Displaying posts published in

2016

With Small Muslim Community, Italy Tries to Stop Extremism Before It Gets Started Rapid expulsions of suspected Islamist radicals—combined with fresh integration efforts—are part of a new Italian experiment By Giada Zampano

Italy is fast-tracking expulsions of dozens of suspected Muslim radicals—often at the first sign of extremism—taking a more aggressive approach than other European countries despite its limited experience with Islamist terror.

Since January of last year, Italian authorities have run checks on about 170,000 people for national security reasons and expelled 115 suspected extremists, including 12 imams, according to the Interior Ministry.

In July, two Moroccan men were expelled after one smashed a wooden crucifix in a Venice church. The other was repatriated after storming into a church and insulting the congregation.

In another instance in September, the government expelled a 33-year-old Moroccan who had served as an unofficial imam in the northern city of Treviso. He had lived in Italy for 18 years and embarked on the yearslong process of obtaining Italian citizenship. But in the final stage, he refused to swear on the Italian constitution because—officials suspect—he had become radical. “This means he was hostile to our traditions and disregarded the founding principles of our country,” Interior Minister Angelino Alfano said.

The rapid-expulsion strategy—combined with broader efforts to integrate Italy’s relatively small but fast-growing Muslim population—lie at the heart of an experiment to prevent extremism before it takes root on Italian soil. Unlike its biggest neighbors, Italy doesn’t have a large second- or third-generation Muslim underclass particularly vulnerable to radicalization, and the government has built its strategy around that fact.

“This is an advantage we need to exploit, acting quickly both on security and integration policies,” said Domenico Manzione, undersecretary of Italy’s Interior Ministry.

The twin approach has attracted the attention of allies, including U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who praised Italy’s counter-extremism efforts during an October visit to Rome. “We look at Italy as a leader in this field,” she told an audience of justice and law-enforcement officials there. CONTINUE AT SITE

Opinion Commentary My Unhappy Life as a Climate Heretic My research was attacked by thought police in journalism, activist groups funded by billionaires and even the White House. By Roger Pielke Jr.

Much to my surprise, I showed up in the WikiLeaks releases before the election. In a 2014 email, a staffer at the Center for American Progress, founded by John Podesta in 2003, took credit for a campaign to have me eliminated as a writer for Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight website. In the email, the editor of the think tank’s climate blog bragged to one of its billionaire donors, Tom Steyer: “I think it’s fair [to] say that, without Climate Progress, Pielke would still be writing on climate change for 538.”

WikiLeaks provides a window into a world I’ve seen up close for decades: the debate over what to do about climate change, and the role of science in that argument. Although it is too soon to tell how the Trump administration will engage the scientific community, my long experience shows what can happen when politicians and media turn against inconvenient research—which we’ve seen under Republican and Democratic presidents.

I understand why Mr. Podesta—most recently Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman—wanted to drive me out of the climate-change discussion. When substantively countering an academic’s research proves difficult, other techniques are needed to banish it. That is how politics sometimes works, and professors need to understand this if we want to participate in that arena.

More troubling is the degree to which journalists and other academics joined the campaign against me. What sort of responsibility do scientists and the media have to defend the ability to share research, on any subject, that might be inconvenient to political interests—even our own?

I believe climate change is real and that human emissions of greenhouse gases risk justifying action, including a carbon tax. But my research led me to a conclusion that many climate campaigners find unacceptable: There is scant evidence to indicate that hurricanes, floods, tornadoes or drought have become more frequent or intense in the U.S. or globally. In fact we are in an era of good fortune when it comes to extreme weather. This is a topic I’ve studied and published on as much as anyone over two decades. My conclusion might be wrong, but I think I’ve earned the right to share this research without risk to my career.

Instead, my research was under constant attack for years by activists, journalists and politicians. In 2011 writers in the journal Foreign Policy signaled that some accused me of being a “climate-change denier.” I earned the title, the authors explained, by “questioning certain graphs presented in IPCC reports.” That an academic who raised questions about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in an area of his expertise was tarred as a denier reveals the groupthink at work.

Yet I was right to question the IPCC’s 2007 report, which included a graph purporting to show that disaster costs were rising due to global temperature increases. The graph was later revealed to have been based on invented and inaccurate information, as I documented in my book “The Climate Fix.” The insurance industry scientist Robert-Muir Wood of Risk Management Solutions had smuggled the graph into the IPCC report. He explained in a public debate with me in London in 2010 that he had included the graph and misreferenced it because he expected future research to show a relationship between increasing disaster costs and rising temperatures.

When his research was eventually published in 2008, well after the IPCC report, it concluded the opposite: “We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and normalized catastrophe losses.” Whoops.

The IPCC never acknowledged the snafu, but subsequent reports got the science right: There is not a strong basis for connecting weather disasters with human-caused climate change. CONTINUE AT SITE

Video: Israel’s unprecedented global economic integration Ambassador (Ret.) Yoram Ettinger

YouTube 6-minute-video on-line seminar on US-Israel and the Mideast
Video#27: http://bit.ly/2gOEZGx ; entire video-seminar: http://bit.ly/1ze66dS

According to a Bloomberg study: “An examination of foreign capital flow into Israel shows a near tripling from 2005 when the so-called BDS was started…. Israel’s economy is expected to grow 2.8% in 2016, compared with 1.8% for the US and the EU. In 2015, Israel’s industrial high-tech exports rose 13%, from 2014, to $23.7BN…. Israeli startups raised $3.76BN last year from non-Israeli investors, the highest annual amount in a decade…. Foreign investors spent an additional $5.89BN acquiring Israeli start-ups, including a Chinese $510MN purchase of Israel’s Lumenis, followed by a US private equity firm’s $438MN buyout of ClickSoftware Technologies….”

2. Car manufacturing giant, Ford, which is determined to develop a driverless car by 2021, just made its first acquisition in Israel, acquiring SAIPS, a computer vision and machine learning company, for several tens of millions of dollars. General Motors announced the tripling of the personnel in its Israeli research and development center, which has developed a number of technologies, enhancing GM’s competitive edge in the global market. Germany’s Volkswagen, concluded a strategic partnership agreement – involving a $300MN investment – with Israel’s taxi-hailing, delivery and logistics applications start-up, Gett Taxi.

3. According to Cisco’s Chairman, John Chambers: “Israel is truly a startup nation… ahead of every other country in innovation….” Cisco operates four R&D centers in Israel, employing 2,000 people, has acquired 13 Israeli companies, invested $150MN in 30 Israeli startups and $60MN in four Israeli venture capital funds. According to Warren Buffet: “If you’re going to the Middle East to look for oil, you can skip Israel. However, if you’re looking for brains, look no further.”

4. Eric Schmidt, Google’s Executive Chairman, is a frequent investor in Israel’s high-tech via his own private venture capital fund, Innovation Endeavors. Schmidt state: “Israel is the most important high-tech center in the world after the US.” Google established a large engineering and sales operation in Israel.

5. Hewlett-Packard (HP), a personal computers and printers global giant, operates eight research and development centers in Israel. Intel is one of 250 global high tech giants which operate R&D centers in Israel, operating four R&D centers and two manufacturing plants in Israel, invested in 80 Israeli startups.

Fire Jihad in Israel A reflection on what citizenship demands. Mordechai Nisan

The fire of Islam struck Israel beginning on November 22. It is not likely that the dry season and the easterly winds ignited four separate fire sites in Haifa, also in Zichron Yaakov, Gilon and Mitzpe Harashim in the Galilee, Nataf and Beit Meir in the Judean hills, Dolev and Talmon north of Jerusalem, and Neve Tsuf/Halamish in Samaria.

As in years past, Arab arsonists are primary suspects for this crime of wanton destruction. While police investigations continue, and the left-leaning reality-denying media outlets predictably exonerate the Arabs and blame meteorology and negligence, the experienced and intelligent Israeli public is not fooled. ‘Not all Arabs are terrorists and arsonists’ becomes the inane thought-control conclusion.

After six days, public authorities reported basic statistics: a quarter of Haifa’s population, some 75,000 residents, were evacuated from their homes, while 1,700 dwellings were damaged and over 100 people hospitalized for smoke inhalation; 32,000 acres of land were burned in over 200 fires around the country. Some 10 countries provided Israel with firefighting planes, including the United States and Russia, Greece, Turkey, Cyprus and Italy, the Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Croatia. Thirty Arabs (i.e. Muslims), of which 22 were Israeli citizens, and others from the Palestinian Authority area in the West Bank, had been arrested and interrogated on suspicion of arson.

Insight into Muslim warfare methods can be gleaned from Muhammad the prophet of Islam, who set fire to the palm groves of the Jewish tribe Banu el-Nadr in Medina, despite the fact that the next day, with the imminent banishment of the Jews, the groves would revert to the Muslims. Heaping destruction and humiliation upon the enemy was more satisfying than benefiting from his property. Islam, according to the Muslim scholar Ibn Hazm (994-1064), is permitted to burn the produce of the land and its trees as part of the jihad against infidels.

The wildfires in Israel lead us to address the place of the Arabs in Israel, incorrectly referred to as ‘Israeli Arabs’. Their identity as Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims – excepting Christians and others who are not – transcends their nominal Israeli citizen status.

The Joint Arab List (JAL) of 13 Knesset members relentlessly conducts a political and ideological assault upon the State of Israel and its Jewish Zionist ethos. They are authentic representatives of the Arab voting public, of whom more than 90% cast their ballots for the JAL in the general elections of 2015.

At the head of the Israel-bashing Arab political class and parliamentary caucus is MK Ayman Odeh, himself a resident of Haifa. He is the visible and vocal spokesman of an embittered and angry minority group, demanding national status on the path to redefining Israel as a bi-national Jewish-Arab state. The formula of ‘a state of all its citizens’, with its democratic egalitarian melody, is designed to de-Zionize and destroy the renewed Jewish state. The state that is in fact for all its citizens is essentially and firstly the state of the Jewish people.

Ayman Odeh, who recently memorialized Yasir Arafat at a commemoration ceremony in Ramallah, refused to attend the state funeral for Shimon Peres in Jerusalem. Politically active before entering the Knesset, Odeh aggressively campaigned against the proposal for Arab national service – Arabs are exempt from army service – because it would be in his view an act of ‘collaboration’ with the state.

High-Stakes Game over Syria As Khamenei-Putin Axis Advances How long can Israel defend itself as the Khamenei-Putin axis advances? P. David Hornik

The news out of Syria this week is, as usual, complex—and seemingly contradictory.

On the one hand, the Russian-Syrian-Iranian-Hizballah alliance appeared to have overcome rebel resistance in Aleppo—a major turning point that would shift the war’s momentum in the alliance’s favor.

On the other hand, Arab and other media reported that on Wednesday the Israeli air force struck a Syrian weapons depot west of Damascus and a weapons convoy headed for Hizballah in Lebanon.

As of Thursday evening there had been no retaliation against Israel, and Israeli analysts generally saw a retaliation as unlikely.

Media outside of Israel have, of course, often reported in the past on Israeli airstrikes—usually against Hizballah-bound weaponry—in Syria.

Israel’s policy has been to keep mum, neither denying nor confirming the reports. Last April, though, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu acknowledged that Israel had carried out “dozens” of strikes in Syria against “game-changing weaponry” for Hizballah.

It’s no secret that, since the 2006 war between Israel and Hizballah in Lebanon, Hizballah has massively rearmed and now harbors tens of thousands of missiles. But Israel regards some kinds of weapons—precision rockets, advanced antiship and antiaircraft systems—as out of bounds for the terror group.

What has changed in the Syrian arena, though, is that late last year Russia deployed its powerful S-400 radar and antiaircraft system there. It covers Syria, Lebanon, and much of Israel and can track Israel’s northern airspace.

Since then there have been far fewer reported Israeli airstrikes in Syria. In one of them, last September, the outcome seemed ominous when Syria—not a military match for Israel by itself, but backed by Russia and Iran—fired missiles at two Israeli aircraft.

Why, then, the Israeli strike this week? Why no military response this time?

FRANCE SHOULD BE ASHAMED OF LABELING PRODUCTS MADE BY JEWS BY MICHAEL OREN

To its credit, France is one of the first countries in Europe to ban economic boycotts of Israel. To its shame, France is the first European country to implement a 2015 European Union decision to label Israeli products from Judea and Samaria—the West Bank—and the Golan Heights.

Who, besides France’s Jewish community—already diminished by the sharp rise in anti-Semitism in the country—will buy products labelled “Made in an Israeli Settlement”? Who is the French government fooling when it says that it is against any boycott of Israel and then acts to facilitate one?

Such a policy is viewed by the vast majority of Israelis as highly prejudicial if not anti-Semitic. There are 200 territorial disputes in the world today, and France has singled out one of them—Israel’s with the Palestinians—for special treatment. There is no French labelling of Chinese goods from Tibet or Moroccan goods from Western Sahara. And in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, France labels products from only one party—the Jews.

Most indefensibly, France regards the Golan Heights, where there is not a single Palestinian, as occupied territory. Occupied from what country, one might ask? Syria, which lost the Golan to Israel nearly 50 years ago after twice using the area to wage genocidal wars against the Jewish State, no longer exists. To who would France want Israel to return the Golan—to ISIS, Jabhat al-Nusra, or Bashar al-Assad?

Though intended to punish Israel, France’s labelling decision seriously harms the many thousands of Palestinian and Golan Druze who work in Israeli companies. The move also rewards the Palestinian Authority for refusing to negotiate directly with Israel for almost eight years now and for seeking unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state without giving Israel peace. It rewards the Palestinians for rejecting two Israeli offers of statehood—in 2000 and 2008—in Gaza, almost all of the West Bank, and half of Jerusalem. The French decision places an unelected and far from corruption-free Palestinian leadership ahead of the Middle East’s only functioning democracy.

For Israelis, as well as many Jews worldwide, France’s labelling decision cannot be viewed in isolation from French history. From the Dreyfus trial at the end of the 19th century, to Vichy’s anti-Jewish laws 50 years later, France has much to atone for in its relations with Jews. During World War II, French Jews were prohibited from serving in the army or working as doctors, lawyers, journalists, or state officials. Jewish students were expelled from schools and banned from commerce and industry. The French government and police participated in the roundup of 75,000 Jews, almost all of whom were murdered by the Nazis.

Note to Israelis: The US is not racist: Ruthie Blum

Since Donald Trump won the U.S. presidential election last month, Israelis have been engaged in a heated debate about how the victory of the billionaire businessman who gets into fights on Twitter will affect the Jewish state.

The Left, which has been fawning over Barack Obama for eight years, has been attributing all the ills of his country and the world during this period to a combination of piggish capitalism and racism ostensibly so indigenous to America that even the Great Black Hope was unable to stomp them out. Members of this very vocal sector of the Israeli media and academia are naturally appalled by Trump, but point to his success as evidence that their analysis of the character of the United States is accurate.

According to this position, it was not the failures of the Democratic Party that led to its defeat, but rather the very nature of the voting public. The holders of this view went as far as to claim that a country with such a number of yahoos and evangelical Christians was simply not ready for a woman president.

This is exactly how these same Israelis interpret the fact that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has just broken David Ben-Gurion’s record for the length of tenure in the office of the premiership, though the primitive and religious voters whom they put down are Orthodox Jews and those of North African descent. Different culture, same snobbery. And a virtually identical — delusional — outlook on peacemaking in the Middle East.

In contrast, the Israeli Right has been celebrating Trump’s win, highlighting two causes for optimism. One is the assumption that the president-elect is sympathetic to the settler enterprise — since he does not consider it to be at fault for a lack of peace with the Palestinians — and therefore will not respond to every additional Jewish apartment built in the West Bank with the apoplexy exhibited by the Obama administration.

The other is the hope and even belief that the Trump administration might finally be the one to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, thereby providing an ideological stamp of legitimacy to the sovereignty of the Jewish people over their holy city, the capital of the State of Israel.

School Bans Students from Raising Their Hands to Answer Questions Why not let teachers decide what method works best for their classrooms? By Katherine Timpf

Samworth Church Academy, a high school in Nottinghamshire in the U.K., has banned its students from raising their hands to answer questions because it is unfair to students who do not raise their hands.

In a letter explaining the policy, Samworth principal Barry Found called hand-raising an “age-old practice.”

“We find that the same hands are going up and as such the teaching does not challenge and support the learning of all,” he said, according to an article in the Daily Mail.

Samworth teachers have been instructed to forbid hand-raising in their classrooms and instead call on students at random to answer questions — which is completely and totally ridiculous.

Now, I’m not saying that there is anything wrong with calling on students at random in itself. When I was in school, most of my teachers used a combination of both hand-raising and random call-outs, depending on the situation. If they — being the professionals that they were — noticed that the same students were raising their hands over and over again, they would usually say something along the lines of “Does anyone else have the answer? You’ve been quiet back there, how about you?” and that seemed to work pretty well. Honestly, I really can’t see any benefits to banning hand-raising completely — but I certainly can see some problems.

First of all, as Jane Crich of the U.K.’s National Union of Teachers told the Daily Mail, an administrator’s making a blanket rule prevents the teachers from being able to decide how to best teach their own groups of students.

“Any professional teacher should be trusted to teach a particular topic in a particular style according to the class they have,” Crich said.

Virginia School System Considers Banning ‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’ and ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ By Stephen Kruiser

A key component in the ongoing effort by American public education to make kids dumber is the removal of entire chunks of relevance from various curricula to craft a narrative more conducive to, and comfortable for, the liberal version of things. It is most often done in the history books, where the more integral stories are excised and replaced with a focus on fringe events or people.

Literature is another convenient target. Book banning is generally considered the kind of thing that totalitarian societies run by tyrannical fascists do, but every fascist has to get his or her start somewhere:

Two classic American novels have been temporarily pulled from book shelves in Accomack County Public Schools.

Superintendent Warren Holland confirmed to 10 On Your Side that a parent filed a complaint about “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”

Earlier this month, a parent voiced concerns to the school board about racial slurs in both of the novels.

“Right now, we are a nation divided as it is,” the mother is heard saying in an audio recording of the meeting on Nov. 15. She tells the board that her biracial son, a high school student, struggled getting through a page that was riddled with a racial slur.

“So what are we teaching our children? We’re validating that these words are acceptable, and they are not acceptable by any means,” the parent said.

Victoria Coombs, a mother of two, told 10 On Your Side she agrees that books with offensive racial slurs should not be read in schools.

“It’s not right to put that in a book, let alone read that to a child,” she said.

But other Accomack County residents told 10 On Your Side that banning a classic for offensive language can be a slippery slope.

“I don’t want to see it happen because if you start with one racial word in a book and have to go on and on and on and pretty soon you’ll be burning books left and right,” R. Kellam said.

DNC Chair Candidate Rep. Keith Ellison Met with Hamas Fundraiser Mohammed al-Hanooti By Patrick Poole

Keith Ellison, who is campaigning to become Democratic National Committee chairman, met with Hamas fundraiser Mohammed al-Hanooti at a 2009 campaign fundraiser for Virginia House of Delegates candidate Esam Omeish. Ellison was the keynote speaker at the event.

Last week Chuck Ross at The Daily Caller reported on the appearance of Ellison at the Omeish campaign event, noting that Omeish had previously called for Palestinians to follow “the jihad way” against Israel.

Given that, it’s no surprise to find al-Hanooti, who styled himself as “grand mufti” of Washington D.C. and whom FBI documents identify as a top U.S. fundraiser for Hamas, at the campaign fundraiser.

Pictures posted to Flickr by Omeish show Ellision and al-Hanooti chatting at the event.

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Mohammed al-Hanooti has been identified by federal prosecutors and top counterterrorism officials as a enthusiastic supporter of Hamas — serving as one of its top fundraisers — and also as an active supporter of terrorism and extremist Islamic ideology for several decades.
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He also holds the rare distinction of not only being named by prosecutors as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation trial, the largest terror-finance case in American history, but also of being listed as a conspirator in the trial of “Blind Sheik” Omar Abdel Rahman for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the planned follow-up attack on New York City landmarks.