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An Iranian Dream: “Why Can’t I Dance?” by Majid Rafizadeh

Posted By on August 18th, 2018

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12847/iran-dancing-crime

To people in the West, it may seem impossible for dancing to become a crime. But as sharia laws get imposed, before you know it, any innocent act of “fun” can suddenly become a crime.

Maedeh Hojabri posted video clips of herself dancing on Instagram. For this “crime,” the 19-year-old woman was arrested, jailed without due process and without an opportunity to defend herself, and publicly shamed with a televised confession of her “crime.”

Who will the morality police come for next?

A Muslim mother in the sharia-ruled country of Iran, was talking about her 10-year-old daughter: “She asked me, ‘Why can’t I dance? We dance because we are happy. How can being happy be wrong? Why is dancing a crime?'” She spoke about the confusion in her daughter’s eyes. “It is a question I don’t know how to answer.”

Her daughter’s life had changed, she said, when she heard that a 19-year-old woman named Maedeh Hojabri had become the target of the Iran’s Islamist “morality” police. Her crime? Posting video clips of herself dancing on popular worldwide social media sites, like Instagram. The consequences for an act like that are severe. As has happened to other young women who posted video clips of themselves dancing, Hojabri was arrested, jailed without due process and without an opportunity to defend herself, and publicly shamed with a televised confession of her “crime.”

Hojabri’s dancing videos on Instagram made her a popular figure on Instagram in Iran, and gained her hundreds of thousands of followers on the social media platform. Imagine, if she were living in the West, how she would be treated. She would likely have been considered talented, have had opportunities thrown at her, been invited on popular shows and be sponsored for radio and television programs.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Overthrow the Church of Leftist Guilt By Karl Notturno

Posted By on August 18th, 2018

https://amgreatness.com/2018/08/17/overthrow-the-church

For the past couple of decades, Leftists have used guilt masterfully to convince Americans to vote against the interests of their country. They set forward some lofty and idealistic vision of what justice in America should be, typically using language generic enough to be palatable to both sides. Then they focus on all of the ways we have fallen short of this goal, ignoring the fact that we have gotten much closer than almost any other country or culture in history. And then they offer an opportunity for penance and salvation—keep voting for them and you will continue to be absolved of your sins.

But Democrats still need the vague feel-good vision of America to appeal to voters’ patriotism—it’s hard to run a country that you hate. And so they use aspirational language effectively to campaign while hiding their overwhelming disgust with the nation. They have never been proud of America. They are only proud of what America could be if everyone capitulated to their demands.

Mainstream liberals do not advertise this fact loudly, but they don’t hide it, either. John Kerry chose the slogan Let America be America Again for his presidential campaign—a phrase from a Langston Hughes poem that describes an idealized America, laments that it’s never fulfilled these lofty goals, and finally admits that “America never was America” to him. Michelle Obama famously remarked, during her husband’s first presidential campaign, that it was the first time that she was proud of her country. And, of course, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo—a possible contender for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination—said this week, “We’re not going to make America great again. It was never that great.”

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Beware Jeremy Corbyn and His American Apostles By Christopher Gage

Posted By on August 18th, 2018

https://amgreatness.com/2018/08/18/beware-jeremy-corbyn

Donating £3 to the campaign of Jeremy Corbyn for Labour Party leader was, at the time, the best money I had ever spent.

Fresh from their second election loss in a row, Labour’s mild ineptitude was about to translate into hilarious farce. One which I, and many other conservatives, were all too keen to cement into a laughing stock sure to punctuate the decades ahead with regular dizzying mirth.

For the princely sum of £3 (less than the price of a pint) one could ensure the new Labour leader would be Corbyn, a bedraggled know-nothing backbencher whose terrific dullness would condemn his party to decades of nothing.

Back then, in 2015, Corbyn managed to squeeze onto the leadership ballot via charitable Labour MPs naively hoping to “widen the debate.” It went terribly wrong.

Getting wind of Corbyn’s glittering Marxist résumé, left-wing activists deserted the likes of Great Britain’s Communist party to stump up that tiny sum for a say in the future of the only other party with a chance of meaningful power.

Corbyn won in a near 60 percent landslide. (And increased that figure in a re-do). His supporters were muted only by raucous #ToriesForCorbyn then giddily convinced Labour was castrated.

The victor, after all, was everything that made Labour unelectable for what their party’s sensible and shrinking sect billed the “wilderness years”—18 years of irrelevance as Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher raged on.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Gender Confusion: A Tool of the Left By Peter Skurkiss See Video

Posted By on August 18th, 2018

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/08/gender_confusion_a_tool_of_the_left.html

The Democratic Party has gone off the deep end in many more ways than just pushing socialism. One sign is the fanatical embrace of identity politics, which has become the hallmark of the Party of Obama (POO). Look at Vermont. There, the Democrats’ primary race for governor was won by Christine Hallquist.

What is unusual is that Hallquist calls himself a “transgender woman.” To put it more accurately and without any politically correct gloss, Hallquist is a male pretending to be a woman. His pretending isn’t all that convincing, as evidenced by this YouTube clip from Time magazine.

It’s worth a minute’s time to see Hallquist to connect a face and a voice to the name and see what the Democrats are pushing.

Yes, Hallquist is a man in spite of any superficial changes he has made to his appearance. The chromosomes of the cells in his body haven’t changed, and he can’t erase the fact that he fathered three children when he was known as David Hallquist. Now, it is one thing for an individual to assert himself to be a woman and to act the part. There are always oddities. However, it is something entirely different for a major political party to put forward such a confused person for a high-level position as governor of a state.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Blue State ‘Charity’ Rubbing SALT into the wounds of school-choice scholarships.

Posted By on August 18th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/blue-state-charity-1534546826

Any day now the IRS will release new rules that address efforts by states including Connecticut, Oregon, New York and New Jersey to evade last year’s tax reform by masking tax payments as charitable contributions. The danger is that nonprofit scholarship organizations that are funded in part by tax credits could end up as collateral damage.

The issue arises because certain states—mostly left-leaning—have been looking for gimmicks to claw back the state and local deductions that were capped at $10,000 in the new tax reform. State politicians understand that because taxpayers can no longer fully deduct their high state taxes on federal forms, they are going to pay a higher price for their states’ big-spending ways.

Governors such as New York’s Andrew Cuomo have concocted a scheme to get around this. Essentially they’ve set up fake charities, which would collect in charitable contributions money that taxpayers formerly deducted from their federal taxes—which the states would then use to pay for state programs. Because the tax reform didn’t cap charitable deductions, taxpayers would effectively be taking a charitable deduction as a substitute for their formerly unlimited state and local tax deductions.

The IRS is rightly skeptical and in May issued Notice 2018-54 indicating it would adopt new regulations for such proposals. The danger now is that these new rules will not distinguish between “charities” that are really government fronts to collect taxes and Scholarship Granting Organizations that are not government entities, that do not funnel money back to the state, and that were set up by the states to expand opportunities for students.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Kofi Annan, Former United Nations Secretary-General, Dies at 80 He died after a short, unspecified illness R.I.P.

Posted By on August 18th, 2018

NO COMMENT….RSK HE DID LOOK GREAT IN A TUXEDO

MEDIA Comments turned off

The Press Abets a Coverup There is much to know about America’s own spies in 2016, but it would be impolitic to ask. By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

Posted By on August 18th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-press-abets-a-coverup-1534544446?cx_testId=16&cx_testVariant=cx&cx_artPos=3&cx_tag=collabctx&cx_navSource=newsReel#cxrecs_s

The two biggest shoes are yet to drop in the 2016 investigations. We still don’t know the origins and back story of the intercepted Russian intelligence document that was pivotal in James Comey’s unprecedented, ill-advised and possibly decisive (according to numerous Democratic and independent election analysts) interventions in the presidential race.

Depending on what report you credit, the information was false, it was planted by the Russians, or it accurately indicated an illegal conspiracy to obstruct justice by the Clinton campaign and Obama Attorney General Loretta Lynch. If it was a Russian fabrication, then Mr. Comey was spoofed by the Kremlin into his improper intervention in the race. If the parties to the incepted exchange were simply misinformed, it’s hard to understand Mr. Comey’s reason for intervening.

Presumably some of the questions are answered in a still-secret annex to the inspector general’s report that criticized Mr. Comey’s performance, but even that won’t tell us everything we need to know. What did fellow intelligence agencies, such as the CIA, tell the FBI about this intercept? What did they advise Mr. Comey to do?

P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

Gender Is a Construct—Except When It’s Not For academic feminists, male and female biology is either interchangeable or immutable, depending on what complaint they need to lodge. Heather Mac Donald

Posted By on August 17th, 2018

https://www.city-journal.org/html/gender-construct-16117.html

A foundational tenet of academic feminism holds that alleged differences between males and females are socially constructed. This credo usually maximizes the opportunities for charging sexism, yet it will be discarded in an instant if acknowledging the innate biological and psychological differences between men and women yields an additional trove of feminist complaint. The current issue of the Yale Alumni Magazine shows how the game is played.

For years, medical research neglected “sex and gender differences” in health, according to the magazine. “Historically, the narrative of medicine has been driven by data derived from white men around the age of 40,” the associate dean for curriculum at the Yale Medical School told the magazine’s reporter. Clinical trials only occasionally included females and when they did, the results were rarely analyzed by sex. It’s mysterious why this alleged neglect should matter, if sex differences are “socially constructed.” If males and females are the same psychologically and physically before the patriarchy starts assigning sex roles, then medical research need not distinguish between males and females, either.

It turns out, however, that males and females differentially respond to stress, environmental risk factors, drugs, and disease, as an initiative called Women’s Health Research at Yale devotes itself to documenting. Among the relevant findings:

Two-thirds of all Alzheimer’s patients are female;

Seventy-five percent of people with autoimmune disorders are female;

Females are less likely to develop Parkinson’s disease;

Adult females have twice the rate of depression as adult males;

Females have outbreaks of genital herpes at higher rates than males;

Male and female brains respond differently to early childhood neglect, with males losing gray matter in areas governing impulse control and females losing gray matter in areas governing emotion;

Women are more likely to abuse alcohol after trauma;

Males and females smoke for different reasons and have correspondingly different success rates with the nicotine patch;

The X and Y sex chromosomes, whose pairing determines a person’s sex, influence how the other 23 chromosomes in each cell read the genetic instructions contained in DNA.

MEDIA Comments turned off

Obama’s “N Word” Tape Went Public and the Media Covered It Up There have been a thousand times as many news stories about the hypothetical existence of a Trump “N Word” tape as there are about the real and verified existence of the Obama-Farrakhan photo. August 17, 2018 Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on August 17th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/271064/obamas-n-word-tape-went-public-and-media-covered-daniel-greenfield

Even though the media admits that Omarosa has less credibility than a drunken sailor on shore leave, it keeps buzzing about the existence of a Trump “N Word” tape.

Does it exist? Doesn’t it exist? Will it change anything?

Obama’s own equivalent of the “N Word” tape was released after his time in office. It was a photo of him posing with Louis Farrakhan, the racist and anti-Semitic leader of the Nation of Islam. Farrakhan had praised Hitler and was the head of a hate group that believes white people are devils, created by genetic engineering, who will be wiped out.

That’s a whole lot worse than a racial slur. (Obama’s mentor Jeremiah Wright, whose black nationalist church the Obamas had attended, used his own racial slurs during services.)

The photo was released. And the media embargoed it. A handful of publications mentioned it.

To this date, no reporter has directly asked Obama about it.

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Dereliction of Leadership Imperils Military By Mike Berry

Posted By on August 17th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/08/army-chaplain-disciplined-for-following-rules-threat-to-religious-liberty/

An Army chaplain and his assistant may be disciplined for following his denomination’s rules while accommodating a same-sex couple.

In my 16 years in the U.S. Marine Corps, both on active duty and now in the reserve, I have had the privilege of serving with many fine officers. I know firsthand that the difference between life and death is often a matter of leadership. Whether in combat or in training, strong and decisive leadership inspires confidence, improves morale, and contributes to the ethos of professionalism that has made the U.S. military the finest fighting force in the world.

As director of military affairs for a religious-liberty law firm, I have recently observed a disturbing trend that, if left unchecked, threatens to weaken our military from within. What began as passive-aggressive political correctness has devolved into open hostility to religious liberty in the military. Recent disturbing events within the U.S. Army are a perfect example of both.

An Army investigator under the command of Major General Kurt Sonntag recommended that Army chaplain Scott Squires be found guilty of “dereliction of duty” for rescheduling a marriage retreat that Squires is prohibited from facilitating so that another chaplain could handle it. A same-sex couple had registered for the retreat, and Squires is endorsed by the Southern Baptist Convention’s North American Mission Board (NAMB), which prohibits its chaplains from conducting marriage-related events for same-sex couples. NAMB’s policy clearly states that “endorsed chaplains will not conduct or attend a wedding ceremony for any same-sex couple, bless such a union or perform counseling in support of such a union . . . nor offer any kind of relationship training or retreat, on or off a military installation.”