Displaying posts published in

2016

Palestinians: The Fatah Mess by Khaled Abu Toameh

After many years of being gagged, Fatah’s young guard is finding its voice. But while members of this faction wish to see a “changing of the guards at the Palestinian palace,” this does not mean that they have changed their attitude towards Israel.

Fatah’s young guard is neither interested in, nor authorized to, give up the “right of return” for Palestinian refugees — or even take the basic step of recognizing Israel as a Jewish state. In short, the actors might change, but the same show will go on.

The international community, meanwhile, is busy burying its head in the sand of Abbas’s very messy backyard. The participants at the Middle East peace conference held in Paris last week may have missed the latest revolt against the PA president. Had they been paying attention, instead of calling for a two-state solution, they might have demanded that Abbas and his Fatah faction get their acts together, and include Israel in the show. Perhaps they also would have mentioned that this ought happen before Hamas takes over the West Bank and creates another Islamist regime there, too.

Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas is once again facing insurrection — this time from the young guard in his ruling Fatah faction.

Even autocracy has its limits, and after many years of being gagged, Fatah’s young guard is finding its voice.

This renewed power struggle between the young and the old guard is probably a positive sign. It seems to signal the Palestinians wish to see new faces in power. However, just because members of this faction wish to see a “changing of the guards at the Palestinian palace” does not mean that they have changed their attitude towards Israel.

This young guard, in fact, is neither interested in, nor authorized to, give up the “right of return” for Palestinian refugees — or even take the basic step of recognizing Israel as a Jewish state.

Turkish Professor Suspended over Tweet by Robert Jones

Professor Bardakcioglu is under a disciplinary investigation launched by the university’s rector for his tweet, in which he criticized the conquest of Constantinople in 1453.

After losing his job and being condemned and ostracized by his community, Bardakcioglu defined his deleted tweet as “an ugly and wrong expression that was not my own view.” The professor, sadly, apologized for telling the truth.

Publicly debating historical events recognized by most scholars in free societies is, in Turkey, a criminal offense. You can lose your job, your freedom or even your life.

Turkish state officials constantly claim there is nothing in Turkey’s history that they should be ashamed of, so they continue persecuting and jailing journalists or professors who express differing ideas, and slaughtering non-Muslims and non-Turks.

Erbay Bardakcioglu, a professor at Adnan Menderes University (AMU) in Aydin Province in western Turkey, was suspended after posting a tweet, in which he criticized the conquest of Constantinople, present-day Istanbul, in 1453.

Professor Bardakcioglu’s tweet, on May 29, read, “Today is the anniversary of the invasion of Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, a magnificent civilization, by a barbaric and fanatic tribe.”

After the tweet caused an outrage on social media, Bardakcioglu deleted it.

The professor is also under a disciplinary investigation launched by the university’s rector for his tweet.

The university’s rector, Cavit Bircan, on his Twitter account, also condemned the professor and declared that he was laid off from his job.

Describing Bardakcioglu’s tweet as “unacceptable,” Bircan wrote on his Twitter account:

San Jose police chief who allowed mob attacks on Trump supporters is affiliated with La Raza By Thomas Lifson

San Jose, California disgraced itself last week, allowing rioters to attack people exiting a political rally for the presumptive Republican nominee for president. Now, thanks to Aleister of Gateway Pundit, we know that the police chief of that city, Eddie Garcia, who admitted that he instructed his officers not to intervene and arrest the attackers, is aligned with an extremist race-based group, La Raza (Spanish for “The Race”):

This is a screen-cap from his Twitter account:

The La Raza Roundtable of California celebrated when Garcia was sworn in.

This is how the Roundtable describes itself:

La Raza Roundtable brings together community organizations, community leaders, elected officials, private and public sector representatives in leadership capacities that can impact positive change for La Raza.

Garcia has released a laughable statement in which he suggests that the police didn’t arrest the violent thugs because it would have just made them angrier.

Trump and the judge – It’s not about race, but the rule of law By Brian C. Joondeph

Watch any cable new show panel discussing Donald Trump, including MSNBC this week, and quite predictably you will hear that Trump is a racist. The latest flap is over the judge overseeing the Trump University lawsuit. The judge is of Mexican heritage and Trump raised concerns as to whether the judge can be impartial based on Trump’s hard line stance against illegal immigration from Mexico.

“I’m building a wall. I’m trying to keep business out of Mexico.” Trump said. “He’s of Mexican heritage, and he’s very proud of it, as I am of where I come from.”

Is this about race? Or judicial fairness?

Regarding race, “Mexican” is not a race. In actuality, the federal government maintains five racial groupings – white, black, Hispanic, Asian, and American Indian/Hawaiian, completely divorced from any anthropological or scientific understanding of race. Mexican is counted by the feds as part of the Hispanic racial group, as are most residents of Central and South America, even though Mexicans racially are 60% Mestizo (mixed Amerindian/Spanish), 30% Amerindian, and 9% European in racial makeup. Trump made no mention of the judge being Hispanic or of any of the racial groups making up Mexico’s population, instead only of his Mexican ancestry. Perhaps a fine distinction, but a difference nonetheless.

Trump’s concern is instead about judicial impartiality. The judge in question, Gonzalo Curiel, is a member of the La Raza Lawyers of San Diego, a group that claims it is not affiliated with the National Council of La Raza, but which lists that group, strongly opposed to the Trump candidacy, on its website as part of its “community.” Even the US Supreme Court acknowledges selective justice based on race. The recently upended the death sentence of a black Georgia man convicted by an all-white jury. Meaning that race or ethnicity might prevent judicial fairness.

To be sure, Donald Trump could have spoken more carefully and clearly, instead of initially referring to Judge Curiel, born in the USA, as Mexican, and relying on his affiliations and his serving on a scholarship selection committee that chose an illegal alien to receive funding to attend law school. So why wouldn’t Donald Trump be concerned about the rule of law being applied fairly?

Because it often is not.

Angela Davis and Radical Chic 2016 Acquitted of murder, tenured in academia, feted by the mayor’s wife in a ritzy setting made possible by the system she loathes. Roger Kimball

Saturday marked the 44th anniversary of Angela Davis’s acquittal on charges of murder, kidnapping and conspiracy. Remember Angela Davis? I asked several of my younger colleagues: No one under 35 had heard of her. But the former Black Panther, recipient of the Soviet Union’s Lenin Peace Prize, and two-time vice-presidential candidate on the Communist Party ticket with Gus Hall, was once a household name. That was enough for the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, which last Thursday bestowed on Ms. Davis the 2016 Sackler Center First Award, “honoring women who are first in their fields.”

Previous honorees include the novelist Toni Morrison, Miss Piggy and Anita Hill—pioneers all, no question. Ms. Davis is surely the first person to have parlayed an appearance on the FBI’s 10 most-wanted list into a tenured professorship at the University of California.

The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Auditorium at the Brooklyn Museum was packed to overflowing for the ceremony. It began with a songfest. A couple dozen children from the Manhattan Country School, a boutique “progressive” institution, sang what seemed like 40 or 50 verses of “We Shall Overcome.” Elizabeth A. Sackler, chairwoman of the Brooklyn Museum and scion of Alfred M. Sackler, who made a large part of his considerable fortune marketing the painkiller OxyContin, introduced the evening. She noted proudly that she had grandchildren attending the school where singing “We Shall Overcome” is a daily ritual.

The evening also featured a welcome by Chirlane McCray, wife of Warren Wilhelm Jr., known to most New Yorkers as Mayor Bill de Blasio. The bulk of the evening was taken up with rituals of self-congratulation and a screening of a mercifully abridged “educational” version of “Free Angela and All Political Prisoners,” a 2012 documentary about the signal event in Ms. Davis’s career as a radical: her arrest, prosecution and exoneration. There followed a brief conversation between Ms. Davis and the prima donna Ms. of all Ms.’s, Gloria Steinem. Kathy Boudin, the former member of the Weather Underground who was convicted of murder in 1981, was also in attendance. It was old-home week for wizened radical chic. CONTINUE AT SITE

Islamic State Members From the West Seek Help Getting Home By Maria Abi-Habib see note please

American traitors like these should be sent straight to Gitmo for hard labor….rsk
Disenchanted followers of the extremist group are trying to get out of Syria.

Disenchanted Islamic State members recruited from the West have increasingly been contacting their governments and asking for help in getting home, according to diplomats and a Syrian network that aids defectors.

Some have turned up at diplomatic missions in Turkey, and others have sent furtive messages to their governments seeking assistance in escaping from territory the extremist group controls in neighboring Syria, according to the diplomats, who represent six Western missions in Turkey.

The calls for help from Westerners come as Islamic State loses ground and faces fresh assaults on its Raqqa stronghold and on Fallujah, Iraq, where it has ruled for more than two years.

Some Westerners seeking to escape from Islamic State are fighters, and others are people who were enticed to move to the group’s so-called caliphate and declared their loyalty, and now find themselves in dire straits, the diplomats said.

“Their troops are now starting to leave. There are a lot of French people who are coming back,” France’s national intelligence coordinator, Didier le Bret, said at a recent security conference. “They’ve got a feeling it’s not going that well.” He said citizens of other European countries are also returning.

The Western diplomats said about 150 citizens from just their six countries have sought help to flee or did so on their own since the departures began to ramp up in the fall. The overall number of Westerners who joined Islamic State in Syria and Iraq and then returned home isn’t known, but Western officials have said several hundred fighters have come back to Europe. CONTINUE AT SITE

Punishment Without Evidence on Campus Obama’s latest diktats force schools to eviscerate due process.

This academic year will be remembered for its psychological crack-ups over Halloween costumes (Yale), faculty intimidation of student journalists covering protesters (the University of Missouri) and purges of single-sex social clubs (Harvard). But the dishonor roll isn’t complete without documenting how the Obama Administration is further eroding due process on campus.

The Education and Justice Departments have already gone far to subvert the norm that students accused of sexual assault retain individual rights. Now they are targeting the few rights that are left. Under new standards promulgated this spring, students can be punished before any disciplinary hearing has been held, and sometimes after anonymous allegations.

Starting with a 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter, the Education Department has reinterpreted the Title IX law that prohibits sex discrimination at educational institutions, creating legal obligations that do not exist in federal statutes. Schools can now lose taxpayer funds if they use a “clear and convincing” evidentiary standard for adjudicating assaults instead of the less rigorous “preponderance of the evidence.”

A new round of federal letters appeared starting in April. The one that expanded the definition of sexual harassment the most—and how schools must respond—was the finding of a Justice Department investigation into the University of New Mexico’s grievance protocol.

Justice said UNM violated Title IX in part because of a “failure to provide effective interim safety measures.” Interim measures are imposed on an accused student before any official ruling on guilt. They can include provisional suspensions for the accused; no-contact instructions akin to a restraining order; restrictions on when students can use libraries, dining halls and athletic facilities; evictions from dorms; and bans on extracurricular activities. CONTINUE AT SITE

Will the Media Also Examine the Clinton For-Profit Education Scandal?by Roger Aronoff

Is the race for the White House really coming down to which presidential candidate was tied to the less scandal-plagued for-profit school? Not if the media have anything to say about it. They only want you to know about one of them.

We have seen an endless run of articles and TV segments focusing on Trump University. How does it look? Well, a former sales director there said that “…Trump University was only interested in selling every person the most expensive seminars they possibly could.”

Trump claims that “98% of those people liked the school,” and gave it great report cards, according toCNN. There are currently three lawsuits focusing onTrump University, including one by the New York State Attorney General. Trump has pointed to U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel’s Mexican heritage as a likely factor in the treatment he has received from the class action lawsuits—treatment which he calls unfair. You can read plenty on that issue elsewhere and decide for yourself.

While many Republicans who have reluctantly endorsed Trump view his comments about Judge Curiel as a costly, unforced error that makes it harder for them to publicly defend him, one fact that could play to his advantage is that the law firm behind one of the class action lawsuits has paid the Clintons $675,000 in speaking fees since 2009, which is more than they’ve collected from any other law firm. Politics obviously plays a big part in this saga.

And that’s just the beginning. The real story deals with Laureate Education, whose connection to the Clintons was revealed in Peter Schweizer’s book Clinton Cash. More than $16 million was paid to Bill Clinton through a shell corporation, after which more than $55 million American taxpayer dollars flowed out of Hillary Clinton’s State Department to a non-profit run by Laureate CEO Douglas Becker.

Who Will Write France’s Future? by Daniel Pipes

Two high-profile French novels, dissimilar in timing and tone, portray two influential visions of France in the future. Not just good reads (and both translated into English), together they stimulate thought about the country’s crises of immigration and cultural change.

Jean Raspail (1925-) imagines a racial invasion coming by sea, of rafts and boats taking off from the Indian subcontinent and heading slowly, inexorably for the south of France. In Le Camp des Saints (The Camp of the Saints, 1973), he primarily documents the helpless, panicked French reaction as the horde (a word used 34 times) “kept coming to join the swelling numbers.”

It’s a stark dystopian fantasy about the white race and European life that corresponds to fears articulated by no less than Charles de Gaulle, the dominant politician of post-war France, who welcomed non-white French citizens “on condition that they remain a small minority. Otherwise, France would no longer be France. We are, after all, primarily a European people of the white race.”

Camp also anticipates the notion of “The Great Replacement” (Le Grand Remplacement) conceptualized by the French intellectual Renaud Camus, which anticipates the quick replacement “of the historic people of our country by peoples of immigrant origin who are overwhelmingly non-European.” Roughly this same fear – of immigrants pushing the indigenous French people aside and taking over the country – inspires the National Front party, now polling close to 30 percent of the vote and growing.

Michel Houellebecq (1956-) tells the story not of a country (France) but of an individual (François) in Soumission (Submission, 2015). François is a weary, somewhat decadent professor of the decadent movement in French literature. He lacks family, friends, and ambition; although only in his mid-40s, his will to live has eroded through the ennui of take-out food and a procession of interchangeable sex partners.

When an ostensibly moderate Muslim politician unexpectedly becomes president of France in 2022, many radical changes to French life follow quickly. In a surprise twist, what begins ominously (a corpse in the gas station) soon enough turns benign (delicious Middle Eastern food). Lured by a well-paying and satisfying job with the perk of having access to marry multiple pretty, covered students, François readily abandons his old life and converts to Islam, which offers him the rewards of luxury, exoticism, and patriarchy.

If the 1973 novel never mentions the word Islam or Muslim, its 2015 counterpart dwells on them both – starting with the title: Islam in Arabic means “submission.” Conversely, the first book focuses on race while the second hardly notices it (François’ favorite prostitute is North African). One takeover ends hellishly, the other agreeably. The earlier book is an apocalyptic political tract disguised as entertainment, the later one offers a literary and sardonic take on Europe’s loss of will while not expressing animus toward Islam or Muslims. The one documents an aggression, the other a consolation.

Muslims Yes, Jews No: The Hypocrisy of the NY Times by Rabbi Benjamin Blech

Separate swimming hours to accommodate religious sensitivities provokes hypocritical response.

This time the New York Times really outdid itself.

If there were an award for hypocrisy, the hands-down winner should clearly be the paper which has long regarded itself as “the newspaper of record.” Within the span of just a few months, the Times editorial board took heated and diametrically opposed positions on the identical issue – the only difference being whether an accommodation was being made for the religious sensitivities of Muslims or of Orthodox Jews.

This past February, when the city of Toronto allowed for women-only sessions at a public pool at specific hours at the behest of Muslim residents, the Times was delighted. Although it was a story from across the border, the editorial writers of the newspaper gushed at this beautiful demonstration of “community integration.” This was a “model of inclusion.” Here was Canada showing us how citizens with differing views of modesty and morality could be extended the courtesy of understanding and the consideration of a policy which would be willing to extend community benefits to all at the cost of minimal sacrifice. The pool might not be open to everybody at all times, but everybody could find some times to enjoy a publicly funded recreation.

So religious accommodation, the Times effusively affirmed is a good thing even if, just like any accommodation, it requires a little compromise. But remarkably enough that is not the way they saw it at all when the ideal was now offered as justification for Orthodox Jews having a few hours during the week set aside at a municipal pool in Brooklyn for women whose religious scruples prevent them from swimming together with men.

Suddenly the former defendants of inclusiveness viewed the matter in a totally different light. This desire on the part of, as it turns out, an exceedingly large number of residents in that particular area of Williamsburg to be true to their traditions of modesty is, according to the New York Times, an affront to “the laws of New York City and the Constitution.” The same Constitution in whose name liberals today so vociferously demand equality for same-sex marriages, unrestricted bathroom use for trans-genders and a host of other “rights” which may upset others it seems according to the interpretation of the Times is unequivocally opposed to granting consideration to Orthodox Jews for their beliefs.