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Female Genital Mutilation USA: Where Is the Outrage? By Elizabeth Nahas

Posted By on August 29th, 2017

Several years ago, when I heard about Female Genital Mutilation, FGM, I thought I had been mistaken. The idea that such an atrocity taking place in modern times could not be reconciled with my naive thinking at the time. After reading Alice Walker’s book, Possessing the Secret of Joy, I realized this hideous act toward women was alive and well in the third world countries of Africa practiced among Muslims and some Christians alike. What I could not wrap my head around was the silence from the western world against this barbarism. In addition, as I learned more about the various layers of intrusiveness in FGM, I became even more disturbed by excuses made in the name of religion and culture.

A couple of decades ago, a friend in the mental health field told me a startling but unsubstantiated piece of information. In the 1980s, long before FGM came to light in the Western world, she heard from other colleagues that a few American physicians in a large metropolis performed FGM on the daughters of wealthy Middle Easterners willing to pay the price. Although she was adamant her sources were reliable, I had difficulty believing this. Now, I think, perhaps there was some truth to her story. We will never really know. What we recognize, however, is this hideous action, a crime against humanity, is being performed right beneath our noses in the Midwest and, possibly, other parts of the U.S. If it is not being activated on U.S. soil itself, American girls are being sent away for “vacation cutting.” These young girls are sent home to countries which turn a blind eye toward this primitive ritual. Even though Egypt is trying to curtail the practice, it is included among these countries having over 90 percent of women who undergo FGM.

According to Equality Now:

The federal law addressing FGM in the U.S.: 18 U.S. Code § 116 ‘Female Genital Mutilation’ makes it illegal to:

• Perform FGM in the U.S.

• Knowingly transport a girl out of the U.S. for the purpose of inflicting FGM.

This law began in 1996 regarding the performance of FGM in the U.S., but it was not until the last couple of years the transportation action that is taking your daughter for “vacation cutting” was criminalized.

As an added protection, under half of the states have laws criminalizing this practice. Recently, Maine’s state representatives, mainly Democrats, narrowly defeated a bill to join these other states. The Portland Press Herald reports:

The debate over the bill, L.D. 745, was not whether the practice happens worldwide but rather whether it is occurring in Maine, particularly inside the state’s growing communities of African immigrants.

“I do not believe that it is happening in the state of Maine. I truly do not believe that,” said Rep. Lois Galgay Reckitt, D-South Portland. “And I believe if it was happening, it would be prosecuted vigorously by the federal (laws) or by the abuse statutes in this state.”

But Rep. Heather Sirocki, R-Scarborough, said that since introducing the bill she has heard from numerous people i

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Behind the Bedlam in Berkeley Antifa activists believe in censorship and don’t rule out violence, as they showed again Sunday.

Posted By on August 29th, 2017

Politically charged street brawls broke out in Berkeley, California, on Sunday, with police arresting 13 charming participants on charges including assault with a deadly weapon. One Twitter video showed masked activists kicking a man curled in fetal position on the ground; the beat-down stopped only when a journalist, Al Letson, shielded the man with his body. “I was scared they were going to kill him,” Mr. Letson said.

As Charlottesville drew attention to the worst elements of the far right, Sunday’s melee revealed an increasingly violent fringe of the radical left that has received far less media coverage, much less criticism. It’s called Antifa, pronounced “An-tee-fa,” which is short for “anti-fascist.”
***

Antifa members sometimes claim their movement spans the globe and dates to the 1920s and ’30s, citing the 1936 Battle of Cable Street, where protesters shut down a march by the British Union of Fascists. But in the United States and Britain, Antifa grew in the 1980s primarily out of the punk rock scene. As Nazi and white supremacist skinheads became a bigger part of this largely un-policed subculture, far-leftists met violence with violence, calling it self-defense.

As it grew beyond punk, Antifa’s adherents organized through the now-defunct Anti-Racist Action network and now sometimes through the Torch Network, as well as other less visible groups. Many activists also aligned themselves with the broader anti-globalization movement. But Donald Trump’s election has become the catalyst launching Antifa into a broader political movement.

The Antifa members we’ve interviewed shun the Democratic Party label, saying their activism constitutes its own political orientation. They’re mostly anarchists and anarcho-communists, and they often refer to fellow protesters as “comrades.” Adherents typically despise the government and corporate America alike, seeing police as defenders of both and thus also legitimate targets.

The anti-fascist anarchist website CrimethInc.com recently summarized its philosophy: “In this state of affairs, there is no such thing as nonviolence—the closest we can hope to come is to negate the harm or threat posed by the proponents of top-down violence . . . so instead of asking whether an action is violent, we might do better to ask simply: does it counteract power disparities, or reinforce them?”

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Name-Calling Critics Fail to Refute ZOA’s Concerns About McMaster by Morton A. Klein, Elizabeth Berney and Daniel Mandel

Posted By on August 29th, 2017

The Zionist Organization of America’s August 2017 report detailed US National Security Chief General H.R. McMaster’s troubling record regarding Iran, Israel and radical Islamist terrorism. McMaster’s statements and actions appear to be diametrically opposed to President Donald Trump’s support for Israel, opposition to the Iran nuclear deal and determination to name and combat radical Islamist terrorism.https://www.algemeiner.com/2017/08/27/name-calling-critics-fail-to-refute-zoas-concerns-about-mcmaster/

Critics of ZOA’s report have failed to show that ZOA’s report was wrong in any substantive respect. The criticisms have amounted to name-calling against ZOA, and McMaster’s friends vouching for his character — which is irrelevant to the vital policy issues addressed in ZOA’s report.

McMaster reportedly wrongly refers to the existence of a Palestinian state before 1947 — when no Palestinian state ever existed, and maligns Israel as an “illegitimate,” “occupying power.” In fact, Israel’s re-establishment in 1948 and her self-defensive capture of Judea/Samaria (West Bank) in 1967 were both legal under binding international law, and deprived no country of its sovereign territory.

McMaster wrongly claimed that President Trump would recognize “Palestinian self determination” during his visit to Israel; reportedly opposed President Trump’s visit to Jerusalem’s Western Wall, refused to state that the Western Wall is in Israel, and insisted that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could not accompany President Trump to the Western Wall.

NATO must stand for Western values. Vladimir Putin’s shameful “Zapad 17” military exercise, in regions bordering the eastern democratic lands of NATO and…

And alarmingly, when Israel installed metal detectors at Jerusalem’s Temple Mount after Palestinian terrorists smuggled in firearms and murdered two Israeli policemen, McMaster, according to a senior defense official, described this as “just another excuse by the Israelis to repress the Arabs.”

In his short tenure at the National Security Council (NSC), General McMaster has fired or removed from the NSC six staunchly pro-Israel/anti-Iran officials: Steve Bannon; K.T. McFarland; Adam Lovinger; Rich Higgins, Derek Harvey and Ezra Cohen-Watnick.

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FIFA and International Olympic Committee Furthering Racism, Terror? by A. Z. Mohamed

Posted By on August 29th, 2017

Palestinian Media Watch stated that “FIFA has a clear double standard when responding to violations of its statutes. PMW has reviewed hundreds of decisions of the Court of Arbitration for Sports (CAS) (the highest court for sport) and has learned that FIFA and the football community act forcefully to punish even minor violations when committed by other football clubs or even their fans. Yet the PFA’s and Rajoub’s racism and terror promotion, all serious violations, are being ignored by FIFA.”

Swift action must be taken to remove Jibril Rajoub from his posts, and the Palestinian Authority needs to be pressured to replace him with someone whose passion for sports and sportsmanship exceeds that of his lust for Jewish blood. If this is not undertaken, FIFA should oust the Palestinian Football Association (PFA) from its ranks.

The same applies to the International Olympic Committee, which has a duty to remain true to its mission — “to contribute to building a peaceful and better world by educating youth through sport practiced without discrimination of any kind and in the Olympic spirit, which requires mutual understanding with a spirit of friendship, solidarity and fair play.” It has to threaten the Palestinian Olympic Committee that it will be ousted unless it rids itself of dangerous radicals such as Rajoub.

In its latest violation of the International Olympic Committee’s Code of Ethics in particular and the spirit of sports in general, Palestinian boxer Sultan Abu Al-Haj recently forfeited a match because it was against an Israeli — Druze contender, Amit Madah.

When asked recently by an interviewer on official Palestinian Authority television why he had “refused” to compete in the August 8, 2017 match at the Youth Muaythai World Championships in Bangkok, Abu Al-Haj replied:

“I didn’t make the decision. It’s my coaches and the [Palestinian] Olympic Committee that made the decision, and as an athlete, I cannot oppose them…The decision was reached that it is forbidden to compete with [Israelis] because it’s beneath my dignity and dishonorable to compete with them and recognize them [sic] the State of Israel.”

The Palestinian Olympic Committee (POC) is headed by Fatah Central committee Secretary Jibril Rajoub, a senior Palestinian Authority (PA) leader. As the research organization Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) has documented extensively, Rajoub — who also heads the Palestinian Football Association (PFA) — does not use sports as a means to building bridges or establishing peaceful relations between the PA and Israel, but rather as an additional tool to demonize the Jewish people and the Jewish state.

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Afghanistan: How We See It vs. How They See It by Nonie Darwish

Posted By on August 29th, 2017

CNN International, which is widely watched in the Muslim world, has not been fair to the American position in the current clash between Islam and the West and Israel. Western media have a strong presence in the Middle East but refuse to bring much needed enlightenment to the Muslim public, and explain that the West has a legitimate right to self-defense against Islamic jihadist terrorism. As a result, the majority of Muslims in the Middle East, and many in the West, have no clue why America is in Afghanistan and why Syria is a huge security threat to Western nations.

After the invasion of Afghanistan, Islamic propaganda told Muslims that the US was intentionally poisoning its humanitarian food supplies in order to hurt the Afghani people. My own cousin, who received a good education in Cairo, called during the Afghan war to ask, “Why is the US poisoning Afghanis?”

It is hard for the Western mind to understand why the Muslim leadership and media are frantically trying to keep the public hostile and misinformed as to why the US is in Afghanistan. It is because the truth about violent jihad against the West launched from Afghanistan must be hidden and protected. There is an Islamic law that commands every Muslim head of state to conduct jihad and never abandon that sacred Islamic duty. Sharia dictates that leaders who refuse to conduct and support jihad must be removed from office. Such uncompromising Sharia laws regarding jihad imposed on Muslim heads of states are ignored and not taken seriously by Western leaders and the media.

It was refreshing to hear President Donald J. Trump define without reservation a US mission to fight terrorism and prevent Afghanistan from once again becoming a safe haven for Al-Qaeda, or any other terror groups, when he summarized the US presence in Afghanistan as no longer about nation-building, but rather about “killing terrorists.”

Many Americans, however, are still confused regarding our mission in Afghanistan. This is mainly because the media in general did little to keep the public informed of the complexities of the Middle East and to stay focused on why, after 9/11, the US needed to destroy the safe havens of Al-Qaeda and other terror groups.

Reporting on Afghanistan — not just in the Arab media but also, unfortunately, by many in the US media – often appeared to portray America as the aggressor. That was perhaps a factor in why President George W. Bush overcompensated by including “nation-building” as part of the US mission in Afghanistan. Even though nation-building worked brilliantly in Japan, Germany and South Korea, it unfortunately has failed so far in Muslim nations, which clearly do not want to be “rescued” by infidels.

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How to Get Out of the Iran Nuclear Deal by John R. Bolton

Posted By on August 28th, 2017

Although candidate Donald Trump repeatedly criticized Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear agreement, his administration has twice decided to remain in the deal. It so certified to Congress, most recently in July, as required by law. Before the second certification, Trump asked repeatedly for alternatives to acquiescing yet again in a policy he clearly abhorred. But no such options were forthcoming, despite “a sharp series of exchanges” between the president and his advisers, as the New York Times and similar press reports characterized it.

Many outside the administration wondered how this was possible: Was Trump in control, or were his advisers? Defining a compelling rationale to exit Obama’s failed nuclear deal and elaborating a game plan to do so are quite easy. In fact, Steve Bannon asked me in late July to draw up just such a game plan for the president — the option he didn’t have — which I did.

Here it is. It is only five pages long, but like instant coffee, it can be readily expanded to a comprehensive, hundred-page playbook if the administration were to decide to leave the Iran agreement. There is no need to wait for the next certification deadline in October. Trump can and should free America from this execrable deal at the earliest opportunity.

I offer the paper now as a public service, since staff changes at the White House have made presenting it to President Trump impossible. Although he was once kind enough to tell me “come in and see me any time,” those days are now over.

If the president is never to see this option, so be it. But let it never be said that the option didn’t exist.
Abrogating the Iran Deal: The Way Forward
I. Background

The Trump Administration is required to certify to Congress every 90 days that Iran is complying with the July 2015 nuclear deal (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action — JCPOA), and that this agreement is in the national-security interest of the United States.[1] While a comprehensive Iranian policy review is currently underway, America’s Iran policy should not be frozen. The JCPOA is a threat to U.S. national-security interests, growing more serious by the day. If the President decides to abrogate the JCPOA, a comprehensive plan must be developed and executed to build domestic and international support for the new policy.

Under the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act of 2015, the President must certify every 90 days that:

(i) Iran is transparently, verifiably, and fully implementing the agreement, including all related technical or additional agreements;

(ii) Iran has not committed a material breach with respect to the agreement or, if Iran has committed a material breach, Iran has cured the material breach;

(iii) Iran has not taken any action, including covert activities, that could significantly advance its nuclear weapons program; and

(iv) Suspension of sanctions related to Iran pursuant to the agreement is –

(I) appropriate and proportionate to the specific and verifiable measures taken by Iran with respect to terminating its illicit nuclear program; and

(II) vital to the national-security interests of the United States.

U.S. leadership here is critical, especially through a diplomatic and public education effort to explain a decision not to certify and to abrogate the JCPOA. Like any global campaign, it must be persuasive, thorough, and accurate. Opponents, particularly those who participated in drafting and implementing the JCPOA, will argue strongly against such a decision, contending that it is reckless, ill-advised, and will have negative economic and security consequences.

Accordingly, we must explain the grave threat to the U.S. and our allies, particularly Israel. The JCPOA’s vague and ambiguous wording; its manifest imbalance in Iran’s direction; Iran’s significant violations; and its continued, indeed, increasingly, unacceptable conduct at the strategic level internationally demonstrate convincingly that the JCPOA is not in the national-security interests of the United States. We can bolster the case for abrogation by providing new, declassified information on Iran’s unacceptable behavior around the world.

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Academia is heading off the Left cliff. Can it be steered to safety? by Washington Examiner

Posted By on August 28th, 2017

We’ve seen fires and riots in recent years, but it’s unlikely that tensions on America’s college campuses have yet reached their peak. As students return to campus for the 2017-2018 academic year, be prepared for more chaos that will crowd out learning.

There will be more canceled lectures, more censorship, more protests, more vandalism, and more violence.

For conservatives disillusioned by the increasingly incomprehensible and toxic brand of leftism rising in academia, it’s dangerous to simply dismiss this behavior as the sad inchoate spasms of immature youth. This is a serious movement grounded in a clear and dangerous philosophy.

The anti-liberal mindset of today’s campus liberals has precipitated the rewriting of our political vernacular, the effects of which have already rippled into newsrooms, corporations, and political offices.

Why are conservative student organizations routinely referred to as “hate groups” and bastions of “white supremacy?” Why, on campuses, is it “racist” to wear sombreros on Cinco de Mayo or host Egypt-themed fraternity parties?

Why, for that matter, did fired Google engineer James Damore’s anodyne memorandum on ideological diversity constitute an act of “violence” against women? Furthermore, why is Google sending weekly emails to employees raising awareness of “microaggressions”?

These are the effects of rampant political correctness, yes. But political correctness is a symptom of the campus Left’s deliberate effort to broaden the definitions of the terms “violence,” “bigotry,” “hate,” “racism,” and “white supremacy,” so as to impugn everyone’s conduct and narrow the bounds of permissible dissent to include only their own way of thinking about anything.

Concepts such as privilege, oppression, and violence have been broadened to implicate everyone belonging to a historically enfranchised group in the systematic subjugation of minorities.

White supremacy, for most Americans, likely conjures images of the Ku Klux Klan marching with torches or skinheads tattooed with swastikas spewing bigotry. When most of us think racism, we think of separate drinking fountains or those harrowing pictures of police dogs attacking our fellow Americans in the streets. We may even think of Philando Castile’s shooting, or of birtherism, or of people who remind us of Archie Bunker.

It’s certainly true that racism and white supremacy rear their ugly heads outside these confines. Well-intentioned people can make hurtful mistakes, sometimes subtly, in their interactions with those who experience discrimination. But lumping in proponents of stricter immigration laws or conservative writers such as Heather Mac Donald with proponents of genocide is objectively ridiculous. And, of course, it also fans the flames of conflict on campuses. Conservative students told that standard center-right views are not only wrong but actually justify violence against them, are even more prone to challenge their censorious peers by embracing any forbidden idea they stumble across, including the ones that are actually bad.

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A Tale of Two Labor MPs By Bruce Bawer

Posted By on August 28th, 2017

“These recent developments have made at least one thing clear: in Britain’s Labour Party, it’s OK to call for the destruction of Israel and for the silencing of child rape victims – the one thing you can’t do is tell the truth about Islam.”

The other day, I noted on this site that “thousands of pedophile rapes aren’t enough to snap the British establishment out of its reprehensible PC equivocation about Islam.” Underscoring the pathological level of denial about the connection between Islam and so-called “grooming” gangs is a recent controversy – or, more correctly, pair of controversies – involving two female Labour MPs.

Sarah Champion represents Rotherham and until recently was shadow secretary of state for women and qualities; Naz Shah represents Bradford West and is a key ally of Labour honcho Jeremy Corbyn.

Rotherham, it will be remembered, is the city in which it was discovered that more than 1,400 non-Muslim girls had been raped, over a period of many years, by gangs of Muslim men. Police, social workers, and other public officials knew about this mass atrocity for a long time, but kept mum for fear of being called racist. Rape victims who sought to report the crimes committed against them were told that they were racist.

Eventually at least some of the Rotherham perpetrators were brought to justice, and similar patterns of activity were discovered in other cities across Britain. But an air of unease continues to envelop the whole issue. People don’t want to talk about it, and they especially don’t to mention the fact that the rapists share a common religion and nation of origin.

In an August 10 article for The Sun, Sarah Champion sought to confront this discomfort. “Britain,” she began, “has a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls.” She continued:

There. I said it. Does that make me a racist? Or am I just prepared to call out this horrifying problem for what it is?

For too long we have ignored the race of these abusers and, worse, tried to cover it up.

No more. These people are predators and the common denominator is their ethnic heritage.

We have to have grown-up conversations, however unpalatable, or in six months’ time we will be having this same scenario all over again.

Champion went on to outline her own experience with the issue. Not long after being elected to Parliament in 2012, she attended a committee meeting at which members of the Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council sought to “justify their failure to protect young girls who were victims of this vile crime.” Her response? “I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.”

She launched an inquiry, and found critical problems in both police departments and courts that desperately needed to be addressed. In February 2015, she presented then-Prime Minister David Cameron and his cabinet with a plan for preventing further abuse. But nothing happened. Today “we have warm words and still no action.” Which, she explained, was why she was writing this article.

Note, by the way, one key detail about Champion’s article: she dared to point out that most of the rapists were Pakistanis – but she made no mention of Islam. Apparently she wasn’t willing to go that far.

In any event, her reticence on this point didn’t save her. She’d written the article in an effort to spark official action. Well, it worked – although not in the way she hoped. The article caused a firestorm. So did a brief follow-up column by Sun writer Trevor Kavanagh, who praised Champion for her outspokenness.

In response, Naz Shah drafted an open letter that condemned Kavanagh for using “Nazi-like language” to describe Islam. In fact, he hadn’t even mentioned Islam; his article could hardly have been tamer. But Shah got over a hundred MPs to sign her letter: such is the madness that has taken hold of the world’s oldest parliament.

Champion, feeling the heat, promptly apologized for her article, claimed that The Sun had “stripped” it of “nuance” (in reply, The Sun maintained that she had been “thrilled” with it), and threw Kavanagh under the bus (his column, she charged, was “repulsive and extreme Islamophobic”).

But her mea culpa proved insufficient. Party leader Jeremy Corbyn offered her a choice: resign as shadow minister or be fired. She quit.CONTINUE ST SITE

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

The Feds and the Frog: Private Landowners Stand to Lose on 1,500 Acres The government estimates that regulatory restrictions could cost one family $34 million. By Reed Hopper & Mark Miller —

Posted By on August 28th, 2017

Imagine waking one day and learning that federal officials have declared your private property subject to federal control as “critical habitat” for an endangered frog, even though the frog does not and cannot exist on the property or, apparently, anywhere else in the state.

That is the surreal fate of the Poitevent family, owners of a parcel of land in St. Tammany Parish, La., that has been in the family for more than 100 years. The family started a lumber business on the property after the Civil War. The land is still managed for timber today.

A few years ago, the U.S Fish and Wildlife Service declared the property “essential” to the survival of the Mississippi gopher frog, aptly named, as it’s found only in Mississippi. Only later, when federal officials decided to expand the frog’s territory into Louisiana, did they give it the name it bears today: the dusky gopher frog.

But there is nothing apt about designating over 1,500 acres of private land “critical habitat” when the property is not used as habitat, is unsuitable as habitat, and has no direct connection to the dusky gopher frog.

Federal regulators don’t deny any of this. Instead, they express the hope that the Poitevents’ property can be modified at some point to become hospitable habitat for frogs. This is pure speculation, because the property is tied up in timber leases for decades and may never be usable habitat. Rather than acquire the property so it can be managed for species protection, the government seeks to impose the cost of species conservation on the landowners, who did nothing to put the gopher frog in peril.

Although the property provides no conservation benefit to the gopher frog, the government estimates that the regulatory restrictions on the landowners could cost them $34 million.

A federal district judge took a dim view of this costly land grab, calling it “troubling,” “harsh,” and “remarkably intrusive,” with “all the hallmarks of governmental insensitivity to private property.” Nevertheless, the judge felt “compelled” to defer to the government and allow the “critical habitat” designation to go forward.

On appeal, a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit also deferred to the government, by a 2–1 vote. However, the dissenting judge argued that if regulators can declare that the Poitevents’ non-habitat property is “critical habitat,” the same could happen to any property owner, anywhere. This outcome defied both logic and the law, the judge insisted.

On an 8–6 vote, the full Fifth Circuit declined to review the panel decision. In a stinging, 32-page opinion, the six dissenters called the panel decision an “execrable” misinterpretation of the Endangered Species Act and said it ran contrary to Supreme Court precedent.

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Governor Andrew Cuomo’s preposterous renewable-energy plan threatens Long Island’s fishing industry. Robert Bryce

Posted By on August 28th, 2017

Nat Miller and Jim Bennett didn’t have much time to chat. It was about 8:45 on a sunny Sunday morning in early May, and they were loading their gear onto two boats—a 20-foot skiff with a 115-horsepower outboard, and an 18-foot sharpie with a 50-horse outboard—at Lazy Point, on the southern edge of Napeague Bay, on the South Fork of Long Island. “We are working against the wind and the tide,” Miller said as he shook my hand.

The men had already caught a fluke the size of a doormat and were eager for more. Miller and Bennett are Bonackers, a name for a small group of families who were among eastern Long Island’s earliest Anglo settlers. The Bonackers are some of America’s most storied fishermen. They’ve been profiled several times, most vividly by Peter Matthiessen in his 1986 book Men’s Lives. Miller’s roots in the area go back 13 generations, Bennett’s 14. That morning, Miller and Bennett and five fellow fishermen were heading east to tend their “pound traps,” an ancient method of fishing in shallow water that uses staked enclosures to capture fish as they migrate along the shore. Miller and Bennett were likely to catch scup, bass, porgies, and other species.

If Governor Andrew Cuomo gets his way, though, they and other commercial fishermen on the South Fork may need to look for a new line of work. An avid promoter of renewable energy, Cuomo hopes to install some 2,400 megawatts of wind turbines off New York’s coast, covering several hundred square miles of ocean; a bunch of those turbines will go smack on top of some of the best fisheries on the Eastern Seaboard. One of the projects, led by a Manhattan-based firm, Deepwater Wind, could require plowing the bottom of Napeague Bay to make way for a high-voltage undersea cable connecting the proposed 90-megawatt South Fork wind project to the grid. The proposed 50-mile cable would come ashore near the Devon Yacht Club, a few miles west of the beach on which we were standing. “I have 11 traps, and all of them run parallel to where that cable is proposed to be run,” Miller says. “My grandfather had traps here,” he adds before shoving his skiff into the water. “I want no part of this at all.”

The mounting opposition to the development of offshore wind in Long Island’s waters is the latest example of the growing conflict between renewable-energy promoters and rural residents. Cuomo and climate-change activists love the idea of wind energy, but they’re not the ones having 500-, 600-, or even 700-foot-high wind turbines built in their neighborhoods or on top of their prime fishing spots. The backlash against Big Wind is evident in the numbers: since 2015, about 160 government entities, from Maine to California, have rejected or restricted wind projects. One recent example: on May 2, voters in three Michigan counties went to the polls to vote on wind-related ballot initiatives. Big Wind lost on every initiative.

Few states demonstrate the backlash better than New York. On May 10, the town of Clayton, in northern New York’s Jefferson County, passed an amendment to its zoning ordinance that bans all commercial wind projects. On Lake Ontario, a 200-megawatt project called Lighthouse Wind, headed by Charlottesville, Virginia–based Apex Clean Energy, faces opposition from three counties—Erie, Niagara, and Orleans—as well as the towns of Yates and Somerset. An analysis of media stories shows that, over the past decade or so, about 40 New York communities have shot down or curbed wind projects.

Cuomo started pushing offshore wind because he and his political allies realized that building massive amounts of new wind capacity onshore isn’t going to happen. In January, the governor contended that offshore wind poses none of the aesthetic problems that have made land-based projects so difficult. “Not even Superman standing on Montauk Point could see these wind farms,” he said. Maybe not; and maybe wealthy beachfront homeowners won’t be able to see the proposed turbines, but lots of fishermen will. And that has them spoiling for a fight.