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July 2016

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The Democratic Platform’s Sharp Left Turn This isn’t Bill Clinton’s party anymore. It isn’t even Barack Obama’s. By William A. Galston

By on July 13th, 2016

In parliamentary systems, party platforms are blueprints for governance. In the U.S., they reflect the preferences of each party’s base—the activists and interest groups to which the party must pay attention. Changes in party platforms from one election to the next reveal shifts in thinking and—even more—the balance of power within the base as new groups surge and established forces give way.

That is why the 2016 Democratic platform is so significant. The platform committee hasn’t made public the text that will be taken to the Democratic convention in less than two weeks. But at this stage, based on the July 1 draft and 82 amendments to its text adopted by the end of the final platform committee meeting in Orlando, Fla., we know with near-certainty what the platform will say—and what it means.

The party that Hillary Clinton will lead into battle this fall is not Bill Clinton’s Democratic Party. In important respects it is not even Barack Obama’s Democratic Party. It is a party animated by the frustrations of the Obama years and reshaped by waves of economic and social activism.

Not surprisingly, the document endorses a range of Hillary Clinton’s campaign proposals, including a massive infrastructure-investment program, new incentives for small business, expanded profit-sharing to increase workers’ earnings, a tax on high-frequency financial transactions, paid family and medical leave, an enhanced earned-income tax credit for young workers without children, access to computer-science education for all K-12 students, and measures to make college education more affordable.

Neither is it surprising that the draft incorporates some of Bernie Sanders’s key proposals—most notably, a $15 per hour minimum wage—and that it doesn’t take sides on issues that divided the party, such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement and a broad tax on financial transactions, where neither side would give way.

In other respects, however, the draft is truly remarkable—for example, its near-silence on economic growth. The uninformed reader would not learn that the pace of recovery from the Great Recession has been anemic by postwar standards, or that productivity gains have slowed to a crawl over the past five years, or that firms have been reluctant to invest in new productive capacity. Rather, the platform draft’s core narrative is inequality, the injustice that inequality entails, and the need to rectify it through redistribution.

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MARILYN PENN; A REVIEW OF CAPTAIN FANTASTIC

By on July 13th, 2016

If your heroes are Noam Chomsky and Jesse Jackson, or if you’re a fan of parenting by dictatorial narcissists who retreat to the wilderness and isolate their children from society – you may enjoy Captain Fantastic, starring Viggo Mortenson. The normally swoon-worthy and photogenic actor is buried below a massive beard so you’ll have to wait till the end to see his adorable chin but in the meantime, you can count the many ways that this movie, which should have been titled Captain Fanatic, fails to deliver.

A safe bet is that 90% of the audience does not know who Noam Chomsky is and since his birthday is celebrated instead of Christmas, it’s just plain silly that he’ d be considered a superior reformer to Jesus – son of God, for God’s sake! You may also wonder throughout the course of the film where Viggo – here known as Ben Cash – actually got the cash to buy the various knives and other weapons intrinsic to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle he has imposed on his clan. Likewise for the clothing, food, camping and climbing paraphernalia that comprise a Hollywood minimal lifestyle. As the film progresses and you discover that the missing mother has been hospitalized for mental problems, you continue to wonder who decided it was a good idea to have a hallucinatory bi-polar woman undergo post-partum episodes SIX times. Never fear, for more than half the movie, the children are as upbeat as the von Trapp family and as skillful as the Flying Wallendas. As for precocity, I can only hint that one of them will get into ALL of the top colleges in your lexicon and, in a tasteless shaming of the poorly educated schoolchildren, these kids rival the Bronte and James families combined.

Eventually, the children are brought into the real world where they encounter their ‘civilized” relatives who hardly measure up to the lofty far-left standards of the screenwriter and his creations. Since every movie requires an arc, there comes a confrontation, some meltdowns, some accusations of “I hate you,” along with a generally unbelievable happy ending to rival Mama Mia. The moral of this movie is that even leftover hippies and their progeny look better with haircuts and no one with a chin like Viggo should ever consider a beard.

If you want to test yourself on the credibility factor in this film, try substituting L. Ron Hubbard for Noam Chomsky and ask yourself whether cult tactics of indoctrination are ever appealing coming from the right. How strange that the very same methods are made to look so cute with lefties as inspiration…………..

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Full GOP Platform committee enthusiastically endorses ardently pro-Israel plank. By: Lori Lowenthal Marcus

By on July 13th, 2016

Last night the JewishPress.com brought the news that a GOP subcommittee drafted and endorsed a pro-Israel plank that includes every single item on every (truly) pro-Israel wish list, thanks to the hard work of a few lawmakers such as South Caroline State Rep. Alan Clemmons and several pro-Israel organizations, including the Iron Dome Alliance.

But this morning brings more huge news: the full committee endorsed the pro-Israel plank with no changes. And the passage of that adamantly pro-Israel plank was met with a standing ovation by those in the room.

The Republican party ain’t what it used to be, or at least it doesn’t match the anti-Israel party portrait which so many people have tried to peddle.

And what of the Democrats? Jeff Ballabon, chairman of the Iron Dome Alliance, told the JewishPress.com that his coalition has made it very clear that they “would still love for Democrats to accept the same language and will attempt to persuade delegates in light of today’s success but ha[s] little optimism that it would be accepted.”

He said the coalition didn’t want this (strongly pro-Israel) policy to be tied only to one party, “this should be America’s policy,” but the enthusiasm with which the important language was met and embraced by the Republican platform committee speaks volumes.

While rumors have been swirling that the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC has been trying to stop the truly pro-Israel plank from getting out of the station, if they engaged in that effort, it failed.

And if AIPAC did not work to defeat this non-Two State language, it’s a whole new AIPAC world in which Israel is now in control of the best resolution of the various conflicts besieging the Jewish State, rather than bowing its head to dictates from the U.S. It also signals a change in the lobby’s stance regarding the disputed territories, which it has never strongly embraced.

Here is the language of the new Republican Party Platform on Israel:

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9 Steps to Successfully Counter Jihad: Jamie Glazov

By on July 13th, 2016

While the Obama administration continues to allow the Muslim Brotherhood to direct American foreign policy and, therefore, to implement “strategies” that render America defenseless in the face of Jihad and stealth Jihad, there are some alternative strategies that have the potential to turn this catastrophic situation around completely in America’s favor.

Below are 9 concrete steps that, if implemented by a future American administration, would make a big difference in preserving our civilization and in defending Americans from terrorism:

1. Label the Enemy and Make a Threat Assessment.

The Obama administration continues to refuse to label our enemy and, therefore, it continues to enable our defeat in the terror war. It is urgent that we name our enemy (i.e. Islamic Jihad) and definitively identify what ideology inspires our enemy (i.e. Islamic law).

2. Scrap “Countering Violent Extremism.”

“Countering Violent Extremism” is the pathetic and destructive focus of the Obama administration in allegedly fighting the terror war. On the one hand, this “focus” is vague to the point of being meaningless and completely incapacitates us. On the other hand, this focus allows the administration to perpetuate the destructive fantasy that there are other types of “extremists” — who just happen to be the Left’s political opponents — that pose a great threat to the country.

For example, as Stephen Coughlin has revealed, the “violent extremists” the administration is clearly worried about are the “right-wing Islamophobes” whom the administration obviously considers to be the real threat to American security.

The “Countering Violent Extremism” is trash and needs to be thrown in the garbage.

3. Stop “Partnering” With Muslim Brotherhood Front Groups.

The government needs to stop cooperating with, and listening to, Muslim Brotherhood front groups such as CAIR and ISNA immediately. The Muslim Brotherhood document, the Explanatory Memorandum, has made it clear that the Brotherhood’s objective is to destroy our civilization from within by our own hands with the influence of these groups. Moreover, as Robert Spencer advises, there needs to be legislation that will bar all such groups and affiliated individuals from advising the government or receiving any grants from it.

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The Disappearance of the Two-State Solution It’s long past time that Americans acknowledge the facts on the ground. By Elliott Abrams

By on July 13th, 2016

In the first draft of the 2016 Republican-party platform, references to the two-state solution do not appear. CNN reports the “delegates drafting the Republican National Convention platform approved removing language encouraging a two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians.”

An earlier draft had included support for “two democratic states” — the policy of recent Republican and Democratic administrations — but had removed a reference to Palestine included in the GOP platform four years ago. On Monday, the national security subcommittee of the Platform Committee approved an amendment dropping support of a two-state solution, according to four people who were in the room for the discussion. . . . “The U.S. seeks to assist in the establishment of comprehensive and lasting peace in the Middle East, to be negotiated among those living in the region,” the approved amendment said. “We oppose any measures intended to impose an agreement or to dictate borders or other terms, and call for the immediate termination of all U.S. funding of any entity that attempts to do so.”

The Democratic party platform supports a two-state solution, as it has previously.

What are we to make of this?

Support for a two-state solution has not always been American policy since Israel won the West Bank and Gaza in 1967’s Six-Day War. The initial assumption was that the West Bank would go back to Jordan, and Gaza to Egypt, as part of a “land for peace” deal that would be negotiated between Israel and each of those countries. When I worked in the Reagan administration, Secretary of State George Shultz was explicit in saying we did not favor the creation of a Palestinian state.

And after all, why would we? The Palestine Liberation Organization was led by Yasser Arafat, a terrorist and a thief. Who would want to give him a state? Well, Bill Clinton did. At Camp David in 2000, Clinton tried to broker an agreement between Israel and the PLO chief that would have handed him the West Bank and Gaza. But Arafat said no to Clinton and Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak.

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MY SAY: DON’T BLAME THIS ONE ON OBAMA

By on July 12th, 2016

The events in Dallas and the advent of #Black Lives Matter and renewed activism of the New Black Panthers is not the fault of President Obama. There is enough wrong in our domestic and foreign policis which is attributable to him. I know many young black jazz musicians that have been pulled over by police for no infractions or suspicious behavior. The President is Black ( I don’t use hyphenations)….and he feels the pain of the sorry predicament of many American Black people. I am Jewish and I dwell on Anti-Semitism and the unfair and immoral bashing of Israel.

There is a large and growing number of Black Americans that have entered into and participated in every institution in our nation, thanks to programs that are anti-discriminatory and the reparations of affirmative action. Why are they mostly silent on the illegitimacy, fourth generation of unwed teen age mothers, rampant drug use and sales, and criminal behavior that plague Black youth and render them unemployable? Why do they accept the false and destructive narrative of the left?

There are exceptions…. Tom Sowell, Jason Riley, Ben Carson, Deroy Murdock, to name a handful, but only Juan Williams honestly confronts these issues on the left? Where are the others?

Blame them and their leaders and their pastors as well as posturing White limousine liberals. But don’t blame the President for this crisis. Rsk

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Stabbing Policemen, “Slut-Shaming” and New Death Threats One Month of Islam and Multiculturalism in France: June 2016 by Yves Mamou

By on July 12th, 2016

Muslim perpetrators rationalize their violence by convincing themselves that they live in a racist society that rejects them and their religion. And the government legitimizes them when it asks the Parliament to vote for a law that favors diversity on public television channels.

Islamist terrorist Larossi Aballa, 26, stabbed to death police officer Jean-Baptiste Salvaing and his wife, police administrator Jessica Schneider, in front of their son, at their home in the Paris suburb of Magnanville. The murderer then live-streamed a video on Facebook, in which he pledged allegiance to the Islamic State (ISIS).

After the Islamist, anti-gay attack in Orlando, left-wing politician Jean-Luc Melenchon wrote in his blog that he felt anxious about a possible “wave of hatred against Muslims”. For many Islamists in France, the Muslim is always the victim, even when he is the killer.

Islamization is gaining ground in the Muslim community of France. For a long time, this trend remained restricted to the cultural sphere and created strong controversies between Islamists and secular intellectuals (such as the ban on face-covering veils in schools and public places). But the debate stopped being a debate. Sometimes Islamic intolerance takes on the appearance of a civil war. The violence, which was mostly concentrated in the suburbs prior to the January 2015 terrorist attack on the satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo, is spreading now to the heart of French cities. Murders, assaults, death threats and “slut-shaming” happens almost every day here and there.

Muslim perpetrators rationalize their violence by convincing themselves that they live in a racist society that rejects them and their religion. And the government legitimizes them when it asks the Parliament to vote for a law that favors diversity on public television channels. What is interesting is that judiciary system seems in disarray and does not know how to treat these types of conflicts: two jihadists back from Syria are condemned to a suspended sentence of six months in prison and a Muslim who slapped a female waiter because she served alcohol during the Ramadan was sentenced to eight months in prison.

The absence of political guidelines spreads fear and aids the rise of the right-wing political party, the Front National.

June 1. Karim Benzema, a French soccer star of Algerian descent, declared, in the Spanish sports newspaper Marca, that French national team’s coach, Didier Deschamps “bowed to the pressure of a racist part of France” by not including him in the team. Benzema was not included in the national soccer team for the UEFA Euro 2016 championship because he is apparently involved in a sex-tape extortion scandal targeting his colleague, Mathieu Valbuena.

June 2. Patrick Kanner, Minister of Urban Affairs, Youth and Sport, said in Le Parisien that Karim Benzema plays an “unfair and dangerous” game when he implies that “ethnic reasons” might have played a role in the decision not to include him in the French soccer team.

June 2. It was reported that the Saudi preacher, Mohammed Ramzan Al-Hajiri, was banned from entering France until 2050. The daily, La Voix du Nord, reported that on May 15, the salafist Abou Bakr Essedik mosque of Roubaix had arranged for him to preach by phone. In April 2014, the same Saudi preacher had declared in public: “Losing your faith makes you no better than an animal” and “to kill a Muslim is a less serious crime than to make him an infidel.”

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Fundamentally Transformed Have we reached a point of no return? By Victor Davis Hanson

By on July 12th, 2016

Multicultural societies — from 19th-century Austria–Hungary to contemporary Iraq, Lebanon, the former Yugoslavia, and Rwanda — have a poor record of keeping the peace between competing tribes. They usually end up mired in nihilistic and endemic violence.

The only hope for history’s rare multiracial, multiethnic, and multireligious nations is to adopt a common culture, one that artificially suppresses the natural instinct of humans to identify first with their particular tribe. America, in the logical spirit of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, was exceptional among modern societies in slowly evolving from its original, largely European immigrant population to a 21st-century assimilated, integrated, and intermarried multiracial society, in which religious and racial affiliations were incidental, not essential, to one’s public character and identity.

But such a bold experiment was always tenuous and against the cruel grain of history, in which the hard work of centuries could be easily torn apart by the brief demagoguery of the moment. Unfortunately, President Obama, ever since he first appeared on the national political scene in 2008, has systematically adopted a rhetoric and an agenda that is predicated on dividing up the country according to tribal grievances, in hopes of recalibrating various factions into a majority grievance culture. In large part, he has succeeded politically. But in doing so he has nearly torn the country apart. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to suggest that no other recent president has offered such a level of polarizing and divisive racial bombast.

Most recently, without citing any facts about the circumstances of the police shootings in Minnesota and Louisiana, Barack Obama castigated the police and the citizenry on their culpability for racial disparity and prejudicial violence. “[T]hese fatal shootings are not isolated incidents. They are symptomatic of the broader challenges within our criminal-justice system, the racial disparities that appear across the system year after year, and the resulting lack of trust that exists between law enforcement and too many of the communities they serve.” Obama did not yet know the race of the policemen involved (as in the case of Baltimore, the Minnesota shooting involved non-white officers), the circumstances that led to the shootings, or the backgrounds of either the officers or their victims.

Shortly afterwards, twelve Dallas law-enforcement officers were shot, and five of them killed, by a black assassin who declared solidarity with Black Lives Matter and proclaimed his hatred for white law enforcement. That outbreak prompted Obama to take to the podium again to recalibrate his earlier message. This time he amplified his gun-control message, and somewhat delusionally added that the upswing in racial polarization did not imperil national unity — in much the same way that, in years past, he had announced that al-Qaeda was on the run, we were leaving behind a stable Iraq, and ISIS was a jayvee organization. Note the Obama editorial method in the case of police incidents, from Skip Gates to Louisiana and Minnesota: He typically speaks before he has the facts, and when subsequent information calls into question his talking points and theorizing, he never goes back and makes the corrections. Nor does he address facts — from Ferguson to Dallas — that do not fit his political agenda. Finally, a police shooting of an African-American suspect is never an “isolated event,” while the shooting of an officer by a black assassin is isolated and never really thematic of any larger racial pathology.

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Iran: ‘More Than 100,000 Missiles Are Ready To Strike Israel’ The Islamist Mullahs get richer — and their threats become more vicious. Dr. Majid Rafizadeh

By on July 12th, 2016

Iran’s anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism have reached unprecedented levels. The deputy commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) recently pointed out that the Islamic Republic has tens of thousands of missiles prepared outside of Iran to strike Israel.

Iran’s state-owned news agency, Tasnim, quoted General Hossein Salami as saying that “Hezbollah has 100,000 missiles that are ready to hit Israel to liberate the occupied Palestinian territories if the Zionist regime repeats its past mistakes.” He added that “today, the grounds for the annihilation and collapse of the Zionist regime are (present) more than ever.” In addition, Gen. Salami warned Israeli leaders that if they make the “wrong move,” Israel would come under attack.

A senior adviser to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ elite unit Quds Force, Ahmad Karimpour, stated a few weeks ago that Iran could destroy Israel in eight minutes if the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, gave the order. According to the semi-official Fars News Agency, he said that “If the Supreme Leader’s orders [are] to be executed, with the abilities and the equipment at our disposal, we will raze the Zionist regime in less than eight minutes.”

In addition, Iran’s final decision-maker and autocrat, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, published a plan after the nuclear agreement, explaining how to destroy Israel. Furthermore, he blatantly predicted that Israel would not be around in 25 years. He stated, “En Sha’a Allah [God willing], there will be no such thing as a Zionist regime in 25 years. Until then, struggling, heroic and jihadi morale will leave no moment of serenity for Zionists.”

Khamenei relies heavily on Hezbollah and IRGC to pursue his government’s anti-Israel and anti-US policies. Thanks to sanctions relief and billions of dollars the Obama administration is sending to Iran’s Central Bank from the American taxpayers, Hezbollah and Iran’s IRGC are amply funded. Iranian leaders are increasingly relying on and boasting about utilizing Hezbollah to wipe out Israel.

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Dallas and Progressive Moral Idiocy Why black lives don’t really matter to the Left. Bruce Thornton

By on July 12th, 2016

The murder of five Dallas policemen at a protest march is the gruesome consequence of the rhetorical war on police being waged by the progressive race industry. The shooter, of course, bears the primary responsibility for the killings. But a climate of opinion makes such events more likely, and those who create such a climate are culpable as well.

The justification for the war on police is that they gun down unarmed black men out of racial animus. The 2014 police shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson Missouri sparked a nationwide movement predicated on this popular urban myth. The Black Lives Matter movement quickly came to national prominence, instigating protests over every police shooting of a black person, and popularizing their signature chant, “Hands up, don’t shoot.”

Everything about this organization is based on a lie. Even Eric Holder’s politicized DOJ determined the Brown shooting was justified, and cleared the officer involved. Brown never put up his hands and said “Don’t shoot,” nor was he a “gentle giant,” as the race-baiters and media claimed. Nor is there an epidemic of racist police killings of unarmed blacks. More blacks than whites are killed relative to their population, but that’s a consequence of blacks being a much larger proportion of violent criminals. Race is not the issue: Whites and Hispanics are three times more likely to die at the hands of police than are blacks, and minority police officers are three times more likely to fire their weapons than are other cops. And a police officer is 2.5 times more likely to be killed by a black than he is to kill an unarmed black.

Despite the empirically false claims of racist police murdering blacks, the myth has attracted support from government and media. A fish rots from the head down, as the proverb has it, and Barack Obama has set the tone. He has intruded himself into interracial incidents and police shootings of blacks, whether justified or not, stoking further the racial divisions he has exploited throughout his presidency. Obama called the police “stupid” in the Henry Louis Gates incident. He said if he had a son “he’d look like” Trayvon Martin, and said of the recent shooting in Minnesota that “there’s a big chunk of our citizenry that feels as if, because of the color of their skin, they are not being treated the same.” He also praised Black Lives Matter for doing “outstanding work,” and said that the arson and looting following the decision not to prosecute the policeman in Ferguson was “an understandable reaction” and that “the law too often feels like it’s being applied in a discriminatory fashion.”

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