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April 2016

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TRiUMPh of the Outsider :Peter Smith

By on April 29th, 2016

“Trump offers hope that he will faithfully represent ordinary people. Of course he won’t represent those on the left – thinking and unthinking — who would tear down capitalism and traditional Western values. Personally I can find nothing amiss in temporarily stopping Muslim immigration into the US; except for the word “temporarily”. Building secure borders is the first duty of any government. From a US perspective, negotiating better trade deals, and getting those living under a US defensive umbrella to stump up more cash to pay for it instead of freeloading, seems unexceptional if ,as president, you are patriotic enough to put the US first.”

Seemingly poised to seize the Republican nomination, the tycoon elicits more ire than his vulgarity alone warrants. The reason, of course, is that while his stump promises may prove illusory, what he says in pitching them indicts do-nothing professional politicians of all mainstream stripes.
Donald Trump is on track to win the Republican nomination despite the machinations of the GOP political elite and the demeaning deal between his competitors, Cruz and Kasich, to split their efforts to prevent him. He is on a roll. Following his thumping victory in the New York primary (April 19), he easily won all five north-eastern states – Delaware, Pennsylvania, Rhode island, Connecticut and Maryland — up for grabs on April 26. If he were to win Indiana on May 3 it would be almost done and dusted.

The political elite don’t like him. Considering what they have done and are doing to screw Western civilisation that must be a plus. The mainstream commentariat don’t like him. After Trump’s victory in New York, Greg Sheridan writing in The Australian said that many things Trump has said “should disqualify him for from serious consideration from running for the presidency.” The paper’s editorial intoned that “even in New York Mr Trump’s divisiveness was on display.” The evidence adduced for this was that Trump lost Manhattan to John Kasich. The editors couldn’t help themselves by then quoting one unnamed commentator as saying that, “the closer you live to Donald Trump the less you actually like him.” There are cheap shots and then there cheap shots from our only remaining newspaper of any quality.

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“Islamophobia” at Highest Levels, Claims Georgetown Panel Andrew Harrod

By on April 29th, 2016

This recent panel pulled out all the well-known arguments about “Islamophobia,” but people seem to be losing interest. A good sign.

In Europe and the United States, “Islamophobia has grown exponentially in 2015. In fact it is pretty much at its highest point,” stated Professor John Esposito on April 14 at his academic home, Georgetown University. His comments typified thepanel, “Race, Religion and U.S. Presidential Politics,” and its hackneyed attribution of growing global concerns about Islam to irrational “Islamophobia.”

Esposito criticized largely negative global media coverage of Islamic issues “with very little coverage of the broader context, the mainstream communities of Muslims around the world.” He referenced Media Tenor, a think tank directed byRoland Schatz, a frequent speaker at Georgetown’s Saudi-funded Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU) headed by Esposito. Yet Media Tenor’s 2013 study on Islam in the global media showed the esteemed Wall Street Journal’s reporting on Islam as heavily negative, indicating a dearth of worldwide good news concerning Islam.

Schatz, who has previously suggested that the media refrain from reporting bad news about Islam in the absence of countervailing good news, has questionable objectivity. He has dubiously asserted that the “hurting of innocents is absolutely not in keeping with the Koran” and described Egypt’s former Grand Mufti, Ali Gomaa, as “remarkably challenging and funny.” Less humorously, Schatz’s collaborator in the C1 World Dialogue has endorsed Islamic doctrines concerning wife-beating and genocidal apocalyptic predictions concerning Jews. Gomaa also supported bizarre ideas about the companions of Islam’s prophet Muhammad drinking his urine.

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The Unexpected Snake by Daniel Greenfield

By on April 29th, 2016

The Farmer and the Snake

A Farmer walked through his field one cold winter morning. On the ground lay a Snake, stiff and frozen with the cold. The Farmer knew how deadly the Snake could be, and yet he picked it up and put it in his bosom to warm it back to life.

The Snake soon revived, and when it had enough strength, bit the man who had been so kind to it. The bite was deadly and the Farmer felt that he must die. “Oh,” cried the Farmer with his last breath, “I am rightly served for pitying a scoundrel.”

The Greatest Kindness Will Not Bind the Ungrateful.

The moral of this Aesopian fable from a mere 2500 years ago is that doing good to evil will only lead to more evil. Aiding those who kill only brings more death, not life. It is human nature to think that people will return good for good and evil for evil. This kind of thinking perversely leads some to assume that if they are being assaulted, then they must have done something to deserve it. This logic is routinely used to argue that Islamic terrorists are simply paying us back in the same coin.

But the assumption that evil exists because evil has been done to someone else, tracing back to an original primal evil of injustice that can only be healed with social justice, is itself evil.

In September 1 1939, W.H Auden responded to Hitler’s invasion of Poland by penning the lines;

Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return

Those same lines have been routinely taken up by those eager to pen their own apologetics for evil. In the wake of another early September, September 11th, Auden’s poem was re-embraced once again by those penning essays explaining why we were the real terrorists to whom evil had been done in return for our own evil.

But while it is easy enough to dismiss W.H. Auden as naive, snakes don’t always look the way you expect them to. Particularly snakes who take refuge in the mind of man. Auden was more snake than farmer and his words were the snake-words of one scaly creature excusing the evil of another.

In September 1939, the USSR and Nazi Germany had an agreement. And the man who two years earlier had penned the line, “The consious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder” in his poem Spain, when referring to the Soviet atrocities in Spain, was not a pacifist. He was one of the snakes.

In time Auden would describe his poem as ”infected with an incurable dishonesty”. The infection, the snake bite of incurable dishonesty, passes through the words. The dishonesty is a poisonous disease.

Are those who go on to quote “Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return”, to excuse and justify terrorism the farmer or the snake? On the surface of it, there is no clearer or simpler justification of evil than these lines. They presume that anyone who does evil, has been first sinned against. And while that may not entirely render them guiltless, it clearly spreads the guilt around and adds a touch of morally equivalent white paint to the murderous figure crouching in the center of the room.

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Turkey’s Islamic Supremacist Foreign Policy by Uzay Bulut

By on April 29th, 2016

“We have never been involved in an attack against Turkey … we were never involved in such an action… Davutoglu wants to pave the way for an offensive on Syria and Rojava and cover up Turkey’s relations with the ISIS which is known to the whole world by now.” — YPG (Kurdish) General Command.

“Thousands of settlers from Anatolia were shipped in by the Turkish government to occupy former Greek villages and to change Cypriot demography — in the same manner the occupying Ottoman Empire once did in the 16th century.” — Victor Davis Hanson, historian.

Turkey, for more than 40 years, has been illegally occupying the northern part of the Republic of Cyprus, historically a Greek and Christian nation, which it invaded with a bloody military campaign in 1974.

What Turkey would call a crime if committed by a non-Turkish or a non-Sunni state, Turkey sees as legitimate if Turkey itself commits it.

Between March 29 and April 2, 2016, Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, paid a visit to Washington D.C. to participate in the 4th Nuclear Security Summit hosted by U.S. President Barack Obama.

In an interview with CNN broadcast March 31, Erdogan said, “We will not allow an act such as giving northern Syria to a terrorist organization… We will never forgive such a wrong. We are determined about that.”

Asked which terror organization he was referring to, Erdogan said: “The YPG [Kurdish People’s Protection Units], the PYD [Democratic Union Party] … and if Daesh [ISIS] has an intention of that sort then it would also never be allowed.”

Erdogan was thereby once again attempting to equate Islamic State (ISIS), which has tortured, raped, sold or slaughtered so many innocent people in Syria and Iraq, with the Kurdish PYD, and its YPG militia, whose members have been fighting with their lives to defeat genocidal jihadist groups such as al-Nusra and ISIS.

The question is not why Erdogan or his government have such an intense hatred for Kurds. Turkey’s genocidal policies against the Kurds are not a secret. Turkey’s most recent deadly attacks are ongoing in Kurdish districts even now. The more important question is why Erdogan thinks that Turkey is the one to decide to whom the predominantly Kurdish north of Syria will belong — or who will not rule that part of Syria.

On February 17, Turkey’s capital, Ankara, was shaken by a car bomb that killed 28 people and wounded 61 others.

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Palestinians: University Students Vote For Terror by Khaled Abu Toameh

By on April 29th, 2016

Palestinian political analysts said that the Hamas victory is an indication of what would happen if general elections were held these days in the West Bank.

The 3,481 students who voted in favor of the Hamas-affiliated list want to see the destruction of Israel.

Both Hamas and the PFLP are strongly opposed to any peace process with Israel. They continue to call for terror attacks against Israelis. The results of the election mean that most of the students at Bir Zeit University in the West Bank, not Gaza, support groups that have chosen terrorism over peace.

The Hamas victory at Bir Zeit University also shows that it does not matter how much money you pour on Fatah’s campus supporter; a majority of students would still prefer to vote for terror groups that do not believe in Israel’s right to exist.

The main charge against Fatah is that it has failed to reform and pave the way for the emergence of new and younger leaders.

“Fatah needs an internal shake-up before it faces more defeats.” –Sufyan Abu Zayda, a senior Fatah official from the Gaza Strip.

Hamas leaders also called for holding long overdue presidential and parliamentary elections in the Palestinian territories. They said they had no doubt that their movement would easily defeat Fatah.

Under such circumstances, it is not a good idea to promote the idea of free and democratic elections in the Palestinian territories. Worse, the talk about a renewed peace process and a two-state solution has become a tasteless joke.

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A U.S. Spy Left to Hang Washington has abandoned a CIA agent facing jail in Europe.

By on April 29th, 2016

The threat from terrorism is worse than at any time since 9/11, even as the West has limited its capacity for self-defense. One example of the latter is the way the Obama Administration has abandoned former CIA agent Sabrina De Sousa.

Ms. De Sousa was one of 26 U.S. officials convicted by Italy in 2009 for their role in the rendition of a radical Egyptian cleric. A Portuguese-American dual national who currently resides in Portugal, she received a seven-year sentence from an Italian court (later reduced to four years). Last week Portugal’s highest court cleared the way for her extradition to Italy under a European arrest warrant.

CIA agents working with their Italian counterparts in 2003 captured the cleric, known as Abu Omar, who was suspected of recruiting fighters for Islamists in Iraq, among other things, and transferred him from Milan to Egypt, where he says he was tortured. Egyptian authorities eventually released Abu Omar without charge, though Italy later convicted him in absentia on terror charges.

Among the anti-antiterror left, his case became emblematic of the evils of rendition. Italian prosecutors in 2004 launched an investigation and Italian courts eventually convicted, in absentia, the CIA agents, including Ms. De Sousa, and a U.S. Air Force colonel for their alleged participation in the affair. All of the convicted Americans had left Italy by the time the court case was under way.

Ms. De Sousa was acting in her official capacity and following U.S. policy during the 2003 rendition. Yet the U.S. government never asserted diplomatic immunity in her case, although it asserted a similar immunity on behalf of at least one other American involved in the affair.

When Ms. De Sousa sued the CIA, State and the Justice Department for failing to invoke immunity on her behalf, Justice argued that immunity is asserted for the benefit of the government, not of an individual employee. That’s a sound principle and is exactly why the government should act to protect Ms. De Sousa. Failing to do so sends a terrible signal to other U.S. operatives in the field. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Netanyahu Stands Firm on Peace Talks Israeli prime minister reiterates need for bilateral negotiations without third-party mediation By Rory Jones

By on April 29th, 2016

Alas, he stands firmly on weak knees…he should scuttle all negotiations….rsk
TEL AVIV—Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday poured cold water on a French initiative to restart peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians, saying the two sides should be speaking directly rather than through a third party.

“Israel adheres to its position that the best way to resolve the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is direct, bilateral negotiations,” said a statement from Mr. Netanyahu’s office. “Any other diplomatic initiative distances the Palestinians from direct negotiations.”

French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault last week said he would invite ministers from the U.S., Europe, Middle East and Asia to Paris on May 30 to discuss a framework for a new round of peace talks, aiming to host an international conference later this year that would include Israeli and Palestinian leaders.

France first suggested the international conference in January, the Israeli leader expressed similar concerns at that time too.

A spokesman for Israel’s foreign ministry said the prime minister’s statement didn’t completely rule out Israeli officials attending a conference as no invitations to the two sides had been sent out yet.

After welcoming the French initiative last week, Palestinian negotiators slammed Israel’s pessimism over the plan.

“The Israeli government’s call for bilateral negotiations is not a call for the achievement of the two-state solution, but an attempt at legitimizing its settlement enterprise and the imposition of an apartheid regime,” said Saeb Erekat, the secretary-general of the Palestine Liberation Organization, which represents Palestinian political factions in peace negotiations. “We call upon the French Government and the rest of the international community to take immediate steps in order to give peace a chance.”

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has sought support from the international community in recent years at forums such as the United Nations and International Criminal Court in a bid to create a Palestinian state. CONTINUE AT SITE

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The Clinton Pivot Begins You’re about to meet the second coming of Franklin Roosevelt and Bill Clinton. By Daniel Henninger

By on April 29th, 2016

Want to know which way America’s political winds are blowing? When Bill Clinton speaks, listen.

Talking in Spokane last month about the U.S. economy, the former president mentioned “the awful legacy of the last eight years.” In Indianapolis Tuesday, Mr. Clinton let the same cat out of the bag:

“The problem is, 80% of the American people are still living on what they were living on the day before the [2008 financial] crash. And about half the American people, after you adjust for inflation, are living on what they were living on the last day I was president 15 years ago. So that’s what’s the matter.”

Hours later, Hillary Clinton delivered her victory speech in Philadelphia after winning four of five primaries against Bernie Sanders. With that speech, the great Clinton pivot has begun. By the time she’s done repositioning herself for the fall campaign run, most likely against Donald Trump, Hillary’s pivots will make Stephen Curry look like a little old lady.

Note well this phrase toward the end: “So my friends, if you are a Democrat, an Independent or a thoughtful Republican . . . .”

That doesn’t quite sound like the Obama coalition of millennials, minorities and college-educated white women circa 2012. It sounds more like the centrist Clinton coalition, circa 1996. Democrats, independents and thoughtful Republicans—call it neo-triangulation for Trumpian times. CONTINUE AT SITE

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The Agony of a Trump Delegate Rules may say they’re bound to The Donald, but many are thinking through their options. By Kimberley A. Strassel

By on April 29th, 2016

Donald Trump, fresh off his Northeast sweep, declared himself the “presumptive nominee.” He presumes too much.

For all the news of Mr. Trump’s victories and Ted Cruz’s veepmate, the essential action of this GOP contest continues to take place far from the media lights. It’s happening in towns like Harrisonburg, Va., where Republican voters will gather this weekend to pick a slate of delegates for the Cleveland convention. That’s the action that matters, and it’s not going Mr. Trump’s way.

With the media all but anointing the mogul, it’s worth a short primer on presidential nominations, why Mr. Trump is still far from claiming the title, and why (by the way) this is, in fact, democracy in action.

Start with this: The GOP is a collection of 50 state parties. Each gets a voice in choosing who the national party nominates for president. In long-standing deference to states’ rights (a concept conservatives are supposed to revere), the state parties have total control over how they pick delegates to the national convention.

Some states, like Colorado, still do this purely the old-fashioned way. Republicans meet at the precinct level, at the district level, and at the state level, and vote for delegates who will speak for them. This isn’t a “rigged” system, but representative democracy.

Other states think it useful to canvas wider views. They hold what the media call primaries, but what are technically “presidential preference polls.” (Note those words.) In many states, the results of these polls are supposed to bind “delegates” to candidates at the national convention.

Only here’s the rub: Even states with primaries still go through an independent process to elect the actual people who will serve as delegates. The Republicans at these events can still choose whomever they want. And they aren’t electing delegates who personally support Mr. Trump.

Look at Virginia. The Old Dominion held its statewide preference poll (primary) on March 1, and 35% of voters (who included independents and Democrats) preferred Mr. Trump. Some 17% preferred Mr. Cruz. On paper, the delegates are automatically apportioned based on these results.

Yet at the two district conventions so far (in Virginia’s 9th and 10th congressional districts), attendees have elected five delegates who personally support Mr. Cruz and only one who supports Mr. Trump. At the statewide convention in Harrisonburg this weekend, 4,000 attendees will choose another 13 delegates. Cruz supporters will likely dominate.

This is happening across the country, and no surprise. While some attendees at these events are “the establishment”—party officials and operatives—many more are intensely committed GOP activists. These are the people who brought you the tea party, the rebels in the U.S. House, and the cheers for government shutdown. CONTINUE AT SITE

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