The university has declared that members of the all-male off-campus eating clubs will no longer be eligible for leadership positions on campus, including captains of sports teams. They will also be refused recommendations for post-graduate scholarships and fellowships. These restrictions will equally apply to all-female clubs and single sex fraternities and sororities. Presumably, the impetus for integrating the all-male clubs came from surveys and interviews with women who felt that an atmosphere of misogyny and sexual misconduct was re-enforced at these venues and since sexual assault is apparently a pandemic threat to women on campus, the obvious remedy is to alter the venue. It seems that Harvard students don’t read the classics anymore or they would have immediately thought of the Lysistrata solution for women to simply not attend gatherings, parties or any other events that take place at the offending clubs. Boycotts are popular at all the Ivies and they don’t require anything more than a signature on a petition and negative attendance – both of which students are good at. The boycott would guarantee zero sexual assault of women if no women showed up and before long, those lame-brained, horny men might figure out the problem and check their privilege without administrative interference.
‘This is a good, quick read with insightful analysis of strategies needed to defeat global jihad.”
Al Qaeda’s September 11, 2001, attacks showed that the “totalitarians are back. This time the dictatorship invokes the name of God, as opposed to the working class or the Führer, but they are back, and they will either kill us or enslave us.” So writes Dr.Sebastian Gorka in his new book Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War, an excellent strategic primer for the free world’s current struggle against a totalitarian foe, namely global jihadists.
As Gorka recently explained at a Heritage Foundation presentationin Washington, DC, he views jihadism in a broader history of totalitarianisms like the Communism his father fought against in postwar Hungary. “As an immigrant who chose to become an American and the son of parents who had to fight for their freedom, I understand 9/11 differently from those for whom the threat of totalitarianism is purely abstract,” he writes. Given his personal insight, he finds that the “similarities between groups like Al Qaeda or the Islamic State and USSR are too numerous and fundamental to be ignored.”
Discussing Muhammad, Gorka explains that Islam’s “founder was at the same time a political leader, a military commander, a self-proclaimed prophet. Islam, then, is by its nature and its origins a theocracy.” While Jesus famously taught of the distinction between Caesar and God, “this seminal Christian idea finds no counterpart in foundational Islam.” Groups like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State “are not in fact ‘perverting’ religious texts but skillfully applying those alleged revelations that best support their cause.” Given jihadism’s doctrinal basis in Islam, “our current enemy predates even fascism and communism…we have been at war with the jihadists since at least the Barbary Wars of the eighteenth century.”
http://jamieglazov.com/2016/05/07/naming-the-enemy-on-the-glazov-gang/
This special edition of The Glazov Gang was joined by Stephen Coughlin, the co-founder of UnconstrainedAnalytics.org and the author of the new book, Catastrophic Failure.
He came on the show to discuss Naming the Enemy, analyzing the question: “Do we say the word?”
Don’t miss it!
Prior to serving in Congress, Representative McSally served 26 years in the U.S. Air Force, retiring in 2010 as a full Colonel. She is the first female fighter pilot to fly in combat and first to command a fighter squadron in combat in United States history.Rep. McSally is a distinguished graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy and after training to fly the A-10 Warthog, flew her first combat mission to Iraq while deployed from Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in 1995. During that assignment, she flew nearly 100 combat hours in support of Operation Southern Watch in the Middle East.Rep. McSally was next selected to become an A-10 Instructor Pilot in the 358th Fighter Squadron, becoming the first woman in U.S. history to serve in that role.
In 1999, Rep. McSally was chosen to participate in the Air Force’s Legislative Fellowship Program, serving on the staff of Senator Jon Kyl as national security advisor on issues including terrorism, cyber security, and missile defense.After serving as a Legislative Fellow, Rep. McSally was assigned to Saudi Arabia to oversee combat search and rescue operations over southern Iraq and Afghanistan. While there, Rep. McSally was on the leadership team that planned and executed the initial air campaign in Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks.
In 2001, Rep. McSally became a Flight Commander and then the Director of Operations in the 612 Combat Operations Squadron at 12th Air Force Headquarters at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base. She deployed twice back to the Middle East, holding leadership positions at the Combined Air Operations Center for Operations Southern Watch, Enduring Freedom, and then Iraqi Freedom.While stationed in Saudi Arabia, Rep. McSally challenged a discriminatory Pentagon policy that required servicewomen to wear Muslim garb when traveling off-base. She fought for a total of eight years to get the policy changed, eventually culminating with filing McSally vs Rumsfeld in court. She then helped to successfully shepherd legislation that was signed by the President and into law ending the demeaning policy.
In 2004, Rep. McSally took over as commander of the 354th Fighter Squadron, becoming the first woman in U.S. history to command a combat aviation unit. In that role, she was responsible for deploying her squadron anywhere in the world in 24 hours’ notice. As Squadron Commander, Rep. McSally flew for 225 combat hours, leading her A-10 combat team during Operation Enduring Freedom from September 2005 to February 2006. For her combat leadership, Rep. McSally was awarded the Bronze Star and her squadron was awarded the Air Force Association David C. Schilling Award for the most outstanding contribution in the field of flight in 2006.
During her military career, Rep. McSally flew 2,600 flight hours, including over 325 combat hours, earning six air medals. After her time in the military, she taught and mentored senior military officials from around the world as a Professor of National Security Studies at the George C. Marshall Center in Germany.
Rep. McSally holds Masters Degrees from Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and the U.S. Air War College in Public Policy and Strategic Studies, where she graduated #1 in her class of 261 senior military officers.
Just for the record….Randy Forbes is a strong supporter of Israel and ranked -6 by the American Arab Institute….rsk
The images from earlier this year are still appalling: ten American sailors, on their knees with their hands behind their head, held at gunpoint aboard a broken-down patrol boat by paramilitary forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
The capture and detainment of those ten U.S. Navy sailors on January 12, 2016, came at the start of a year in which America’s foreign policy has been at a crossroads. In the State of the Union address he delivered the very next day, President Obama spoke of living in a time of extraordinary change, with the international system led by the United States under growing strain. In his speech, the president conceded that we are living in increasingly dangerous times but dismissed “all the rhetoric about . . . our enemies getting stronger and America getting weaker” as “political hot air.” With humiliating footage of our captured sailors still playing on the news, however, it was hard to deny that our nation faces a number of worrisome problems.
Around the world, we see a number of threatening actors — nation-states and other groups alike — with growing capabilities and diminished regard for international laws and norms. Iran’s illegal detainment of ten U.S. sailors was only the latest malicious action by a rogue regime that continues to brazenly support terrorism, develop and test ballistic missiles, and threaten oil exports from the Gulf. ISIS remains uncontained, and from remote villages in Pakistan to the cultural capitals of Europe, extremists have been successfully plotting and executing horrific terrorist attacks. Putin has annexed Ukraine, buzzed our ships and airplanes, threatened our NATO allies, and elevated Russian submarine activity and nuclear saber-rattling to Cold War levels. In Asia, China is amassing military power and slowly but steadily securing de facto control of the nearby seas, while North Korea has acquired nuclear weapons and delivery systems that can reach the United States.
Climate Hustle: An Impressive, though Flawed, Exposé of Global-Warming Alarmism By Rachelle Peterson
Last year Sony Pictures Classics released Merchants of Doubt, a documentary alleging that paid hucksters peddle climate denialism. Marc Morano, who founded and runs the website Climate Depot, was featured prominently as huckster-in-chief. This week Morano struck back with Climate Hustle, a 90-minute film released by the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) and CDR Communications. Climate Hustle exposes the industry of climate alarmism through an impressive sequence of interviews and news clips revealing the politicized narrative pushed onto the public. It’s a film with an important message. Unfortunately, its reach will be limited by its low budget and a few missteps in narrative development. But anyone interested in the politicization of contemporary science must see it. It showed in theaters only on May 2 but is set for release on DVD later this spring.
Climate Hustle unveils seven “hustles” perpetrated by climate con artists. These include the sleight of hand (patching together data sets into misleading temperature records) and the “ol’ switcheroo” (the pivot from global cooling to global warming and then again to “climate change” and “extreme weather”). Damning sequences show original clips of news anchors and scientists changing their tune as doom-predicting climate models fail to match the facts.
More often — and this is the key point of Climate Hustle – the hustlers stick to their talking points long after the facts have left them behind. We see climate scientists fumbling to explain the 18-year pause in global warming. We also see the precarious positions of celebrity global-warming apologists stuck on repeat, unsure which island of pseudo-scientific messaging to leap onto next. The most hilarious of these (filed under “The limited time offer,” one of the seven hustles) is Prince Charles, who in five nicely timed clips declares that nations will be under water in ten years (that was in 1999); then in 100 months (2008), seven years (2009), 86 months (2010). Finally, in 2014, he enunciates the worn-out warning that we are once again “running out of time.”
Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has at least four different problems.
First, an upcoming State Comptroller report seems set to accuse Mr. Netanyahu of keeping critical information from his cabinet in the buildup to Israel’s summer 2014 military action in Gaza, and of failing to adequately respond to tunnels Hamas used in launching attacks on Israeli soil.
Second, Mr. Netanyahu is under increasing pressure from coalition partners in his cabinet. As I noted last November, the Israeli government is defined by significant internal tensions. Leading the charge for tougher action against the Palestinians is Education Minister Naftali Bennett. A young, charismatic hawk and proponent of expanded West Bank settlement construction, Mr. Bennett wants to bend Mr. Netanyahu to his hard-line agenda.
Third, the likelihood of renewed conflict with Hamas is growing by the day. Recent weeks have seen Hamas escalate the pace of rocket, mortar, knife, and bomb attacks on Israelis. In response, the Israeli military is launching operations against Hamas facilitation nodes.
Fourth and finally, tensions are growing with Iranian proxies in the Golan region on Israel’s border.
Let’s take the third and fourth issues first. Israel’s strategic goal in dealing with Hamas is to constrain the group’s military capabilities. Partly motivated by the aforementioned domestic controversy over Hamas’s infiltration tunnels in 2014, Netanyahu also wants to ensure that they cannot launch a surprise attack on Israeli civilians. Such an attack would cost innocent lives, and, more important, it would embolden Israeli adversaries at a time of growing regional instability.
And that leads us to Iran. With President Bashar al-Assad of Syria now buoyed by Russia, Lebanese Hezbollah (LH) and Iran sense an opportunity to re-commit their energies toward Israel’s northern border. The Syrian Civil War has imposed a heavy military and political toll on Iran and LH, but their existential fetish for Jewish blood is unrelenting. As the Middle East sinks into unrestrained violence, the Obama administration has sat idly by, dancing to Vladimir Putin’s tune at every turn. And without any confidence that Obama would come to its aid in a time of need, Israel is now aligning with the Sunni-Arab monarchies against Iran. Netanyahu’s recent assurance of Israel’s continued claim to the Golan Heights was a physical metaphor for Israel’s evolving security strategy: Israel wants Iran to know that it will not replicate America’s strategy of acquiescence and will role the military dice to preserve its deterrent posture if it must.
It’s been my great good fortune to know many patriotic Americans, a goodly number but by no means all of them conservatives, who are now supporters of Donald Trump. Similarly, many of my friends and allies in the conservative movement are immovably #NeverTrump. There is significant infighting between these camps. How can it be that people for whom the national interest remains paramount find themselves at loggerheads, after fighting shoulder to shoulder for decades against anti-Americanism and cultural decline?
The occasion for posing this question is my close encounter with the intensity of the rupture. Yesterday, I published on the Corner a post in support of exploring an independent candidacy for the presidency, a bid that could provide a credible alternative to both Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, and Hillary Clinton, who is certain to be the Democrats’ standard-bearer. What was most baffling about the negative reaction I got from some friends, colleagues, and readers — ranging from disappointment to white-hot anger — is that we are in basic agreement about priorities. It’s not like we’re not playing for the same team anymore. The bitter disagreement is about how to achieve the main objective.
And what is the objective? At this point, it is to prevent Hillary Clinton from becoming president of the United States. For most of us — those who reluctantly realize we must confront the strong possibility of defeat — there is also a corollary: to minimize the amount of damage Mrs. Clinton could do if she wins.
Interestingly, few of my pro-Trump correspondents see the objective as electing Trump for the good that he would do for the country. The case for Trump is that elections, as the estimable John Bolton put it in a recent interview, present a “binary choice.” The main attraction of Trump, for those who are attracted, is the belief that he stands the best chance of defeating Clinton.
While Trump has his fans, he troubles most conservatives — to put it mildly. That is because records matter more than late-life conversions, proclaimed with varying amounts of conviction and coherence. On his record, Donald Trump is a left-wing Democrat, whose newfangled conservatism is suspect. He is a deal-maker, whose positions, regardless of the fervor with which they are announced, are best understood as the start of a negotiation — endlessly elastic.
That said, the two principal objections of my correspondents are: (a) Clinton’s election would be assured by an independent bid — which many refer to as a “third party” candidacy, even though what I’ve endorsed is a run by an independent Republican (the distinction is significant for reasons I’ll get to); and (b) an independent bid is just a scheme to sneak a GOP-establishment operative into the White House against the will of the voters, who overwhelmingly rejected the establishment in the primaries.
These are the two objections I anticipated in my post. All I can do is elaborate on what I’ve said.
First, I would support only an independent bid that has a decent chance to succeed — either in getting the 270 electoral votes needed to win or, more likely, denying that Electoral College majority to any candidate, which would throw the election into the Republican-controlled House of Representatives. There, Clinton would stand the least chance of winning. If an independent bid lacked the capacity to compete realistically with the major parties, or lacked a candidate who could attract a competitive coalition, I would throw up my hands and vote for Trump. I am not trying to spare myself or anyone else the stark choice of Trump v. Clinton if that’s what we are realistically down to. I do not need a third option as a symbolic gesture so I can con myself into believing I haven’t helped elect Hillary. (In fact, I live in New Jersey, which will vote for the Democrat regardless of whom I vote for, or whether I vote at all.)
RELATED: What Chance Would a Third-Party Candidate Have?
Chances are that Donald Trump and his foreign policy crowd have not been reading The American Thinker. I would rather believe that Trump & Co. are just endowed with common sense and a genuine concern for the American interest. This also happens to be in the best interest of most people in the world — except for the jihad war crowd.
American Thinker and like-minded people have been yelling into the storm for almost eight years now, but we can’t take credit for Trump’s common sense in foreign affairs. Good sense guided American policy long before the Rise of the One.
The great exception to ordinary common sense has been Obama himself.
Donald Trump has been attacked as a populist lowbrow, but he has just given a foreign policy speech that makes more sense than any blowhard fantasy coming from the left. The Don didn’t promise to roll back the rising oceans, like King Canute, but instead he presented sensible policy goals to get us out of the swamp.
Trump is promising to be pro-American, in contrast to Obama’s fantasy policies that ended up killing hundreds of thousands of people abroad for no discernible reason at all. Obama bombed Libya for no stated reason except the obvious lie that we were going to stop genocide. Instead, things got much worse, and today Libya is still entangled in an avoidable civil war.
But the biggest, most desperately needed step has already been taken by Trump, even before the election.
Donald Trump has named the enemy in the Jihad War. He calls it “radical Islam.” That’s good enough, because it labels the war theology of jihad as the real enemy. We do not hate Muslims. We hate their indoctrination into a pre-medieval desert theology that makes war on infidels a first duty for every believer.
Raised-Fist Photo by Black Women at West Point Spurs Inquiry By Dave Philipps
” “These ladies weren’t raising their fist to say Black Panthers. They were raising it to say Beyoncé,” said Mary Tobin, a 2003 graduate of West Point and an Iraq veteran who is a mentor to some of the seniors and has talked with them about the photograph.” (huh?!!!!)
Young black women set to graduate from West Point ignited debate last week when they raised their fists in this group photo.
A group of young black women poised to graduate from the United States Military Academy gathered on the steps of West Point’s oldest barracks last week in traditional gray dress uniforms, complete with sabers, for a group photo. Known as an “Old Corps” photograph because it mimics historical portraits, it was nearly identical to thousands that cadets have posed for over the decades, with one key difference: The 16 women raised their clenched fists.
The gesture, posted on Facebook and Twitter last week, touched off a barrage of criticism in and out of the armed forces as some commenters accused the women of allying themselves with the Black Lives Matter movement and sowing racial divisions in a military that relies on assimilation.
West Point opened an investigation on April 28 into whether the women violated Army rules that prohibit political activities while in uniform. Now, as the women wait to hear if they will be punished, they are gaining supporters who say they were simply making a gesture of solidarity and strength.
The elite public military academy, which trains many of the Army’s future leaders, is overwhelmingly male and 70 percent white. The 16 cadets in the photo represented all but one of the black women in a graduating class of about 1,000, a meager 1.7 percent. But the Army has long tried to play down race and gender to create a force where “everyone is green.”
When it comes to protest, West Point could not be more different from a civilian campus, where demonstrations, sit-ins and leaflets are commonplace.
At the military academy, in contrast, public displays of politics by students and staff members are prohibited in an effort to build a unified force that remains clear of partisanship.
The group photo has revealed an underlying tension at West Point.
The academy, while seeking to foster a diverse student body that reflects the nation, also aims to educate future officers in the regimented ways of the military, in which the only differences that matter are the ranks displayed on soldiers’ shoulders.
