Displaying posts published in

November 2016

ISRAEL Comments turned off

MY SAY: LEAVE THE UN!

By on November 29th, 2016

http://www.mideastoutpost.com/archives/leave-the-united-nations-ruth-king.htmlThe story of Taiwan’s expulsion from the UN is a cautionary tale for Israel. In 1971, after Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger implemented a rapprochement with the despots of Communist China, pro-American Taiwan was expelled by the United Nations to accommodate Peking (now Beijing).

In 1979 the American embassy in Taipei was downgraded to a consulate, the embassy to China relocated to Beijing.

Although Taiwan gave up all claims to the mainland, it didn’t help at the UN which systematically reduced Taiwan’s role, banning it not only from the Security Council but from the General Assembly. It has hung on to a peripheral place on a few subcommittees, where it is routinely harassed by other members. Taiwan continues to apply for UN membership but its applications have been denied, shamefully with American support for the continuing ban. Nonetheless Taiwan remains a thriving democracy now governed by a woman, Tsai Ing-wen.

The American embassy today is in Tel-Aviv not in Jerusalem, Israel’s capital. The United Nations edges closer and closer to recognition of a “Palestinian” state. Israel can meet the fate of Taiwan should a “Greater Arab Palestine” be formally endorsed by the representatives of the “HateIsraelstans”– those post-colonial nations that won independence in the 1950s, increasing the number of UN member states to 193, most of them oppressive tyrannies.

The United Nations and its sub agencies bash, libel and condemn Israel in an unending barrage of hostile resolutions, while ignoring the depredations of the most oppressive regimes in the world.

In response Israel has adopted two opposing policies.

One–the less appealing–is making concessions, even though all previous concessions have had disastrous results. Israel then airbrushes the inevitable violent Arab/Moslem response.

The second–and more appealing—policy is one through which Israel garners respect for strength, determination and indifference to the howling of antagonists.

The incredible lightning victory of 1967 brought an outpouring of Western support. So did the epic rescue of hostages at Entebbe in 1976. So did the raid of 1981, launched from an air base in the Sinai, which destroyed Saddam Hussein’s nuclear reactor at Osirak.

Initially the last produced howls from the left. To its discredit, the United States abstained on a vote for UN resolution 487 which condemned Israel’s attack on an IAEA-approved nuclear site, entitled Iraq to sue for compensation, and urged Israel to place its nuclear facilities under IAEA safeguards.

However, much of the international press and public admired Israel’s pluck. For a brief period Israel basked in approval before turning to “peace processing” away its sovereignty.

So here is my proposal for a daring act by Israel. Leave the United Nations. Pack up, close the Permanent Mission to the United Nations and find real jobs for all the bureaucrats, pseudo diplomats and ancillary staff.

Continue reading →
ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Peter O’Brien :The AGW Scam Runs Cold

By on November 29th, 2016

It is one thing to persuade gullible boy and girl reporters that climate change is sending the planet on a one-way trip to catastrophe, but average citizens are smarter than that. They notice this year’s other-than-predicted cold and their faith dies, one stupendous electricity bill at a time’
One thing that CAGW sceptics and alarmists seem to agree on is that, as both sides say, ‘weather is not climate’. Each camp trots out that line whenever the other cites a particularly hot or cold spell to support its position. And whilst the aphorism is true in general, its power in the hands of alarmists is waning — a case study in the law of diminishing. I’ll return to this point later.

At about this time last year and the year before, Gavin Schmidt, the soon to-be-redundant, number-crunching head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a catastropharian nonpareil, revealed his agency’s very elastic global surface temperature record. This is always accompanied by the gleefully morose warning ‘this year is likely to be the hottest ever recorded’. Under his watchful eye and, it must be said, his hand (or is it merely a thumb on the scale?), so it proven to be.

Here’s how it played out in 2014. On January 16, 2015, NASA GISS issued a statement jointly with NOAA NCDC announcing that 2014 was the ‘warmest year in the modern record’. As there is no shortage of scientifically semi-illiterate and terminally credulous reporters, this was trumpeted by the global media as yet further “proof” the planet was speeding toward its sweaty death throes. However, on closer examination, it turned out that 2014 beat the previous record (2010) by a mere 0.02C, well within the margin of error of 0.10C. Schmidt later conceded that they were only 38% certain that 2014 was, after all, a record. You can read all about this from a number of sources, but why not use the one least likely to call out any irregularities on the part of true ‘climate scientists’? That would be the ABC, in other words. the ABC.

Gavin must have learned his lesson because 2015 presented a different story. Here’s how this one was reported by Climate Central, benignly described described by Wikipedia as a “non-profit news organization that analyzes and reports on climate science” but, as the casual visitor to its website will discern at a glance, a bottomless pit of warmist alarmism.

2015 Shatters Hottest Year Mark; 2016 Hot on its Heels?

It’s official: 2015 was the hottest year on record, beating out 2014 by the widest margin in 136 years of record keeping, U.S. government agencies announced Wednesday.

Continue reading →
HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Muslim Refugee Brings Jihad Terror at Ohio State And the Left uses it to call for…gun control. Robert Spencer

By on November 29th, 2016

Ohio State University student Abdul Razak Ali Artan on Monday morning set off a fire alarm on campus, the drove his car into the crowd of students evacuating the building. Then he jumped out of his car and began stabbing people with a butcher knife. In a departure from the usual denial and obfuscation, Columbus Police Chief Kim Jacobs was refreshingly honest, saying: “I think we have to consider that it is” a terror attack. Leftists took advantage of the occasion to call for gun control, which might have been a cogent argument were it not for one inconvenient detail: Artan didn’t have a gun. But above all, Artan was a “refugee”: the attack vindicates President-elect Trump on Muslim immigration.

Artan was no poster boy for gun control, but he may have been one for the Islamic State, which issued this call in September 2014:

So O muwahhid, do not let this battle pass you by wherever you may be. You must strike the soldiers, patrons, and troops of the tawaghit. Strike their police, security, and intelligence members, as well as their treacherous agents. Destroy their beds. Embitter their lives for them and busy them with themselves. If you can kill a disbelieving American or European — especially the spiteful and filthy French — or an Australian, or a Canadian, or any other disbeliever from the disbelievers waging war, including the citizens of the countries that entered into a coalition against the Islamic State, then rely upon Allah, and kill him in any manner or way however it may be….If you are not able to find an IED or a bullet, then single out the disbelieving American, Frenchman, or any of their allies. Smash his head with a rock, or slaughter him with a knife, or run him over with your car, or throw him down from a high place, or choke him, or poison him….

Intriguingly, before his jihad attack, Artan demonstrated that he knew well how to play the victim card. He appeared in Ohio State University’s The Lantern, in a feature entitled “Humans of Ohio State.” In it, he spoke about being “scared” about performing his Islamic prayers in public:

I just transferred from Columbus State. We had prayer rooms, like actual rooms where we could go to pray because we Muslims have to pray five times a day. There’s Fajr, which is early in the morning, at dawn. Then Zuhr during the daytime, then Asr in the evening, like right about now. And then Maghrib, which is like right at sunset and then Isha at night. I wanted to pray Asr. I mean, I’m new here. This is my first day. This place is huge, and I don’t even know where to pray. I wanted to pray in the open, but I was kind of scared with everything going on in the media. I’m a Muslim, it’s not what the media portrays me to be. If people look at me, a Muslim praying, I don’t know what they’re going to think, what’s going to happen. But, I don’t blame them, it’s the media that put that picture in their heads so they’re just going to have it and it, it’s going to make them feel uncomfortable. I was kind of scared right now. But I just did it. I relied on God. I went over to the corner and just prayed.

Abdul Razak Artan, “third-year in logistic management,” is dead now, so The Lantern can’t go back to him and ask him if he understands better now why people might be nervous about Muslims praying, and why it isn’t just the fault of “the media.”

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

A Party of Teeth-Gnashers The broken record of racism/sexism/homophobia plays on and on and on. By Victor Davis Hanson

By on November 29th, 2016

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/442535/print

—

After the Democratic equality-of-opportunity agenda was largely realized (Social Security, Medicare, overtime, a 40-hour work week, disability insurance, civil rights, etc.), the next-generation equality-of-result effort has largely failed.

What is left of Democratic ideology is identity politics and assorted dead-end green movements as conservation has become radical environmentalism and fairness under the law is now unapologetic redistributionism. The 2016 campaign and the frenzied reaction to the result are reminders that the Left is no longer serious about formulating and advancing a practical agenda. In sum, for now it is reduced to a party of gatecrashers.

The Podesta archive, when coupled with the pay-for-play Clinton Foundation, summed up the liberal ideology: progressive platitudes as cover for an elite’s pursuit of power and influence. Examine a coastal Democratic establishmentarian, and there is little discernable difference in his lifestyle, income, or material tastes from those conservatives (usually poorer) whom he accuses of all sorts of politically incorrect behaviors. Self-righteous outrage is a Democratic selling point and a wise career move for journalists, academics, bureaucrats, and politicians.

Without an ideology that even remotely matched the life she led, Hillary Clinton could only run a campaign without consistent positions. She flipped on the Keystone pipeline and trade agreements. She refuted the entire 1990s Clinton economic and social agenda. Indeed, her positions of 2008 — anti–gay marriage, border enforcement, and rural populism — were the very positions that she smeared others for embracing in 2016. In 2008, Clinton damned Obama for his “clingers” speech; in 2016, she trumped him with her deplorables and irredeemables.

She both derided Wall Street and was enriched by it. Her 2008 brief flirtation with the white working classes as a modern Annie Oakley came full circle in 2016, with exultant promises to put coal miners out of work. In the end, Hillary had no ideology other than getting even richer by leveraging the office of secretary of state and pandering to identity politics in hopes that record numbers of women and minorities would vote for a 68-year-old white multimillionaire, much as they had voted for Barack Obama. The more she talked of the LGBT or Latino communities, apparently the more we were to think that the Clintons had subverted their offices and reputations to grift a $150 million personal fortune for the underprivileged.

One of the reasons Trump won without commensurate money, organization, ground game, big-name endorsements, establishment unity, conservative media encouragement, and despite a campaign of gaffes and opposition-planted IEDS, was that half the country felt it would not have survived four more years of the cynicism of left-wing politics. In other words, voters got tired of being accused of thought crimes from a party led by wealthy people who made them poorer while adding insult to injury.

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Report: Trump Picks Rep. Tom Price as HHS Secretary By Debra Heine

By on November 29th, 2016

Dr. Price, a fierce ObamaCare opponent, has his own plan to replace it ….
According to the Washington Post, President-elect Donald Trump has chosen Georgia Rep. Tom Price, a former orthopedic surgeon and staunch ObamaCare opponent to serve as the secretary of health and human services in his administration.

An insider from within the transition team told the Post that the public announcement of Trump’s selection of Price, could come as early as Tuesday.

As HHS secretary, Price would become the Trump administration’s point person on dismantling and replacing the Affordable Care Act, one of Trump’s major campaign promises.

Price, 62, who represents a suburban Atlanta district, has played a leading role in the Republican opposition to the law known as Obamacare and has helped draft several comprehensive bills to replace it.

During the campaign, Trump railed against the Affordable Care Act and vowed to repeal and replace it. But after meeting with Obama in the Oval Office shortly following the election, he was convinced to perhaps keep some of the more popular elements of the law intact and amend the law rather than repeal it.

Trump has said he would favor keeping the provision preventing insurers from refusing coverage for preexisting conditions as well as the one permitting children to stay on their parents’ health plans until age 26.

Price is a six-term congressman who chairs the House Budget Committee and is said to be close to House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.).

Continue reading →
WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Fidel Castro’s Mass Murder by the Numbers By David P. Goldman

By on November 29th, 2016

Fidel Castro shed blood on a scale unimaginable in American terms. His butchers executed perhaps 15,000 prisoners, according to academic estimates cited by Wikipedia:

British historian Hugh Thomas, in his study Cuba or the pursuit of freedom[22] stated that “perhaps” 5,000 executions had taken place by 1970,[21] while The World Handbook of Political and Social Indicators ascertained that there had been 2,113 political executions between the years of 1958–67.

Professor of political science at the University of Hawaii, Rudolph J. Rummel estimated the number of political executions at between 4,000 and 33,000 from 1958–87, with a mid range of 15,000.

That was in a country of 7 million. In per capita terms, that’s the equivalent of about 680,000 executions in the United States of America with our population of 318 million. What’s 680,000? The entire population of Denver or Seattle. Imagine taking every man, woman, and child of a major American city and murdering them. That’s the scale of Fidel Castro’s crimes.

680,000 is a bit less than the standard estimate for total military deaths in the American Civil War. Imagine standing 680,000 soldiers against a wall — all the dead of Antietam, Gettysburg, Cold Harbor Chickamauga and every other battle of the Civil War — and shooting them dead in cold blood. That’s the equivalent of Fidel Castro’s mass murder.

Stalin, Hitler, Mao and Pol Pot killed more people in relative terms. After that, it’s hard to find a tyrant with a bigger body count than Fidel. To speak of him with anything but a curse is an insult to the memory of his victims.

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

FRANK GAFFNEY: THE BIG LIE IS BACK

By on November 29th, 2016

In 2011, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton promised the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) to use “some old fashioned techniques of peer pressure and shaming” against those whose exercise of free speech “we abhor.”

At the time, she had in mind specifically perpetrators of what the OIC, the Muslim Brotherhood, other Islamic supremacists and their enablers on the Left call “defamation of Islam.” But the same playbook – in the tradition of Mrs. Clinton’s mentor, Saul Alinsky – is now being followed with a vengeance against what is abhorred by the cabal best described as the Red-Green Axis.

Much in evidence among such “old-fashioned techniques” now being employed is what’s known as “the Big Lie.” It entails the endless repetition of outrageous falsehoods to defame, and ultimately silence, one’s political opponents.

Three good men Donald Trump has selected for key strategic and national security positions are currently getting the Big Lie treatment: his White House Counsel Steve Bannon, Attorney General-designate Senator Jeff Sessions, and incoming National Security Advisor Lieutenant General Michael Flynn. They are being relentlessly vilified as “racists,” “bigots” and “haters.”

I feel these able public servants’ pain. Indeed, I know what it’s like to be subjected to the Big Lie. For years, the Islamists and their allies on the hard Left – notably, the discredited (for example, here and here) Southern Poverty Law Center – have used character assassination and vitriol against me (for example, here, here and here) to protect what they otherwise cannot defend: the totalitarian program its adherents call Sharia. The false assertion last week that I had been asked to serve on the Trump transition team sent these rogues into fresh paroxysms of hateful denunciation, repeated like a mantra by their media echo chamber (for example, here, here, here and here).

I am hardly alone in being diagnosed by such charlatans with the made-up condition of “Islamophobia.” Indeed, I am proud to be included in the company of men and women being pilloried for what Islamic supremacists and their enablers would have us believe is “defamation of Islam.” In fact, it is simply informed, astute and courageous truth-telling about the global jihad movement and threat it poses. Steve Bannon, Jeff Sessions and Mike Flynn are under assault for doing the same in this and other contexts.

It seems that critics are particularly unhinged by the clarity of these three men and the president they will serve about the fact that Islamic supremacism is not simply a menace overseas. The Red-Green types are determined to prevent Donald Trump from operationalizing the plan of action he described in a major address on the topic on August 15, 2016. Among its highlights are the following:

Our new approach, which must be shared by both parties in America, by our allies overseas, and by our friends in the Middle East, must be to halt the spread of Radical Islam. All actions should be oriented around this goal….Just as we won the Cold War, in part, by exposing the evils of communism and the virtues of free markets, so too must we take on the ideology of Radical Islam….

Continue reading →
EDUCATION Comments turned off

Flunking Higher Education By Glenn Fairman *****

By on November 29th, 2016

Peace Studies, Black Studies, Womens’ Studies, Ethnic Studies, even Marijuana Studies. These “Sensitivity Degrees,” from 40K plus a year universities, are coming home to roost — as our youth begin taking their surly bite out of the “reality sandwich.” Having initially lusted after those glossy course catalogs, what a cold slap in the face it was to learn that an engineering degree actually required spending nights burning the midnight oil, rather than the bong. How comforting it was to switch majors after the freshman term and saunter into the lukewarm waters of sub-mediocrity. How natural it felt to re-enter the progressive womb and be “Born Again” as a smart-phone toting infant — where the ability to emote (and bullshit) was valued over the cruel, patriarchal, intolerant, and narrow world of science and its unforgiving mistress: mathematics.

And even if one still wished to cultivate the traditional loosey-goosey creative life, these days the disciplines of: Philosophy, English, and Political Science are more representative of Progressive indoctrination than that once blessed golden path of diving deep into the human condition. Now, the liberal arts or social sciences are indispensable to a cultured society, but only in the last few generations has our moribund culture succumbed to the delusion that such knowledge was sufficient, in and of itself, for obtaining gainful employment. Little did they know that “The Technical City” has little need of such pleasantries, and this cruel revelation hit working class parents perhaps the hardest. Indeed, how many scrimping couples mortgaged their golden years so that little Heather and charming Max could swig and cavort to the dulcet tones of Higher Education — that velvet-lined Hamster box of learning? Having handed over their treasures to the longhairs, Mom and Pop were handed back sniveling toddlers. And if we have learned anything from this vast transfer of wealth, it is that an expensive dumbed down liberal arts education only increases the difficulty of dynamiting the entitled little bastards out of the basement before we qualify for Medicare.

Listen. America has surpassed its solubility limit for the number of parasites it can absorb and coddle. A knowledge of Foucault or Betty Friedan may impress in the decadent salons of Manhattan, but not so much in cleaning storm drains or in inquiring whether a patron would prefer a refill of his beverage of choice at that petit’ bourgeois establishment — Le’ Burger King.

What have we learned, class? You’re taking too damn long to grow up here in America! And while the philosopher contemplates his indigence and the psych major has her head examined, the principle on that student loan ain’t budged a lick. How’s that for some fundamental transformation?

Continue reading →
ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

THE FOREST JIHAD IS HERE: ARIEL KOCH

By on November 29th, 2016

This piece was first published on the Hebrew-language website Mida on November 25, 2016, rendered into English by Avi Woolf, and republished here with permission.http://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/2016/11/the-forest-jihad-is-here/

In contrast to talk about a “new form of terror,” the weapon of arson has served radical Islam for years around the world, with the aim of causing damage and “sowing fear into the hearts of infidels.”

A wave of fires is raging throughout Israel, causing great damage and leading to furious debates and rumor mills regarding their cause. Is this deliberate, negligence, or just a matter of the weather? The answer, so it seems, is a combination of the three. Some of the fires may indeed be the result of negligence, but such a large number of them in so many places suggests deliberate intent, helped by changes in the weather.

Indeed, police officials spoke this week of a “wave of arson,” and even arrested some suspects. At a press conference convened in burning Haifa by Prime Minister Netanyahu and Interior Minister Gilad Erdan, the fires were described as “terror,” and Minister Erdan even defined the “arson terror” as a new phenomenon which Israel is now coping with. But in fact, this isn’t the first time terrorists have made use of the arson weapon, and the idea has been widespread on the internet for years. The main party spreading it is al-Qaeda.

While Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaeda leadership hid in the Afghan-Pakistani hills, Abu Mus’ab al-Suri, the organization’s ideologue and strategist, published a two-volume book entitled A Call for Global Islamic Resistance. In his book, al-Suri calls on supporters of global jihad to hurt the West via urban combat and terror, individually and in groups. He provided inspiration for the terrorists who bombed Madrid in March 2004 and London in July 2005. Marc Sageman, a former psychiatrist working for American intelligence called this approach “leaderless jihad.” After the attack by terrorist Mohammad Merah on the Jewish Otzar Hatorah school in Toulouse, the head of Europol called it “the new jihad.”

Continue reading →
FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

The War That Dare Not Speak Its Name For all his promises to get America out, Obama’s legacy is a renewed war in Iraq.By William McGurn

By on November 29th, 2016

When David Petraeus appeared Monday at Trump Tower for a meeting with the president-elect, the headlines naturally fixated on whether the retired Army general and former CIA chief would serve as secretary of state for the incoming administration.

Certainly Mr. Trump’s choice here will be one of his most consequential cabinet picks. But the appearance of Mr. Petraeus carries an even more striking implication. Because his presence is a reminder of a painful truth that Mr. Trump, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton all found easier to ignore throughout the 2016 election campaign.

The truth is this: America is still at war in Iraq.

All throughout the campaign, Mr. Trump rightly thumped both President Obama and Mrs. Clinton for their refusal to use the I-word—Islamist—when speaking of the terror threat against the American people. But when it came to the W-word—war—Mr. Trump was not much better.

In three presidential debates, neither Mr. Trump nor Mrs. Clinton used the word war to describe the fighting in Iraq in which our troops are now engaged. When they did use the word, the context was almost always frozen in 2002.

There are political reasons for this. Mrs. Clinton, for example, is well aware that the Bernie Sanders wing of her party regards her as a latter-day Dr. Strangelove. So when she did talk about war and Iraq, it was mostly to declare that her Senate vote to authorize it was a mistake she deeply regrets.

Mr. Trump mostly fixated on the past as well. On almost every occasion the Iraq war came up, Mr. Trump used the opportunity to insist he’d opposed it from the start.

Continue reading →