President Obama’s Transgender Proclamation Is Far Broader and More Dangerous than You Think By David French

On May 9, Vanita Gupta — the head of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice — uttered these words:

Here are the facts. Transgender men are men — they live, work, and study as men. Transgender women are women — they live, work, and study as women.

In other words, according to the DOJ, it is a simple “fact” that a man can have a menstrual cycle, that a woman can have a penis, and that men can get pregnant.

Then, on May 13, the administration purported to transform these “facts” into law by issuing a letter that threatened every single public school in America with the loss of federal funds unless it adopts the administration’s point of view that gender is defined not by biology but instead by personal preference.

The administration’s edict is clear: It interprets federal law to require schools to create a “safe,” “nondiscriminatory,” and even “supportive” environment for transgender students. Creating gender-neutral access to bathrooms or showers represent mere examples of how schools comply with the edict. In other words, the broad principle is “nondiscrimination,” and bathroom access is but one narrow application. Thinking through the broad principles reveals the depth and breadth of the administration’s power grab. The consequences will be profound.

First, the very act of teaching biology and human physiology will be hate speech unless it’s modified to conform to the new transgender “facts.” Teachers will have to take great pains to note that chromosomes, reproductive organs, hormonal systems, and any other physical marker of sex is irrelevant to this thing called “gender,” which, “factually,” is a mere state of mind.

Second, any statements of dissent — from teachers or students — will be treated as both “anti-science” and “discriminatory,” contributing to a “hostile environment” that schools are legally bound to prohibit. This prohibition will go well beyond the use of pronouns and into discussions of what it means to be male and female. The argument that a “girl” with a penis remains a boy will be treated exactly the same as an argument that blacks are inferior to whites or Arabs inferior to Jews.

FIXING FLINT MICHIGAN’S SELF INFLICTED WATER WOES BY DANIEL GREENFIELD

You’ve probably never heard of Sebring, Ohio. Despite tainted water, which the EPA knew about for months before the public did, shipments of water bottles for the angry residents, two EPA employees being put on leave, and all the other elements of a scandal, it was missing something.

Sebring is 98% white. Ohio governor John Kasich is a Republican, but currently favored by the media. So talk of Sebring being the next Flint remained just that.

St. Joseph, Louisiana might have been the other “next Flint,” but before long Louisiana had elected a Democratic governor. St Joe’s is mostly black and there are no Republicans in sight to blame for its water crisis. Plenty of villages, towns and cities have tainted water. The cause is usually local, but the media is only interested if it has the right victims and the right villain for its manufactured drama.

The closest counterpart to the media’s wildly dishonest coverage of Flint’s water troubles was its Katrina reporting. Even though New Orleans had an incompetent Democratic mayor, who would be sent to jail, and a Democratic governor, all the blame was directed at the Republican president. The crisis coverage was filled with hyperbolic exaggeration in which Brian Williams’ own lies garnered no attention. New Orleans was a post-apocalyptic hell on earth where the residents had devolved to cannibalism. All because of Bush. The Flint coverage is the old Katrina coverage with Snyder swapped out for Bush.

If Romney had won the last election, Flint would be his fault. But with Democrats in the White House and in Flint, the media chose the lone Republican in the middle. It had no interest in asking questions about the EPA’s slow response to the crisis or in investigating local Flint politicians.

These included Councilman Wantwaz Davis, a convicted killer, whom the media celebrated as the hero of the Flint crisis, while dismissing his time in jail for murder. Davis was expert at getting media attention by playing up his background and denouncing the tainted water as “genocide”.

BDS Spreads Anti-Semitism Across U.S. Campuses Where BDS goes, Jew hatred follows. Noah Beck

Reprinted from InvestigativeProject.org.

Anti-Semitic incidents seem to spring up each week on college campuses throughout the United States. According to a study, “The strongest predictor of anti-Jewish hostility on campus” is the presence of a Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel. The greater the BDS activity, especially involving faculty members, the more likely anti-Semitic episodes become, said the study issued last month by the AMCHA Initiative, a non-profit organization dedicated to investigating, documenting, and combating anti-Semitism on U.S. campuses.

One recent example occurred on April 15, when the City University of New York Doctoral Students’ Council passed a resolution calling for an academic boycott of Israel, 42-19. Weeks earlier, a CUNY professor and BDS advocate claimed that the killing of Palestinians in Gaza “reflects Jewish values.” On CUNY campuses, the New York Observer reports, Jewish students were harassed, with “Jews out of CUNY” uttered in at least one instance, and a professor who wears a yarmulke was called a “Zionist pig.”

On April 21, two-thirds of a union representing about 2,000 graduate students at New York University voted to approve a motion to support a BDS resolution against Israel. The motion also urges the union and its affiliate, the United Auto Workers, to divest from Israeli companies. The resolution asks NYU to close its program at Tel Aviv University, claiming the program violates NYU’s non-discrimination policy.

About a month earlier, NYU’s Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), one of the main organizing forces behind the nationwide BDS campaign, hosted Israeli academic Ilan Pappé, described by Benny Morris as “one of the world’s sloppiest historians.”

100 YEARS AGO TODAY- OPINIONS ON THE SYKES-PICOT AGREEMENT FROM TOM GROSS

The Islamic State, Al-Qaeda, American pundit-comedian Jon Stewart, U.S. Vice-President Joe Biden, and the president of Iraqi Kurdistan, all agree that the Sykes-Picot Agreement, a secret plan for dividing up the Middle East signed by France and Britain 100 years ago today, was a bad thing.

But was it?

Certainly there were losers: the Kurds for example, or 1.3 million ethnic Greeks driven out of Anatolia by the Turks.

But others, such as The Economist magazine, argue that the chaos of the Middle East is very much the fault of the regimes there. “Lots of countries have blossomed despite traumatic histories: South Korea and Poland, for example – not to mention Israel,” argues The Economist.

Below I attach seven articles on the hundredth anniversary of the Sykes-Picot agreement, containing a variety of views. There are extracts first, for those who don’t have time to read the articles in full.

It is worth noting that today is also significant in that it marks the 50th anniversary of another globally important event, the beginning of China’s murderous Cultural Revolution.

(Please note that my hand is still injured, it is hard to type, and I may not be able to reply to emails.)

Kerry Boosts Iran’s Economy by Elliott Abrams

The Wall Street Journal has a remarkable story this week, entitled as follows:”Kerry Tries to Drum Up Some Business in Europe for Iran.”

Mr. Kerry, traveling in Europe, was urging European firms to do business with Iran in the aftermath of last year’s nuclear deal. The story continues:

“If they don’t see a good business deal, they shouldn’t say, ‘Oh, we can’t do it because of the United States.’ That’s just not fair. That’s not accurate,” Mr. Kerry said. The secretary is here through Thursday for an anticorruption summit and diplomatic meetings. He will meet with European banking leaders to “address their concerns about conducting business with Iran” after the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, a U.S. official said. In New York last month, Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif pressed Mr. Kerry and other U.S. officials to do more to reassure other countries that they could do business with Iran without penalty. “Iran has a right to the benefits of the agreement they signed up to and if people, by confusion or misinterpretation or in some cases disinformation, are being misled, it’s appropriate for us to try to clarify that….”

Iran is the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism. It continues to rally its population with shouts of “Death to America.” It supports Hezbollah, a murderous terrorist group with the blood of hundreds of Americans on its hands. It has a nuclear weapons program that has been delayed, one hopes, by the nuclear deal–but continues its ballistic missile program, whose only logical purpose is to deliver nuclear weapons. It is an enemy of American allies such as Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Israel.

Why, then, is our Secretary of State trying to assist its economy? The so-called “spirit” of the nuclear agreement? There is no such thing, or Iran would not have captured and abused American sailors in the Gulf in January. Iran’s “rights” to benefits from the agreement? That is nonsense. Iran has the “right” to an end to nuclear sanctions, but has no “right” to additional business. There are many reasons companies may hold back, ranging from American terrorism and human rights sanctions, to uncertainty about future American policy, to fear that entities in Iran with which they may undertake business are also involved in illegal or terrorist activities. Moreover, Iran is not a democracy with a reliable legal system, but a dictatorship run by the ayatollahs and the Revolutionary Guard where legal rights cannot possibly be guaranteed. There is simply no defensible reason for an American official, much less our top diplomat, to concern himself with how much investment and profit Iran can eke out of the nuclear deal. The effort to do so betrays America’s real interests in the Middle East, which are challenged by a richer and better resourced Iran.

NBC News Reports Yet Another Case of ‘Known Wolf’ U.S. Terrorists By Patrick Poole

Zakia Nasrin was a promising student growing up in a pleasant suburb of Columbus, Ohio, after arriving here with her family in 2000 from Bangladesh. She graduated high school as valedictorian. She later enrolled at Ohio State University in a pre-med program after marrying Jaffrey Khan, who grew up in a tony neighborhood in Silicon Valley.

In May 2014, Zakia, Jaffrey, and Zakia’s younger brother Rasel Raihan traveled to the capital city of the Islamic State: Raqqa, Syria. According to U.S. intelligence officials, Rasel was killed there.

That’s the story related in a report published by NBC News yesterday on documents obtained from an ISIS defector showing registration forms of would-be fighters looking to join the group. The registration forms included 15 Americans; two were Jaffrey and Rasel.

This report raises several alarming issues.

According to NBC News, Jaffrey and Rasel were already known as extremists by the FBI after an informant’s tip. Suspicions were further raised when Jaffrey and Zakia claimed to have “lost” their passports while in Kenya. Rasel admitted to friends that he had been interviewed by the FBI. The report also claims that they were indeed on the terror watch list.

This is a recurring problem I’ve repeatedly identified here at PJ Media as “known wolf” terrorism: again and again, individuals who engage in terrorism or join terrorist groups are already known to law enforcement and national security agencies.

Why were these individuals allowed to slip into Syria? CONTINUE AT SITE

The FBI may be looking at a violation of the Constitution in their Hillary investigation By Richard Henry Lee

Section 9 of the U.S. Constitution forbids office holders from accepting anything of value from a foreign state, yet husband Bill Clinton collected $1 million from the Abu Dhabi government while Hillary was secretary of state.

Bill Clinton spoke at the Abu Dhabi Global Environmental Data Initiative (AGEDI) on December 13, 2011 and received a speaking fee of $500,000. The AGEDI is a program funded by the Abu Dhabi government, so the source of the funds was the government itself. Although the fee was paid to Bill, Hillary equally benefited from the payment. In effect, she accepted money from a foreign state.

A year later, Bill spoke to the World Travel and Tourism Council in Abu Dhabi (also funded by the Abu Dhabi government) for another fee of $500,000, for a total of $1 million.

The U.S. Constitution provides in Section 9 as follows:

No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.

The Congress has provided that gifts to the president from foreign governments, for example, are transferred to the United States government. The Congress has never provided for office holders to accept personal gifts. Yet somehow, the Department of State allowed Bill to collect large speaking fees when Hillary was also a benefactor.

Bill and Hillary both studied law at Yale University and they presumably took a course on constitutional law. Also, Obama taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago. Yet Bill was allowed to brazenly accept large speaking fees from a foreign government where Hillary also stood to benefit.

The Federal Bathroom Squeeze By James Arlandson

President Obama has put the squeeze on school districts across the county: fall in line or else!

CNN has a report:

This latest guidance for schools goes beyond the bathroom issue, touching upon privacy rights, education records and sex-segregated athletics, all but guaranteeing transgender students the right to identify in school as they choose. It echoes what members of the administration have previously said on the topic.

“There is no room in our schools for discrimination of any kind, including discrimination against transgender students on the basis of their sex,” Attorney General Loretta Lynch said. “This guidance gives administrators, teachers and parents the tools they need to protect transgender students from peer harassment and to identify and address unjust school policies.”

The letter does not carry the force of law but the message was clear: Fall in line or face loss of federal funding.

This is a big government shakedown, which violates the intent of the Constitution.

Let’s look at it in the big picture. The history of the West can be written on the theme of the Few v. the Many. The Few are the monarchs and the aristocrats and their retainers, and the many are everyone else. Power and money flowed from the Many and toward the Few. It was a centralized government. That’s why Highclere Castle, where many of the Downton Abbey scenes are shot, is so huge and luxurious. Though I like the series, I have to admit the real castle was built on the backs of the Many.

When our Founders saw Old Europe, they realized they had to go in a different direction. Power and wealth had to flow throughout the Many, and the Few couldn’t take it through the piling on of laws and taxes. It was a decentralized government. They also knew, of course, that the Federal Government existed to settle disputes between the States. But whatever was not delineated in the Constitution that was reserved to the Feds went to the States.

This is the cornerstone of conservatism and sets us apart from Obama and the Dems who, ironically, practice the act of power and wealth going to the Few, even though they believe they champion the cause of the Many. Misguided and violates the Constitution.

Merv Bendle: Populism From Above

“Populism is a disease of the elites, imposed by them on the people as they struggle to maintain control, and the present crisis and popular revolt is best seen as a reaction to this.”

We are cursed with a bi-partisan political class that will say and do anything it believes might secure the hearts, minds and votes of those whose self-interest matches its own desire to remain in power. Principles and the common good? They count for nothing
“A permanent crisis in governance across the democratic world”. That is the threat we face, according to Greg Sheridan in an excellent article, “Populism diminishing democracies”. Sheridan is one of the few political commentators capable of seeing the big picture. While most journalists focus on trivia, Sheridan is able to analyse Australian politics in the context of a range of ominous global trends that will shape the future far more profoundly than Bill Shorten’s ‘man boobs’ or Malcolm Turnbull’s ‘harbourside mansion’. But is Sheridan correct? Is the crisis one of populism, as primal forces are unleashed within Western societies? Or is the crisis actually caused by the failure of the elites in those societies?

Populism, of both the left and the right, is Sheridan’s concern, and he attempts to define it and account for its emergence. Across the democratic world, the centre of the political spectrum is increasingly being deserted in favour of “gross, vulgar, hyper-partisan populism [which] is winning victory after victory for irrational hatreds and prejudices.” He cites the presidential victory of Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, the success of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in the US, the impeachment of Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff, the victory of Norbert Hofer of the far-right Freedom Party in the first round of the Austrian presidential elections, the accompanying shift of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic to the ‘illiberal right’, and the embrace of naked populism by the previously economically rationalist UK Independence Party.

Time to Leave UNESCO – Again by Guy Millière

Only six countries voted no: the United States, Estonia, Germany, Lithuania, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom. France, Spain, Sweden, Slovenia accepted the text and voted yes. The resolution was presented with the support of several Muslim countries – some often described as “moderate” : Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco.

What

UNESCO’s resolution is not only biased : it is negationist. All traces of Jewish presence in Jerusalem and Judea in ancient times are striped at the stroke of a pen.

is worrisome is that only six Western countries were ready to reject a totally poisonous, fraudulent resolution.

UNESCO is a branch of the United Nations, and the United Nations is an organization where democracies are in the minority, surrounded by a huge majority of ​​dictatorships and authoritarian regimes imbued with hatred toward the West. Israel is virtually the only country designated as guilty of violation of Human Rights by the so-called Human Rights Council, and where, in 2009, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was welcomed as a hero.

On April 11, 2016, the Executive Board of UNESCO adopted a resolution called “Occupied Palestine.” The title immediately exposes it as a biased document. That is not surprising. All the texts adopted by UNESCO concerning the Middle East are biased.

However, those who read it carefully can see that a further step was taken.

UNESCO’s resolution is not only biased: it is negationist. All traces of Jewish presence in Jerusalem and Judea in ancient times are striped at the stroke of a pen. The Temple Mount is never mentioned. It is only called by the name al-Aqsa Mosque / Haram al Sharif. The name “Western Wall” is placed between quotation marks, to indicate that it is a non-valid name: Al Buraq Wall is used without quotation marks. The graves of Jewish cemeteries are described as “false tombs.”