World War II — D-Day, the Allied Invasion of Normandy – https://www.dday.org/history/d-day-the-invasion/overview.html
It is hard to conceive the epic scope of this decisive battle that foreshadowed the end of Hitlers dream of Nazi domination. Overlord was the largest air, land, and sea operation undertaken before or since June 6, 1944. The landing included over 5,000 ships, 11,000 airplanes, and over 150,000 service men.
After years of meticulous planning and seemingly endless training, for the Allied Forces, it all came down to this: The boat ramp goes down, then jump, swim, run, and crawl to the cliffs. Many of the first young men (most not yet 20 years old) entered the surf carrying eighty pounds of equipment. They faced over 200 yards of beach before reaching the first natural feature offering any protection. Blanketed by small-arms fire and bracketed by artillery, they found themselves in hell.
When it was over, the Allied Forces had suffered nearly 10,000 casualties; more than 4,000 were dead. Yet somehow, due to planning and preparation, and due to the valor, fidelity, and sacrifice of the Allied Forces, Fortress Europe had been breached.
The rift in the European Union between the older, mostly Western European, members and the newer ones from Eastern Europe has become increasingly clear lately over the refusal of most Eastern European countries to receive migrants from the Middle East and North Africa.
The European Commission has proposed reforms to EU asylum rules that would see financial penalties imposed on members refusing to take in what it deems a sufficient number of asylum seekers, amounting to $290,000 for every migrant. The penalties, if passed, are particularly aimed at the newest EU countries, such as Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, since these are countries who have closed their borders to migrants or are in the process of doing so.
Disagreement over how to respond to the migrant crisis in Europe, however, is not the only issue dividing the Eastern European members of the EU from Western European ones. Israel is another such contentious issue.
Several Eastern European countries, while having pasts rife with virulent anti-Semitism and atrocious records of behavior toward Jews during the Second World War, differ greatly in their policies toward Israel compared to their Western European counterparts. That does not mean that everything they do is in favor of Israel, far from it. The entire EU, including those Eastern European countries, voted in favor of the latest U.N. resolution to slander Israel, when they voted that Israel was the world’s only health violator. There must be some diplomats sitting around with very bad tastes in their mouths.
Nevertheless, Eastern European countries today represent the only part of Europe that, out of national interest or a genuine sense of solidarity, stands with Israel in one form or another. This is already saying much on a continent where, for example, Dutch Foreign Minister Bert Koenders only recently declared that calls to boycott, divest and sanction Israel are considered by the Netherlands to be “freedom of speech” and therefore legal. (It would appear that there are some serious cognitive issues in the Dutch government: What happens when the calls actually lead to real action, such as municipalities refusing to do business with Israel or refusing to buy Israeli goods and services? Would that be legal, too, according to the foreign minister? As discussed previously in this column, a Spanish court recently declared such municipal boycotts of Israel to be in violation of the European Convention of Human Rights, the same convention that Koenders invokes in his condoning of BDS as “free speech.”)
The False Comparison of Trump to Hillary Unveiling the false equivalence. Bruce Thornton
“The November election is not a choice between two equally bad candidates. It’s the moment when we reject the candidate who we know, based on her long public record of corruption, lying, and grasping for power and wealth, will take us further down the road to political perdition.”
A lot of Republicans still upset over Donald Trump winning the nomination resort to a false equivalence between Trump and Clinton in order to justify sitting the election out or even voting for Hillary.
Take a recent example by the National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru. First he lists Hillary’s manifold sins that Trump is innocent of: lying to the parents of the Benghazi victims, promising to nominate hard-left jurists to the Supreme Court, and supporting Obamas’ high-tax economics and unconstitutional amnesty of illegal aliens.
Then Ponnuru offers a catalogue of Trump’s sins Hillary hasn’t committed: mocking a reporter’s disability, indulging a preposterous conspiracy theory about Ted Cruz’s father and Lee Harvey Oswald, threatening a trade war with China, or threatening war crimes against the families of terrorists. Trump’s list presumably balances Hillary’s flaws, in order to make the point that both Trump and Hillary are equally distasteful, thus making the election a Hobson’s choice for principled conservatives.
But this comparison is false and misleading, for Trump and Clinton have had very different careers with different obligations and responsibilities.
Yale English majors are demanding a safe space from Chaucer.
In a petition to the English department, Yale undergraduates declare that a required two-semester seminar on Major English Poets is a danger to their well-being. Never mind that the offending poets – Shakespeare, Chaucer, Donne, Milton, Wordsworth, et al. – are the foundational writers in the English language. It’s as if chemistry students objected to learning the periodic table or math students rose up against the teaching of differential calculus.
The root of the plaint against the seminar is, of course, the usual PC bean-counting, where prodigious talents who have stood the test of time and explore the deepest questions about what it means to be human are found wanting because they wouldn’t be suitable models for a United Colors of Benetton ad.
The petition whines that “a year spent around a seminar table where the literary contributions of women, people of color, and queer folk are absent actively harms all students, regardless of their identity.”
This is a variation on the widespread belief on campus that unwelcome speech is tantamount to a physical threat. In this case, the speech happens to be some of the most eloquent words written in the English language. One can only pity the exceedingly fragile sensibility it takes to feel assaulted by, say, “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey.”
The petition’s implicit contention is that the major poets are too circumscribed by their race and gender to speak to today’s socially aware students, when, in point of fact, it is the students who are too blinkered by race and gender to marvel at great works of art.
It takes a deeply impoverished imagination to read Shakespeare and regard him simply as an agent of the patriarchy. It is safe to say that the bard is better at expressing what it is like to be a teenage girl in love, or a woman disguised as a man who falls for a man, or a bloody tyrant than almost every actual teenage girl in love, woman disguised as a man, or bloody tyrant.
The poet Maya Angelou said in a lecture once that as a child she thought, “Shakespeare must be a black girl.” It was because, growing up in the Jim Crow South, a victim of unspeakable abuse, Sonnet 29 spoke so powerfully to her. (“When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, / I all alone beweep my outcast state, / And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, / And look upon myself and curse my fate.”)
Islamic violence is nearly impossible to deny. But why is Islam violent? The usual answer is to point to Koranic verses calling for the conquest and subjugation of non-Muslims. That certainly covers the theological basis for Islamic violence. But it fails to explain why Muslims continue to practice it. Even against each other. Violence has become the defining form of Islamic exceptionalism.
Optimists speak of reforming Islam. But such reforms had over a thousand years in which to take place.
Islam is an ideology. Its violence is a strategy. That strategy fit the needs of Mohammed. Mohammed chose to use force to spread his ideology. He needed to recruit fighters so he preached the inferiority of non-Muslims, the obligation for Muslims to conquer non-Muslims and the right of his fighters to seize the property and wives of non-Muslims as incentive for them to join his fight. Furthermore he even promised them that if they should fall in battle, they would receive loot and women in paradise.
The strategy was barbarous, but quite effective. Mohammed had created a new super-tribe in a tribal society. The tribe of Islam united different groups in a mission of conquest. The Islamic religion allowed the varying clans to be more effective and ambitious than their victims. Within a surprisingly short amount of time the chain of conquests made Islam into a world religion. The most effective Islamic conquerors could not only claim vast territories, carving up civilization into fiefdoms, but they could prepare their sons and grandsons to continue the chain of conquests.
Islam made the standard tactics of tribal warfare far more effective. Its alliance was harder to fragment and its fighters were not afraid of death. But at the same time Islam remained fundamentally tribal. It made tribal banditry more effective, but didn’t change the civilization. It codified the tribal suspicion of outsiders and women into a religious doctrine. That still drives Islamic violence against non-Muslims and women today.
And yet Islam could have reformed. All it had to do was choose a different civilizational strategy.
On June 4, 2016 The Boston Globe published a report, “Criminal immigrants reoffend at higher rates than ICE has suggested” that focused on information the newspaper was finally able to obtain by filing a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act that sought to obtain the database of criminal aliens who were released by ICE. The roughly five year odyssey finally yielded the information the administration attempted to conceal from the public- including, incredibly- even law enforcement agencies.
The article included the links to the Timeline of the Globe’s lawsuit – It’s nearly a five-year saga.
This eye-opening report began with this excerpt:
They were among the nation’s top priorities for deportation, criminals who were supposed to be sent back to their home countries. But instead they were released, one by one, in secret across the United States. Federal officials said that many of the criminals posed little threat to the public, but did little to verify whether that was true.
It wasn’t.
A Globe review of 323 criminals released in New England from 2008 to 2012 found that as many as 30 percent committed new offenses, including rape, attempted murder, and child molestation — a rate that is markedly higher than Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have suggested to Congress in the past.
The first and most important thing to grasp about the expression of political views and sympathies is that they must not aggravate or annoy anyone on the left. Break that rule, as do Donald Trump supporters by attending his rallies, and you will only have yourself to blame for the bruising consequences.
Things are pretty calm Stateside. Donald Trump hasn’t said or done anything particularly interesting since stitching up the Republican nomination. The Democrats continue their drawn-out bloodbath, ensuring Hillary Clinton will limp into the general election looking like a pre-op Darth Vader. Good news for Trump and anyone else running for president, excluding David French.
Speaking of pre-ops, the head of the Georgia chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union – a group of left-wing, censoriously PC lawyers roughly comparable to the Human Rights Commission, and sporting an equally Orwellian name – resigned after three drag queens followed her girl-children into the toilet. For those who haven’t been following the transgender bathroom row, the Obama Administration is fighting for sex-changers to have access to all public restroom facilities, with “transgender” defined as … well, it’s not defined per se. Basically, anyone who says they’re a woman can use the women’s lavatory, and ditto with men. This, by the by, includes public school locker rooms. Which has unnerved some parents who aren’t too keen on pubescent ragamuffins being given a warm welcome to the showers where their daughters are washing up after gym class.
This, apparently, includes Maya Dillard Smith, who had to console her daughters after a trio of six-foot-tall men with bulging Adam’s apples and other things took loud, stand-up pees in the stalls next to them, trading cosmetology tips in crooning baritones. Following her resignation, Smith founded a new website (just what we needed!) called Finding the Middle Ground, which promises – couched in the language of political correctness – a “safe space to talk about civil rights for all.” Ho ho! Not likely, Ms. Smith. Having risen through the ranks of the PC Gestapo, you should know there’s not going to be a “safe space” for those who contradict Big Brother’s latest definition of “civil rights”. There’s something quaintly pathetic about the name “Middle Ground”, as though the elites have ever accepted any compromise in their ideological war against decency and common sense.
That’s not to say the rules of political correctness are fixed. They’re not. Take the riots that have erupted outside Donald Trump’s rallies in California. Supporters are being intimidated, egged, and beaten up by vicious young men of Latino extraction who burn the American flag and assert Mexico’s right to reclaim its former territories in the Southwestern United States. Yes, it’s a travesty against free speech, free assembly, human decency, etc. And yes, it’s beneath contempt that anyone would think to condemn the good people of Arizona to Mexican citizenship.
trumpette eggedBut the worst part may be the smug, unironic victim-blaming directed against Trump and his cadre. “At some point Donald Trump needs to take responsibility for the irresponsible behavior of his campaign,” Sam Liccardo, the mayor of San Jose and a Clinton supporter, told the Associated Press afterwards. “It is regrettable that this has become a pattern for cities hosting Mr. Trump across the nation.” One of those who “must take responsibility” is pictured at left — a Trump supporter who was cornered by the mob against a locked door, pelted and assaulted.
After many years of being gagged, Fatah’s young guard is finding its voice. But while members of this faction wish to see a “changing of the guards at the Palestinian palace,” this does not mean that they have changed their attitude towards Israel.
Fatah’s young guard is neither interested in, nor authorized to, give up the “right of return” for Palestinian refugees — or even take the basic step of recognizing Israel as a Jewish state. In short, the actors might change, but the same show will go on.
The international community, meanwhile, is busy burying its head in the sand of Abbas’s very messy backyard. The participants at the Middle East peace conference held in Paris last week may have missed the latest revolt against the PA president. Had they been paying attention, instead of calling for a two-state solution, they might have demanded that Abbas and his Fatah faction get their acts together, and include Israel in the show. Perhaps they also would have mentioned that this ought happen before Hamas takes over the West Bank and creates another Islamist regime there, too.
Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas is once again facing insurrection — this time from the young guard in his ruling Fatah faction.
Even autocracy has its limits, and after many years of being gagged, Fatah’s young guard is finding its voice.
This renewed power struggle between the young and the old guard is probably a positive sign. It seems to signal the Palestinians wish to see new faces in power. However, just because members of this faction wish to see a “changing of the guards at the Palestinian palace” does not mean that they have changed their attitude towards Israel.
This young guard, in fact, is neither interested in, nor authorized to, give up the “right of return” for Palestinian refugees — or even take the basic step of recognizing Israel as a Jewish state.
Professor Bardakcioglu is under a disciplinary investigation launched by the university’s rector for his tweet, in which he criticized the conquest of Constantinople in 1453.
After losing his job and being condemned and ostracized by his community, Bardakcioglu defined his deleted tweet as “an ugly and wrong expression that was not my own view.” The professor, sadly, apologized for telling the truth.
Publicly debating historical events recognized by most scholars in free societies is, in Turkey, a criminal offense. You can lose your job, your freedom or even your life.
Turkish state officials constantly claim there is nothing in Turkey’s history that they should be ashamed of, so they continue persecuting and jailing journalists or professors who express differing ideas, and slaughtering non-Muslims and non-Turks.
Erbay Bardakcioglu, a professor at Adnan Menderes University (AMU) in Aydin Province in western Turkey, was suspended after posting a tweet, in which he criticized the conquest of Constantinople, present-day Istanbul, in 1453.
Professor Bardakcioglu’s tweet, on May 29, read, “Today is the anniversary of the invasion of Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, a magnificent civilization, by a barbaric and fanatic tribe.”
After the tweet caused an outrage on social media, Bardakcioglu deleted it.
The professor is also under a disciplinary investigation launched by the university’s rector for his tweet.
The university’s rector, Cavit Bircan, on his Twitter account, also condemned the professor and declared that he was laid off from his job.
Describing Bardakcioglu’s tweet as “unacceptable,” Bircan wrote on his Twitter account:
San Jose, California disgraced itself last week, allowing rioters to attack people exiting a political rally for the presumptive Republican nominee for president. Now, thanks to Aleister of Gateway Pundit, we know that the police chief of that city, Eddie Garcia, who admitted that he instructed his officers not to intervene and arrest the attackers, is aligned with an extremist race-based group, La Raza (Spanish for “The Race”):
This is a screen-cap from his Twitter account:
The La Raza Roundtable of California celebrated when Garcia was sworn in.
This is how the Roundtable describes itself:
La Raza Roundtable brings together community organizations, community leaders, elected officials, private and public sector representatives in leadership capacities that can impact positive change for La Raza.
Garcia has released a laughable statement in which he suggests that the police didn’t arrest the violent thugs because it would have just made them angrier.
