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2016

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Transgender Activism Has Produced a Legal Absurdity From the May 23, 2016, issue of NR By Ed Whelan

By on May 11th, 2016

In a 2–1 panel ruling in mid April, a federal appellate court decided (or at least seemed to think that it decided) that G.G., a girl who identifies herself as male, has a legal right to use the boys’ restrooms at her high school in rural Gloucester County, Va. In so doing, the panel’s majority, consisting of two appointees of President Obama, kowtowed to the Obama administration’s radical claim that federal law requires any college or school that receives federal funding to make its single-sex restrooms, locker rooms, showers, housing, and sports teams available to “transgender students consistent with their gender identity.”

Never has a more brazen and aggressive bureaucratic misreading of federal law encountered a more craven and confused judicial reception.

In 1972, Congress enacted the federal law known as Title IX. Title IX provides generally that no school that receives federal funding — a category that includes public grade schools and high schools as well as nearly all colleges, public or private — may “discriminat[e]” “on the basis of sex.” Everyone understood from the beginning, and the Obama administration still agrees, that Title IX allows schools to have single-sex restrooms, locker rooms, and showers. A regulation dating from 1975 says exactly that — a school “may provide separate toilet, locker room, and shower facilities on the basis of sex” — and goes on to specify only that “such facilities provided for students of one sex shall be comparable to such facilities provided for students of the other sex” (emphasis added).

Pushing the transgender agenda through the entire alphabet of the federal bureaucracy has been a high priority for the administration in President Obama’s second term. So it was that in January 2015 an obscure functionary named James A. Ferg-Cadima, in his temporary capacity as acting deputy assistant secretary at the Department of Education, signed his name to a letter and sent that letter to G.G. (and to various transgender activists). In his letter, Ferg-Cadima made two cursory legal claims on behalf of the department. First, he declared that Title IX’s ban on discrimination on the basis of sex includes a ban on discrimination on the basis of gender identity. Second, he asserted that schools that provide “sex-segregated restrooms, locker rooms, shower facilities, housing, athletic teams, and single-sex classes” must “treat transgender students consistent with their gender identity.”

RELATED: The Obama Administration Provokes a War against North Carolina

Ponder for a moment some examples of what Ferg-Cadima’s second claim means for schools that receive federal funding. A young man who says his gender identity is female must be offered a college dormitory room with roommates who are women (irrespective of the wishes of those roommates). An athlete who is biologically male in all respects must be allowed to compete for a position on a women’s sports team if he identifies himself as female. A first-grade girl who thinks she’s a boy can use the boys’ bathroom. And, yes, high-school boys who say they’re transgender girls may use the girls’ locker rooms and showers on the same terms, and at the same time, as the girls do — and vice versa, of course, for girls who say they’re transgender boys.

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In London, Russian Dissident Vladimir Bukovsky Feels the Ill Effects of Putin’s Long Reach By Claire Berlinski

By on May 11th, 2016

Vladimir Bukovsky’s name, like that of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov, is synonymous with an almost unimaginable bravery and resilience in the face of Soviet totalitarianism. Born in 1942, Bukovsky was a founder of the dissident movement of the 1960s and 1970s. First arrested at the age of 20 for the possession of “anti-Soviet literature,” he was involved in organizing the December 1965 rally on Pushkin Square, the only opposition demonstration Moscow had seen in four decades. For his efforts, he was rewarded with twelve years in the USSR’s prisons, labor camps, and psikhushkas — political psychiatric hospitals.

In 1971, Bukovsky succeeded in smuggling to the West more than 150 pages documenting the Soviet Union’s abuse of psychiatric institutions to silence its opponents. Because of this, the West learned that the KGB routinely declared dissenters mentally ill to avoid embarrassing publiс trials and to discredit any regime opposition as the product of a diseased mind. In 1976, after months of negotiation between the Soviet and American governments, Bukovsky was exchanged for Luis Corvalán, the general secretary of the Communist Party of Chile. He has lived in Cambridge, England, ever since.

He has remained actively and vocally opposed to the Soviet system and to its successors, which in his view have not thoroughly enough expunged the dangerous elements of the Soviet regime. In a 1992 interview, he warned of allowing former Communists to play leading roles in the government of post-Soviet Russia:

Having failed to finish off conclusively the Communist system, we are now in danger of integrating the resulting monster into our world. It may not be called Communism anymore, but it has retained many of its dangerous characteristics. . . . Until a Nuremberg-style tribunal passes its judgment on all the crimes committed by Communism, it is not dead and the war is not over.

In 1994, Bukovsky warned that Yeltsin had become hostage of Russia’s security agencies. In his judgment, a restoration of KGB rule was therefore inevitable. He was correct. Bukovsky has not limited his criticism to Russia; he has also vocally condemned Westerners who have been gullible about, or complicit with, the Soviet Union and its successors.

In 2004, Bukovsky founded the so-called Committee 2008, along with Garry Kasparov, Vladimir Kara-Murza, and the late — murdered — Boris Nemtsov. The committee was formed to ensure free and fair elections in 2008, when a successor to Vladimir Putin would be elected. What happened instead is well known.

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Dem Mayor of Flint Redirected Water Donations to Own PAC Daniel Greenfield

By on May 11th, 2016

The ugly truth about Flint is that it was run into the ground by Democrats. And Democrats have predictably ranted about Governor Snyder because he is conveniently enough a Republican. Meanwhile here’s what the Democratic mayor was getting up to.

Mayor Karen Weaver has been an outspoken advocate for the people of Flint during the city’s water crisis, but she is now facing tough questions about what happened to some of the money sent to aid the city’s recovery. The money was supposed to help families impacted by the water crisis, but a former Flint city administrator claims she was fired when she reported Mayor Weaver may be redirecting the charitable cash for her own political gain.

Former city administrator Natasha Henderson claims she was fired after reporting Mayor Karen Weaver may have been telling staff to direct water crisis donations to her own personal funds.

Henderson filed a federal lawsuit Monday, May 9, in Detroit U.S. District Court, claiming she was fired from her position after asking the city attorney’s office to investigate claims Weaver may have been telling city staff and volunteers to send potential water crisis donors to her own personal account, rather than the official fund managed by the Community Foundation of Greater Flint.

The lawsuit claims Weaver’s executive assistant Maxine Murray reported around Feb. 9 to Henderson that “she feared going to jail” after Weaver instructed her and a city volunteer to direct donations from the Community Foundation of Greater Flint’s Safe Water/Safe Home Fund to a different fund, named “Karenabout Flint.”

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Miracle country : Israel’s accomplishments in the past 68 years are nothing short of a miracle. Dan Illouz

By on May 11th, 2016

This past week, a group of young right-wing activists, including myself, met for a discussion with former MK Moshe Feiglin, in which he spoke about his goals when creating his new political party, Zehut.

Feiglin described the reality the way he saw it, as he often does, by describing the “horrible” state of affairs and claiming that the State of Israel was in very bad shape. He, of course, then promised that he was the only person who could change things.

“Is this the State of Israel that we dreamed of for 2,000 years?” he said.In the time leading up to Independence Day, I could not help but cringe when hearing such a description of reality.

I also could not help but answer with a resounding yes! This is indeed the state we dreamed of for 2,000 years, for in the past 68, Israel has grown into nothing less than a miracle.

ISRAEL’S POPULATION grew from a mere 800,000 in 1948 to an impressive eight million by 2013. This growth was caused by two things that were, by themselves, miraculous.

For a western country, Israel has a high birthrate, with 3.04 per woman in 2012, compared to 1.88 in America, 2.0 in France and 1.38 in Germany.

Since birthrates are usually a reflection of hope for the future, the fact that people living in war-torn Israel are still investing in birth is great testament that a nation whose national anthem is called “The Hope” is still living by this important principle.

The second factor leading to this population growth was Israel’s impressive ability to integrate hundreds of thousands of Jews who immigrated from all around the world.

From Australia to North America, through Brazil, Morocco, Europe, Ethiopia, Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Syria and Asia, Israel has successfully been fulfilling the biblical prophecy of the ingathering of the exiles: “The Lord, your God, will bring back your exiles, and He will have mercy upon you. He will once again gather you from all the nations, where the Lord, your God, had dispersed you.”

From its very beginning, this young and small nation with a fragile economy has been able to bring together people from very different backgrounds into one nation and an impressive, thriving democracy.

Israel is also the only nation in history that has been able to revive a dead language. It is hard to believe that at the beginning of the previous century, Hebrew was used as a language only for prayer and religious study. Today, it is thriving. People speak in Hebrew, sing in Hebrew, joke in Hebrew and even curse in Hebrew. Hebrew is once again a living language.

From 1950 to 2007, the per-capita GDP in Israel grew six-fold. The country’s now-thriving economy is at the center of international innovation, which abounds in Israel not only in hitech, the heart of the so-called start-up nation, but also in academia and defense industries.

As for international relations, things have never been better. Just recently, Israel opened an office at NATO’s headquarters in Brussels. It joined the OECD a few years ago. While relations with the European Union are at times tense, bilateral relations between Israel and European states remain strong: Germany, France, England and the Czech Republic are all led by people who proudly call themselves friends of Israel. Australia and Canada have constantly deepened their ties with Israel, and even a very hostile Obama administration has not been able to hurt the strong bond between the Israeli people and the American people.

ISRAEL IS far from perfect. Its shortcomings span all its sectors. However, one must realize that this is true of every single nation in this world.

There are no nations that are perfect, no states without shortcomings. It is easy for a politician like Feiglin to distort reality by focusing only there and ignoring the incredible advancements of our society. It is also easy for politicians who have never been in a position of power – where they need to compromise on their principles, the way every leader rightfully needs to do in a democracy – to criticize ruling politicians for “not going the whole way.”

One can easily list the problems with our lack of sovereignty in Judea and Samaria, ignoring the silent steps undertaken in order to protect the rights of the Jews living in these areas. One can easily list the problems we have on the Temple Mount, where Jews are robbed of their right to the free practice of religion when they are not allowed to pray.

Yes, there are still many shortcomings.

However, when we come to understand that perfection exists only in utopian fantasies, we quickly realize that when looking at the accomplishments of a government or state, we must judge not the way things are, but the trends that are present. Anyone claiming that Israel’s history has been anything but blessed with positive trends is living in a parallel reality.

There is still a long way to go, but Israel is on the right path.

A person can start working with the system to try and influence change, incremental as it might be, instead of having a “my way or the highway” approach like Feiglin has had ever since entering politics, where he announced he was running for prime minister before he even entered the Knesset as a regular parliamentarian.

Yes, compromise is less appealing, but it is the way things get done. This is how we see slow change happening. A lack of compromise means no change will happen.

Feiglin’s discourse is not very different from the discourse of the Left. People there are also imbued with utopian dreams instead of realistic policies. They like to blame Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for everything bad in this world, as if he were responsible even for the weather. Yet a worse aspect of this discourse is that it shows a great deal of ungratefulness for what we have accomplished as a nation in such a short time.

ONE WEEK ago, we celebrated Holocaust Remembrance Day. This week, we marked Remembrance Day, in which we remembered and thanked the soldiers who sacrificed their lives for us to achieve these great accomplishments, and celebrated Independence Day. The contrast between the two days shows how far our nation has moved forward in only a few decades.

By ignoring our accomplishments, by always asking for more without recognizing what we already have, people are showing a great deal of ungratefulness to all those who sacrificed so much to bring us to where we are today.

Asking for us to keep moving forward is a great thing. Ignoring our accomplishments turns us into incredibly ungrateful beings. ■

The writer is an attorney and a former legislative adviser to the Knesset’s coalition chairman. He previously served in a legal capacity at the Foreign Ministry. He is a graduate of McGill University Law School and Hebrew University’s master’s program in public policy.
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Time for a New Israeli Diplomatic Initiative How to address the international lynch mob. Caroline Glick

By on May 11th, 2016

In a week or two, Israel will again be the focus of a well-dressed international lynch mob. According to news reports, US President Barack Obama intends to use the so-called Middle East Quartet, comprised of the US, the UN, Russia and the EU, as a tool to ratchet up Western condemnations of the Jewish state.

The report is expected to include even more expansive assaults on Israel for refusing to deny Jews our civil rights in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria.

It will likely ratchet up the false claims that have already been made to the effect that Jewish cities, towns, neighborhoods and homes beyond the 1949 armistice lines are illegal and a threat to world peace.

The Quartet statement will also brutalize Israel for lawfully destroying illegal construction projects undertaken by the EU in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem. The EU engages in illegal building in order to subvert Israel’s rule of law and enfeeble the IDF.

Around the same time that Obama has scheduled his newest assault on Israel, France is expected to convene a so-called peace conference. The stated purpose of the conference is to restart the fraudulent peace process which the Palestinians killed nearly 16 years ago and have never agreed to resuscitate.

The novel aspect of the French conference, which neither Israeli nor Palestinian diplomats will attend, is that other than the misleading headlines referring to their powwow as a peace conference, the French are making no effort to hide that the sole purpose of their initiative is to condemn Israel.

The purpose of the conference is to provide diplomatic cover for the French government to recognize a state called Palestine. When then French foreign minister Laurent Fabius announced the conference in January, he said that whether or not the conference leads to peace, France will recognize “Palestine.” And just to be clear, the “Palestine” France intends to recognize will be located in land controlled by Israel and to which Israel has a valid claim of sovereignty.

In the face of the approaching international onslaught, thought leaders and politicians on the Left insist that Israel must act. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, they argue, must participate in the Paris conference, and he must announce an initiative now to vacate Judea and Samaria, or to stop allowing Jews to exercise their legal right to build homes in these areas and in Jerusalem.

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Obama’s Master of Deceit on the Iran Nuke Deal From aspiring novelist to chief spinner of the president’s lies. Joseph Klein

By on May 11th, 2016

Deputy National Security Adviser for Strategic Communications Ben Rhodes confirmed what FrontPage Magazine has been saying all along. President Obama and senior members of his administration sold his nuclear deal with Iran, known formally as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), with a pack of lies.

Rhodes was an aspiring fiction writer, who fulfilled his aspirations for make-believe as a senior member of the Obama administration. In a profile of Rhodes, written by New York Times reporter David Samuels and appearing in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, Samuels recounted Rhodes’ tall tales concerning how the negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program came about. The article’s title, by the way, is “The Aspiring Novelist Who Became Obama’s Foreign-Policy Guru.”

The Obama administration, led by Rhodes, spun the tale that it had to take advantage of the opportunity suddenly created for commencing negotiations with Iran when Hassan Rouhani, a so-called “moderate,” was elected as Iran’s president. According to Rhodes’ concocted narrative of the negotiations, the administration determined that the time had finally arrived, with Rouhani having replaced hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to enter into serious negotiations. This narrative of when and how the negotiations began, David Samuels wrote, “was largely manufactured for the purpose for selling the deal.”

The Obama administration wanted to give the false impression that it was adeptly exploiting a schism between the so-called “moderate” faction in Iran that had taken over the presidency and the hardliners whom had taken a beating in the presidential election. They painted Rouhani as a “moderate” leader with real power, whom could serve as an effective counterweight to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei and the hardliners surrounding him.

As Leon Panetta, Obama’s former CIA chief and Secretary of Defense, explained to the New York Times reporter, the intelligence agency did not consider there to be a divide between so-called “moderates” and hardliners in any meaningful sense. “There was not much question that the Quds Force and the supreme leader ran that country with a strong arm,” Panetta was quoted as saying.

In truth, Obama was so intent on reaching a deal with Iran at any price that senior members of his administration had started serious discussions with Iranian hardliners a year before Rouhani’s election. “Obama’s closest advisers always understood him to be eager to do a deal with Iran as far back as 2012, and even since the beginning of his presidency,” David Samuels concluded after speaking with key members of the administration including Rhodes, whom were part of Obama’s inner circle.

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The deeply flawed analyses of Fort McMurray’s climate By Sierra Rayne

By on May 11th, 2016

As every Tom, Dick, and Harrietta tries to talk about climate change and the massive wildfire that destroyed a good portion of the northern Alberta city of Fort McMurray — in the heart of the oil sands region, there is unscientific nonsense being spewed all over the place.

Take Elizabeth Kolbert’s article at The New Yorker. Apparently Kolbert won the “2015 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction.”

Kolbert claims the following: “April was exceptionally mild.”

Wrong. Wrong. And even more wrong.

Here are the mean daily maximum and mean daily temperatures for the month of April at Fort McMurray since records began in 1916, with the 2016 data highlighted in red.

Not only was April 2016 not “exceptionally mild,” it was colder than April 2015 and quite a bit colder than many other Aprils in the past several decades.

What is happening instead is that Fort Mac’s annual average temperature is changing rapidly over time.

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Natan Sharansky On Robert Bernstein:The Dissident’s Best Friend The publisher’s moral and practical support was exceptional and profoundly encouraging to those of us trapped behind the Iron Curtain.

By on May 11th, 2016

Very few people can look back on their lives and say that they managed to build an institution of lasting and widespread influence. Fewer still can say, as Robert L. Bernstein can, that they built two.

With his boundless energy and optimism, Mr. Bernstein has succeeded over the course of his lifetime in turning Random House into the world’s biggest publisher—bringing the works of William Faulkner, Toni Morrison and Dr. Seuss to the world—and Human Rights Watch (originally Helsinki Watch) into the leading international NGO in its field. His memoir, “Speaking Freely,” is a flowing account of the people with and against whom he worked on these two great projects. Mr. Bernstein, now 93 years old, tells his stories with great detail and good humor, finding ways to laugh at life while communicating his deep love for the friends he made along the way.

Even more remarkable than the life Mr. Bernstein recounts, however, is how he chooses to portray himself—not, as many autobiographers do, by emphasizing his role in various events but if anything by understating his own significance. At least this is very much the case with respect to the events I know well, those surrounding the struggle for human rights in the Soviet Union, in which he played a much more central role than he in his modesty is willing to let on.

Mr. Bernstein vividly recounts his visits to the Soviet Union in the early 1970s with delegations from the Association of American Publishers. The official purpose of these trips was to meet with leaders of the Soviet publishing industry, but Mr. Bernstein made a point of meeting Andrei Sakharov and other dissidents while he was there. He explains that afterward he was haunted by the thought of what it would be like to be a writer behind the Iron Curtain and of what happened to anyone who crossed the government’s “tight and arbitrary” party line. He became convinced of the importance of supporting those whose voices were suppressed under Soviet tyranny, and he proceeded to do so in meaningful ways, from making repeated visits to dissidents, to mobilizing prominent authors such as Robert Penn Warren and Arthur Miller to speak on their behalf, to becoming the publisher of Sakharov’s books and essays.

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Why Terrorism Thrives in West Africa by Nuhu Othman

By on May 11th, 2016

The general consensus among the Muslims in the now fragmented Caliphate was that the West won over the vast Caliphate not by the superiority of its idea or civilization but by its sheer superiority in organized violence. This reasoning plays into the hands of extremist Islamic groups today.

Above all, there has been no way for people to reject the past Empire and Caliphate in West Africa as failed systems because they were not replaced by better systems.

Whatever democratic values were handed to these newly independent states, however, were short-lived, trampled by military incursions. Military leadership suppressed freedoms in every aspect. This in itself served as a gag to protest the rule of any aspiring terror group. Now Africa, especially West Africa, would like to democratize. Amid the madness of terrorism, it is calling for freedom. But Is anyone listening?

Unfortunately, Iran’s nuclear deal has emboldened the terrorists, and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has also been increasing its presence in Nigeria by sponsoring Sunni clergymen into their institutions of learning.

Great civilizations were in northern Nigeria before the West ever set foot there. The Kanem Bornu Empire (700-1900) stretched to present day Chad, Libya, Niger and Cameroon, and was bound by trade and ethnic similarities and religion.

Present day Northern Nigeria, on which this piece on terrorism, concentrates, is home to a large ethnic group, the Hausa. Their language of the same name is spoken by more than 50 million people and covers the present day Sahel: central north Africa (Niger, Nigeria, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Togo, Chad, and Sudan.) Hausa is still the second language of trade; the first are from colonizers: English, and French and to a degree Arabic.

In the early 19th century a towering Islamic figure, Sheikh Uthman ibn Fodio (1754-1817), emerged in what is now northwest Nigeria. Although of Fulani extraction, he galvanized support across the Hausa-dominated regions and parts of the old Kanem Bornu Empire. In this multi-directional region, he had a uni-directional purpose: Islamic evangelism, crusade and dominance. He ended up created an Islamic caliphate.

In the mid-20th century, the West partitioned West Africa, and other parts of the African continent, into nation states that had nothing in common with each other apart from geographical proximity. The ethnic elements that made up the old order still consider themselves as one regardless of the fragmentation of the Caliphate into several nation states. An Azeri considers his kind as living in Iran or Azerbaijan; a Kurd, in Turkey or Iraq, a Russian in Russia, Ukraine or in the Urals, and so on. Under such splintering, it was easy for the ideas of Sayyid Qutb or Osama Bin Laden violently to re-order the region through Jihad to reverberate and gain a following.

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HIS SAY: BRUCE KESLER: WHERE DOES LOYALTY BELONG?

By on May 11th, 2016

Writer Bruce Kesler is a veteran who served our country with honor in the Vietnam War…..rsk
I am from the school of loyalty belonging to God, family, country, in that order. When it comes to voting, my loyalty does not belong to any individual or political party. My vote belongs to me. And, I have an obligation to behave responsibly and sensibly with my vote.

In that vein, whether I am a lifelong Republican or conservative is important, but only in so far as my deeply held beliefs are furthered or protected. Many Republicans or conservatives are disaffected or in pique by the apparent triumph of Donald Trump. However, for me, Trump does not get my vote because I am a Republican or conservative but because the alternatives are far worse in a continuation of the Democrats’ ongoing literal destruction of our ethics, our economy, and our national security, while in actuality doing relatively less to upraise the unfortunate than to tie them into being lackeys of the central government instead of their own initiative, compounded by our citizen poor being undercut by uncontrolled inflows of foreign competitors for jobs and public funds. To not vote is to vote for the continuation of the past 8-years of the outright assault on the very fiber of the United States.

I cannot accept with any respect any Republicans or conservatives who will now support Hillary Clinton. They do not deserve it. They exhibit themselves as rent-seekers, to profit from her probable election to the presidency due to the lock that Democrats have on a near majority of the electoral college. Or, they exhibit their overriding loyalty to their liberal social circle in New York or Washington. They do not exhibit the judgment to choose the lesser of evils, and they increase the probability of loss of Republican control of the Senate and House, which only increases the damages from a leftist administration.

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