ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

The Left’s New Cure-All: ‘Science’ The upcoming ‘March for Science’ is set to be all about identify politics and progressive hobbyhorses. By Heather Wilhelm

Posted By on April 12th, 2017

Ah, science. If you’re even loosely engaged in the wild and dark art that is politics these days, you know by now that “science,” as a word, has taken on an almost mystical meaning. “Science,” in many of its modern incantations, now serves as a form of code, as vague and fuzzy as a Wiccan chant. For a growing number of political activists, the meaning is simple: Science, you see, is a lively mix of standard progressive hobbyhorses, tossed wild-eyed and cranky into one cantankerous bag.

Witness the upcoming March for Science, scheduled for Saturday, April 22. This also happens to be Earth Day, which is nice enough — and hey, who could object to a good old-fashioned rah-rah session for science? I, for one, always welcome a refresher on string theory, or the confounding conflict between the general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics, or that long, troubling episode in our planet’s history when a few impertinent continents apparently traipsed all the way over to the other side of the globe and no one was there to panic about it.

Alas, this March for Science does not appear to be largely about science, or about people who know a great deal about science, or even about people who want to know a great deal about science. (It would be kind of fun, in fact, to quiz earnest potential attendees about the details of the scientific method, or whether Johannes Kepler should finally win that well-deserved Oscar.) Keeping up with today’s hottest trends, the March for Science has wrapped itself in identity politics, cranked up the oven to “scorch,” and potentially set things on track to unceremoniously collapse into one giant intersectional soufflé.

The troubles brewing within the March for Science surfaced in January, marked by a now-deleted official tweet: “Colonization, racism, immigration, native rights, sexism, ableism, queer-, trans-, intersex-phobia, & econ justice are scientific issues.” Since then, the addled march has torn through four different diversity statements, shellacked by critics on both sides. (Harvard’s Steven Pinker bashed the march’s “anti-science PC/identity politics/hard-left rhetoric,” while others complained the statement didn’t go far enough.) The march’s latest set of “Diversity and Inclusion Principles,” when paired with its more shame-faced and apologetic sibling, the “Statement on Diversity and Inclusion,” tops out at over 1,000 words.

You might think that this amounts to a protest march protesting too much. But the hits keep coming. When Bill Nye, the children’s TV personality-turned-science-advocate, was announced as an honorary chair of the march last week, critics bemoaned his status as a white male. Oddly, no one seemed particularly riled up about the fact that Nye is not an actual “scientist” at all. “I was born a dorky white guy who became an engineer,” Nye told BuzzFeed, reportedly “baffled” at the brouhaha. “I’m playing the hand I was dealt. We can’t — this march can’t solve every problem at once.”

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The Russian Stooge Obama’s record on Russia By Rich Lowry

Posted By on April 12th, 2017

The circumstantial evidence is mounting that the Kremlin succeeded in infiltrating the U.S. government at the highest levels.

How else to explain a newly elected president looking the other way after an act of Russian aggression? Agreeing to a farcically one-sided nuclear deal? Mercilessly mocking the idea that Russia represents our foremost geopolitical foe? Accommodating the illicit nuclear ambitions of a Russian ally? Welcoming a Russian foothold in the Middle East? Refusing to provide arms to a sovereign country invaded by Russia? Diminishing our defenses and pursuing a Moscow-friendly policy of hostility to fossil fuels?

All of these items, of course, refer to things said or done by President Barack Obama. To take them in order: He reset with Russia shortly after its clash with Georgia in 2008. He concluded the New START agreement with Moscow that reduced our nuclear forces but not theirs. When candidate Mitt Romney warned about Russia in the 2012 campaign, Obama rejected him as a Cold War relic. The president then went on to forge an agreement with Russia’s ally Iran to allow it to preserve its nuclear program. During the red-line fiasco, he eagerly grasped a lifeline from Russia at the price of accepting its intervention in Syria. He never budged on giving Ukraine “lethal” weapons to defend itself from Russian attack. Finally, Obama cut U.S. defense spending and cracked down on fossil fuels, a policy that Russia welcomed since its economy is dependent on high oil prices.

Put all of this together, and it’s impossible to conclude anything other than that Obama was a Russian stooge, and not out of any nefarious deals, but out of his own naivete and weakness. Obama didn’t expect any rewards when he asked then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev during a hot-mic moment at an international meeting to relay to Vladimir Putin his ability to be more “flexible” after the 2012 election; he was, to put it in terms of the current Russian election controversy, “colluding” with the Russians in the belief it was a good strategy. His kompromat was his own foolishness.

The cost of Obama’s orientation toward Russia became clearer during the past two weeks. When he pulled up short from enforcing his red line, an agreement with the Russians to remove Bashar Assad’s chemical weapons became the fig leaf to cover his retreat. This deal was obviously deficient, but Obama officials used clever language to give the impression that it had removed all chemical weapons from Syria. Never mind that Assad still used chlorine gas to attack his population — exploiting a grievous loophole — and that evidence piled up that Assad was cheating more broadly.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Another College Stops Using the Word ‘Master’ Because of Slavery ‘Connotation’ The word ‘master’ can describe having talent in pretty much any area — are all of these uses going to become offensive, too? By Katherine Timpf

Posted By on April 12th, 2017

Rice University has decided to stop using the term “master” to describe the heads of its residential colleges over concerns that the word is associated with slavery.

The school will instead use the term “magister,” a classical Latin word meaning “teacher,” according to an April 6 memo from school officials as reported by the College Fix.

“It conveys the traditional role and duties of the people holding this position, without the negative historical connotation of the word ‘master,’” Dean of Undergraduates John Hutchinson stated in the memo. “We believe that ‘college magister’ holds true to our cultural roots, while eliminating the concerns and confusion about the previous title.”

Now, Hutchinson specifically mentions the “historical connotation” of the word, but it’s important to note that this “historical connotation” that some students were perceiving is very different from its actual history. As the school newspaper, the Rice Thresher, notes, the college began using the term in 1956, when it moved to a residential system based on the systems at Harvard and Yale — both of which “had adopted the residential system housing system as well as the term ‘master’ from Oxford and Cambridge.”

“At Oxford, the use of the term ‘master’ may have originated as a shorthand for ‘headmaster’ or ‘schoolmaster,” the Thresher explains.

(As the College Fix notes, Yale, Harvard, and Princeton have all already stopped using the term for the same reasons.)

Normally, when we talk about the “historical connotation” of a word being offensive, we talk about it having an offensive origin or that it’s a word that has been uniquely linked to something that’s problematic. For example, feminists often decry any use of the word “hysterical” because it comes from the Greek hysterikos, which means “of the womb” or “suffering in the womb,” and people used to use it to attribute a woman’s psychological distress to her having a uterus. That was the specific use of the word; it was never used to describe men. Personally, I have no problem with the use of “hysterical,” because it has since evolved to apply to a whole host of other scenarios, and getting offended by a word based on what it used to uniquely apply to seems a little insane to me.

The word ‘master’ plays such a large role in the English language — just how much are we going to have to change our current dictionary?

But this “master” situation is even more insane, because you cannot even make the case that the word was uniquely associated with slavery. Yes, it describes having control or authority over another (derived from the late Old English word mægester, which means exactly that) and that does describe the power dynamics of slavery, but it hasn’t been used uniquely for that purpose. It does, however, have a long history of being used in the context of academic authority in particular; it was used to describe “a degree conveying authority to teach in the universities” in the late 14th century. So basically, there’s a push to stop using a word to describe an academic authority that has roots in being used to describe specifically academic authority.

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A Russian Patriot and His Country, Part III The extraordinary Vladimir Kara-Murza By Jay Nordlinger

Posted By on April 12th, 2017

Editor’s Note: In the current issue of National Review, we have a piece by Jay Nordlinger on Vladimir Kara-Murza, the Russian democracy leader. This week in his Impromptus, Mr. Nordlinger has expanded that piece. For the first two installments, go here and here. The series concludes today.

In America, we’ve had a lot of talk recently about patriotism and nationalism. In Russia recently, there was an amazing conversation in a classroom. On one side were a teacher and a principal; on the other, the students. This was in the city of Bryansk, about 235 miles southwest of Moscow.

From this classroom, a student had been snatched by the police. His offense was to encourage others to participate in an anti-corruption rally. After the student’s arrest, the principal came in to have a talk with the class, along with the teacher.

And a student recorded the conversation, which was later transcribed and published at Meduza, the Russian news site. (The journalists who work at Meduza operate in Riga, Latvia, so that they can report freely and truthfully on their homeland, Russia. It’s too dangerous to do so at home.) To read a transcript of the conversation in English, go here.

A student says that “there are videos going around” showing Russian troops in Ukraine. The principal says, “The videos are staged, for starters.” The teacher chimes in, “And you shouldn’t believe them.”

Another student says, “Our TV networks show only what’s good for the government.” The principal, who has evidently had enough, says, “I got it. Somehow, we messed up your civic education. In terms of civics, you’ve got big shortcomings. Do you all mean to tell me that there are no patriots in your class?”

The student says, “And what does it mean to be a patriot? That you support the authorities?”

Every day, people such as Vladimir Kara-Murza are called “national traitors.” They are “American spies” and the like. In response to this, Kara-Murza talks to me a little about Boris Nemtsov, his late friend, the leader of the Russian opposition.

“He was a great Russian patriot. He gave his life for his country. What more can you do than that? So many other people who are supposedly liberals or democrats from the ’90s chose to settle for a quiet and comfortable existence under the Putin regime, either working for it or keeping their distance from the opposition.”

Nemtsov could have done anything, says Kara-Murza. He was a brilliant scientist — remember that Ph.D. in physics at age 25 — and he had extensive, nearly unique experience in Russian politics. He could have taught anywhere in the West. But he never considered it. “This is my country,” he would say, “and I have to fight for it.”

Kara-Murza says, “There is nothing more unpatriotic than stealing from your own citizens, which is what Putin and his cronies are doing. There is nothing more unpatriotic than shutting people up, beating up peaceful protesters, rigging elections, which is another form of stealing — stealing votes from your own people. How is that patriotic?”

According to Kara-Murza, “true patriots are trying to change things. They think that Russia should be a normal, modern, democratic country. People are prepared to fight for it, even at the risk of their own lives. They are the true patriots in Russia.”

Ukraine is important. I ask Kara-Murza to tell me why — why Ukraine is important in the context of Russia.

“The most important motivation of Mr. Putin’s aggression in Ukraine was not geopolitical. It was not related to foreign policy. It was domestic. It wasn’t about ‘sphere of influence’ or restoring the old Soviet empire, although these things might have been added benefits, from the regime’s point of view.”

MEDIA Comments turned off

What Rick Perlstein’s Embarrassing New York Times Essay Gets Wrong Perlstein’s essay offers a really good insight into how the Times has jettisoned so much credibility in the age of Trump. By Jonah Goldberg

Posted By on April 12th, 2017

If you’ll forgive the self-indulgence, let me start by sharing a few things about my professional life since Donald Trump won the Republican presidential nomination, in no particular order. Every day, on social media, I am attacked, dismissed, or otherwise declared an illegitimate analyst or fake conservative because of my criticisms of President Trump, even if I include praise or beneficial context.

During the election season, I lost large sums of money — large to me, anyway — because I had to turn down speeches in which I was expected to be a de facto surrogate for the Republican point of view. My appearances on Fox News have dropped precipitously. It’s not a ban or anything like that. It’s just an unavoidable fact that the way a lot of cable news works is you have a person defending the incumbent administration and a person criticizing it. I’m ill-suited for many of these debates, because I don’t fit in the obvious grooves. Some friends of National Review complain about me, including donors. Just a couple weeks ago, a prominent Republican politician chewed me out for the better part of an hour because of my criticisms of President Trump.

I could go on like this for pages, but you get the point. Or maybe you don’t. So let me explain. I offer this seeming tale of woe not out of self-pity or a desire for yours. This is the life I’ve chosen, to paraphrase Hyman Roth in The Godfather II. Indeed, I should add that I’ve also heard from hundreds of readers, peers, friends, colleagues, and more than a few politicians thanking me for my efforts to combat the attempt to redefine conservatism as mere nationalism or Trumpism.

I have written literally tens of thousands of words explaining that I will criticize Trump when I think it warranted and praise him when warranted as well. I won’t let him make me a hack or a liar. I think I’ve done a pretty good job sticking to that policy (and so has National Review).

Which brings me to the left-wing polemicist Rick Perlstein. He has a big essay in the latest New York Times Magazine. It begins with some typical bragging about his role as a historian of conservatism and some table setting about how conservatives tried to stop Trump. He then quotes me:

Then the nation’s pre-eminent birther ran for president. Trump’s campaign was surreal and an intellectual embarrassment, and political experts of all stripes told us he could never become president. That wasn’t how the story was supposed to end. National Review devoted an issue to writing Trump out of the conservative movement; an editor there, Jonah Goldberg, even became a leader of the “Never Trump” crusade. But Trump won — and conservative intellectuals quickly embraced a man who exploited the same brutish energies that [William F.] Buckley had supposedly banished, with Goldberg explaining simply that Never Trump “was about the G.O.P. primary and the general election, not the presidency.”

Perlstein doesn’t explicitly say that I (or National Review) “quickly embraced” Trump, but the insinuation is (Perlstein has a gift for snotty insinuations) that I am emblematic of this sudden, hypocritical transformation. For the reasons stated above, this came as news to me.

Now I’ve never taken Perlstein very seriously and I see little reason to start now. I’ve long known he dislikes me (he recently whined on Facebook about the outrage of NPR having me on), but he’s known for disliking conservatives generally and letting that tribal partisanship infect almost everything he writes (which is why he’s so popular with the Left). In short, who cares?

But Perlstein is writing this for the New York Times, and I think it offers a really good insight into the way the Times — and much of the mainstream media — has jettisoned so much credibility in the age of Trump.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Spicer Is Criticized for Stating a Fact About Hitler By Rick Moran see note please

Posted By on April 12th, 2017

I have listened over and over to exactly what Spicer said and I agree 100% with Rick Moran on this one……rsk

I’m not quite feeling the furious reaction to White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s comment about Hitler and poison gas. To be sure, much of the over-the-top criticism is politically motivated. But this is one of those instances where people have to dig pretty deep in that manure pile to find the pony.

Spicer made the following observation which is absolutely true.

Politico:

“We didn’t use chemical weapons in World War II,” Spicer told reporters, as he criticized the Russian government for its support of Assad. “Someone who is despicable as Hitler who didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons. You have to, if you’re Russia, ask yourself, is this a country that you, and a regime that you want to align yourself with?”

Correct Fact #1: We did not use chemical weapons in World War II.

Correct Fact #2: Hitler did not use chemical weapons during World War II.

That should have been the end of the story. But the ignoramuses in the press and Twitter immediately sprang into action.

In fact, Hitler’s Nazi Germany did use chemical weapons, most notably through the Holocaust, the genocidal program intended to murder Europe’s entire Jewish population. Many of the Jews who died in the Holocaust were killed in gas chambers using Zyklon B and other poisons.

Sarin gas, the weapon believed to have been used by Assad’s regime, was first created and weaponized by Nazi scientists in 1938.

Earth to Politco: Zyklon B was not a chemical weapon. It was a fumigator/ pesticide and was never weaponized. It was sold in the form of pellets or crystals that, when exposed to the air, turned into a gas. It was a horrific product used for evil purposes. But to say it was a “chemical weapon” which was the point that Spicer was making, is ludicrous.

The Nazis also created special trucks where they would stuff dozens of Jews into the back of the closed vehicle and route carbon monoxide into the closed space. Carbon monoxide is a gas. Should we call it a weapon too?

And the Nazis may have, indeed, created sarin gas and weaponized it. But Spicer didn’t say the Nazis didn’t make chemical weapons. He said they never used them. Why did Politico even allow that idiotic point to be published?

Spicer tried to clarify:

“In no way was I trying to lessen the horrendous nature of the Holocaust,” Spicer said in the statement. “I was trying to draw a distinction of the tactic of using airplanes to drop chemical weapons on population centers. Any attack on innocent people is reprehensible and inexcusable.”

Everyone understood what he was originally talking about except those trying to score political points.

The press secretary’s statement was quickly derided and fact-checked, including by MSNBC, which followed the press briefing with a chyron summarizing what Spicer had said and adding parenthetically that “Hitler gassed millions.” Chelsea Clinton, the daughter of 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, wrote on Twitter that she hopes Spicer “takes time to visit @HolocaustMuseum. It’s a few blocks away.”

Sen. Ben Cardin, Democrat of Maryland, tweeted that Spicer needed a “refresher history course on Hitler stat.” “#Icantbelievehereallysaidthat,” Cardin added.

IMMIGRATION, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

AG Sessions Unveils New ‘Get Tough’ Approach to Immigration Enforcement By Debra Heine

Posted By on April 12th, 2017

Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Tuesday unveiled what he called a new “get tough” approach to immigration enforcement during his first visit to the U.S.-Mexico border in Nogales, Ariz., Tuesday. The nation’s top law enforcement officer vowed to confront the gangs and cartels plaguing the region and said the administration will bring more felony prosecutions against immigrants entering the country illegally.

“Where an alien has entered the country — which is a misdemeanor — that alien will now be charged with a felony if they unlawfully enter, or attempt to enter a second time, and certain aggravating circumstances are present,” Sessions said.

The attorney general credited Trump for a steep decline of border apprehensions this year, and declared that “the lawlessness, the abdication of the duty to enforce our immigration laws, and the catch and release practices of old are over.” The attorney general proclaimed that we are living in a new era — “the Trump era.”

Via Fox News:

Sessions met with law enforcement, members of the military and border agents in Nogales, Ariz., urging their confidence in the administration as they push to implement policies boosting agents working to secure the southern border. The tone of his comments at times echoed the explicit rhetoric President Trump himself used when discussing illegal immigration and cartels during the campaign.

He said, “when we talk about MS-13 and the cartels, what do we mean? We mean international criminal organizations that turn cities and suburbs into war zones, that rape and kill innocent civilians, and who profit by smuggling poison and other human beings across our borders. Depravity and violence are their calling cards, including brutal machete attacks and beheadings. It is here on this very sliver of land—on this border—that we take our stand. It is a direct threat to our legal system, peace, and prosperity.”

The Wall Street Journal’s transcript of the speech included a slightly different version of the above line, saying: “it is here on this very sliver of land where we take our stand against this filth.” That gave the mainstream media an opening to grossly misinterpret what he said.

Via the Washington Free Beacon:

Politico reporter Josh Dawsey took a partial quote from a Wall Street Journal story on Sessions’ speech out of context, tweeting that Sessions described illegal immigrants as filth. From there, it caught the eye of Tufts professor and writer of the Washington Post‘s Spoiler Alerts blog Daniel Drezner, and the misinterpretation spread throughout Twitter.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, POLITICS Comments turned off

Lindsey Graham: The crazy man of the Senate By Monica Showalter see note please

Posted By on April 12th, 2017

I agree that McCain and Graham are idiots, but I would not say that about Mitch McConnell who did usher through the nomination of Neil Gorsuch…and does not make ludicrous policy statements….rsk
When will this jackass get the hook from the voters?

Every time Senator Lindsay Graham opens his mouth, crazy things fly out. Is there something wrong with this guy?

It’s not for nothing that a MorningConsult poll released Tuesday pegged him at the third-most unpopular senator, trailed by only John McCain and Mitch McConnell.

But there are methods to the madnesses of McCain and McConnell. In Graham’s case, the loathing is justified, given his out of control statements, signalling an unserious mind, unmoored from reality.

His latest was a call for 5,000 to 6,000 U.S. ground troops in Syria, backseat-driving the Trump administration, which seems to already have a handle on the situation. He told Meet the Press:

“We’re relying too much on the Kurds. More armed forces, 5,000 or 6,000, would attract more regional fighters to destroy ISIL.

“You need a safe haven quickly, so people can regroup inside of Syria. Then you train the opposition to go after Assad. That’s how he’s taken out by his own people with our efforts. And you tell the Russians if you continue to bomb the people we train, we’ll shoot you down.”

and

“I want more American troops, 5,000 or 6,000, like we have in Iraq, to help destroy ISIL.”

It’s like the Bush years never happened with this guy. All of those things have been tried. They’ve all been found wanting. The Syrian charmers we trained as freedom fighters back then took their shiny new weapons and joined Isis. Now this armchair general wants to risk 6,000 more American lives for this scheme? Why 6,000? Why not 20,000? Why not 1,000? Does he know what he’s talking abou? And a war with Russia? Like it’s some trivial afterthought? How blithely he puts American lives on the line for his been-there-done-that ‘prescriptions.’

UPDATE: Oh wait, I erred – Graham’s latest verbal diarrheaic was his new recommendation that barrel bombs be President Trump’s new red line with Assad, not chemical weapons. Keep on micromanaging, fool.

Less than a week earlier, he was calling for 7,000 troops. He was an easy target for Fox News’ Tucker Carlson.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

China moves 150,000 troops to border with North Korea By Rick Moran

Posted By on April 12th, 2017

The ripple effect from President Trump’s missile attack on Syria has reached the Korean peninsula with China reportedly deploying 150,000 troops to their border with North Korea.

The reason for the troop movement, according to South Korean news sources, is to handle the flood of refugees if the U.S. attacks North Korea.

The U.S. strike on Syria has unsettled America’s enemies, who have come to the conclusion that President Trump is no President Obama and will not hesitate to take action to defend what he perceives as American security.

Daily Mail:

The troops have been dispatched to handle North Korean refugees and ‘unforeseen circumstances’, such as the prospect of preemptive attacks on North Korea, the news agency said.

Meanwhile, the US Navy has moved the USS Carl Vinson aircraft carrier strike group from Singapore to North Korea after the country conducted more missile testing.

It is not likely that the troop movement is in response to the decision to send the carrier strike group toward the Korean peninsula, which was just announced yesterday. The troop movements are a contingency in case tens of thousands of North Korean refugees look to escape a military action by the U.S.

Speculation of an imminent nuclear test is brewing as the North marks major anniversaries including the 105th birthday of its founding leader on Saturday – sometimes celebrated with a demonstration of military might.

Wu Dawei, China’s Special Representative for Korean Peninsula Affairs, met with his South Korean counterpart on Monday to discuss the nuclear issue.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Extreme vetting: The Passover lesson By Rachel Ehrenfeld

Posted By on April 12th, 2017

Anti-Trump, anti-American, anti-Israeli, and anti-Semitic propaganda or “fake news” relies on the general public’s vague familiarity with details.

Take for example the left’s reaction to Jared Kushner’s and Ivanka Trump’s celebration of the Jewish “Holiday of Freedom,” or Passover (Pesach in Hebrew), beginning at the Seder table, to celebrate the Jews’ miraculous exodus from Egyptian slavery back to freedom in their homeland, Israel.

Here is what Fusion.net published:

Perhaps during her family’s seder, Ivanka (or, better yet, one of the little Trumplets!) could add a fifth question to the proceedings just for her father: Would the exodus-era Israelites – a group seeking refuge from unimaginable hardships in the Middle East – need some sort of “extreme vetting” to enter the U.S., or would they simply be banned altogether?

This is a new addition to the nine-centuries-old “blood libel” against Jews celebrating Pesach. The first known incident happened in the twelfth century in Norwich, England, where Jews were falsely accused of torturing to death a 12-year-old and using his blood as part of the holiday ritual. By 1171, the blood libel of Passover ritual murder resulted in burning to death the whole Jewish community of Blois, France. Since then, similar false accusations have been used against the Jews throughout the world, not only around Passover time, and not only by European Christians. Nazi and Muslim regimes used staged blood libel cases to solidify the masses against the Jewish bogeyman. And the Muslims, including the peace-loving “enlightened” Palestinian leadership, use it to this day.

In March 2013, Hanan Ashrawi, a Christian Palestinian politician and Muslim Brotherhood sympathizer, who was a close confidant of the late Yasser Arafat and is very popular in the West, published an article criticizing President Obama for hosting the Jewish Seder in the White House.

“Does Obama, in fact, know the relationship, for example, between ‘Passover’ and ‘Christian blood’?!” Ashrawi asked. “Or ‘Passover’ and ‘Jewish blood rituals?!'” To add credibility to her rant, Ashrawi noted: “[M]uch of the chatter and gossip about historical Jewish blood rituals in Europe are real and not fake as they claim; the Jews used the blood of Christians in the Jewish Passover.”

The article was published on the website of the NGO Ashrawi founded in 1998, Miftah, which, according to its website, is “the Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy, an initiative which works towards respect for Palestinian human rights, democracy and peace.” Miftah is generously funded by United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the British Oxfam, Canada, Denmark, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and others. With much fanfare, Ashrawi received the 2003 Sydney Peace Prize and was endorsed by former former United Nations high commissioner for human rights and former president of Ireland Mary Robinson, as well as Archbishop Desmond Tutu and former U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright, who said, “She [Ashrawi] is a brilliant spokeswoman for her cause.”