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Statement on the Election of a New Interpol President by Garry Kasparov and Members of the Standing Committee of the Free Russia Forum

Posted By on November 21st, 2018

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13333/interpol-president-election-russia

It is well-established that Russia has abused Interpol as a tool to persecute abroad the political opponents of the ruling Russian regime who have been forced to emigrate.

Such an influential organization as Interpol cannot be led by a representative and functionary of an unfree nation that violates the rights and freedoms of its own citizens, violates its international obligations, annexes the territories of other states, and is currently the protagonist of several wars of aggression.

Would Interpol target these people on Russian request? It is difficult to imagine otherwise should a Russian official becomes the head of Interpol. The candidate for the post of the head of Interpol also raises questions. Alexander Prokopchuk is a major general of the Russian police, an organization known for its corruption and persecution of representatives of the Russian opposition.

On November 21, the election of a new President of Interpol will take place. The leading candidate for this post is the representative of the Russian Federation, Major General of the Russian Police Alexander Prokopchuk. The Standing Committee of the Free Russia Forum expresses its categorical protest against the election of this candidate to the post of head of Interpol. Such an influential organization as Interpol cannot be led by a representative and functionary of an unfree nation that violates the rights and freedoms of its own citizens, violates its international obligations, annexes the territories of other states, and is currently the protagonist of several wars of aggression.

It is well-established that Russia has abused Interpol as a tool to persecute abroad the political opponents of the ruling Russian regime who have been forced to emigrate. Critics and other targets of the Putin regime residing outside of Russia have repeatedly been victimized by Interpol mechanisms such as Red Notices and “diffusion” notices, as a result of which they were detained and put through lengthy legal procedures before they managed to convince Interpol of the political nature of their persecution — often requiring political intervention on their behalf.

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Germany: Turkish-Muslim Appointed Second-In-Command of Domestic Intelligence by Soeren Kern

Posted By on November 21st, 2018

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13334/germany-domestic-intelligence

Sinan Selen, a 46-year-old Istanbul-born counter-terrorism expert, will be the first Muslim to fill a top leadership position within Germany’s intelligence community.

Throughout his government career, Selen has been resolute in confronting Islamic fundamentalists in Germany. He also led efforts at the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) to monitor the Turkish nationalist Milli Görüs, an influential Islamist movement strongly opposed to Muslim integration into European society.

The leadership changes at the BfV were spurred by a cellphone video that purportedly showed right-wing mobs attacking migrants over the murder of a German citizen in Chemnitz by two failed asylum seekers. According to the respected blog Tichys Einblick, the video actually documented migrants attacking Germans, not Germans “hunting” migrants.

Chancellor Angela Merkel has appointed a Turkish immigrant to fill the second-highest position in Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, BfV).

As the BfV’s new vice president, Sinan Selen, a 46-year-old Istanbul-born counter-terrorism expert, will be the first Muslim to fill a top leadership position within Germany’s intelligence community.

The appointment comes just weeks after Merkel fired BfV President Hans-Georg Maaßen for publicly defending the anti-mass-migration party Alternative for Germany (AfD) against attacks from Merkel and her junior coalition partner, the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD).

By choosing Selen, Merkel appears to be trying to achieve several objectives. First, she seems to be attempting to save her floundering government by placating the SPD, which has demanded that the domestic intelligence agency begin monitoring the AfD party, and which has called for more people with a “migration background” in leadership positions at federal agencies.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Rent-Seeking Run Amok By Colin A. Carter Henry I. Miller

Posted By on November 21st, 2018

https://amgreatness.com/2018/11/21/rent-s

President Trump announced last month that his administration will take actions to allow the year-round sale of fuel containing 15 percent ethanol, which is currently banned during summer months. The rent-seeking justification for this expansion of a flawed policy revved up immediately, in the form of a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Iowa U.S. Senators Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst. They lauded the decision, as well as the existing federal mandate to blend ethanol with transportation fuels, citing the contributions to the nation’s job growth, GDP, and tax revenues.

The same arguments could be made for a federal law mandating that all the alcohol in hard liquor and mouthwash be derived from corn. Would that be sound public policy?

Politics aside, any defense of U.S. ethanol policy must embrace a series of fallacies which include:

ethanol produced from corn makes the U.S. less dependent on fossil fuels,
ethanol lowers the price of gasoline,
an increase in the percentage of ethanol blended into gasoline boosts the overall supply of gasoline, and
ethanol is environmentally friendly and lowers global carbon dioxide emissions.

Although none of these claims is true, the ethanol lobby continues to promote them, and many politicians—particularly in the major corn-producing states—seem intoxicated by them.

Politicians like to say that ethanol is environmentally friendly, but these claims are misleading. Although corn is a renewable resource, it has a far lower yield relative to the energy used to produce it than ethanol from sugar cane. Moreover, ethanol yields about 33 percent less energy per gallon than gasoline, so mileage drops off significantly. Fuel costs for Americans are often artificially inflated due to the low energy content of ethanol (in spite of a possible octane boost) and the high costs faced by fuel companies trying to comply with ill-conceived fuel regulations. In a 2014 study, the Congressional Budget Office found that raising the mandated use of corn ethanol raises motor fuel prices.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Even Astronauts Fear the Left By Dennis Prager

Posted By on November 21st, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/11/scott-kellys-winston-churchill-comment/

Advocating magnanimity in politics, Scott Kelly holds up Churchill as a model and provokes a firestorm of indignation.

There are many reasons I pity today’s younger generation of Americans.

Among them are:

• The unconscionable debt we are leaving them.

• The obliteration of male and female as separate and distinct categories — and the sexual confusion that is left in its wake.

• The emasculation of men and the de-feminization of women.

• The undermining of the value of marriage.

• The lack of God and religion in their lives — and the consequent search for meaning in the wrong places.

• The receiving of indoctrination, rather than education, in most schools from elementary through graduate.

• The inability to celebrate being American.

Tragically and ironically, each one of these was brought on by the very group many young people identify with: the Left.

You can add to the list the Left’s tearing down of heroes.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Asia Bibi and the Plight of Pakistani Christians An inconvenient narrative for Western media elites. Jack Kerwick

Posted By on November 21st, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271992/asia-bibi-and-plight-pakistani-christians-jack-kerwick

Media talking heads and self-appointed monitors of “hate” have been waxing hysterical over what they claim is a rising tide of “hate crimes” nationwide, a phenomenon, they want for us to believe, provoked by the rhetoric of President Donald J. Trump.

This claim, of course, is nonsense. Yet there’s another point that I wish to make here.

While the Western world has been deluged with media coverage regarding the legions of Muslims that fled to Europe from the oppression that they allegedly suffered in their own homelands, as well as with stories (many of which have been revealed as hoaxes) of Christians victimizing religious minorities in the streets of America, media elites never make a sound concerning the oppression that Christians around the world really suffer at the hands of the non-Christian majorities with which they co-exist.

Take Asia Bibi as just one example of this endemic phenomenon. This young woman’s experience is illustrative of that endured by numerous Christians throughout Bibi’s home country of Pakistan and throughout the Islamic world. Hers is worth drawing attention to, however, for more people are increasingly becoming familiar with Bibi’s name.

Bibi is a Pakistani woman, a mother of five children, and a member of Pakistan’s Christian minority. In 2009, she was arrested. The following year, Bibi was found guilty of the blasphemy charges that had been brought against her and she was sentenced to…death.

Bibi had been charged by her co-workers with having made offensive remarks about Muhammad and the Quran. They had ordered her to fetch them some water. She did. But after Bibi drank from it, they refused to do so and mocked her for having “defiled” the drink. Bibi’s co-workers ordered her to convert to Islam. It was then that Bibi had responded that it is they, her harassers, who should convert, for while Jesus saved humanity from its sins, what had Muhammad ever done for humanity, Bibi asked.

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

A Short History of American Immigration Coming to the U.S. always took courage and tolerance for risk, traits that are still part of the country’s DNA. By John Steele Gordon

Posted By on November 21st, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-short-history-of-american-immigration-1542758403

“Modern opposition to immigration is for the most part not to immigration per se, nor to particular ethnic groups, as it was in the past, but to the perception that illegal immigration has undermined the rule of law. America’s prosperity, freedom and entrepreneurial spirit will always be a magnet for the ambitious and talented. It will remain one of the country’s greatest strengths. But that doesn’t mean the U.S. shouldn’t decide who gets to come in.”

If Americans are famous for our get-up-and-go, it is because we all have ancestors who got up and came. Whether sailing into the Chesapeake Bay in the early 17th century, waiting in line at Ellis Island in the early 20th, or crossing the South Texas border in the early 21st, immigrants to the U.S. have had to bid farewell to the familiar and enter a strange land with strange customs and, often, a strange language. That took—and still takes—courage and tolerance for risk, traits that are very much part of the American gene pool.

Sometimes the risk was to one’s life. About 25% of immigrants to Virginia in the 1620s died within a year. In the late 19th century, about 1 in 7 didn’t survive the trans-Atlantic voyage. Crossing the border illegally remains dangerous.

The first wave of immigration to the U.S. came between 1620, when the Mayflower arrived in Plymouth, Mass., and 1642, when the English Civil War began. About 25,000 Puritans, seeking to worship God in their own way, traveled to New England during those decades. The war brought the Puritan migration to a close, but other religious and ethnic groups, such as the Quakers and Huguenots, took up the slack in the late 17th century.

The Dutch came to New Amsterdam in the early 1600s to trade fur, tolerating all religions. New York has been America’s most commercially minded and religiously pluralistic city ever since.

The next wave of migration began in the mid-18th century, when Scots-Irish from Ulster began to immigrate in numbers. Many arrived in Philadelphia and made their way westward and then down the Appalachians, populating the Southern upcountry. Their descendants have formed the backbone of a number of populist movements, from Andrew Jackson to Donald Trump.

EDUCATION, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Reviving Due Process on Campus DeVos restores the right to cross-examination. Democrats are outraged.

Posted By on November 21st, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/reviving-due-process-on-campus-1542758809

For those awaiting a restoration of rational discourse in American politics, well, you’ll have to keep waiting. No other conclusion is possible after seeing the reaction to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s long-awaited regulatory proposals last week on handling accusations of sexual abuse on campus.

From California Democrat Maxine Waters: “Betsy DeVos, you won’t get away with what you are doing. We are organizing to put an end to your destruction of civil rights protections for students.”

Former Vice President Joe Biden said on Facebook that the proposal “would return us to the days when schools swept rape and assault under the rug and survivors were shamed into silence.”

The centerpiece of the proposed regulations is—hold your fire—restoring the right of cross-examination, one of the oldest and most hallowed elements of due process.

The Obama Department of Education, responding to legitimate concerns about sexual abuse on campus, issued guidelines that went overboard, casting away many basic protections for the accused. The result has subjected victims and the accused to a system of campus justice often controlled by amateurs and political activists.

For more than four decades the Department of Education has set Title IX policy by issuing “guidance,” which circumvents the normal rule-making process. The Obama-era sexual abuse guidance was essentially an administrative diktat. The public had no chance to comment, and universities, which understood federal funding was at risk, opted to dilute standard legal protections for accused students.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Criminal justice reform: We can improve expensive, ineffective system by lowering recidivism Jared Kushner and Tomas J. Philipson

Posted By on November 20th, 2018

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/11/19/donald-trump-criminal-justice-reform-recidivism-jared-kushner-column/2047239002/
The costs of criminal activity are unacceptably high, but the reforms supported by the president promise to reduce costs and cut down on recidivism.

Crime imposes substantial fiscal and social costs on the United States. In 2016, more than 1.4 percent of our Nation’s GDP was spent funding the State and Federal criminal justice system. Victims and society at large also bear significant costs through pain, suffering, reduced quality of life, property losses, increased medical costs, and loss of life. The most recent estimates from 2014 indicate that altogether these damages constitute an additional 1.5 percent of GDP, yielding a total burden of 2.9 percent of GDP, or roughly $500 billion.

These costs can be attributed, in part, to crimes committed by prisoners after already serving once in prison, through recidivism after being released from state and federal facilities. If recent trends hold, almost half of federal inmates who were conditionally released will be re-arrested within 5 years of release and more than 75 percent of state offenders who were released on community supervision will be re-arrested within 5 years of release.
The president is reducing spending, crime

To break this cycle, President Donald J. Trump is working to effect bipartisan and evidence-based prison reforms to reduce recidivism. He issued an executive order in March that is bringing together more than a dozen Federal agencies to identify ways to reduce recidivism, enhance the reentry process, and improve public safety.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Video Obama on Change: We Are Still Confused, Blind, Shrouded With Hate, Anger, Racism, Mommy Issues Posted By Ian Schwartz

Posted By on November 20th, 2018

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2018/11/20/obama_on_change_we_are_still_confused_blind_shrouded_with_hate_anger_racism_mommy_issues.html

Former President Barack Obama blamed “racism” and “mommy issues,” among other factors, limiting the ability for the U.S. to make “progress” on any important issue under President Donald Trump.

Obama, speaking at the Obama Foundation Summit on Monday night, said the answers already exist to solve many of the problems facing both the U.S. and the world, but that the nation was not making progress “because we are still confused, blind, shrouded with hate, anger, racism, mommy issues.”

“People call me Spock for a reason,” Obama quipped. “I believe in reason and logic and all these enlightenment values.”

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Statement from President Donald J. Trump on Standing with Saudi Arabia

Posted By on November 20th, 2018

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/statement-president-donald-j-trump-standing-saudi-arabia/

The world is a very dangerous place!

The country of Iran, as an example, is responsible for a bloody proxy war against Saudi Arabia in Yemen, trying to destabilize Iraq’s fragile attempt at democracy, supporting the terror group Hezbollah in Lebanon, propping up dictator Bashar Assad in Syria (who has killed millions of his own citizens), and much more. Likewise, the Iranians have killed many Americans and other innocent people throughout the Middle East. Iran states openly, and with great force, “Death to America!” and “Death to Israel!” Iran is considered “the world’s leading sponsor of terror.”

On the other hand, Saudi Arabia would gladly withdraw from Yemen if the Iranians would agree to leave. They would immediately provide desperately needed humanitarian assistance. Additionally, Saudi Arabia has agreed to spend billions of dollars in leading the fight against Radical Islamic Terrorism.

After my heavily negotiated trip to Saudi Arabia last year, the Kingdom agreed to spend and invest $450 billion in the United States. This is a record amount of money. It will create hundreds of thousands of jobs, tremendous economic development, and much additional wealth for the United States. Of the $450 billion, $110 billion will be spent on the purchase of military equipment from Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and many other great U.S. defense contractors. If we foolishly cancel these contracts, Russia and China would be the enormous beneficiaries – and very happy to acquire all of this newfound business. It would be a wonderful gift to them directly from the United States!

The crime against Jamal Khashoggi was a terrible one, and one that our country does not condone. Indeed, we have taken strong action against those already known to have participated in the murder. After great independent research, we now know many details of this horrible crime. We have already sanctioned 17 Saudis known to have been involved in the murder of Mr. Khashoggi, and the disposal of his body.

Representatives of Saudi Arabia say that Jamal Khashoggi was an “enemy of the state” and a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, but my decision is in no way based on that – this is an unacceptable and horrible crime. King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman vigorously deny any knowledge of the planning or execution of the murder of Mr. Khashoggi. Our intelligence agencies continue to assess all information, but it could very well be that the Crown Prince had knowledge of this tragic event – maybe he did and maybe he didn’t!