanitarian workers who had been held for three years by Egyptian authorities. Trump sent a government plane to pick up the entoruage and welcome Hijazi to the White House for a photo-op. CONTINUE AT SITE

EDUCATION, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Bill Maher Says College Anti-Free Speech Warriors Are the Liberals’ Version of Book Burning VIDEO

Posted By on April 24th, 2017

https://pjmedia.com/video/bill-maher-says-college-anti-free-speech-warriors-are-the-liberals-version-of-book-burning/

Bill Maher is a liberal, but even he doesn’t like the fact that liberals have silenced conservative speakers on college campuses. The latest victim of the social justice warriors’ attack on our civil rights is Ann Coulter, who was set to give a speech at UC Berkeley. Maher said that the anti-debate and anti-education nonsense at our college campuses is the liberals’ version of book burning. Let’s put aside the fact that most of the historic book burnings have been perpetrated by liberals, and focus on the one liberal, Bill Maher, actually standing up for our civil liberties.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Tony Thomas: Warmists Fight Their Own Nuclear War

Posted By on April 24th, 2017

Forget North Korea’s threat to make Australia a lake of irradiated glass because such an attack would be as nothing in comparison with the civil war amongst tax-supported catastropharians. What set them off? One side’s footnoted paper that renewables can’t hold an organic candle to atomic power.
Fights within the climate-alarm community are vibrant entertainment for sceptics. There’s the fun factor as rival climate alarmists kick shins and yank each others’ hair. And they deride each other’s extreme and foolish arguments, which saves sceptics some work. Moreover, the unedifying fights reduce the credibility of so-called climate “science” in the eyes of important onlookers like politicians.

A splendid fight-in-the-family broke out this month with the publication of a paper by four advocates of the nuclear-power route to emissions reduction. Their paper, “Burden of proof: A comprehensive review of the feasibility of 100% renewable-electricity systems,” is published in Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, (edited by Lawrence Kazmerski, who visited Australia in 2010 and played a small, proud part in forcing up electricity prices to their current obscene levels).

The study mercilessly exposes the nonsense of the wind and solar advocates, who imagine a world of 100% electricity from renewables by 2050. These fantasists have induced Australian state and federal governments to set unrealistic renewable energy targets, much as mad dogs infect bystanders with rabies. (The Victorian government, for example, last February passed its Climate Change Act with a net zero emissions target by 2050).

There is the added piquancy that all four authors exposing the technical impossibility of wind/solar regimes established their academic profiles in South Australia, where blackouts have made the state a global cautionary tale against moving to 50% renewables (let alone any higher percent).

The lead author is Ben Heard, PhD candidate at Adelaide University, the co-authors being Professors Barry Brook (U.Tas), Tom Wigley of National Center for Atmospheric Research at Boulder, Colorado, and Corey Bradshaw (Flinders U.) All are nuclear-power advocates, which enrages their wind/solar-loving peers.

Here’s the gist of the Heard paper:

“Our sobering results show that 100% renewable electricity supply would, at the very least, demand a reinvention of the entire electricity supply-and-demand system to enable renewable supplies to approach the reliability of current systems. This would move humanity away from known, understood and operationally successful systems into uncertain futures with many dependencies for success and unanswered challenges in basic feasibility.”

They reviewed 24 scenario studies supporting 100% renewables as the way ahead and found not one passed the technical-feasibility test – let alone any commercial tests. On the Heard scale for technical feasibility, with a top score of 7 , they found only one study that even achieved a score of 4.

Four studies scored zero – these included, of course, the propaganda screeds presented as practial plans by WWF and Greenpeace. Another seven studies scraped up scores of just 1. Among those scoring a mere one out of seven was a scenario co-authored by the Climateworks (Monash University/Myer Foundation) crowd, headed by Labor’s John Thwaites, who was once Victoria’s deputy-premier. The Australian Academy of Science relied on that half-baked Climateworks exercise in its 2015 submission to the federal government endorsing the magic zero emissions solution to global warming by 2050.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Incidents of Piracy on Upswing Off Somalia, Prompting Concern After five-year hiatus, U.S. military’s Africa Command said there have been as many as six incidents in past two months By Gordon Lubold

Posted By on April 24th, 2017

CAMP LEMONNIER, Djibouti—Piracy has made a worrisome return to the waters off Somalia after a five-year hiatus, U.S. defense officials said, prompting commercial shippers, the military and others to revisit the issue.

In the past two months, there have been as many as six incidents of piracy, according to Gen. Tom Waldhauser, head of the U.S. military’s Africa Command, speaking to reporters here Sunday. They are the first incidents since about 2012, Gen. Waldhauser said. Pirates seized food, oil and other commodities from smaller-size boats, he said.

Gen. Waldhauser appeared with Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, who is winding up a trip through the Middle East and North Africa. Mr. Mattis stopped in Djibouti on Sunday to meet with Djiboutian President Ismail Omar Guelleh. He also met with French troops stationed here and received briefings about U.S. operations at Camp Lemonnier, a sprawling U.S. naval base here with more than 4,000 U.S. personnel.

The base provides support for a number of U.S. activities, including training and advising forces in Somalia and in nearby Yemen, and is home to numerous logistical and tactical aircraft and drones. The senior command, Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa, is also based here, the only permanent U.S. base on the African continent.

Gen. Waldhauser attributed the return of piracy part to famine and drought in Somalia, adding private security measures should be kept in place to defend against pirates. CONTINUE AT SITE

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

North Korea’s Latest American Hostage The Kim regime detains a teacher, its third American captive.

Posted By on April 24th, 2017

As global events go, one of the safest predictions is that North Korea would take another American hostage amid growing tensions over its nuclear program. Sure enough, the Kim Jong Un regime on Saturday arrested an American teacher as he waited to board a flight out of the country.

South Korean media identified the new hostage as Kim Sang-duk, who was teaching a class in international finance and management at the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology. The mere thought of such a class is puzzling since North Korea’s “international finance” is smuggling. But Mr. Kim had taught at a sister school in China near the border with North Korea, and perhaps he thought he could spread some goodwill. Bad mistake.

In addition to Kim Sang-duk, the North is known to hold two other Americans. Otto Warmbier, a University of Virginia student who was on a tour of North Korea, was detained last year for allegedly trying to steal a propaganda poster. He was convicted of subversion and sentenced to 15 years of hard labor. He hasn’t been seen since March 2016. American businessman Kim Dong-chul was charged with spying last year and sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Hostage politics is a hardy Korean perennial, perhaps because it always seems to yield some political or diplomatic benefit. Pyongyang recently detained Malaysian citizens and traded them to Kuala Lumpur in return for the North Koreans suspected of conspiring to assassinate Kim Jong Un’s brother. The North has also traded Americans over the years for visits by high-ranking U.S. officials, even former Presidents, who offer the regime some legitimacy and sometimes more tangible benefits.

That’s the best reason for the Trump Administration not to engage in hostage negotiations. The U.S. warns Americans not to travel to North Korea, yet some still tempt fate by doing so. The U.S. can ask China to intercede for the imprisoned Americans on humanitarian grounds, but the U.S. also needs China’s help against North Korea’s nuclear missiles.

North Korea is a terrorist government that obeys none of the norms of international behavior. The only solution is regime change. But in the meantime, the U.S. should make clear that Americans who travel to North Korea do so at their own risk.