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2016

Peter Smith : The Donald and the Judge

Would a mainstream politician have dared raise the affiliations, sympathies, ethnic heritage and political patrons of the judge hearing his case? Never, not in a million years. But the outsider candidate detested by his own party’s establishment is no normal politician. Nor is he a racist

Donald Trump gets into trouble to often for his own good and America’s. He has to get with the PC program, give away his throwaways and stick to major national issues and policies. His policy objectives are all vote winners. Look at this partial list and find fault if you can. Putting myself in patriotic American shoes, I can’t.

Securing the border, building the military, taking better care of vets, destroying ISIS, putting America first by insisting that allies pull their military weight
Controlling immigration, particularly Muslim immigration
Replacing Obamacare
Creating jobs by lowering taxes and regulations, liberating the exploitation of fossil fuel energy and negotiating better trade deals.

If he concentrates on his policies and reserves his criticisms for Clinton he will likely win. It’s the diversions that get him into trouble. This time Trump criticised the judge hearing the class-action civil suit against Trump University, which, as I understand it, purported to teach people how to profit from real estate. That would have been OK. His mistake was in suggesting that the judge’s Mexican heritage (his parents were Mexican migrants) may have played a part in swaying his conduct of the proceedings.

He said this because the judge, Gonzalo Curiel, appointed by President Obama, is a member of a Latino lawyers association (La Raza Lawyers Association) whose members have a record of acting for illegal migrants. Moreover, the class action was brought by a legal firm which has given large sums of money to the Clintons. Trump’s thinking is that the case has taken on a political dimension and that his own strong stand on illegal Mexican immigration may have affected the judge’s ability to act objectively.

Trump argues that his side is being treated unfairly. As an example he notes that a leading plaintiff was found to be on record praising the University. As a result, the legal firm representing her asked that she be removed from the case; as you would. At question, in Trump’s view, is why the judge allowed this without summarily dismissing the case.

I have no idea of the precise accuracy of this account or of the legal rights and wrongs of what occurred. But that doesn’t matter. The question I would like to pose is this: was Trump’s statement racist, as Paul Ryan and other Republicans have said; and as numbers of conservative commentators like, for example, Charles Krauthammer, have said?

I will cut to the chase. It isn’t racist. Asserting that some white jurymen and white judges in the Deep South in, say, the 1960s were influenced by their ethnicity in evaluating the testimony of black witnesses is not racist. As we know, in those cases, the racists were on the bench and on the juries.

Of course, if Trump had said what his critics claim it would be racist. Time and time again, I heard them say that Trump had said that Curiel’s Mexican heritage disqualified him from hearing the case. The problem is that he didn’t say that. The segment of the stump address that sparked the escalating brouhaha can be viewed below. Watch it if you have 11 minutes to spare and see if the press is reporting an actual comment or an imaginary one.

One Ohio Mosque Has Been at the Center of SIX Terror Cases By Patrick Poole

The website for Masjid Omar Ibn El Khattab, just a mile from the Ohio State University campus, proclaims itself “the Muslim Heart of Columbus.” And yet the mosque, described as one of the most ideologically hardline in the city, has grabbed the media spotlight once again: former attendees were recently reported as having joined the Islamic State (ISIS) in Syria.

As mosque officials struggle to distance themselves from yet another resident terror cell, the recent news raises questions about the extensive history of this Ohio mosque as a turnstile for terrorism.

Just a few weeks ago, I reported here at PJ Media that three individuals who lived just yards from Masjid Omar for two years joined ISIS in Syria in July 2014. Rasel Raihan was killed in Syria in a U.S. airstrike. His older sister Zakia Nasrin and her husband Jaffrey Khan are still in Raqqa, according to internal ISIS documents which NBC News obtained from an ISIS defector.

In that NBC News report, the mosque’s president, Basil Gohar, tried to distance the trio from the mosque. He said that Jaffrey, despite living so close to the mosque for two years, had only attended the mosque for a few weeks and had kept to himself.

When a local TV station caught up with him a few days later, Gohar again tried to distance the mosque from the ISIS recruits — as well as from the previous convicted terrorists who had attended the mosque:

We share the shock and horror of these actions, and we wish that we could have found out or stopped them … It’s quite unfortunate what these people went and did, but the fact they attended has no bearing on their actions. Anyone can come to our mosque. We have an open door policy. It’s not possible for us to screen someone’s ideology.

Trump and the Judge: Cynical Politics, Not Law and Not Racism By Andrew C. McCarthy

To hear many commentators tell it, Donald Trump claims that an American-born judge, by dint of nothing other than his Mexican ancestry, should be deemed so biased against him that the judge should be recused from a civil fraud case in which Trump is a defendant. Indeed, Trump is said to have dug himself an even deeper hole last weekend, adding Muslim-American judges to the class of jurists before whom we are to believe he cannot get a fair trial.

For present purposes, I am putting the Muslim judge issue aside because it is hypothetical – i.e., while Trump’s meanderings about the judge of Mexican descent involve a concrete case, I know of no actual case involving the litigious Trump and a judge who happens to be Muslim.

Moreover, to avoid further elongating this column, I will not address whether, in analyzing an actual legal claim of judicial bias, a judge’s race, ethnic ancestry or religious affiliation might become relevant due to that judge’s political activism. Trump surrogates insist that, to the extent the candidate has invoked a judge’s Mexican descent or (hypothetically) Islam, he was not relying solely on ethnic or religious status, but on such status in conjunction with political activism on behalf of Mexican illegal aliens or political Islam’s sharia law agenda. There is a lot to be said for this argument, which reminds us why judges – who are obliged to maintain the objectivity and public integrity of judicial proceedings – should resist political activism. In any event, this is a complex legal issue and it deserves separate consideration.

Instead, the purpose of this column is to focus on two rudimentary questions that I do not believe have been adequately addressed:

First, did Trump do it? That is, has he posited an actual legal claim – a noxious and dangerous one – that mere ethnic heritage can disqualify a judge from presiding over a legal controversy? Or is Trump, as I conclude, making an unsavory political argument?

Second, is Trump’s argument really about the purported bias of the judge in question, Gonzalo P. Curiel of the federal district court in Southern California? Or is Trump, as I conclude, attempting – however cynically – to draw the sting of disclosures regarding the civil fraud case involving “Trump University”?

To cut to the chase: Is Trump trying to discredit the judge, not out of racism or an honest belief that Judge Curiel is violating his due process rights, but in hopes of discrediting the underlying Trump U shenanigans by persuading people that it is a biased judge, rather than damaging evidence, that is making him look bad? Does Trump fear that his critics will otherwise use the Trump U disclosures against him the same way Hillary Clinton’s detractors have exploited disclosures about her email improprieties to damage her presidential bid?

Sufficient evidence exists to require Judge Curiel to recuse himself from any litigation involving Trump By Sierra Rayne

“A lifetime member of an organization that very recently made public calls for a general boycott of the defendant’s businesses.”

The most important argument in favor of forcing U.S. district judge Gonzalo Curiel to recuse himself from the Trump University lawsuits was published today by the Conservative Treehouse.

The Treehouse linked to a copy of Judge Curiel’s “United States Senate: Committee on the Judiciary – Questionnaire for Judicial Nominees” in which, on page four of his response, Judge Curiel states that he is a “Life-time Member” of the “Hispanic National Bar Association [HNBA].”

The HNBA made public a press release in July 2015 that called for the following actions against Donald Trump and his enterprises:

The HNBA calls for a boycott of all of Trump business ventures, including golf courses, hotels, and restaurants. We salute NBC/Universal, Univision and Macy’s for ending their association with Trump, and we join them in standing up against bigotry and racist rhetoric. Other businesses and corporations should follow the lead of NBC/Universal, Univision and Macy’s and take similar actions against Donald Trump’s business interests.

A case can be made that no sitting judge should be aligned with any such activist organization in general, but for a judge to preside over a case involving a defendant’s business whereby said judge is also a lifetime member of an organization that very recently made public calls for a general boycott of the defendant’s businesses is an undeniable stain on the purported impartiality of the judiciary.

THE RESPONSE TO THE THE MARKETPLACE TERROR…WILL SOMEONE CALL THIS “DISPROPORTIONATE”?????

“After the attack, dozens of Palestinians in Hebron began to celebrate the attack and fire weapons into the air, media outlets said. Also, at East Jerusalem’s emblematic Damascus Gate people celebrated the attack, which comes on the third day of Ramadan.”

At least four people died and 13 were wounded in an attack carried out Wednesday evening by two Palestinians in a popular open-air market in Tel Aviv located in front of the Defense Ministry and the Army Central Command.

Both suspects, one of them wounded by security personnel, were arrested.

The incident occurred about 9:30 p.m. at the Sarona Market, an crowded shopping center with dozens of restaurants and stores located right in front of Israel’s main military base.

According to the preliminary police investigation, the two attackers, who were said to be cousins from the West Bank city of Hebron, arrived at the shopping center, had something to drink and then produced automatic weapons, tried to enter the shopping center and opened fire on the crowd.

Seeing themselves blocked by the market’s Israeli guards, they continued shooting until they ran out of ammunition, then mixed in with the fleeing crowd and disappeared.

The Jihad Goes On Two recent books look at the state of Islamic radicalism—and the U.S. response—15 years after 9/11. Judith Miller

United States of Jihad: Investigating America’s Homegrown Terrorists, by Peter Bergen (Crown, 400 pp., $28)

Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror, by Michael V. Hayden (Penguin, 464 pp., $30)

In mid-April, President Barack Obama boasted that America and its allies were winning the fight against the Islamic State. In a rare visit to Central Intelligence Agency headquarters, Obama noted that though ISIS could still inflict “horrific violence,” America’s 11,500 air strikes had put the group on its heels. “We have momentum,” the president said, “and we intend to keep that.” Only days before, however, senior administration officials sounded gloomier about the state of the war. While American air strikes and other operations had killed 25,000 ISIS fighters in Iraq and Syria, incinerated hundreds of millions of dollars that ISIS had stolen from banks and seized from kidnappings and extortion, forced it to cut salaries by a third, and taken back some territory it had seized in Iraq and Syria, the terror group now had roots in 15 countries and continued to expand its reach in Europe, North Africa, and Afghanistan. Deputy Secretary of State Anthony Blinken told senators that despite the progress, America and its allies had failed to stop “the recruitment, radicalization, and mobilization of people, especially young people, to engage in terrorist activities.” In February, James Clapper, President Obama’s director of national intelligence, testified that ISIS remained not only the nation’s “preeminent terrorist threat,” but that al-Qaida and its affiliates were “positioned to make gains in 2016.” ISIS, he said later, was a “phenomenon.”

Is the threat of ISIS to Americans at home and abroad growing or waning? What has prompted its rise and that of like-minded militant Islamists? And most crucially, how can America and its allies defeat them and their seductive extremist ideology?

No shortage of books has appeared on the issue of Islamic terrorism since al-Qaida’s attacks on New York and Washington on September 11. The rise of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s al-Qaida in Iraq, which evolved into the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, is compellingly described in Black Flags, Joby Warrick’s riveting account of how ISIS, aided partly by the strategic errors of Presidents Bush and Obama, managed to seize and impose its barbaric, authoritarian rule on a territory the size of Great Britain. Published last year, the book won a Pulitzer Prize. It was a worthy successor to The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright’s majestic 2006 account of the rise of al-Qaida. Now, new books by Peter Bergen, a CNN national security analyst and professor at Arizona State University who was the first reporter to interview bin Laden for an American broadcast network, and Michael V. Hayden, a former director of the National Security Administration and the Central Intelligence Agency, enhance our understanding of the spread of ISIS and like-minded jihadi groups; the appeal of the extremism underlying them; how law enforcement, intelligence agencies, and American Muslims have responded to the threat of Islamist terror; and how that appeal might be reduced.

Horror: 19 Women Burned Alive After They Refused to Sleep With ISIS Militants : Matt Vespa

The Islamic State has given us a rather horrific string of public executions, some of which they have recorded for the entire world to see their unbridled brutality. They burned a captured Jordanian pilot alive. They executed Christians for refusing to renounce their faith. They reportedly blew up a baby for “training purposes.” It was a demonstration in how to properly use explosives. There was also the video where they killed “16 men by drowning them in a cage, decapitating them with explosives and firing a rocket-propelled grenade into a car.” Oh, and let’s not forget the beheadings of American journalists Steven Sotloff and James Foley. Now, they’ve reportedly burned to death 19 Yazidi women for refusing to have sex with their ISIS husbands (via YNetNews):

Nineteen Yazidi women were brutally executed last weekend in Mosul, Iraq, after refusing to have sex with their husbands – all members of ISIS.

Eyewitnesses told news agencies that the women were put in an iron cage and burned alive in front of a crowd of hundreds of spectators.

They were burnt to death while hundreds watched,” an eyewitness told the Syrian news agency ARA. “No one could do anything to save them from the horrific punishment.”

Abdullah al-Mala, another witness, said that “they were punished because they refused to have sex with ISIS militants.”

ISIS militants kidnapped the nineteen women, along with thousands of others, after having taken control of Yazidi territory in Iraq in August 2014, and used them as sex slaves.

Of course, given this group’s history with women, this shouldn’t be surprising, though it’s horrific all the same. In March, the State Department finally declared that the Islamic State was engaging in genocide against Christians in Iraq and Syria. On top of their barbarism, they have also engaged in a prolonged campaign against countless historical sites. Lastly, they’ve engaged in terror attacks across Europe. Last November, they killed over 100 people in coordinated attacks in Paris, and they’ve claimed to be responsible for the recent bombing in Belgium.

Horrific executions, sex slavery, genocide against Christians, and involvement in international terrorism—all the more reason to take them out, though we won’t see such actions from the Obama administration.

JIHAD DAY 3 OF RAMADAN

http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/

Muslims often insist that other religions are just as violent
as theirs and that the bigger problem is “Islamophobia.”
We put that narrative to the test each Ramadan with a
running count of ALL terror attacks, categorized by motive.

Public Support for the European Union Plunges “The EU policy elites are in panic” by Soeren Kern

Public anger is also being fueled by the growing number of diktats issued by the unelected officials running the Brussels-based European Commission, the powerful administrative arm of the bloc, which has been relentless in its usurpation of sovereignty from the 28 nation states that comprise the European Union.

Although the survey does not explicitly say so, the findings almost certainly reflect growing anger at the anti-democratic nature of the EU and its never-ending power grabs.

On May 31, the EU, in partnership with Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Microsoft, unveiled a “code of conduct” to combat the spread of “illegal hate speech” online. Critics say the EU’s definition of “hate speech” is so vague that it could include virtually anything deemed politically incorrect by European authorities, including criticism of mass migration, Islam or even the EU itself.

On April 20, the European Political Strategy Centre, an in-house EU think tank that reports directly to Juncker, proposed that the European Union establish its own central intelligence agency, which would answer only to unelected bureaucrats.

Public opposition to the European Union is growing in all key member states, according to a new survey of voters in ten EU countries.

Public disaffection with the EU is being fueled by the bloc’s mishandling of the refugee and debt crises, according to the survey, which interviewed voters in Britain, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain and Sweden.

Public anger is also being fueled by the growing number of diktats issued by the unelected officials running the Brussels-based European Commission, the powerful administrative arm of the bloc, which has been relentless in its usurpation of sovereignty from the 28 nation states that comprise the European Union.

Swedish Politicians: “Islam is Definitely Compatible with Democracy!” Part II of a Series: The Islamization of Sweden by Ingrid Carlqvist

With their goodhearted eagerness to be inclusive, not to discriminate and to defend freedom of religion, Swedish politicians are easy prey for Islamists with an anti-democratic agenda.

“The presumption is that Muslims want nothing more than to adapt to a Western way of life and Western values. … the presumption is also that Islam can be tamed…” — Jimmie Åkesson, Sweden Democrats party leader.

“Democracy is a man-made system, meaning rule by the people for the people. Thus it is contrary to Islam, because rule is for Allaah… it is not permissible to give legislative rights to any human being…” — Sheik Muhammad Saalih al-Munajjid, in fatwa number 07166.

Everyone knows what happens to anyone who criticizes Islam — first, you get labeled an “Islamophobe racist,” then, like the artist Lars Vilks, you might get a fatwa of death on your head.

The question is where the democratic Muslims will be when Islam has gained even more influence in Sweden — will they stand up for Swedish democracy if that means openly going against the tenets of Islam?

It should not be a mystery whether Islam is compatible with democracy or not. All you have to do is look at the Islamic sources or call any imam and pretend to be impressed that Islam does not separate religion and politics.

Yet, when Gatestone Institute called Swedish politicians at all levels to ask if Islam and democracy were compatible, they gave assurances that there were no problems whatsoever with Islam’s capacity for democracy — or they hung up.

The two most common answers given were:

Islam is definitely compatible with democracy!
I cannot discuss this matter right now.

The question cuts through all parties; apparently no one dares to face the facts. So far, throughout history, and now in the world’s 57 Muslim countries in the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), nowhere has Islam been compatible with democracy, freedom of speech, human rights and legal certainty. These Muslim states have not signed the UN’s Declaration of Human Rights, a document Swedish politicians seem to cherish. Instead, those countries have joined the Cairo Declaration, which stipulates that sharia is the only foundation for human rights. In short, human rights are all well and good so long as they do not conflict with sharia — if they do, sharia wins. In practice, this means that in the Islamic world, there are, in the Western sense, no human rights.