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What to Expect in Iran by Jagdish N. Singh

Posted By on February 22nd, 2016

“The destruction of Israel is non-negotiable.” — Mohammad Neza Naghdi, Commander of Iran’s Basij paramilitary force.

Sanctions relief will mainly benefit Ayatollah Khamenei and members of the Revolutionary Guards: they control up to one-third of Iran’s economy.

Part of the Iranian regime’s grand strategy is to inflict “death to America” and replace it with its own radical version of Islamic governance. Ayatollah Khamenei himself called for America’s destruction amid nuclear negotiations.

Officials also believe Iran is indirectly funding the Islamic State (IS) in the Sinai. “Suitcases of cash” are sent directly to Hamas officials in the Gaza Strip; part of the money is then transferred to IS.

Iran now poses an even greater threat. If democracies today continue their present policies towards Iran, it will only embolden Iran’s regime to continue its quest to obtain nuclear weapons as well as its terrorism and human rights violations.

Humanity seldom seems to learn its lessons. The governments of the world’s leading democracies appear to be suffering from this predicament in their nuclear dealings with the Islamic Republic of Iran. To avoid catastrophe, democracies need quickly to correct their course.

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Primary 2016: The Pause that Refreshes By Roger Kimball

Posted By on February 22nd, 2016

To listen to some of the commentary about yesterday’s primary in South Carolina, you would think that Donald Trump now had the nomination sewn up. Yesterday, the pundits crow, Trump won by a comfortable ten points, beating Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz 32.5 to 22.5 (22.3 for Cruz). Gosh. Slam dunk, what? Time for Mrs. Trump to start thinking about new curtains for the Oval Office or at least battling against whoever the Democratic nominee will be after Hillary Clinton drops out sometime (I predict) before the end of March.

But there are several things to note about yesterday’s primary that make this exercise in congratulation premature.

First of all, a scant week ago, the polls had Trump at 38, Cruz at 28.5, Rubio at 13.5. Clearly, this is one of those “plastic moments” of political fermentation that Karl Marx told us about. Things can change quickly.

Second, it is worth casting one’s mind way back to ancient times, to the winter of 2012, when Newt Gingrich won South Carolina with 40.4% of the vote. Mitt Romney took 27.8, Rick Santorum (remember him?) took 17%.

Gingrich lost no time announcing on some talk show that it was obvious that he was going to be the nominee.

It didn’t turn out that way, but he came in a respectable second in Florida and won decisively with 48.5% in the key southern state of Georgia.

How do you spell “Romney”?

I suppose it is possible that Donald Trump — the man who supports single-payer health care (Obamacare on steroids), who didn’t know about the nuclear triad until a few weeks ago, who once proposed a 14.25% wealth tax on “the rich,” and until 15 minutes ago was an enthusiastic proponent of abortion on demand, even that form of infanticide euphemistically described as “partial birth abortion” by its partisans — I suppose it is possible that Donald Trump will get the country to rally around him and hand him the Republican nomination.

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Backlash After Tens of Thousands of Criminals Now Allowed to Vote in Maryland By Rod Kackley

Posted By on February 22nd, 2016

Maryland Senate President Mike Miller (D) is accusing Gov. Larry Hogan (R) and his “staff of right-wing people haters” of orchestrating a hate mail and phone call campaign aimed at him and 28 other Democrats who voted to override Hogan’s veto of legislation that allows felons on parole to vote.

The Baltimore Sun reported the new law, which goes into effect March 10, will unleash a herd of new voters. More than 40,000 former prison inmates will be eligible to register to vote in Baltimore’s mayoral, city council and presidential primary elections this spring.

This is happening in a state where Democrats already outnumber Republicans 2-1.

Under current Maryland law, felons have to complete their probation and parole before being allowed to register to vote, a system that Democrats have called demoralizing and confusing for those released from prison, along with being unnecessary.

The American Probation and Parole Association testified during a General Assembly debate that “civic participation is integral to successful rehabilitation” of prison inmates.

The Baltimore City Council voiced its collective support for General Assembly Democrats by approving a city council resolution that read: “Denying so many of our neighbors the right to vote makes it much more difficult to engage them in the process.”

“The General Assembly was right to open the door to meaningful participation in our society to all non-incarcerated ex-offenders, and it should complete the process by overriding the Governor’s veto at the earliest opportunity in the 2016 legislative session,” the city council resolution concluded.

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Is Our Children Learning? By Michael Walsh

Posted By on February 22nd, 2016

Patrick Deneen puts his finger on the biggest problem facing the American future: a generation of students who know nothing about anything:

My students are know-nothings. They are exceedingly nice, pleasant, trustworthy, mostly honest, well-intentioned, and utterly decent. But their brains are largely empty, devoid of any substantial knowledge that might be the fruits of an education in an inheritance and a gift of a previous generation. They are the culmination of western civilization, a civilization that has forgotten nearly everything about itself, and as a result, has achieved near-perfect indifference to its own culture.

It’s difficult to gain admissions to the schools where I’ve taught – Princeton, Georgetown, and now Notre Dame. Students at these institutions have done what has been demanded of them: they are superb test-takers, they know exactly what is needed to get an A in every class (meaning that they rarely allow themselves to become passionate and invested in any one subject); they build superb resumes. They are respectful and cordial to their elders, though easy-going if crude with their peers. They respect diversity (without having the slightest clue what diversity is) and they are experts in the arts of non-judgmentalism (at least publically). They are the cream of their generation, the masters of the universe, a generation-in-waiting to run America and the world.

But ask them some basic questions about the civilization they will be inheriting, and be prepared for averted eyes and somewhat panicked looks. Who fought in the Peloponnesian War? Who taught Plato, and whom did Plato teach? How did Socrates die? Raise your hand if you have read both the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Canterbury Tales? Paradise Lost? The Inferno?

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Weimar America By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on February 22nd, 2016

2016 is a pivotal year in which accustomed referents of a stable West are now disappearing. We seem to be living in a chaotic age, akin to the mid-1930s, of cynicism and skepticism. Government, religion, and popular culture are corrupt and irrelevant—and the world order of the last 70 years has all but collapsed.

Neither the president nor his would-be successors talk much about the fact that we are now nearing $20 trillion in debt—in an ossified economy of near-zero interest rates, little if any GDP growth, and record numbers of able-bodied but non-working adults. (The most frequent complaint I hear in my hometown is that the government lags behind in their cost-of-living raises in Social Security disability payments.)

No one can figure out how and why America’s youth have borrowed a collective $1 trillion for college tuition, and yet received so little education and skills in the bargain. Today’s campuses have become as foreign to American traditions of tolerance and free expression as what followed the Weimar Republic. To appreciate cry-bully censorship, visit a campus “free-speech” area. To witness segregation, walk into a college “safe space.” To hear unapologetic anti-Semitism, attend a university lecture. To learn of the absence of due process, read of a campus hearing on alleged sexual assault. To see a brown shirt in action, watch faculty call for muscle at a campus demonstration. To relearn the mentality of a Chamberlain or Daladier, listen to the contextualizations of a college president. And to talk to an uneducated person, approach a recent college graduate.

If all that is confusing, factor in the Trimalchio banquet of campus rock-climbing walls, students glued to their iPhone 6s, $200 sneakers, latte bars, late-model foreign cars in the parking lot, and yoga classes. Affluence, arrogance, and ignorance are quite a trifecta.

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Reasons why Muslims are not ‘the new Jews’ By Julie Burchill,

Posted By on February 22nd, 2016

In 2006, the Sunday Times columnist India Knight wrote a piece arguing that Muslims are “the new Jews”, in which she attacked Jack Straw for asking female Muslim constituents consulting him at his Blackburn surgery to consider uncovering their noses and mouths in order to allow better communication. (I use the word “attacked” loosely; if, as Denis Healey said, being dissed by Geoffrey Howe was like “being savaged by a dead sheep” then being attacked by Knight is akin to being traduced by a twice-used tea-bag.)

A decade later, so many sad souls have clambered aboard this ship of fools that it’s a wonder it stays afloat, so extreme is the level of dysentery masquerading as discourse which issues from it. Most recently, Holocaust Memorial Day was used by Islamists and their grisly groupies as the opening steps to a danse macabre of what-aboutery, comparing the Kindertransport to the current influx of refugees from the Muslim world and implying that if we do not welcome them all to our shores with open arms, we are as bad as the Nazis.

But those who make such hysterical comparisons are, in my view, the silly led by the sinister, as the Sainted Hitchens once dismissed the Not In My Name mob.

How are Muslims not the New Jews? Let me count the ways.

For a start, there seems to be no sign of any sort of Kindertransport in action – rather, the modus operandi would appear to be “women and children last” judging by the huge groups of able-bodied young men who have found their way to the West. And this of course leads to the sort of trouble we saw in Cologne. Though no one could accuse Jewish men of not being interested in sex, I don’t recall any accounts of marauding bands of Jewish youths mob-handedly molesting gentile women on the streets of countries which gave them refuge.

Splendidly Chinese girls from poor homes are now the highest achieving group of school children in Britain

Western women are now being told by the governors of some European cities that they should do their best not to inflame men, many of whom are coming from countries where child-marriage is legal, where scholars say it’s fine to sexually assault non-believers and where it is allowable to attack young women out on their own, singly or in groups. The Muslim Brotherhood was behind the gangs of men attacking young women who dared leave their homes unescorted in Egypt from the 1960s onwards.

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David Singer: Syria – End The Diplomatic Doublespeak Start Getting Serious

Posted By on February 22nd, 2016

The deadline for a ceasefire in Syria by 19 February has passed with no indication that it will be achieved at any time in the foreseeable future. Hopes for that ceasefire were high after the UN Security Council had unanimously passed Resolution 2254 on 18 December 2015 requesting:

“the Secretary-General to lead the effort, through the office of his Special Envoy and in consultation with relevant parties, to determine the modalities and requirements of a ceasefire as well as continue planning for the support of ceasefire implementation, and urges Member States, in particular members of the ISSG, to support and accelerate all efforts to achieve a ceasefire, including through pressing all relevant parties to agree and adhere to such a ceasefire”

The ISSG mentioned in the Resolution is the International Syria Support Group – comprising the Arab League, China, Egypt, the EU, France, Germany, Iran, Iraq, Italy, Jordan, Lebanon, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, Oman, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, the United Nations, and the United States.

ISSG has proved totally ineffective in ending the five year conflict in Syria that has seen more than 300000 deaths and seven million Syrians internally displaced or fleeing to neighbouring States and swamping Europe to escape the horrific carnage unleashed in Syria during that time.

Islamic State was spawned in Syria and Iraq in July 2014 and now occupies more land than the area of Great Britain. Together with Al Nusra Front – a Syria-based Sunni extremist group that adheres to the global jihadist ideology of al-Qa’ida – both have been declared terrorist organisations by the UN Security Council. Meeting in Munich on 12 and 13 February the ISSG members agreed that:

“The UN shall serve as the secretariat of the ceasefire task force. The cessation of hostilities will commence in one week, after confirmation by the Syrian government and opposition, following appropriate consultations in Syria.”

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Dear President Obama: Don’t turn into Raul’s new North American ‘amigo’ By Silvio Canto, Jr.

Posted By on February 22nd, 2016

President Obama will be visiting Cuba in March.

I guess that he needs to go to a place where people will be happy to see him.

Frankly, there aren’t too many of those places left in the U.S.: his job approval is 45% in the RCP average of polls. A whopping 63% believe that the country is in the wrong track. Only 38% approve of how he is handling foreign policy.

So let’s go to Havana and let Raul Castro stage a nice welcome party. He will close the government offices and fill the streets with Cubans.

Let’s hope that President Obama finally calls for change in Cuba rather than play the role of Raul’s new American friend. He will be speaking to a skeptical Cuban audience who thought that “los Americanos” would bring prosperity and change. So far, the only thing that most Cubans have seen is repression and more of it.

He should start by calling for multiparty elections in Cuba, as Roger Noriega said “Let the Cubans vote”:

“Let Cubans vote.” Those three words, spoken by President Obama on his planned trip to Cuba, could unite all Americans — including those Americans in neighboring countries — behind a worthy cause. Will a man elected promising “hope and change” advance those objectives in a country where they are genuinely needed?

We shouldn’t have to ask.

The president’s visit to Cuba comes as the winds of change have shifted toward freedom, away from the authoritarian populism promoted by the Castro brothers for 60 years. Voters in Argentina recently elected a pro-free-market conservative who has pledged to seek a positive relationship with the United States. In December, Venezuela’s democrats won congressional elections in a landslide and now represent a majority that opposes the Cuban-backed regime that has brought the country to political and economic ruin.

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Antonin Scalia and the Battle against Kritarchy By Robert Weissberg

Posted By on February 22nd, 2016

Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia’s death has been a tragedy, at least for conservatives. Less obvious, though I would argue of ultimately greater importance, is that this outpouring of feeling and machinations regarding his replacement exposes a second tragedy – that the United States now edges on becoming a kritarchy, a government of judges. How else can one possibly explain the wall-to-wall media coverage on how his death might transform 5-4 victories into 4-4 stalemates or, worse, 5-4 defeats if Obama picks the next associate justice?

The political influence of judge-made law is clearly visible in everything from Obamacare to gun control, same-sex marriages, abortion, redistricting, the death penalty, immigration, campaign finance, and racial preferences in higher education. It is no exaggeration to say that the highest laws of the land now reflect the views of at least five unelected officials who are 99.9% immune to public pressure. And this power seems to be growing. Hard to believe that Scalia’s nomination to the Court was so uncontroversial that it passed the Senate by a 98-0 margin.

If one’s side has sympathetic judges, the kritarchy temptation can be irresistible, but evaluated against democratic criteria, the liabilities far outweigh the benefits. Let me offer some of the key anti-kritarchy arguments prior to discussing reversing this dangerous drift.

First, courts, regardless of whose ideology dominates, have scant control over their agenda, so those dependent on judge-made law may never have the chance to be victorious, even if one’s side enjoys a 9-0 majority. A virtual perfect storm is necessary to put an issue before a court, and even then, not necessarily in a way that permits a decisive outcome. Opponents of Roe v. Wade (1973) may never live to see it totally overturned, since abortion cases inevitably concern a variety of administrative details, not the core up-or-down issue.

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Peter Smith Populate or Perish

Posted By on February 22nd, 2016

The West is doomed because, as Europe is demonstrating, there aren’t enough births to sustain culture and traditions under assault by exuberantly fecund new arrivals who simply do not share them. The solution: subsidise larger families rather than immigrant benefits
A French novel has changed my mind on an expensive piece of entitlement largesse championed by Tony Abbott. Mr Abbott was right and I was badly wrong, along with all conservative commentators. I have also been wrong about opposing the increasing amounts of taxpayer money paid and promised for child care. The reason is simple: we pay it, and a lot more of it, or we die. Bear with me.

“Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past,” came to mind when reading: “If you control the children, you control the future.” The first is the familiar Party slogan in Nineteen Eighty-Four. The second is a description of the Muslim Brotherhood’s motivation in Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission (2015). I was struck by the parallel, and it didn’t end there.

I was not familiar with Houellebecq’s work before reading Submission. For those like me, Douglas Murray provides an excellent review of Submission and some of the author’s earlier works, together with a little about the man, in the November, 2015, edition of Quadrant. Murray recounts that Houellebecq was the target of legal proceedings for having one of his characters in Platform (2001), whose girlfriend had been killed on a tourist beach by jihadists, express hatred for Islam and Muslims. He speculates that this may have been one of the reasons Houellebecq decided to live in Ireland. Whatever the truth of that, it says something sinister about where we are heading when a novelist is held to legal account for the expressed feelings of one of his characters. Perhaps the local Thought Police suspected he was venting his own secret Islamophobic thoughts?