Displaying posts published in

2016

My First Hizb-ut-Tahrir Conference by Z.

“Why,” I said to the woman next to me, “is this flag there? Is that not the ISIS flag?”

The half-full banquet hall, divided into the men’s side and the women’s side, admitted about 100 attendees. A black flag with white script was on display, on both the screen and on the podium. “Why,” I said to the woman next to me, “is this flag there? Is that not the ISIS flag?” The woman, later identified as Naeema, said it was not, and called her son, one of the organizers, to address the question. It seemed difficult for him, too; he went off to look for someone else more knowledgeable to the help with the problem. Naeema explained that the writing was different. “I can read Arabic,” I said. No one could be found to answer the question.

As the event started late, Naeema began a conversation. We talked about our origins and how long we had been in Canada. She said she had been here 40 years, so I asked about the disconnect between enjoying 40 years of democracy, yet trying to end it. I mentioned a book published by Hizb-ut-Tahrir:

“Democracy is Infidelity: its use, application and promotion are prohibited.”

“الديمقراطية نظام كفر، يحرم أخذها أو تطبيقها أو الدعوة إليها”

Naeema said she was not qualified to debate the topic, but that democracy had done nothing good for people, so she and other believers would follow the rule of Allah. Reflecting on the Muslim Brotherhood’s year in power in Egypt, I asked if she were prepared to have a dictator claim to be Allah’s spokesman even if he abused the power. She said she had never thought about it like that, but, again, that she was not qualified to debate the topic. As the conference began, the conversation stopped.

GOP sues over Virginia governor’s felon voting order By Robert Knight

The Democrat felon voting express train in Virginia hit a sharp curve on Monday when Republican lawmakers went to the state’s highest court to derail it.

Constitutional attorney Charles J. Cooper’s law firm filed a lawsuit on behalf of Republican leaders in the Virginia legislature asking the state Supreme Court to block 206,000 felons from voting in November.

The lawsuit Howell v. McAuliffe states that Democrat Gov. Terry McAuliffe abused the separation of powers in an April 22 executive order that gives a blanket restoration to convicts who’ve completed their sentences.

McAuliffe is countermanding longtime policy, in which Virginia’s governors have restored voting rights by individual cases, the suit states. The felons who received the blanket amnesty include inmates convicted of rape, murder, and other major offenses.

It’s worth noting that McAuliffe, who served as a fundraiser for Bill and Hillary Clinton, ignored the fact that his two predecessors, Democrat Tim Kaine and Republican Bob McDonnell, both attempted blanket amnesty for some felons but abided by opinions from state attorneys general ruling this out as unconstitutional.

The current hyper-partisan attorney general, Democrat Mark Herring, who refused to defend the state’s constitutional marriage amendment, has no such qualms, which is why the GOP leaders resorted to the lawsuit.

New Fast and Furious emails show Obama administration obstructing Congress By Rick Moran

The lid may finally blow off the Fast and Furious cover-up by the Obama administration, as a federal judge ordered the release of thousands of emails showing how then-attorney general Eric Holder obstructed, stonewalled, and misdirected congressional investigators looking into the program.

People in the Nixon administration went to jail for less.

New York Post:

“The documents reveal how senior Justice Department officials — including Attorney General Holder — intensely followed and managed an effort to carefully limit and obstruct the information produced to Congress,” he asserted.

They also indict Holder deputy Lanny Breuer, an old Clinton hand, who had to step down in 2013 after falsely denying authorizing Fast and Furious.

Their efforts to impede investigations included:

Devising strategies to redact or otherwise withhold relevant information;
Manipulating media coverage to control fallout;
Scapegoating the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) for the scandal.

For instance, a June 2011 e-mail discusses withholding ATF lab reports from Congress, and a July 2011 e-mail details senior Justice officials agreeing to “stay away from a representation that we’ll fully cooperate.”

Peter Smith Growth, It’s the Last, Best Hope

The culture of entitlement is so well entrenched that handouts, which see the minority that pays taxes subsidising those who do not, have morphed into “rights” impossible to wind back. Given that the battle is lost, fiscal conservatives should focus instead on reducing impediments to growth
As intractable budget deficit after budget deficit forebodes national ruin and frames the forthcoming election, there is no shortage of fiscal conservatives complaining that the Government has failed to cut spending. Maybe I have missed it but I can’t recall one that has actually set out and quantified exactly where material expenditure cuts should be made and can feasibly be made. When it comes to specifics there is empty space. Why? The answer is simple. It is just too darn hard.

In 2013 the Centre for Independent Studies established its TARGET30 campaign with the objective of fashioning a public debate that would lead to a reduction in general government spending (federal, state and local) from around 35% of GDP to 30% in ten years. This is a laudable objective. But, predictably, no progress has been made or is remotely in sight.

The bulk of the growing expenditure burden is in the areas of health, welfare, pensions and education, which account for an estimated 60% of federal government spending in 2015-16. It is all electorally inviolable. Certainly new promises (of the reckless Gillard kind on Gonski, hospital funding and the NDIS) should be resisted. But once a program is in place it is all but impossible to make cuts.

Too many people are now getting some benefit or other. Added to this, the culture of entitlement is so well entrenched that handouts, which involve a minority of the population (predominantly the despised ‘rich’) subsidising the maintenance and lifestyle of the rest, have morphed into rights. Short of some cataclysmic overturning of the existing order this will not change. In fact, it will become akin to a law of nature.

Ask yourself, if Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher failed to stem the growth in entitlement spending, as they did in a less far-gone age of dependency, what chance has anybody now?

The question then becomes what to do, if you believe – unlike left-green politicians living in their own delusional world – that growing debt will eventually lead to national ruin. The only feasible answer is to boost economic growth to pay the bills. Sure keep on fighting the good fight to contain spending but understand that this is largely whistling in the wind and that any solution will predominantly lie on the supply side of the economy.

ISRAEL’S PROWESS IN MEDICAL TECHNOLOGY AND DEVICES : BRIAN GORMLEY

“Israel is known for its medical-device prowess, producing companies such as OrbiMed-backed Given Imaging Ltd., which went public in 2001 and merged with Covidien Ltd. in 2014. With support from the Israeli government, Israel’s biotechnology market is also expanding, said Erez Chimovits, a senior managing director at OrbiMed.”
OrbiMed Closes Second Israel Venture Fund at $307M

OrbiMed Advisors, which sold Israeli holding cCAM Biotherapeutics to Merck & Co. last year, has raised $307 million for its second Israel-focused health-care fund.

New York-based OrbiMed invests in a series of funds with a goal of providing various types of capital to companies globally. Its funds include a global venture fund, which closed at $975 million last year, and vehicles devoted to Asia, Israel, and royalty and credit opportunities. OrbiMed held a final closing on its $222 million first Israel fund in 2012.

The firm set out last year to raise a similar amount for OrbiMed Israel Partners II LP, according to Managing Director Anat Naschitz. Strong interest in the fund from unidentified health-care companies, family offices and other investors led the firm to take more.

A bigger fund helps OrbiMed carry portfolio companies further and improves its ability to participate in large financings of later-stage companies, according to Ms. Naschitz. The firm expects to back about 20 companies from this fund, making early- to later-stage investments in drug, diagnostic, medical-device and digital-health businesses. Holdings in the new fund include LogicBio Therapeutics Inc., a gene-therapy company.

Netanyahu Against the Generals A case pits Israel’s faith in democracy against the views of its military brass. Bret Stephens

In 2012 a former New York Times reporter named Patrick Tyler published an invidious book called “Fortress Israel,” the point of which was that the Jewish state is a modern-day Sparta whose “sabra military elite” is addicted to war.

“Six decades after its founding,” Mr. Tyler wrote, Israel “remains in thrall to an original martial impulse, the depth of which has given rise to succeeding generations of leaders who are stunted in their capacity to wield or sustain diplomacy as a rival to military strategy.” Worse, these leaders do this “reflexively and instinctively, in order to perpetuate a system of governance where national policy is dominated by the military.”

Israel’s reflexive militarists are at it again, though probably not as Mr. Tyler imagined. Last week, Moshe Ya’alon, a former army chief of staff and a member of the ruling Likud party, resigned as defense minister following ructions regarding the appropriate role of the military in political life. In his place, the prime minister intends to appoint Avigdor Lieberman, a right-wing political brawler whose military career never went higher than corporal rank.

The spat between the prime minister and Mr. Ya’alon began in late March, after an Israeli soldier named Elor Azariah shot and killed a Palestinian man who was lying wounded and motionless on the ground after trying to stab another soldier. Sgt. Azariah is now standing trial for manslaughter and faces up to 20 years in prison. Video of the killing suggests the wounded Palestinian was no threat to the soldiers when the sergeant put a bullet in his head.

The killing has been emphatically—and rightly—condemned by Israel’s military brass. But Israelis also have little sympathy for Palestinians trying to stick knives into their sons and daughters, and Messrs. Netanyahu and Lieberman have offered expressions of support for Sgt. Azariah and his family, to the applause of the Israeli right and the infuriation of senior generals. As often as not in Israel, military leaders and security officials are to the left of the public and their civilian leadership.

If that were the end of the story, you might have a morality tale about Mr. Netanyahu’s political instincts. Or you might have a story about the high ethical standards to which Israel holds itself. What you don’t have is anything resembling a mindlessly belligerent “sabra military elite” that wants to kill helpless (though not innocent) Palestinians to protect its own.

But that isn’t the end of the story. At a ceremony marking Holocaust Remembrance Day earlier this month, Yair Golan, Israel’s deputy chief of staff, compared trends in Israeli society to Germany in the 1930s. When Mr. Netanyahu rebuked him—correctly—for defaming Israel and cheapening the memory of the Holocaust, Mr. Ya’alon leapt to the general’s defense and told officers that they should feel free to speak their minds in public. Hence his ouster. CONTINUE AT SITE

America’s Vietnam Pivot Uneasy about Beijing, Hanoi is eager for more democratic allies.

Barack Obama announced the lifting of the U.S. arms embargo on Vietnam on his visit to Hanoi on Monday, marking an important milestone in America’s rapprochement with its old adversary and its broader pivot to Asia. The decision also sends an unmistakable signal to Beijing’s leaders that their efforts to bully its neighbors have backfired.

Hanoi has reason to be deeply uneasy about Chinese intentions. Beijing has reclaimed land on disputed rocks in the South China Sea and created military bases that threaten its neighbors’ claims. In 2014 it placed a deep-sea oil exploration rig within Vietnam’s exclusive economic zone, leading to a maritime standoff between the two navies.

Vietnam’s top leader, General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong, visited the White House in July and called the U.S. a force for regional stability. His concerns over militarization of the South China Sea and freedom of navigation refute Beijing’s claims that the U.S. is stirring trouble in the region.

Vietnam’s military, while dwarfed by China’s, is still the most formidable in Southeast Asia. It garrisons 23 of the shoals in the disputed Spratly Islands, as compared to China’s seven, and can offer the U.S. and its allies access to the deep-water naval base at Cam Ranh Bay. But first both sides have to prove that this relationship will be stable and lasting.

Washington has already allowed the sale of arms related to maritime security, including six Defiant 75 fast-response boats for Vietnam’s coast guard. But Hanoi wants to reduce its reliance on Russia for advanced weaponry and forge closer military ties with the U.S. CONTINUE AT SITE

Sex, Bill Clinton and Trump In the 1990s, Bill Clinton taught us that only bluenoses worry about a pol’s treatment of women.By William McGurn

Those of a certain age will recall the 1990s, the good old days when James Carville warned America that only “an abusive, privacy-invading, sex-obsessed” hypocrite could even think a president’s personal behavior toward women had anything to say about his fitness for public office.

Today it seems like ancient history, now that Donald Trump’s treatment of women has become a political issue. True enough, there was a day when Americans would have blanched at the thought of a candidate bragging about his adultery or using a presidential debate to boast about his genitalia. But in the 1990s we learned that only bluenoses care about these things.

We had it from no less than the Big Dawg himself. On Aug. 17, 1998, just hours after a grand jury session in which he’d tussled with prosecutors asking about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky, he delivered a defiant, nationally televised address admitting his earlier denials had been misleading. Still, he insisted, whatever he had done with that young intern was between him and his family.

“It’s nobody’s business but ours,” he said. “Even presidents have private lives. It is time to stop the pursuit of personal destruction and the prying into private lives and get on with our national life.”

Even perjury didn’t matter in this case, because, as New York Congressman Jerrold Nadler put it, it was “perjury regarding sex.” All that mattered was that Mr. Clinton was good at his day job.

The American people seemed to agree, with a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll on the eve of the House vote to impeach showing only a third of the public in support.

Here’s the kicker: Donald Trump was on the Bill Clinton side of the argument.

For Mr. Trump, this was all much ado about Monica. Mr. Clinton’s mistake, he said, was that he’d lied about the sex instead of sticking with the argument it was irrelevant. In a September 1998 New York Times forum that ran under the headline “Can Clinton Find the Road Back?” Mr. Trump gave this advice:

“Accept complete responsibility for personal failures, be lucky enough to have enemies with their own shortcomings, and hold steadfast to your political agenda. After the initial shock is past, the American people are less interested in sexual transgressions than they are in public achievements.” CONTINUE AT SITE

The NYTimes Platform for Anti-Netanyahu Opponents : Yisrael Medad

Ronen Bergman of Yedioth Ahronot, not a paper favorably disposed to Israel’s Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, was provided a platform of op-ed space to comment on recent political and military developments in Israel. In his May 21 piece, entitled “Israel’s Army Goes to War with Its Politicians”, a theme most Americans would presume to be a non-democratic step, Bergman justifies the situation by painting Netanyahu and friends as basically the facsists in the matter.

I am not going to fisk the entire article and for most of you who read my blogs, you can easily figure out most of it yourselves. Let me zero in on one example.

Here’s what Bergman wrote:

IN most countries, the political class supervises the defense establishment and restrains its leaders from violating human rights or pursuing dangerous, aggressive policies. In Israel, the opposite is happening. Here, politicians blatantly trample the state’s values and laws and seek belligerent solutions, while the chiefs of the Israel Defense Forces and the heads of the intelligence agencies try to calm and restrain them.

None of this happened.

In fact, the opposite. It was the army brass, headed by the Minister of Defense, who were trampling values and laws and stirring up passions.

Minister Ya’alon and Commander in Chief Gadi Eizenkot illegally prejudged any in-house military investigation and trial in their public declarations. Deputy IDF Commander Yair Golan factually erred in the content of his speech and blatantly lied when he explained he didn’t say what he most certainly did say.

I am not even going to point out that, for the most part, Ya’alon has not been that successful in protecting Israel’s security – and I do not receive Netanyahu of his shared responsibility for this. But the subject is does the IDF have to interfere in the running of the civilian affairs of the country.

Madeleine Albright as Commencement Speaker: Not at All Bright : Julia Gorin

Dear Editor:

It seems everyone has missed the actual problem with Madeleine Albright as commencement speaker, including Meghan Daum (“Scripps College’s baffling crusade for simple thinking,” May 12), and Rosanna Xia (“War criminal or role model?” May 9). While both articles shrugged at Albright’s record, and student objections took on standard PC tones, the reason Albright is no role model goes even deeper down the rabbit hold than war criminality.

Let’s recall that, more than anyone else, Albright pushed for a universal military attack against Yugoslavia, such that it was dubbed “Maddie’s War” (remember her in full combat regalia on the cover of TIME). But it’s the spoils of war that make Albright particularly contemptible. Few know that her firm, Albright Capital Management, had aggressively bid for — and was shortlisted to win — privatization of Kosovo’s state telecom company (which wouldn’t be up for grabs without her war to wrest Kosovo from Serbia in the first place). It was only eventually, after being advised how icky it looked, that she bowed out of this grubby profiteering.

Three months earlier, there was a bizarre and telling incident in the Czech Republic. In late October 2012, Albright was signing books at a Prague bookstore when she was confronted by some Czech anti-war activists holding photos of the devastation she visited upon Yugoslavian civilians and their infrastructure — targets unprecedented in the history of traditional warfare. “Get out!” she screamed repeatedly, and followed up with, “Disgusting Serbs.” The video is still available on YouTube.

Is it proper statecraft, when taking one’s country to war in an outside ethno-territorial conflict, for a high official to harbor hatred and perhaps even a vendetta against one of the sides?

Indeed, Albright’s having achieved being the first female secretary of State is regarded as a virtue in and of itself. Rarely is it considered that this ‘accomplishment’ — facilitated by a nod from Hillary to husband Bill — could be an eternal disgrace to womankind. Hillary voters, take note.