Displaying posts published in

2016

Bystanders to Genocide Samantha Power and the responsibility for ‘barbarism’ in Syria.

Russian and Syrian government forces continue to press their offensive in Aleppo, killing hundreds of civilians with incendiary and bunker-busting bombs. Samantha Power, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, has denounced the assault as “barbarism” and called out Russia at the Security Council for its chronic mendacity and refusal to take responsibility for its participation in the slaughter.

Ms. Power knows something about barbarism and responsibility. In 2001 she published a searing account in the Atlantic about the Clinton Administration’s failure to stop the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, in which as many as 800,000 Tutsis were killed over three months by their Hutu neighbors.

Ms. Power spared no one in her depiction of the Administration’s “almost willful delusion” about the killing, its diplomatic prevarications to avoid using the word “genocide,” and its concern with how U.S. intervention would play in the midterm elections. She was particularly tough on U.S. officials who “were firmly convinced that they were doing all they could—and, most important, all they should—in light of competing American interests and a highly circumscribed understanding of what was ‘possible’ for the United States to do.”
The essay was titled “Bystanders to Genocide.” Ms. Power later expanded the article into a book, “A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide,” for which she was widely praised. Barack Obama read the book and promoted her rise in government.

Fast forward to the present, and Ms. Power can sound like those officials she once scolded for thinking they were doing everything they could given the complexities of the situation.

“Well, Syria is a very complex picture,” Ms. Power told CBS earlier this month. “There are thousands of armed groups. The question again of what military intervention would achieve, where you would do it, how you would do it in a way where the terrorists wouldn’t be the ones to take advantage of it—this has been extremely challenging. But the idea that we have not been doing quote anything in Syria seems absurd. We’ve done everything short of waging war against the Assad regime and we are, I should note, having significant success against ISIL on the ground.”

Hillary-Hatred Derangement Syndrome She alone stands between America and the reign of the most unstable, unfit president in U.S. history.Dorothy Rabinowitz see note please

The author is a dear friend of mine…..And I totally disagree and the bulk of comments do so also…..e.g. “She has confused the minor peccadilloes of Trump — a little misogyny here, a little narcissism there — with the full-throated roar of Hillary’s lies, corruption, hate of the American people and the country they love, her Marxist-inspired ideology and her basic incompetence, displayed, full monty, by her handling of Libya (esp. Benghazi), Syria, reset of Russia, North Korea and Iran”…..rsk

There were cheers when Donald Trump assured his Virginia audience last weekend that the wall will be built and, yes, that Mexico would pay for it. But the cheers lacked the roaring ecstasy his promise used to evoke at rallies. No one has the heart, by now, to pretend that such a wall will actually be built, but that’s all right with Mr. Trump’s dauntless fans, who can find plenty of other reasons for their faith in him. The NeverTrump forces, appalled at the prospect of a Trump presidency, are no less passionate.

The NeverHillary forces are another matter entirely—citizens well aware of the darker aspects of Donald Trump’s character but who have nonetheless concluded that they should give him their vote. They are aware of his casual disregard for truth, his self-obsession, his ignorance, his ingrained vindictiveness. Not even the first presidential debate, which saw him erupt into a snarling aside about Rosie O’Donnell, could loosen his hold on that visceral drive to inflict payback, in this case over a feud 10 years old.

The NeverHillary forces are aware, too, of his grandiosity—his announcement that he knows more about Islamic State than any of America’s generals will long be remembered—his impulse-driven character, his insatiable need for applause, the head-turning effect on him of an approving word from Vladimir Putin. The Russian leader’s compliment late last year was of the mildest kind—he referred to Mr. Trump as “talented” and “colorful”—but it was enough to make the candidate’s heart go pitter-patter with gratitude and engender instant expressions of his faith in Mr. Putin’s integrity and leadership. As Mr. Trump himself has explained, “if he says nice things about me, I’m going to say nice things about him.”

Such are the values that drive the Republican candidate’s judgment—a fact interesting to contemplate as one imagines a President Trump dealing with international conflict and rogue heads of state. Still Mr. Trump is now the choice of voters who have concluded that of the two flawed contenders running, he would be far preferable.

Jonathan Turley: FBI’s Tanked Clinton Email Probe ‘a Legitimate Matter of Congressional Concern and Investigation’ By Debra Heine

A professor of law at George Washington University is expressing grave concern over the “bizarre” way in which the FBI handled the Clinton email investigation.

Respected legal scholar Jonathan Turley had previously opined that “FBI Director James Comey was within accepted lines of prosecutorial discretion in declining criminal charges,” even though he believed that charges could have been brought. Now, due to recent revelations that the Department of Justice handed out at least five immunity deals, Turley believes the matter is a “legitimate matter of congressional concern and investigation.”
The Five Clinton Aides Covering for Her Who Were Granted Immunity

Turley writes at his blog, “the news of the immunity deals (and particularly the deal given top ranking Clinton aide Cheryl Mills) was baffling and those deals seriously undermined the ability to bring criminal charges in my view.”

Now, Comey has testified before both the Senate and the House. His answers only magnified concerns over the impact and even the intent of granting immunity to those most at risk of criminal charges.

Before his testimony in the House, Comey spoke in the Senate and stated that he gave immunity to Mills because she refused to turn over her laptop — a highly dubious rationale, as I previously discussed.

First the timeline is now becoming clear and it makes the immunity deal even more bizarre given what the FBI knew [about] Colorado-based tech specialist Paul Combetta and Clinton aides Cheryl Mills and IT specialist Bryan Pagliano.

In July 2014 , then-chief of staff Cheryl Mills was told that Clinton’s emails were being sought.

On July 23, 2014 Combetta got a call from Mills on the server and emails.

On July 24, 2014, Combetta received an email from Clinton IT specialist Pagliano.

On July 24, Combetta then went online to Reddit to solicit help on stripping out “a VIP’s (VERY VIP) email address from a bunch of archived emails.” He revealed that “they don’t want the VIP’s email address exposed to anyone.”

Tel Aviv: A Beach-to-Market Food Tour Israeli food is having its global moment, spurring ever more inventive cooking in trendsetting Tel Aviv. Here’s how to find the city’s most exciting restaurants, food stalls—and the king of all pita sandwiches By Raphael Kadushin

When I was 7 my family moved from the Midwest, in the dead of winter, to Israel and everything shifted. Our snow boots gave way to sandals, blizzards turned into salty sea breezes and food that used to arrive wrapped in plastic came alive, in very real ways. On Friday mornings the poultry vendor would chase our Sabbath chicken around the market yard, until we heard the last strangled squawk. The oranges from our neighbor’s tree would spray juice when we halved them, and hummus was always spilling out of pita and running down our bare arms.

We left Israel before I entered high school and returned for short visits in the years that followed. But I hadn’t gone back for an extended visit until last year, around the same time the rest of the world was busy discovering the tastes I remembered. Israeli cuisine is having a huge global moment, from Jerusalem-born chef Yotam Ottolenghi’s network of Middle-Eastern restaurants in London to Alon Shaya’s Shaya, currently one of the toughest reservations in New Orleans. And all that excitement isn’t just an Israeli export. The Tel Aviv I knew, a relatively quiet, provincial town, has morphed into Israel’s largely secular trendsetter; new restaurants are debuting weekly. “We’re open to the world now,” chef Eytan Vanunu later told me, “in fashion, art, music and, of course, food.”
On this return trip, the proof of that voracious appetite, and Tel Aviv’s ascendance as style maker, were obvious my first day in town. I passed the Tel Aviv Museum of Art’s glossy new contemporary wing, and the warren of boutiques and galleries crowding the Neve Tzedek neighborhood, before my cab deposited me in the hipsterized Florentin district at Halutzim 3, the restaurant Mr. Vanunu runs with his partner, Naama Szterenlicht. Housed in a small renovated warehouse, the bistro is anchored by a recycled wood counter and filled with flea-market-find tables. But if the dining room’s casual design doesn’t suggest the dynamism of Israeli food, the amped-up menu unequivocally does. The parents of Mr. Vanunu and Ms. Szterenlicht variously came to Israel from Argentina, Poland, Germany and Morocco. A decade ago northern European Jewish (Ashkenazi) and southern (Sephardic) recipes would have ended up in different pots. But Mr. Vanunu and Ms. Szterenlicht, representing a new generation of Israeli chefs, bring all those international accents to the freshest local produce and turn out a coherent tumble of flavors. At Halutzim 3, my bowl of black lentils, true to Israel’s abiding vegetarian palate, came tossed with coriander, cured lemon, tomatoes, roasted almonds and goat yogurt. Unabashedly non-kosher, the kitchen also serves a challah loaf stuffed with minced pork and a calamari salad brightened by lime and parsley.

‘When you look at a national cuisine, it’s usually the history of a people. But we come from all over.’

“Israeli cuisine,” Mr. Vanunu told me, as he dished up the lentils, “is a dialogue that starts now. When you look at a national cuisine, it’s usually the history of a people. But we come from all over. The flavors on your plate aren’t just Naama and my own personal heritage. They also blend in lots of other strands of Israeli culture—Palestinian, Lebanese, Russian, Tunisian, Turkish, Algerian, Romanian, Bulgarian.” Add the growing number of French and Iraqi immigrants and Tel Aviv’s border-hopping food, taking shape before our eyes, is driven by an exuberant flavor profile that won’t be confined by any rigid tradition.

The lesson got reinforced that night when I dined at Yaffo Tel Aviv, an industrial-cool restaurant sitting at the base of downtown’s sleek Electra Tower. The standout hybrid dishes included a puffy focaccia that read more like pita, and an Italo-Israeli gnocchi with shavings of local goat cheese, for a taste of Tel Aviv on the Tiber.

The next morning, though, the very idea of another restaurant seemed claustrophobic. In a city where the sun rarely dives behind clouds, nobody stays inside too long, and Tel Aviv’s dense network of markets and street vendors do a brisk business. The choices are legion. Determined to recover a nostalgic taste of my childhood, I started just down the block from Halutzim 3 at the Levinksy Market, where the fruit stalls displayed pyramids of pomegranates and the market’s long-running Yom Tov Deli was selling cream cheese-stuffed hibiscus flowers in a dollhouse-sized storefront. “What’s good?” I stupidly asked the sale clerk. “Everything,” he said, with a classic Tel Aviv shrug, as I popped a rice-filled grape leaf in mouth, “We’re a deli.

After Islamic State, Fears of a ‘Shiite Crescent’ in Mideast Sunni Arab countries could face a potentially more dangerous challenge if Iranian allies establish a land corridor from Tehran to Beirut By Yaroslav Trofimov

From the point of view of Sunni Arab regimes anxious about Iran’s regional ambitions, Islamic State—as repellent as it is—provides a silver lining. The extremist group’s firewall blocks territorial contiguity between Iran and its Arab proxies in Syria and Lebanon.

This means that now, as Islamic State is losing more and more land to Iranian allies, these Sunni countries—particularly Saudi Arabia—face a potentially more dangerous challenge: a land corridor from Tehran to Beirut that would reinforce a more capable and no less implacable enemy.

Pro-Iranian Shiite militias such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Iraq’s Badr and Asaib Ahl al-Haq are filling the void left by Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, and they are much better equipped and trained than the Sunni extremist group. They are also just as hostile to the Saudi regime, openly talking about dismantling the kingdom and freeing Islam’s holy places from the House of Saud.

That rhetoric only intensified after January’s breakup in diplomatic ties between Riyadh and Tehran.

Many Western officials see these Shiite militias—which currently refrain from attacking Western targets—as an undoubtedly preferable alternative to Islamic State’s murderous rule, and some of the groups operating in Iraq indirectly coordinate with U.S. air power. But that isn’t how those militias are viewed in Riyadh and other Gulf capitals.

Abuses committed by Iranian proxies in Sunni areas are just as bad as those of Islamic State, argued Prince Turki al-Faisal, the former head of Saudi intelligence and a nephew of the current king.

“They are equally threatening, and one feeds off the other,” Prince Turki said in an interview. “Both of them are equally vicious, equally treacherous, and equally destructive.”

The West, he added, fundamentally misunderstood Iranian intentions in the region. “It’s wishful thinking that, if we try to embrace them, they may tango with us. That’s an illusion,” he said.

Fears over a “Shiite crescent” of Iranian influence in the Middle East aren’t new. They were first aired by Jordan’s King Abdullah a year after the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq brought pro-Iranian politicians to power in Baghdad.

In the following years, the huge U.S. military presence in Iraq and the Sunni insurgency there kept Iranian power in check. Then, just as the U.S. withdrawal and the taming of the insurgency seemed to herald a new era of Iranian prominence in the region, the 2011 upheaval of the Arab Spring unleashed the Syrian civil war.

The dramatic rise of Islamic State that followed created a Britain-sized Sunni statelet in Syria and Iraq—and severed all land communications in the middle of that “Shiite crescent.”

“Prior to 2011, Iran already had overwhelming influence in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. So Iran has not significantly expanded its influence in the region, but rather it has been forced to provide military protection to pivotal allies it risked losing,” said Ali Vaez, Iran expert at the International Crisis Group. “If this has caused panic in Riyadh, it’s mainly because the Arab world is in a state of disarray.” CONTINUE AT SITE

Here’s What Happens When a College Lets Students Pick Their Preferred Gender Pronouns By Kyle Foley

Like some other colleges these days, the University of Michigan is bowing to progressive convention and letting students who don’t want to be referred as either “he” or “she” pick their own gender pronouns. Whatever they choose determines the way professors and other staff at the school will address them.http://heatst.com/culture-wars/heres-what-happens-when-a-college-lets-students-pick-their-preferred-gender-pronouns/

While the whole exercise it meant to allow students to re-identify as any one of dozens of obscure genders (like agender, sisgender, etc), some students are having a bit of fun with the challenge. One student, Grant Strobl, seemed to have sparked a mini movement by officially changing his preferred pronoun to “His Majesty.” His are some of the other ways students now want to be addressed.

AND: University of Michigan Professors Will Face Disciplinary Action for Ignoring ‘Preferred Pronouns’By Jillian Kay Melchior http://heatst.com/culture-wars/university-of-michigan-professors-will-face-disciplinary-action-for-ignoring-preferred-pronouns/

The University of Michigan yesterday unveiled a new webpage that allows students to choose their preferred pronouns, including “they” and “ze.”

Preferred pronouns will appear on class rosters, and if professors accidentally use the wrong pronoun, “you can acknowledge that you made a mistake and use the correct pronoun next time,” said the university’s provost and vice president for student life in a campus-wide email announcement. It also called using preferred pronouns “one of the most basic ways to show your respect for their identity and to cultivate an environment that respects all gender identities.”

A university spokesman tells Heat Street, “If there were a persistent pattern of ignoring a student’s preference, we would address that as a performance matter.”

The new Wolverine Access page allows students to add, change, or delete preferred pronouns, which will be shared only with “those who have a legitimate education interest in the information,” the new webpage says. Students who don’t specify a preferred pronoun won’t have one listed, the university said.

The college’s IT team made the change, so it had no specific cost, a university spokesman said.

The decision comes after a University of Michigan junior founded the Wolverines for Preferred Pronouns Initiative, also starting a Change.org petition that has gained more than 750 signatures this year.

Chess Players Forced to Compete in Hijabs At World Championship in Iran By Kieran Corcoran see note please

WILL THE BISHOPS ON THE BOARD BE CALLED MULLAHS? RSK
Female chess grandmasters will be forced to wear hijabs at the world chess championship in Iran next year.

http://heatst.com/world/chess-players-forced-to-compete-in-hijabs-at-world-championship-in-iran/?mod=hsnewsletter_dd

Women hoping to prove themselves the best player in the world have been told to respect “cultural differences” and cover up at the Islamic theocracy was named the host nation.
Players threatened to boycott the event in response and attacked the sport’s governing body for kowtowing to the demands of Iran’s religious police.Visitors to Iran face fines and even arrest if they appear in public with their hair on show.

Congress Overrides Obama’s Veto on 9/11 Suits against Saudis Finally rousing itself to oppose the president, Congress chose an issue on which the president was right. By Andrew C. McCarthy

On Wednesday, Congress overwhelmingly nullified President Obama’s veto of legislation that enables 9/11 victims and their families to sue the government of Saudi Arabia. Each chamber easily cleared the two-thirds’ supermajority requirement for override: The vote was 97–1 in the Senate and 348–77 in the House.

In what perhaps is a sign of lame-duck times, it marked the first veto override of Obama’s presidency. To repeat the rueful observation I made two weeks ago, it’s a shame that when the Republican-controlled Congress finally roused itself to oppose the president in a decisive showdown, lawmakers chose an issue on which the president was right.

To be clear, I mean “right” in the sense of maintaining a prudent defense of basic international-relations protocols. Obama is not right insofar as the American–Saudi relationship is concerned. On that score, I want to revisit a point I expressed poorly in the previous column.

There, I went through the multiple reasons why the legislation — the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA) — portends major problems: It foolishly delegates the delicate political duty of conducting foreign relations to the courts; it undermines the important concept of sovereign immunity; and it encourages reciprocal foreign-government action against U.S. political officials and military personnel.

On that last blunder, JASTA proponents tirelessly insist the bill is narrowly tailored to the allegedly unique circumstances of Saudi complicity in the 9/11 attacks. Of course, the scale of the attacks aside, there is nothing unique about rogue regimes providing material support to terrorism. But even if there were something to the “narrowly tailored / unique circumstances” claim, JASTA proponents miss the point. Foreign governments that decide to retaliate against the United States over this law will not deem themselves limited to action commensurate with our legislation. Once the principle of sovereign immunity is breached, all bets are off. The Saudis — to say nothing of our enemies in Tehran and our hostile rivals in Moscow and Beijing, all of whom exploit any excuse to make trouble for us — will not be constrained by Congress’s narrow tailoring.

France’s New Sharia Police by Yves Mamou

Are French institutions sacrificing one freedom for another? Is equality between men and women being sacrificed to freedom of religion (Islam) to impose its diktats on French society?

If someone still does not realize that the Islamic dress code is the Trojan horse of Islamist jihad, he will learn it fast.

For years, “big brothers” have been obliging their mothers and sisters to wear a veil when they go out. Now that this job is done, they have begun to fight non-Muslim women who wear shorts and skirts — no longer just in the sensitive Muslim “no-go zones” of the suburbs, where women no longer dare to wear skirts — but now also in the heart of big cities.

“The law guarantees women, in all fields, same equal rights as men.”

What people do not seem to know is that in the heart of Paris, a Muslim man can insult a woman for drinking a cola in the street and is served in stores first, before women.

Many people evidently still do not know that Islam is a religion and a political movement at war with the West — and openly intent on subjugating the West. It must be responded to as such. The problem is, every time it is responded to as such, Muslim extremists run for cover under the claim of freedom of religion.

It is crucial for Western societies to start making a distinction between freedom of speech and incitement to violence, and to begin seriously penalizing attacks on innocents, as well as calls to attack innocents.

The Council of State, the highest administrative court in France, decided that, to allow freedom of religion, the burkini must not be banned. At first the ruling looked sound: why should people not be able to wear what they wish when they wish? What is not visible, however, is that the harm comes later.

UTOPIA’S CLASSES: DANIEL GREENFIELD

The sort of people who set off class wars as a hobby have very particular classless societies in mind. The average left-wing revolutionary is not poor. He is a homicidal dilettante from the upper classes with a burning conviction of his own importance that he is unwilling to realize through disciplined labor. His revolution climaxes with a classless society in which he is at the very top.

Not near the top, not adjacent to the top, as he usually was before, but at the very top.

Utopia has a class system. At the top are the thinkers, the philosopher kings who develop plans based on how things ought to be and then turn them over to lesser men to actually implement. They are the priestly class of an ideological movement whose deity is politics and whose priests are politicians.

In a planned economy, they are the titans of industry and finance, they are the heads of banks and the men who move millions and billions around the board, and they are utterly unfit for the job. But they also make decisions in matters of war and science. And in all things. They measure political heresy in all things and all the activities of man are measured against their dogma and rewarded or punished.

This is the way it was in the Soviet Union or Communist China. But take a closer glance at the White House and see if you don’t spot the occasional similarity.

In the middle of Utopia’s class system is the middle class. This is not the middle class you are familiar with. There are no small business owners here. No one striving to make it up the ladder. Utopia’s middle class is the bureaucracy, the interlinked hive mind of government and non-profits.

At the top of Utopia’s class system are the philosopher-planners who issue the regulations. Or rather they offer objectives. The bureaucracy filters them through successive layers, transforming grandiose ideas into stultifying regulations and each successive layers expands them into further microcosms of unnecessary detail. This expansion of regulations also expands the bureaucracy. One feeds off the other.

Utopia has no lower class. That would be dystopian. Instead it has a client class. The client class is what used to be known as the working class. Utopia however transforms it into the welfare class.

Clienture transforms the working class into the welfare class. The destruction of the conditions under which the working class can exist forces its members either upward into the bureaucracy, a feat that is only possible for the younger generation willing to undergo the educational process, or downward into the welfare class.