Europe Stumbling Toward Apocalyptic Strife By J. Robert Smith

Western Europe’s long, slow suicide is too long and slow for Western European elites, apparently. You know, the self-loathing, Western-loathing progressive-minded sorts. Projections of Muslim supremacy in Europe by the latter part of the 21st Century means that Europe’s enlightened class won’t experience the pleasure of watching Muslims hoist guidons emblazoned with the shahada and the takbir over the Vatican. Quite a visual, won’t it be, compliments of Al Jazeera, having a muckety-muck imam emerge on the once papal balcony — a balcony festooned with a boldly oversized crescent moon and star flag — to bestow blessings on masses of believers shouting, “Allah Akbar,” as a global audience watches enthralled.

Thus the intent to hasten Europe’s demise — that is, whatever remains of degraded Christian Europe and Western Civilization there. Muslim ascendency has its satisfactions, but nothing beats witnessing the coup de grâce, the final scimitar coming down on the neck of once mighty Europe. That’s what open borders means — it’s a quickening of the suicide. It gives an outside chance for Western Europe’s elites to witness the dénouement of their crimes (perhaps they would prefer the kinder, gentler word, “designs”).

The Donald’s Missing Details Who would be eligible for TrumpCare? What will the border wall cost? He doesn’t say. Karl Rove

Having led the polls for three months, Donald Trump has shown he’s no flash in the pan. Voters and the media should therefore treat him as a traditional front-runner, examine his temperament and require him to go beyond sound bites. A governing agenda is essential to win the White House. Candidates must demonstrate mastery of the issues and cannot wing it. Platitudes don’t cut it for swing voters. Inquiring minds might like to hear Mr. Trump explain what specifically he would do as president.

He has said that he would deport the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants living in the U.S., and in two years or less, thanks to “really good management.” But what exactly is Mr. Trump’s plan to arrest, detain and deport—with all the litigation that entails—15,000 people a day? That’s roughly 10 times the number of daily arrests in the U.S. for violent crime. How will Mr. Trump round up these people in a way that is, as he promises, “very humane” and “very nice”? And how many tens of billions will this cost?

Why Aren’t There More Black Scientists? The evidence suggests that one reason is the perverse impact of university racial preferences. By Gail Heriot

Remember when Justice Sandra Day O’Connor predicted in Grutter v. Bollinger (2003) that universities would no longer need race-preferential admissions policies in 25 years? By the end of this year, that period will be half over. Yet the level of preferential treatment given to minority students has, if anything, increased.

Meanwhile, numerous studies—as I explain in a recent report for the Heritage Foundation—show that the supposed beneficiaries of affirmative action are less likely to go on to high-prestige careers than otherwise-identical students who attend schools where their entering academic credentials put them in the middle of the class or higher. In other words, encouraging black students to attend schools where their entering credentials place them near the bottom of the class has resulted in fewer black physicians, engineers, scientists, lawyers and professors than would otherwise be the case.

But university administrators don’t want to hear that their support for affirmative action has left many intended beneficiaries worse off, and they refuse to take the evidence seriously.

The mainstream media support them on this. The Washington Post, for instance, recently featured a story lamenting that black students are less likely to major in science and engineering than their Asian or white counterparts. Left unstated was why. As my report shows, while black students tend to be a little more interested in majoring in science and engineering than whites when they first enter college, they transfer into softer majors in much larger numbers and so end up with fewer science or engineering degrees.

This Child Doesn’t Need a Solar Panel By Bjorn Lomborg ****

Spending billions of dollars on climate-related aid in countries that need help with tuberculosis, malaria and malnutrition.
In the run-up to the 2015 U.N. Climate Change Conference in Paris from Nov. 30 to Dec. 11, rich countries and development organizations are scrambling to join the fashionable ranks of “climate aid” donors. This effectively means telling the world’s worst-off people, suffering from tuberculosis, malaria or malnutrition, that what they really need isn’t medicine, mosquito nets or micronutrients, but a solar panel. It is terrible news.

On Oct. 9, World Bank President Jim Yong Kim pledged a one-third increase in the bank’s direct climate-related financing, bringing the bank’s annual total to an estimated $29 billion by 2020. In September, Chinese President Xi Jinping pledged to match President Obama’s promised $3 billion in aid to the U.N.’s Green Climate Fund. Meanwhile, the U.K is diverting $8.9 billion from its overseas aid budget to climate-related aid over the next five years, and France is promising $5.6 billion annually by 2020, up from $3.4 billion today. The African Development Bank is planning to triple its climate-related investments to more than $5 billion a year by 2020, representing 40% of its total portfolio.

Benghazi Panel to Focus on Attack, Not Hillary Clinton’s Emails By Byron Tau

Republicans Say Committee will concentrate questions on details of fatal 2012 assault, according to GOP lawmakers

WASHINGTON—The House Committee on Benghazi will focus its long-awaited questioning of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on details of the 2012 attack on a Libyan diplomatic outpost, rather than on Mrs. Clinton’s email arrangements, Republicans said this week.

The panel’s hand has been forced by recent suggestions, including by some Republicans, that the committee’s motivations are chiefly political. That has shifted the dynamics of Thursday’s high-profile hearing, with Republicans facing pressure to show they are playing fair just as Mrs. Clinton faces pressure to show she didn’t botch a tragic incident.

Republicans remain eager to press Mrs. Clinton publicly on the State Department’s Libya policy before, during and after the attack in which four Americans died, while she looks to defuse lingering claims that the incident reveals flaws in her management of the State Department, her leadership or her judgment.

Mrs. Clinton’s campaign has been dogged for months by her decision to use a private email server while she served as secretary of state, an arrangement revealed by the committee’s work. But Republicans say most of Thursday’s hearing will tackle topics more directly related to the attack in Libya.

France’s Long Ambivalent Relationship with the Jews: Joshua Muravchick

The image of a “French republican idyll” masks a history of repeated anti-Jewish prejudice, and worse.

At the outset of his very interesting and provocative essay, Alain El-Mouchan quotes French Prime Minister Manuel Valls: “If 100,000 [French] Jews leave [for Israel], France will no longer be France. The French Republic will be judged a failure.”

Will France’s Jews depart en masse for Israel? Should they? If they do, will France still be France? These are disturbing questions to which I do not have the answers, and which may be unanswerable. But I would like to offer a number of thoughts and reactions, mainly of a historical nature, and some in the form of further questions.

Let us recall that in the first half of the 20th century, one-quarter of the Jews living in France were murdered in the Holocaust, with French connivance. Was France still France after that? If so, then it is hard for me to see how the departure of one-quarter of today’s Jewish population—not for Auschwitz but for Israel—would constitute the end of France.

But El-Mouchan, like Prime Minister Valls, has something more specific in mind. For both of them, that something, in El-Mouchan’s words, is “the French republican idyll, one of the most attractive and promising chapters in the history of mankind,” and one hallmark of this idyll was France’s “exceptionally open and welcoming” posture toward the Jews. That idyll, says El-Mouchan, has now “reached the beginning of the end.”

THE BLACK CONSERVATIVES FUND *****

http://www.blackconservativesfund.com/

ABOUT BLACK CONSERVATIVES FUND
The Black Conservatives Fund is a political action committee committed to turning out the black vote and elect black conservatives at every level of government.
We provide direct contributions in addition to running TV and radio ads, conducting get-out-the vote drives, and funding any other activities our endorsed candidates need.
We are first and foremost a CONSERVATIVE political action committee. We are committed to assisting candidates who support reining in the size and scope of government, protecting our nation through a strong military, and promoting American values – especially the right to life.

We believe that despite the election of Barack Obama, the conservative movement has a golden opportunity to expand our coalition by supporting black conservative candidates whenever possible.

An entirely new generation of black leaders is stepping forward to help save this nation. They believe that the welfare state and a corrupt education system are destroying our future. They understand that big government has created nothing but big problems.
And they are willing to fight back against the left-wing race baiters of the Democratic Party.
These black conservative heroes are willing to endure the personal attacks and outright ridicule from the liberal political establishment and the left wing media in order to stand up for what’s right. And for that, they deserve our encouragement and our support.

Bernard-Henri Lévy: Things We Need to Stop Hearing About the ‘Stabbing Intifada’

It is painful to hear the phrase “lone wolves” applied to the handful
— and perhaps tomorrow the dozens and then the hundreds — of killers
of Jews “liked” by thousands of “friends,” followed by tens of
thousands of “Tweeters,” and connected to a constellation of sites
(such as the Al-Aqsa Media Center and its page dedicated to “the third
Jerusalem intifada”) that are orchestrating, at least in part, this
bloody ballet.

It is equally painful to listen to the refrain about “Palestinian
youth no longer subject to any control,” after seeing the series of
sermons published by the Middle East Media Research Institute, in
which preachers from Gaza, facing the camera, dagger in hand, call
upon followers to take to the streets to maim as many Jews as they
can, to inflict as much pain as possible and to spill the maximum
amount of blood; doubly painful to hear that refrain from Mahmoud
Abbas himself, at the outset of this tragic chain of events a few
weeks back, describing as “heroic” the murder of the Henkins in the
presence of their children, and then expressing indignation at seeing
the “dirty feet” of Jews “defiling” the Al-Aqsa Mosque and declaring
“each drop of blood” shed by “each martyr” who dies for Jerusalem
“pure.”

More Arab Christians at Georgetown, this time two longstanding anti-Israel Palestinians who advocate BDS and have various terrorist affiliations. By Andrew Harrod

Why did Professor Yvonne Haddad call Naim Ateek and Jonathan Kuttab “two Palestinian Christians writing eloquently about Palestine?” Why – as he welcomed them to Georgetown University on Sept. 25 – did he say that he has been following these anti-Israel propagandists for years? The pair’s background and biases also appeared to not bother the “Christians in the Holy Land” event’s audience members, which included a Catholic priest and Haddad’s colleague, Jonathan Brown.

Although largely unstated at the panel, Ateek (an Anglican priest) and Kuttab (a University of Virginia Law School graduate) both have longstanding anti-Israel backgrounds. The pair was among the 1989 founders of the Sabeel Ecumenical Theology Liberation Center in Jerusalem, a Palestinian Christian organization noted for its anti-Semitism and condemnation of Israeli “apartheid.” With Kuttab’s approval, Ateek subsequently helped draft the 2009 Kairos Palestine document with its praise of terrorism and replacement theology.

India Fears U.S.-Pakistan Nuclear Deal By Janet Levy

The meeting today between Pakistan Prime Minister Sharif and President Obama at the White House is a continuation of a dangerous charade engaged in for decades by the United States. By perceiving Pakistan, a failed Islamic terrorist state, as a valuable strategic ally when it, in fact, has a blatant history of actions and circumstances to the contrary, the United States is pursuing a delusional foreign policy that further endangers American national security.
The meeting with Pakistan occurs at a time when the ink is barely dry on the dubious Iran bomb deal. Now, President Obama stands poised to sign a second nuclear agreement that will threaten U.S. ally, India, and likely destabilize the region. The first agreement, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), was led by the United States and finalized in July.