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March 2016

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A Bad Night for Marco Rubio By Alexis Levinson

By on March 6th, 2016

Saturday night’s four nominating contests provided little clarity as to who has the edge in the race for the Republican nomination. But at the end of the night one thing was clear: It was a bad night for Marco Rubio.

Ten days before the Florida primary — the most important contest of the primary season for him — Rubio finished poorly across the board. Coming on the heels of a disappointing Super Tuesday, this lent ammunition to his opponents’ contention that the establishment spoke too soon in anointing him the best challenger to take on Donald Trump.

Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, and Maine all held nominating contests Saturday. Ted Cruz handily won the Kansas and Maine caucuses. Donald Trump beat out Cruz for narrow wins in the Louisiana primary and the Kentucky caucuses. In all of those contests, Rubio was a distant third — except in Maine, where he came in a distant fourth, behind John Kasich. In Louisiana and Maine, Rubio finished so far behind that he failed to meet the threshold necessary to receive any delegates at all.

To be sure, these four states were not expected to be Rubio strongholds. But he fell short even in areas where he ought to have done well. Kansas Republicans, for instance, expected that Rubio would win in Johnson County, the area around Kansas City. Instead, Cruz bested him there nearly two to one — 42 percent to 22 percent. Maine Republicans predicted that Rubio would finish behind Trump and Cruz in the state, but they expected him to perform more strongly in the Portland area. Instead, he finished in fourth place in the Portland-area caucus, trailing Cruz, Trump, and Kasich.

It’s the third night this week that headlines have proclaimed a disappointing night for Rubio. On Super Tuesday, he fell to Trump and Cruz in all but one state: Minnesota. On Thursday, he had a disappointing debate performance: Hoarse and fighting the flu, he climbed down into the mud pit to fight with Trump, and did not always emerge the victor. He earned criticism for contributing to the mayhem and was outshone by both Cruz and Kasich, who came off, by comparison, as the adults on the stage.

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World Council of Churches Struggles with the Truth – Again by Malcolm Lowe

By on March 6th, 2016

The open letter from the World Council of Churches (WCC) should have first quoted the three points from my article, then answered them one by one. Such a letter, however, was impossible, because all three points are simply and obviously correct. Instead, the WCC wrote a letter that completely ignored Tveit’s mistakes and falsely claimed that he was using only UN sources, apparently trusting that nobody would read my article.

If the WCC is truly thirsty for Palestinian water justice, why has it not rushed to the defense of Najat Abu Bakr?

Suppose, however, that the WCC wants to start a dialogue based on truth rather than “narratives.” Then there is a way for it to do so.

Two recent Gatestone Institute articles were addressed to the current campaign of the World Council of Churches (WCC) called “Seven Weeks of Water 2016.” In response, the WCC has issued an open letter to Gatestone. This author is responsible only for what his article stated. Conversely, we can examine the WCC’s response exclusively as referring to that article.

The article concerned the “sermon” preached by the General Secretary of the World Council of Churches (WCC), Olav Fykse Tveit, when he launched the campaign in a Jerusalem church. The sermon can be downloaded from the WCC’s website.

From this viewpoint, the WCC’s open letter contains a plainly false statement. It says: “The information and statistics we employ in the campaign are derived from United Nations sources. None are from the Palestinian Water Authority.”

Read the sermon from beginning to end and back, and you will find only one reference to a United Nations source: that the World Health Organization (WHO) recommends 100 liters of water per day per person (a target that is missed in many parts of the world). Regarding Palestinian water, Tveit’s “information and statistics” are drawn, as the sermon explicitly says, from the “advocacy group of Palestine, EWASH” (that is, from the Palestinian website “Thirsting for justice”). So, contrary to what the open letter states, Tveit’s sermon, which constituted the opening statement of the campaign and sets the tone for whatever follows, is based on a source openly engaged in pro-Palestinian agitation.

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Finland’s Immigration Crisis by Dawid Bunikowski

By on March 6th, 2016

The Tapanila gang-rape shocked the quiet Helsinki suburb, and all of Finland. Many wondered why these second-generation Somalis, citizens of Finland, would carry out such a savage attack.

The rapists were eventually brought to trial. One was sentenced to a year and four months imprisonment, two were given one-year prison sentences and two others were acquitted. Penalties were softened due to the age of the rapists.

“1,010 rapes were reported to the police in 2014, according to the Official Statistics of Finland. The number of suspected immigrants in these cases is about three times higher than of the suspected natives in relation to the population.” – Finland Today.

Hate speech is problematic: there is no clear definition, a lapse that leads to confusion and debates. Finns believe that freedom of speech should be absolute. Unsuccessful attempts to deregulate blasphemy as a religious crime took place between the 1910s until the 1990s.

Finland — an open country that prides itself on respecting different ways of life, cultures and religions — is being greatly tested by the wave of Middle Eastern asylum seekers.

Finland is a homogenous country that has roughly 5.5 million inhabitants, about 4% of which are foreign[1]. Twenty years ago, thousands of Somalis immigrated to Finland. In the last decade or so, more international students came to study, and more foreigners came to live and work.

Finnish universities and the academia are of a high level, and most Finns speak some English. But it is not easy for foreigners to find jobs. The barrier is the language: Finnish, like Hungarian, is a part of the Finno-Ugric languages, and difficult to learn.

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“An Overthrow of the Government”By Joan Swirsky – see note please

By on March 6th, 2016

I love and admire Joan Swirsky but this is not a matter of ” ballots not bullets”…..it is more a matter of “bullies and blowhards”…..Trump is a liar and a cur….rsk

Donald Trump’s success represents a peaceful “overthrow of the government” and that the Republican establishment should be glad it’s being achieved with “ballots not bullets.”
Sure enough, presidential candidate Donald J. Trump racked up impressive statistics in his Fox News debate tonight, effectively trouncing the competition that included Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, and Ohio Gov. John Kasich.

Once again, however, Fox’s Megyn “hell hath no fury like a woman scorned” Kelly ambushed Mr. Trump by falsely stating that the Better Business Bureau had given Trump University a D-minus rating, when in fact it’s rating is, as Trump asserted, an A!

Below is the Better Business Bureau report, with an “A” grade for Trump University.

The same trouncing happened last week when Trump’s victories in the primaries garnered him the lion’s share of electoral votes by winning Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Massachusetts, Tennessee, and Virginia, which, according to Philip Bump of The Washington Post, “no Republican has ever won…going back to 1960.”

Both pundits and pollsters attributed the massive turn-outs to Mr. Trump’s having excited, inspired and therefore mobilized the electorate—in some cases well over 100% increase above the 2012 midterms. In one instance, Mr. Trump beat Sen. Cruz by 450,000 votes; in another he beat Sen. Rubio by over a million votes! According to writers Bill Barrow and Emily Swanson, Trump had “significant support across educational, ideological, age and income classifications.”

In his victory speech last week, looking and sounding presidential, Mr. Trump accurately proclaimed: “We have expanded the Republican Party.”

This ought to have been music to the ears of Republicans everywhere, especially “establishment” types who constantly seek to attract influential voting blocs comprised of African-Americans, Hispanics, and young people, all of whom—mysteriously, incomprehensibly, self-destructively—have huddled under the Democrat tent for decades, gaining not a micrometer of progress in their personal lives, wages, schools, crime rates, the pathetic list is endless.

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DANIEL GREENFIELD: EVERYONE EXCEPT HILLARY CLINTON IS RACIST AND SEXIST

By on March 6th, 2016

If a state doesn’t vote for Hillary Clinton, it’s racist.

That’s the label that poor New Hampshire, the state just too white to appreciate the virtues of a white woman with dyed blonde hair who occasionally puts on a bad fake southern accent and switches from loving the Yankees to hating them, was stuck with after turning her down.

Sensing trouble up the road in Nevada, Clintonworld tried to accuse Nevada, a state with a sizable Latino population, of also being too white for Hillary. Then once Nevada voted the right way, its was suddenly just right enough.

Ex-Salon boss Joan Walsh suggested that Hillary Clinton was losing white voters because of second-hand racism from her time working for Obama. She’s losing men because they’re sexist and she’s losing women because, according to Gloria Steinem, they’re going ”where the boys are”. It won’t be long before the handful of black people who vote for Bernie Sanders are accused of “acting white”.

Hillary Clinton has turned into Tonya Harding; an obnoxious criminal who can’t stop making excuses, while towing around Bill Clinton as her Jeff Gillooly to kneecap her opponents with awkward attacks. After trying and failing to run on experience, the only thing she’s running on now is identity politics. And her campaign has tapped into the most repugnant and obnoxious politically correct smears.

If you don’t vote for Hillary Clinton, you’re a racist. If you’re a woman who doesn’t vote for her, you’re going to hell. If you ask her about her illegal email server or her speaking fees, you’re sexist.

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A CHRISTIAN PREACHER DEBATES MUSLIMS ABOUT MOHAMMED — ON THE GLAZOV GANG

By on March 6th, 2016

This special edition of The Glazov Gang was joined by Louis Lionheart, a Christian preacher and scholar of Islam who came on the show to discuss his experience of Debating Muslims about Mohammed on the Streets of Santa Monica. He unveils the problematic ingredients of Muslims’ arguments about their religion and shares the myriad forms of abuse and threats that have been heaped upon him.

Don’t miss it!

And make sure to watch Louis on the other special Glazov Gang episode, Muslim Woman Attacks Christian Preacher, in which he shares the assault he suffered when he dared to tell the truth about Mohammed and Aisha on 3rd. St. Promenade. (Video clip of the assault is played in the program):

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Steven Kates The Indispensable Roger Scruton

By on March 6th, 2016

The academic left and its idiocies pollute our intellectual environment, their near-unreadable nonsense restricting debate to the ever-censored essence of politically correct pedantry, as a genuinely great mind explains in an invaluable new book, ‘Fools, Frauds and Firebrands’
Fools, Frauds and Firebrands

by Roger Scruton
Bloomsbury, 2015, 304 pages, $35

You should read this book. No one else will tell you this, so I will. There has hardly been a more important book published over the past twelve months. If you sincerely wish to understand the times in which you live, there is no book like it. In describing it I will not be able to do it justice, since it provides a complex outline of the intellectual world that continues to promote the ideas of the Left, as inane and destructive as they are. But if you are to understand where these ideas come from, and why they continue to persist, you must read this book. There is no substitute anywhere that I know of. Read it.

The book has a specific purpose. It is to provide a way of escape to students who are caught up in various versions of a modern humanities course, where they are fed an endless mind-numbing postmodernist gruel. The book goes through the various manifestations of the modern Left to explain their idiocies and unravel the Newspeak in which they are encoded. But the book does more. It opens up to those of us who are only vaguely aware of the ways in which the humanities are now taught, our own entry into the depths of a problem most of us are, at best, only dimly aware of.

To use my own education as an example, I am not unaware of the forms of the postmodernism that surround us in the academic world. I meet it in the occasional seminar and come across it in various papers and presentations. Parts of it are almost common core, such as Thomas Kuhn’s notion that science is nothing other than what scientists do, and that the notion of something called “truth” is an entity impossible to discover. But it goes farther, to argue that truth is relative, that there is more than one way to skin an empirical fact. It goes farther still, and argues that even the facts we think we know are merely the product of the ideological world in which we have been raised. And it takes that one extra step to argue that to transcend our own bourgeois outlook, it is necessary to see the world liberated from our own limited backgrounds and instead, see things through the lens of Marxist thought.

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Kevin Donnelly Safe Schools’ Rainbow Is Mostly Red

By on March 6th, 2016

Sex education in our schools once consisted of clinical explanations of the mechanical. These days, as the Safe Schools scandal has demonstrated, lessons in what fits where are apt to be immersion courses in the discriminatory nature of oppressive capitalism.
The Commonwealth government’s Safe Schools Coalition program, directed at providing a more positive environment for “same-sex attracted, intersex and gender-diverse students” is being criticised for advocating radical views about gender and sexuality. Senator Cory Bernardi, from South Australia, describes the program as indoctrinating “children into a Marxist agenda of cultural relativism”. Senator Eric Abetz, from Tasmania, argues that it is “a program of social engineering where parents, when they get to understand what it is, rebel against it and in fact vote for their schools not to be involved”.

While there is no doubt that elements of the program involve a genuine attempt to reduce bullying and prejudice against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex (LGBTQI) students, Senators’ Abetz and Bernardi are correct in what they argue. The ideology underpinning the program and associated material reflects a cultural-left bias about gender and sexuality that has existed for many years. As I detailed in Why Our Schools Are Failing, published in 2004, the cultural left has long critiques Western capitalist society as ‘phallocentric’, ‘oppressive’ and ‘misogynist’. A rainbow alliance of cultural-left movements, including neo-Marxism, feminism, gender studies and queer theory argue that traditional views about sexuality and gender enforce a binary, hierarchical code that oppresses women and anyone who does not conform to society’s heterosexist expectations.

Examples quoted in Why Our Schools Are Failing include the University of Melbourne’s History Department’s course ‘The Body: History, Sex and Gender’, where students are introduced to “an understanding of the different readings of the body… of the construction of the slender body, the gay and lesbian body, and the gendered body of the late 20th century”. At a national conference of English teachers an academic, when referring to heterosexuality, argued: “I am proposing that this new form of hierarchical dualism can and should be resisted and challenged (by) using the English classroom as a site for resistance and interventionist strategies.”

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Alistair Pope Beijing and the South China Sea

By on March 6th, 2016

As a US battle group heads to area, the next war in Asia may be much closer than we care to imagine. With China’s claim to a few barren shoals and tiny islands representing the flint, the iron resolve of neighbouring nations to resist being reduced to vassal states may well see the region set ablaze.
The South China Sea is a key militarily strategic and economic waterway for the nations bordering it. The area’s economic importance is clear: roughly one-third of the world’s shipping sails through its waters and huge oil and gas reserves are believed to be found beneath its seabed. As there are few resources on the various sets of islands dotting its surface, many not much more than tidal shoals, and because there is almost no fresh water on any of them, they have remained uninhabited, except for seasonal visits by fishermen or, more recently, sporadic occupation by military forces.

For all nations, except China, the South China Sea has long been regarded as a local ‘lake’ available to all for fishing, transit and, more recently, for the possible economic exploitation of the gas and oil deposits that have been detected. Although they have not been accurately quantified, about 7.7Bn barrels of recoverable oil has been identified with a potential for 28Bn barrels in total. This treasure trove is augmented by 266 trillion cubic feet of Natural Gas reserves. In 2014, China began to drill for oil in waters near the Paracel Islands that are disputed with Vietnam. This immense potential wealth has greatly raised the stakes for all claimants to the archipelagos and the surrounding seas.

As China has grown in economic and military power, the South China Sea has become both Beijing’s front line for naval defence and a limitation to its global projection of its power, as the island states to its east limit its access to the open waters of the Pacific Ocean. To be recognized as a world naval power the Chinese Navy (PLAN) must control both the South China Sea and the egress from it. This is the real basis for the aggressive Chinese claim to almost the whole of the sea, in some parts nearly to the shorelines of the littoral nations. Gaining control of these blue-water exits is also one reason for the Chinese government’s recent, more accommodating political relationship with Taiwan. This improved relationship has seen the unhindered transit of Chinese warships through the northern Taiwan Straits exit into the Pacific Ocean.

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What makes Donald run? Ambassador (Ret.) Yoram Ettinger

By on March 6th, 2016

Donald Trump’s fortunes rise as the fortunes of the US seem dimmer, as the image of the US political establishment is deflating, and as the self-confidence of the US working and middle classes is eroding.

In 2008, the US electorate was driven by a sense of urgency to snatch America from its economic and social crises, and therefore approached the inexperienced presidential candidate, Barack Obama, as the “Light Worker,” possessing mythical capabilities to heal the country. In 2016, a growing segment of the US electorate has lost its confidence in the political establishment, looking for a strong man on a white horse to stop the slippery slope trend of recent years.

Trump reverberates the intensifying frustration of the general constituency with career politicians, and GOP voters’ disillusionment with the GOP party machine and GOP legislators on Capitol Hill, who have failed to stifle President Obama’s implementation of his goal to fundamentally transform the US landscape internationally and domestically, socially, educationally, medically, economically, legally, ethnically, diplomatically and even militarily.

Trump is leveraging the growing gap/rift between the working and middle classes and the economic-intellectual-media “elites;” between the growing number of state and federal-supported/employed people and the rest of the population; between voters in the major urban centers and the “flyover” Americans of Middle America (not only “Joe Six Pack” and “Lunch Pail Mabel”); and between Metropolitan (“Wall Street”) and Micro-politan (“Main Street”) America.

Trump capitalizes on the significant erosion – especially since the 2008 economic meltdown – of America’s self-confidence, optimism, patriotism and conviction in its moral, economic, scientific, social and military exceptionalism, compared to the rest of the world.

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