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2016

The Palestinian Authority’s Crackdown On Journalists by Khaled Abu Toameh

According to his account, Abu Zeid was also subjected to shabah-style torture, where a detainee’s hands and feet are tied in painful positions while his head is covered with a bag. He said that one of the interrogators threw him to the floor and kicked him in sensitive parts of his lower body.

The interrogators also threatened to arrest Abu Zeid’s wife, a female colleague and his lawyer. That would have been the closest he would have gotten to the lawyer: in the 37 days of detention, Abu Zeid claimed that he was prevented from meeting with his lawyer or any representative of a human rights organization.

The report noted that the year 2015 witnessed a “deterioration” in human rights in the territories and described the situation there as “catastrophic on all levels — political, security and human rights.” The report pointed out that Palestinians, including journalists, were being arrested by the Palestinian Authority (PA) because of their work and postings on social media.

Ironically, this campaign by the PA against journalists, which has failed to draw the attention of the international community and mainstream media in the West, is designed to prevent the world from understanding that the PA is a dictatorship. So far, the plan is working.

On May 16, Palestinian Authority security officers raided the home of Palestinian journalist Tareq Abu Zeid in the West Bank city of Nablus. After ransacking the house, the officers confiscated a computer and mobile phone before taking Abu Zeid into custody.

Abu Zeid, 40, who works for the Al-Aqsa TV channel, which is affiliated with Hamas, was held in detention for 37 days at the notorious Palestinian Authority-controlled Jneid Prison in Nablus.

On June 22, a Palestinian court in Nablus ordered the release of the journalist on a 5,000 Jordanian dinar (about $8,000) bail. The same court had ordered Abu Zeid remanded into custody three times during his detention. The court had turned down seven petitions demanding the release of the journalist during his incarceration.

No charges have been filed against Abu Zeid, who is originally from the West Bank city of Jenin. It is also highly unlikely that he will ever stand trial.

Palestinian security sources said he was suspected of “publishing news that harms the public interest and fomenting strife” among Palestinians. Although the sources did not provide further details, it is believed that Abu Zeid was accused of publishing stories that reflected negatively on the Palestinian Authority and its leaders. In other words, the journalist failed to serve as a mouthpiece for the Palestinian Authority and its leaders.

Abu Zeid is not the first Palestinian journalist to be targeted by the PA. Such arrests have become commonplace under the Palestinian Authority. But now it seems that the Palestinian Authority has moved from the phase of intimidation to torture.

Turkey: A Thuggish Ramadan by Burak Bekdil

Observant Muslims stubbornly refuse to understand that while the Koran commands them to abstain from alcohol, it does not command them to attack those Muslims (and non-Muslims) who do not do so.

It has become the observant Muslims’ self-granted authority collectively to forbid evil and command good, rather than just individually to avoid evil and choose good.

Zaytung, a popular online humor magazine (a kind of Turkish “The Onion”) ran a story:

“Government officials in this eastern city are mulling the possibility of airdropping food, beverages and cigarettes onto busy streets, hoping that this may break some fasters’ resistance to hunger, thirst and tobacco needs. The city has been in shock as, already one week into the holy month of Ramadan, no one has been publicly beaten up for eating, drinking or smoking.”

Zaytung’s mocking was not without a reason. “If one tried to eat in a restaurant [in some parts of Turkey] during Ramadan, one may be insulted or even physically harmed. Indeed, each year there is an incident of an unobservant college student being beaten up or even murdered in the southeast for not fasting during Ramadan,” observed Soner Cagaptay in a 2008 article in the Washington Institute.

In 2010, as art lovers drank sangria out of plastic cups and contemplated iconoclastic pieces of art, a group of locals in central Istanbul attacked them with pepper gas and frozen oranges. For an hour, they smashed windows and injured dozens, including visiting foreigners. The attackers justified themselves, saying that drinking alcohol, especially outdoors, violated Islamic rules. Then Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, now president, said, “Such incidents occur everywhere in the world.”

Nearly six years after that incident, a mob of men carrying sticks and bottles attacked a group of Radiohead fans at a record store owned by a South Korean man. The fans had been holding a listening party of the band’s music, again in central Istanbul. Video footage of the incident shows an angry man storming into the store, shouting curses and threats and most of the people hastily leaving. A waiting mob then reportedly attacked the group and the door of the record store was smashed, although fortunately there were no serious injuries reported from the assault.

TOM GROSS: DISPATCHES

Post-Brexit: EU Still a Superpower
By Steven Hill
The Globalist
June 27, 2016

If you type the words “European Union” and “crisis” into the Google search engine, you instantly receive 115 million hits. When I did that back in 2009, before the eurozone crisis, “only” 58 million hits popped up. Is the EU really in that much worse shape today? Apparently yes, according to the daily headlines. Recall that even before the Brexit vote, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls declared that Europe could “fall apart within months.”

But this is not the first time that political leaders and media outlets have declared the end of Europe. Prior to the economic crisis of 2008, the European economy was written off by most analysts as suffering from “Eurosclerosis” and condemned to decline.

Here’s a small sample of brassy headlines from leading media outlets over the last decade, trumpeting imminent collapse:

“The End of Europe”, “Europe Isn’t Working”, “Will Europe Ever Work?”, “What’s Wrong with Europe”, “Is Europe Dying?”, “The Decline and Fall of Europe”, “Why America Outpaces Europe”, and many more. In the 1990s, The Economist dubbed Germany the new “sick man of Europe,” and other media doomsayers warned of a future of rising unemployment, crime, and taxes to “a level not seen since the Weimar Republic.” Yet now a prospering Germany has become a global player.

The superpower rationale

Yes, the EU is juggling a number of daunting situations, but that’s what superpowers do. They deal with one crisis after another, year after year, some of them domestic and others international.

A superpower by definition occupies a big corner of the world, in which messes happen and things have a tendency to fall apart.

That rationale, always applied to the United States of America, also has its place when analyzing the EU. But does the EU really qualify for that lofty status? Emphatically yes. First, the EU is powered by one of the world’s great economic engines. Even with the eurozone crisis, what I call the EU-Plus (EU28 + Norway and Switzerland) still has the largest economy in the world (post-Brexit, the UK would still be part of the EU-Plus, due to the deep integration of the UK and EU economies). These nations produce a quarter of the world’s GDP.

Indeed, according to World Bank figures, the EU-Plus economy is larger than that of the United States and India combined.

It has more Fortune 500 companies than the U.S., India and Russia combined, and some of the most competitive national economies according to the World Economic Forum (European countries hold 13 of its top 25 rankings). This vitality extends to small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs), which provide two-thirds of Europe’s private sector jobs and 85% of net job growth (in the United States, SMEs only provide half the jobs). I hear many leaders complaining, “Europe isn’t innovative enough. Where are the European Facebooks, Googles and Apples?” Before we fall too much for that Silicon Valley-hyped rhetoric, let us just remember that those companies actually don’t create that many jobs. They are using software and algorithms to replace human workers. You want innovation? Take a look at Germany’s Mittelstand (i.e., small and medium sized) companies which are world-class exporters as well as job creators, making products that are crucial to industrial growth all over the world. So much for excessive red tape supposedly strangling the European economy. In another display of bold innovation, Europe has led a small revolution for greater economic democracy and a broadly shared prosperity. It is based on practices like codetermination, works councils, effective labor unions and the “visible hand” of an active government that guides the “social capitalist” economy.

These are things largely unheard of and/or unimaginable in the United States to date. The way in which Bernie Sanders’ campaign resonates with large swaths of young people and others underscores that there is a stron appetite in the U.S. for a similarly fairness-based approach to the economy.

EU as world leader while US stands still

Why Trump frightens the GOP Illuminati By Lee Cary

George Will, Brent Scowcroft, Hank Paulson, and Paul Ryan all fear Donald Trump.

They’re part of a growing list of GOP Establishment Illuminati that includes Bill Kristol, Robert Kagan and Mitch McConnell.

George Will officially declared himself an independent – no longer aligned with the GOP. He recommends that Republican conservative voters “grit their teeth” and hope Trump loses. Referring to the GOP, Will said, “This is not my party.”

George doesn’t understand that he never owned the party.

On June 23, 2016, CNN trumpeted that “a heavyweight foreign policy adviser to Republican presidents” had endorsed Hillary Clinton’s candidacy:

“Brent Scowcroft, who served as National Security Adviser to Presidents George H. W. Bush and Gerald Ford, and who worked in the White House of Presidents Richard Nixon and George W. Bush, said Clinton ‘brings truly unique experience and perspective to the White House.’”

Then, on June 24, 2016, CNN gleefully announced that Hank Paulson “endorsed Hillary Clinton, adding his name to prominent GOP heavyweights who are backing the presumptive Democratic nominee.”

Yet another “prominent” GOP “heavyweight” for Clinton!

Paulson was Treasury Secretary during George W. Bush’s presidency. Hank brought us the 2008 Big Bank Bailout – along with union pension fund bailouts – plus, funding for all those “shovel-ready” infrastructure projects that were never-ready for shovels. A huge scam.

And there’s Robert Kagan, a reputed neoconservative who writes for the Washington Post. On July 21, 2016, Kagan is scheduled to headline a D.C. fundraiser for Clinton. TPM quotes him saying,

“For this former Republican, and perhaps for others, the only choice will be to vote for Hillary Clinton. The party cannot be saved, but the country still can be.”

Kagan is concerned that America will become 1933 Germany. His May 18, 2016, Post article led with this incendiary title: “This is how fascism comes to America.” In it, he deploys 1,300 words to describe Trump as America’s rendition of Adolf Hitler.

No hedging from Kagan there – we Americans are potential Nazis. Speak for yourself, Bob.

Spain to Europe’s Relief The center-right gains while the voters reject hard-left Podemos.

Amid so much post-Brexit gloom about Europe, Sunday brought some especially welcome news in the unlikely vehicle of a Spanish election. The country’s voters increased support for Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy’s center-right Popular Party (PP) while rejecting the bid for power by the left-wing Podemos movement.

The election improves on the muddled results of six months ago in which no party won a majority. This time the PP increased its seats in the new Parliament to 137 from 123. The Socialists retained second place with 85 seats, blocking Podemos’s attempt to become the main party of the left. Markets responded with relief, pushing the Spanish 10-year government bond yield down 0.17 percentage points, the sharpest drop since 2014.

Mr. Rajoy is short of an absolute majority, but this is nonetheless a case of sound policy rewarded. Since taking power in 2011, the PP has ignored the Keynesian councils of Brussels and Washington in favor of supply-side economic reforms. Mr. Rajoy has cut personal and corporate taxes and simplified the tax system, trimmed civil-service spending and made it easier to hire and fire Spaniards.

And what do you know, faster growth has followed. Spain’s economy grew 3.2% last year and about 3% over the past eight quarters, according to the European Union’s statistical agency, while the jobless rate has fallen to 22.7% from a crisis-era peak of 26%.

This Spanish revival is all the more remarkable considering the lackluster growth in most of the rest of Europe. Growth in Germany was 1.7% last year and a mere 1.3% in France, where the jobless rate continues to be above 10%.

These results no doubt helped to blunt the appeal of Podemos, which fancies itself a version of Greece’s hard-left Syriza party. Left-wing populism prospers amid economic stagnation. Some credit also belongs to the Socialists, who have behaved like a responsible center-left opposition that favors more government intervention but rejects Podemos’s anticapitalist platform. CONTINUE AT SITE

The Supreme Court’s Cultural Winners The liberals outlaw nearly any state abortion regulation.

An important, persistent question of our times is how to account for the wide political and social polarization between liberals and conservatives. Monday’s 5-3 Supreme Court decision striking down a Texas abortion law reveals what’s beneath these divisions.

The Court’s opinion in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt was about abortion certainly, but the argument between the majority and minority goes deeper. In the final paragraph of his dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas went to the heart of the matter.

He noted first the divisions that always emerge from an abortion case: “Today’s decision will prompt some to claim victory, just as it will stiffen opponents’ will to object.” But, he continued, “the entire Nation has lost something essential.” He said the majority’s reasoning is an acknowledgement that “we have passed the point where ‘law,’ properly speaking, has any further application.” Justice Thomas is accusing his colleagues of lawlessness.

If putting it that way sounds familiar, it is because Justice Thomas was quoting from a law review article by the late Justice Antonin Scalia. Bluntly stated, the dissents by Justices Thomas and Samuel Alito accuse the majority of manipulating the Court’s precedents to police rights favored by liberal politics and to delegitimize the claims of their opponents. The favored right in this case is access to abortion.
In 2013 the Texas legislature passed a law that doctors doing abortions must have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of the abortion clinic. It also said the clinics had to equal the health and safety rules of ambulatory surgical centers. The Court’s majority struck down the entire law as a violation of the Constitution because its provisions impose an “undue burden” on a woman’s right to an abortion. It suggested that the law’s hospital-admissions rules for abortion doctors would harm women in rural counties.

The phrase “undue burden” is the famous legal test of state regulatory authority as defined in the 1992 abortion case, Planned Parenthood v. Casey. The point of Casey was to establish that states had the right to regulate abortion absent an undue burden on women. The point of Monday’s Texas decision is to tell the states to forget Casey, that the legal path is so narrow as to make state regulation of abortion a fiction. CONTINUE AT SITE

HERBERT LONDON: BREXIT REVISITED

Herbert London is President of the London Center for Policy Research
Now that the London fog has cleared, a dispassionate analysis of the Brexit vote is possible, even with murky clouds over the British Isles. The pound plunged with the Brexit vote as did global markets. Political elites from Cameron to Obama shuddered. Investors on both sides of the Atlantic were pummeled. Some say the British vote to leave the European Union is an invitation to anarchy.

I would say the vote represents a monumental assertion of free will, a vindication of a millennium of democracy and self-government. While those in London favored remaining in the E.U., the rest of Britain rebelled against the stain of migration that has disrupted the countryside, even leading to the massive rape of underage girls in one community by recent Muslim immigrants. The idea that Britain could absorb another 650,000 immigrants under E.U. mandate is, in the minds of many, a prescription for disaster.

Multiculturalism is in retreat as are the politically correct nostroms that have unsettled life for the average Brit. Brexit speaks to the Grand Old England, the one led by Margaret Thatcher who was the original Euroskeptic. She understood that the arrogant assertion of a united European entity undoing 500 years of history since the Westphalian accord was a fantasy. It has taken forty years for that fantasy to reveal itself, but now it has and dissolution is on the horizon. Brexit will lead to Czechit and Italianit and the slow but inexorable splitting of the elitist conception of Europe.

Most Brits were tired of a group of bureaucrats in Brussels telling them whether the use of an electric teapot was permissible or the allowable size of a lawn mower. Who are these bureaucrats anyway? They weren’t elected by British citizens. In fact, the entire E.U. is supra – democratic – a reach beyond sovereignty to unassigned authority. Ordinary people understand the disconnect with a government over which their control cannot be exercised.

David Goldman: A Review of “It’s Dangerous to Believe: Religious Freedom and Its Enemies” by Mary Eberstadt

It’s Dangerous to Believe: Religious Freedom and Its Enemies
by Mary Eberstadt
Harper, 158 pages, $25.99

Members of traditional religions became moral outlaws in the United States once equal rights for sexual preference and gender choice were enshrined in regulation and law. To believe that homosexual relations are sinful, as does biblical religion, defines the believer as a bigot in the view of liberal opinion, which is backed by the federal regulatory apparatus and the regulators of most American states, as well as by most of the judicial system.

As Mary Eberstadt reports, expressions of religious belief that society considered innocuous and normal until quite recently are now grounds for dismissal from jobs, denial of employment, and boycotts by the media. Devout Christians believe they must choose between their faith and job security, and they commonly conceal their faith in the workplace to avert discrimination. (Muslims are exempt because liberals consider them a threatened minority and make allowances for their misogyny and gay-bashing.)

Actions or speech (quoting a Bible verse or leaving a religious symbol in plain view) elicit persecution. In some cases, evidence of past incorrect opinion is sufficient: The CEO of the software firm Mozilla, Brendan Eich, was hounded from his post in 2014 for a $1,000 contribution to a 2008 California referendum campaign against gay marriage, evidence of a position he shared at the time with Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

Eberstadt is a wonderful writer. She has written passionately and with insight on faith and demographics, for example in her 2013 volume How the West Really Lost God, which I reviewed with enthusiasm. She has a great ear for anecdotes, and her field reports of Christians persecuted for ideological heresy entertain as much as they alarm. But her book is not only testimony to the gravity of the problem, but evidence as well: It betrays weakness within the Christian camp. She quotes friends who ask sadly, “Where can we [Christians] go?” and ponders the “Benedict Option,” forming small closed communities of Christians shut off from the world.

Eberstadt calls the persecution of traditional religion a “witch-hunt”—a critical error. A witch-hunt is a search for malefactors who pretend to be good people but really are intent on doing evil. There is a witch-hunt going on today, namely the search for secret racists at American universities. The witch-hunters pillory teachers and administrators who claim to hold politically correct views but allegedly betray their secret racism through wicked actions, for instance by correcting bad grammarin minority students’ term papers. Loyal liberals who commit no aggressions are said to be guilty of micro-aggressions.

By contrast, the purge of traditional Christians and Jews is a heretic hunt, an Inquisition, whose objective is to isolate and punish individuals who actually profess opinions contrary to the prevailing orthodoxy. There can be some overlap between an Inquisition and a witch-hunt, to be sure. But today’s liberal Inquisitors are not searching for individuals secretly in communion with God—yet.

This is a critical distinction. Witch-hunters eventually discover that burning a few old hags does not prevent cows’ milk from souring. Inquisitions, by contrast, usually succeed: The Catholic Church succeeded in stamping out broadly held heresies, as in the Albigensian Crusade of 1220-1229, which destroyed between 200,000 and 1,000,000 inhabitants of Cathar-controlled towns in Southern France. In many cases a town’s entire population was killed, just to make sure. For its part, the Spanish Inquisition eliminated all the Jews, Muslims, and Protestants, although it sometimes drove heretical opinions underground, with baleful consequences for the Catholic faith.

Because Eberstadt confuses the present persecution with mere witch-hunting, she hopes that the witch-hunters will realize their error and do the decent thing. She compares the persecution of Christians to Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist campaign of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Here is the nub of her argument:

[I]t was the actions of people on McCarthy’s own side that were decisive—those of the political right who disassociated themselves from his bullying tactics, beginning with seven Republican senators.

MARK CHRISTIAN MOMENT: CAN ANY LGBT INDIVIDUAL SURVIVE A DAY UNDER SHARIA LAW?

This special edition of The Glazov Gang presents the Mark Christian Moment with Mark Christian, the President and Executive Director of the Global Faith Institute. He is the son and nephew of high ranking leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood in his home country of Egypt. After his conversion from Islam to Christianity, Dr. Christian dedicated his life and work to the proposition that “the first victims of Islam are the Muslim themselves.”

Dr. Christian discussed Can Any LGBT Individual Survive a Day Under Sharia Law?, unveiling the connection between Islamic theology and the jihadist massacre in Orlando.

Don’t miss it!

Obama’s Iran appeasement and Brexit: Richard Baehr

The catastrophe that has hit Syria — hundreds of thousands dead, millions dislocated, and a multi-year stream of refugees headed to Europe that now numbers in the millions — is a political and human disaster with multiple godfathers. After several years of war, there is still no evidence that the fighting will soon end, or that a political solution is at hand.

One of the biggest reasons for this calamity has been the near complete abdication of responsibility for or interest in addressing the conflict by the Obama administration, a neglect that history will not regard as benign. When over 50 State Department officials expressed their dismay at American policy towards Syria in a written statement, and their disgust was made public, it was, unfortunately, only a one-day story for the national networks and leading papers.

This is, after all, a press corps that was never eager to embarrass the administration, which they have so ably served for more than seven years. This history of journalistic obeisance was what enabled White House adviser Ben Rhodes to gloat over how easy it was to deceive the reporters on what was really in the Iran nuclear deal. Rhodes

classified most of the reporters as young know-nothings. Of course, there were also those who were knowingly in the bag for the deal for other reasons (such as former Ambassador Thomas Pickering, who was bought and paid for by Boeing while he was lobbying Congress for the Iran deal, never disclosing his financial arrangement with the plane manufacturer).

It is obvious in one regard why the Obama administration shied away from any serious military involvement in Syria, including the time when the president reversed course on responding to Syria’s use of chemical weapons, the supposed red line that he set up that was crossed and presumably demanded military action. The president saw his role as being the un-Bush, the leader who would take America out of conflicts into which his predecessor had led it. These conflicts included the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The president put little effort into achieving a separation agreement with the Iraqi government that would have enabled a modest American force to remain in the country. The rise of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria was hastened by the American withdrawal and the perception in Iraq among the minority Sunni population that the Shiite government in power, now linked up with Iran, would make life miserable for the country’s Sunnis. The American “surge” effort in the final years of the Bush administration enabled President Barack Obama to begin his term with the country in far better shape than had been the case a few years earlier in terms of both military status and political arrangements. Today Iraq and Syria are in a state that makes the worst days of the conflict during the Bush years seem like a stroll in the park.