Displaying posts published in

2016

U.S. at Easter: When Christians Are Slaughtered, Look the Other Way Muslims Slaughter Over 10,000 Christians and Destroy 13,000 Churches in Nigeria by Raymond Ibrahim

“Over 500 Christian villagers were slain in one night.” — Emmanuel Ogebe, Nigerian human rights lawyer, March 2, 2016.

What Christians in Nigeria are experiencing is a live snapshot of what millions of Christians and other non-Muslims have experienced since the seventh century, when Islam “migrated” to their borders: violence, persecution, enslavement, and the destruction of churches.

The Obama Administration refuses to associate Boko Haram — an organization that defines itself in purely Islamic terms — with Islam, just as it refuses to associate the ISIS with Islam.

In all cases, the Obama Administration looks the other way, while insisting that the jihad is a product of “inequality,” “poverty” and “a lack of opportunity for jobs” — never of Islamic teaching.

Boko Haram, the Nigerian Islamic extremist group, has killed more people in the name of jihad than the Islamic State (ISIS), according to the findings of a new report. Since 2000, when twelve Northern Nigerian states began implementing or more fully enforcing Islamic sharia law, “between 9,000 to 11,500 Christians” have been killed. This is “a conservative estimate.”

In addition, “1.3 million Christians have become internally displaced or forced to relocate elsewhere,” and “13,000 churches have been closed or destroyed altogether.” Countless “thousands of Christian businesses, houses and other property have been destroyed.”

Anti-Semitism on California Campuses by Richard L. Cravatts

The problem on campuses across the country is that pro-Palestinian activists, in their zeal to seek self-affirmation, statehood, and “social justice,” have waged an extremely caustic cognitive war against Israel and Jews.

Being pro-Palestinian on campuses today does not necessarily mean that one is committed to helping Palestinians be productive, live well, build a free and open nation or create a civil society with transparent government, a free press, human rights, and a representative government.

What being pro-Palestinian seems to have come to mean is continually denigrating and attacking Israel with a false historical narrative and the grotesquely misused language of human rights. What is claimed to be anti-Israel sentiment often rises to the level of raw anti-Semitism.

It is enough to make Jewish students, whether or not they care about Israel at all, uncomfortable, unsafe, or even hated on their own campuses.

The California university system seems to have the dubious distinction of being the epicenter of the campus war against Israel. The situation that has apparently reached such intolerable levels that the Board of Regents of the University of California (UC Regents) was forced to take some action. This effort resulted in a study entitled the “Final Report of the Regents Working Group on Principles Against Intolerance.” The study attempts to establish guidelines by which any discrimination against a minority group on campus would be identified and censured. The report, however, specifically focused on the thorny issue of anti-Israelism and anti-Semitism as a prevalent and ugly reality throughout the California university system.

The report examined a range of incidents that occurred during the 2014-15 academic year. It cited unfortunate transgressions that “included vandalism targeting property associated with Jewish people or Judaism; challenges to the candidacies of Jewish students seeking to assume representative positions within student government; political, intellectual and social dialogue that is anti-Semitic; and social exclusion and stereotyping.”

David Singer : “Internet Intifada Denies Free Speech”

Many Palestinian websites are stifling free speech by refusing to publish comments answering anti-Israel articles published on their sites.The latest example is an article written by Rania Khalek on Electronic Intifada

Responding to the decision by McGraw Hill Education to destroy all copies of its text book Global Politics: Engaging a Complex World – containing the accompanying maps – Khalek claimed:

“The maps, which appear in chronological succession on page 123, show Palestinian land loss from 1946, one year before Zionist militias initiated the displacement of more than 750,000 indigenous Palestinians from historic Palestine, to the year 2000, by which point Palestinian land had been reduced to a handful of tiny non-contiguous enclaves in the occupied West Bank and a sliver of Gaza.”

I endeavoured to post the following comment in response on 21 March pointing out the misleading nature of these maps:

“Map 1:

The heading “Palestinian and Jewish Land 1946“ is misleading for the following reasons:

(i) The map excludes Transjordan which in 1946 still comprised 78% of the territory of the Mandate for Palestine until granted independence by Great Britain in May 1946.

(ii) The land described as “Palestinian land” misleadingly implies legal ownership by the Palestinian Arabs of that land when in fact about 90% of it was State land under British Mandatory control and legal power of disposition.

“These People, They Are Nothing More Than Kufar” & Other Scenes From Eurabia

In the Australian Murdoch-owned newspaper the Herald-Sun on Sunday, a good article by conservative columnist Miranda Devine, who absolutely nailed it when she wrote that the agenda of the ABC (the BBC’s counterpart Down Under)

“is to deny the threat of Islamist terrorism, to engender complacency, and avoid confronting the fact that Islamists are bringing their war to the West.

It is cultural relativists telling us we have no right to feel aggrieved by the attacks on Brussels or Paris or Sydney or Melbourne, because there are more terrorist atrocities in the Middle East and Africa.”

With those familiar mendacious maps

As she so rightly says,

“there’s a reason our civilised Judaeo-Christian societies are peaceful, compared with broken Islamic states that are spawning a murderous ideology that threatens the world. Our culture is superior and we want to keep it that way.

But the Left are still clutching at straws to deny the undeniable. As the blood of innocents fills the streets of Europe … the very people who weakened our defences are now pretending there isn’t a problem.”

Ms Devine quotes from Belgian Senator Alain Destexhe’s “chilling article” in La Libre Belgique last week, in which he describes how the long-serving former Mayor of Molenbeek, Philippe Moureaux,

“ushered in a generation of Muslim radicals, mainly from Morocco or Turkey, who kept him in power and who silenced critics by calling them Islamophobic….

Fundamentalist Salafist imams and teachers funded by Saudi Arabia were imported to spread ideological poison. Molenbeek, now more than 40 per cent Muslim, became Belgium’s fastest growing place….Molenbeek gradually became an area of lawlessness, where agents of the water or electricity services must be accompanied by police, where almost all restaurants are closed during Ramadan, when ‘dirty Jew’ has become a common insult… and where blondes and those who wear short skirts are treated as whores or sluts.”

No-go areas. Islamic antisemitism. Contempt for and attacks on women. That has a familiar ring, of course.

Fighting Intensifies Between CIA-Backed Militias and Pentagon-Backed Syrian Rebels By Rick Moran ????!!

Clashes between militias trained by the CIA and the Pentagon are intensifying as bitter fighting has broken out near Aleppo and the Turkish border.

Chicago Tribune:

The fighting has intensified over the past two months, as CIA-armed units and Pentagon-armed ones have repeatedly shot at each other as they have maneuvered through contested territory on the northern outskirts of Aleppo, U.S. officials and rebel leaders have confirmed.

In mid-February, a CIA-armed militia called Fursan al Haq, or Knights of Righteousness, was run out of the town of Marea, about 20 miles north of Aleppo, by Pentagon-backed Syrian Democratic Forces moving in from Kurdish-controlled areas to the east.

“Any faction that attacks us, regardless from where it gets its support, we will fight it,” said Maj. Fares Bayoush, a leader of Fursan al Haq.

Rebel fighters described similar clashes in the town of Azaz, a key transit point for fighters and supplies between Aleppo and the Turkish border, and March 3 in the Aleppo neighborhood of Sheikh Maqsud.

The attacks come amid continued heavy fighting in Syria and illustrate the difficulty facing U.S. efforts to coordinate among dozens of armed groups that are trying to overthrow the government of President Bashar Assad, fight the Islamic State militant group and battle one another all at the same time.

“It is an enormous challenge,” said Rep.Adam Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, who described the clashes between U.S.-supported groups as “a fairly new phenomenon.”

“It is part of the three-dimensional chess that is the Syrian battlefield,” he said.

Between a Louse and a Flea By Roger Kimball

Back in January, I asked: “Why the Sudden Love Among Establishment Republicans for Donald Trump?” “It has,” I wrote, “been quite an experience — half amusing, half alarming — to behold the sudden transformation of Donald Trump from pariah to desperate hope of the Republican Party.”

In the weeks that have followed, more and more GOP-friendly pundits, functionaries, factota, courtiers, lackeys, lobbyists, consultants, and eminences grises have boarded the Trump Express. They explain, if pressed, that: a) Trump is inevitable and one has to get with the program; and/or b) the only alternative is Hillary Clinton, and you wouldn’t want that, would you?

I confess that I don’t find either rejoinder particularly convincing. In the first place, it is worth noting how frequently what we were assured was inevitable turns out to have been merely contingent, and being merely contingent, how often it fails to happen.

Trump may be the nominee. It is not, however, inevitable. I am not even convinced that it is likely.

And speaking of unlikely things, it is not at all clear to me that Hillary will be the nominee, either. Her supporters might not care that she blamed Benghazi on an internet video or that she endangered American national security by her cavalier disregard of communication protocols while secretary of state, but the FBI seems to be taking a different view of the matter. There is also the cognate issue of the pay-to-play processes of the Clinton Foundation, which have also attracted the FBI’s attention.

The Apology Tour of Our Next President By Victor Davis Hanson

In Havana recently, President Obama talked of the similarities between Cuba and the United States, as if a constitutional republic of some 240 years and a thuggish and murderous communist dictatorship were kindred souls. In Argentina, Obama both tangoed and then apologized for the nth time for his country while abroad, this time supposedly for not opposing the brutal Argentine military dictatorship at the height of the Cold War. He also advised young people that there was not that much difference between communism and capitalism—without giving them a glimpse of his own retirement plans that will make the Obamas fabulously rich by following the hyper-capitalist post-presidential get-rich program of the Clintons.

Obama also missed the irony that, while he had just warmed up to a present-day Cuban dictatorship with blood on its hands, he then blamed his distant predecessors for warming up to a long-gone Argentine dictatorship with blood on its hands. Argentine General Galtieri and his predecessors, who may have overseen the killing of some 20,000, are long dead; Raul Castro, who may have the blood of about the same number on his hands, is very much alive—and in the back-slapping company of President Obama. So the next chief executive might return to Argentina to apologize to its youth for his predecessor having suggested that capitalism and communism were essentially synonymous—given the 100 million people of the 20th century who were slaughtered by their own communist governments in China, the Soviet Union and Cambodia.

As his presidency winds down, and there so far appears no positive legacy from it, Obama seeks his iconic moments at others’ expense—reaching out to communist Cuba, sidestepping the U.S. Senate to conduct a treaty with Iran, redefining Israel as a neutral, dismissing radical Islamic terrorism as a mere generic jayvee-like threat, hoping to close the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, dissolving the U.S. southern border, and through the destruction of federal immigration law remaking the political demography of the U.S.

ACTIVISM U AND THE END OF EDUCATION: DANIEL GREENFIELD

The campus wars aren’t really about race. Race and the rest of the identity politics roster are the engine for transforming an academic environment into an activist environment.

Think of it as the Post-Educational University. Or Activism U.

The average campus already skews left, but maintains the pretense of serving an educational purpose. The demands put forward on campuses begin with racial privileges, but do not end there. These demands call for politicizing every department, the mandatory political indoctrination of all students and faculty, and the submission of non-political academic departments to activist political ones.

The campus wars are a declaration that activist non-academic departments that offer identity politics analysis while contributing nothing and which often owe their existence to campus clashes from a previous generation, should dominate all areas of life and thought at every university.

Imagine if physics majors rioted and demanded that every single area of study on campus had to incorporate theoretical physics and hire physics majors. That is exactly what is happening with identity politics studies. It’s a naked power grab that has the potential to redefine academia.

Behind the minority students that are the public face of the campaign, are embedded faculty radicals like Melissa Click whose abuses recently led to her firing from the University of Missouri. Click’s body of work, gender, race and sexuality analyses of popular culture, is fairly typical of the activist faculty behind the power grab. Media studies is often confused with journalism, but the two have little in common. Media studies has become a guide to politicizing culture by viewing it through the intersectional lens.

Click’s husband, Richard Callahan, who also took part in the harassment, is a religion professor on paper, but in practice offers class analysis of religious practices. These resumes are fairly typical of the faculty activists behind the crybully insurgency. They may belong to anthropology, sociology, religious studies or a dozen other departments, but all they ever do is overlay their political filter over a given field. And once it is in place, activism is the inevitable step for correcting the “injustices”.

They’re not academics; they’re activists with a mandate to impose their filter on everyone.

When we talk about political correctness, it isn’t just about banning certain jokes. That’s the smallest part of it. Political correctness is about making the political filter, the left’s lens, mandatory for all.

The Lie of Academic Free Speech By Richard L. Cravatts

The disturbing campaign to suppress speech that is purportedly hurtful, unpleasant, or morally distasteful is a troubling and recurrent pattern of behavior by “progressive” leftists and “social justice” advocates from Muslim-led pro-Palestinian groups. Coalescing around the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, this unholy alliance has been formed in a libelous and vituperative campaign to demonize Israel, attack pro-Israel individuals, and promote a relentless campaign against Israel in the form of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement. As the ideological assault against Israel and Jews intensifies on university campuses, and pro-Israel individuals begin answering their ideological opponents, the student groups leading the pro-Palestinian charge (including such groups as the radical Students for Justice in Palestine [SJP]) have decided that their tactic of unrelenting demonization of Israel is insufficient, and the best way to optimize the propaganda effect of their anti-Israel message is also to suppress or obscure opposing views.

The pronouncements of these groups are now frequently defined by baleful whining. For instance, a leaked memorandum from the Binghamton University Students for Justice in Palestine chapter revealed that members would be required never even to engage in dialogue with pro-Israel groups on their campus. They would be prohibited from “engaging in any form of official collaboration, cooperation, or event co-sponsorship with [pro-Israel] student organizations and groups.” And SJP members “shall in no manner engage in any form of official collaboration with any student group which actively opposes the cause of Palestinian liberation nor with groups which have aided and abetted Zionist student organizations” – meaning, of course, that the so-called intellectual debate that universities purport to promote in exactly this type of discussion will never take place when SJP is involved.

So, is this is an authentic view of Islam? By Russ Vaughn

Earlier today I read that Ballroom Barry is doubling down on his demands that Americans open their hearts and homeland to 100,000 Syrian refugees. In his brief Easter remarks Obama said:

“We have to wield another weapon alongside our airstrikes, our military, our counterterrorism work, and our diplomacy,” Obama said. “And that’s the power of our example. Our openness to refugees fleeing ISIL’s violence. Our determination to win the battle against ISIL’s hateful and violent propaganda — a distorted view of Islam that aims to radicalize young Muslims to their cause.”

Shortly after reading that, a veteran friend out in Guam sent me this refugee pic:

Notice the obvious, that it’s wet, possibly snowing; and the coats, hoods and hands in pockets convey that it’s uncomfortably cold as well. Then notice the less evident fact that the woman is shoeless, unlike any of the seven males. Also distinct from any of those males, she is carrying two small children with the toil of her burden shown in the distressed expression on her face. Notably, hers is the only face showing any strain within the group. Seven healthy, future American males but not one will share the weight of the small children with this woman, much less see to it that she has proper footwear.