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January 2017

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Saudi Journalist to Palestinians: Armed Resistance to Israel is Futile, Arab World Has Lost Interest in Your Cause by Barney Breen-Portnoy

By on January 28th, 2017

The Palestinian cause is “no longer a top priority” for the Arab world, a Saudi journalist declared earlier this month.

In an article published by the Saudi daily Al Jazirah newspaper — andtranslated by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) — Muhammad Aal Al-Sheikh wrote that the reliance of radical Palestinian groups on armed resistance “constitutes a kind of political suicide that only political ignoramuses [can] condone.”

According to Al-Sheikh, a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the sole option “that can be demanded and which enjoys the support of most of the international community.”

Some Israeli citizens traveling in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula were undeterred by an urgent warning issued by their government on Tuesday…

What the Palestinians, Al-Sheikh went on to say, “need to understand is that the Arabs of today are not the Arabs of yesterday, and that the Palestinian cause has lost ground among Arabs. This cause is no longer a top priority for them, because civil wars are literally pulverizing four Arab countries, and because fighting the ‘Islamic’ terrorism is the foremost concern that causes all Arabs, without exception, to lose sleep. It is folly to ask someone to sacrifice [tending to] his own problems and national interests in order to help [you solve] your own problems.”

“All I can say to my Palestinian brethren is that stubbornness, contrariness, and betting on the [support of] the Arab masses are a hopeless effort, and that ultimately you are the only ones who will pay the price of this stubbornness and contrariness,” he concluded.

In recent years, Israel has been quietly developing ties with the Sunni-Arab axis in the Middle East – including Saudi Arabia. In his September address to the UN General Assembly, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that in addition to Egypt and Jordan, which already have signed peace treaties with the Jewish state, “Many other states in the region recognize that Israel is not their enemy. They recognize that Israel is their ally. Our common enemies are ISIS and Iran. Our common goals are security, prosperity and peace. I believe that in the years ahead we will work together to achieve these goals.”

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EDUCATION, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

University offers class on ‘The Problem of Whiteness’ Thomas Columbus – University of Southern California

By on January 28th, 2017

University offers class on ‘The Problem of Whiteness’ – The College Fix

A class to be taught next semester at the University of Wisconsin Madison called “The Problem of Whiteness” aims to “understand how whiteness is socially constructed and experienced in order to help dismantle white supremacy,” the course description states.

“Whites rarely or never questioned what it is to be white,” Assistant Professor Damon Sajnani, who will teach the course, told The College Fix in a telephone interview last week. “So you go through life taking it for granted without ever questioning or critically interrogating it.”

For Sajnani, one way to solve this is to offer “The Problem of Whiteness,” an analysis of what it means to be white and how to deal with it as a “problem.”

“The idea of talking about the problem of whiteness is to turn the question back to where it belongs,” he said.

One of the main goals in the class will be to understand race and identity and how it impacts lives on a daily basis, he said. One of the talking points is juxtaposing white privilege and white power, and how the two can be intertwined and similar to each other, the scholar said.

“The problem of racism is the problem of whites being racist towards blacks,” he said.

The class will also theorize what white students can do with their “whiteness” and how to mobilize their identities as a mode for social justice as opposed to racial injustices, he added.

When asked what he might say to those who oppose the course topic, Sanjani said they have no logical idea of what race actually is and how it is a political machine as well as a social construct.

“Since white supremacy was created by white people, is it not white folks who have the greatest responsibility to eradicate it?” he asks in the course description.

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EDUCATION, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Ohio State class teaches students to detect and respond to microaggressions, white privilege Amanda Tidwell – Ohio State University

By on January 28th, 2017

Crossing Identity Boundaries’ course devoted to identity politicsOhio State class teaches students to detect and respond to microaggressions, white privilege – The College Fix
A class to be offered this spring at Ohio State University is an identity politics-based course that in large part is focused on teaching students how to detect microaggressions and white privilege.

The course is dedicated to social justice themes, and pledges to teach students how to “identify microaggressions,” define and address “systems of power and privilege,” advance notions of diversity and inclusion, and prioritize “global citizenship,” its description states.

“Crossing Identity Boundaries” aims to expand students’ “self-awareness” and help them develop “dialogue skills.”

Taking the course, offered through the Department of Educational Studies, is one way students can fulfill the university’s mandatory diversity requirement, and many sections are offered throughout the school year.

The course coordinator and instructors involved in teaching the class did not respond to requests from The College Fix seeking comment.

Part of the homework includes taking two “implicit bias tests,” and writing journals on prompts such as “power/privilege in your life” or calling on Christians to write about what it might feel like to be Muslim, or males on what it’s like to be female, and “reflecting on how this new identity would have impacted your day.”

One big part of the class is a microaggressions group presentation and reflective paper.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Milo Events Exposing The Violent Core Of The Left Destroying the facade of “tolerance” one campus at a time. Lloyd Billingsley

By on January 27th, 2017

Last year Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos launched his “Dangerous Faggot Tour” on campuses across the United States. As it turned out, the tour did prove dangerous for Yiannopoulos and all supporters of free speech.

At Rutgers, where Yiannopoulos titled his lecture “How the Progressive Left Is Destroying American Education,” protesters smeared themselves with fake blood. “What they’ve demonstrated,” Yiannopoulos said, “is that they are incapable of being exposed to new ideas.”

At DePaul University, Black Lives Matter literally took over the event. Enraged activists harassed Yiannopoulos on stage and chanting “black lives matter,” “dump that Trump” and “build a wall.”

South Florida Gay News reported that “Florida Atlantic University is too dangerous for a ‘dangerous faggot.’” Student organizers “threatened to bring firearms to the talk or blow up the venue. Threats were also made to FAU students.” So Yiannopoulos was unable to deliver his speech about “How Feminism Hurts Women.”

Protesters issued similar threats at many colleges and the violence mounted a surge when Yiannopoulos brought his tour to California campuses. Those have long served as a sanctuary for political correctness, with official approval.

University of California President Janet Napolitano, a Democrat, is former Arizona Governor and Obama’s Department of Homeland Security boss. Napolitano considers statements such as “America is the land of opportunity” and “I believe the most qualified person should get the job” to be unacceptable “microagressions.” In that climate, UC students don’t want to hear different points of view from allegedly “controversial” speakers.

Under the politically correct regime, the default position is that such speakers should not be heard at all. So no surprise that soi disant progressives would deploy mindless violence against Yiannopoulos, who is on record that the campus “rape culture” is a myth. He is also critical of Islam, and the University of California maintains a Center for Race and Gender that includes “Islamophobia Studies.”

When the dangerous faggot tour showed up at UCLA, protesters blocked both entrances and taped up banners reading “Bruins Against Hate.” Other students duct-taped their mouths shut and paraded around with feminist signs. Inside protesters chanted “Build that wall.” As Ari Lieberman noted, radicals clashed with the police and a bomb threat forced evacuation of the building.

Undaunted, Milo Yiannopoulos continued the tour north to the University of California at Davis. Before he showed up, the Sacramento Bee called him and former pharmaceutical executive Martin Shkreli, “two of the past year’s most divisive public figures.” Yiannopolous was identified as “gay” and aligned with “the ultra-conservative ‘alt-right’ movement.” He was on a “crusade” against “social justice warriors” and “has already ignited violent protests on multiple college campuses.” Actually, as across the nation, it was the leftist protesters who ignited the violence.

According to a Washington Post report, protesters threatened the lives of police and students alike, and menaced UC Davis property as well. Protesters shrouded their faces in bandanas and yelled “Get the fuck out of here! Stay the fuck out!” and even “You faggots!” Another yelled “Get these fascists out of here.”

The event did not come off, but Yiannopolous denied reports that the campus Republicans had made the call. As the videos confirm, the old-line establishment media failed to convey the extent of the violence.

Campus Republicans also invited Yiannopoulos to the University of Washington, the last stop on the Dangerous Faggot Tour. On January 20, inauguration day for president Donald Trump, the UW campus hosted the tour’s most bizarre event.

“One man was shot and wounded, several people were hit with paint and officers avoided flying bricks” the Seattle Times reported on January 20, when “Breitbart News editor and provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos addressed a crowd.” An unnamed shooter reportedly turned himself in and the victim was initially unidentified.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Academia’s “New Civics” vs. Traditional American Civics Political ideology replaces civics education. January 27, 2017 Jack Kerwick

By on January 27th, 2017

The election of Donald J. Trump to the office of the Presidency of the United States came as a body blow to leftists. Actually, such was their arrogance—their certitude that their candidate couldn’t lose—that President Trump’s victory hit them more like a sucker punch.

Students and their professors at colleges and universities from around the country participated in “cry-ins,” entered “safe spaces,” cancelled classes and examinations, and organized demonstrations.

While the rest of the country looked incredulously upon this spectacle of presumably educated adults protesting the legitimate election of America’s 45th President, those of us who know a thing or two about the contemporary academic world were not in the least surprised by it.

And those academics who belong to the National Association of Scholars (NAS) know more than most.

The NAS recently released a report on the latest wave of anti-intellectualism to sweep the world of “higher education.” In “Making Citizens: How American Universities Teach Civics,” the NAS explains what it refers to as “the New Civics.” The latter “redefines civics as progressive political activism.”

While the New Civics styles itself “as an up-to-date version of volunteerism and good works,” the reality is that it stems from “the radical program of the 1960’s New Left [.]” Its “soft rhetoric” is designed to conceal its architects’ ultimate goals. First, they want to “repurpose higher education.” Secondly, adherents of the New Left want nothing more than to make students into joint enterprisers in “‘fundamentally transforming’ America.”

This dream of fundamental transformation that the left wants for students to make into a reality is fairly comprehensive. For starters, it involves “de-carbonizing the economy [.]” Yet it also involves “massively redistributing wealth, intensifying identity group grievance, curtailing the free market, expanding government bureaucracy, elevating international ‘norms’ over American Constitutional law, and disparaging our common history and ideals.”

Although leftist academics disagree amongst themselves as to how to prioritize the items on this agenda, they are of one mind that “America must be transformed by ‘systemic change’ from an unjust, oppressive society to a society that embodies social justice.”

The NAS report discloses how the New Civics plans to achieve its goals. It “hopes to accomplish” all of “this by teaching students that a good citizen is a radical activist….”

The New Civics “puts political activism at the center of everything that students do in college, including academic study, extra-curricular pursuits, and off-campus ventures.”

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ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Make Jerusalem Safe Again Why Muslims living in Israel don’t migrate to the Palestinian Authority. Ilana Mercer

By on January 27th, 2017

Relocating the American Embassy to Jerusalem, as President Donald Trump has pledged to do, is more than symbolic. It’s what Christians should be praying for if they value celebrating future Easter Holy Weeks, in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, located in Jerusalem’s Old City. With such a forceful gesture, the Trump Administration will be affirming, for once and for all, the undivided Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish State.

There’s a reason Muslims living in Israel proper—1.5 million of them—don’t migrate to the adjacent Palestinian Authority. They’re better off in Israel. Should Jerusalem, East and West, be recognized formally as the capital of Israel only, under Jewish control alone; Christianity’s holiest sites will be better off. Judaism’s holy sites will be safer. And so will Islam’s.

Jerusalem is no settlement to be haggled over; it’s the capital of the Jewish State. King David conquered it 1000 years Before Christ. The city’s “Muslim Period” began only in the year 638 of the Common Era. “Yerushalaim,” and not Al Quds, is the name of the city that was sacred to Jews for nearly two thousand years before Muhammad. Not once is Jerusalem mentioned in the Quran. And while Muhammad was said to have departed to the heavens from the Al Aksa Mosque, there was no mosque in Jerusalem. The Dome of the Rock and the Al Aksa Mosque were built upon the Jewish Temple Mount. Muslim theologians subsequently justified this usurpation by superimposing their own chronology—and relatively recent fondness for Jerusalem—upon the existing, ancient sanctity of the place to Jews.

Essentially, this amounts to historical identity theft.

It’s bad enough that Bethlehem—the burial site of the matriarch Rachel, birthplace to King David and Jesus and site of the Church of the Nativity—is controlled by the Palestinians. But, as one wag wondered, “How would Christians react if the Muslim theologians aforementioned had chosen to appropriate the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, rename it and declare it Muslim property?”

There is nothing Solomonic about splitting up Jerusalem, which—it bears repeating—was sacred to Jews for nearly two millennia before Muhammad and is not in the Quran. “The Muslim Claim to Jerusalem,” notes Dr. Daniel Pipes, is political, not religious or historic. As such, it’s also a recent project. “Centuries of neglect came to an abrupt end after June 1967, when the Old City came under Israeli control,” explains Pipes. “Palestinians [then] again made Jerusalem the centerpiece of their political program, [when, in fact] Mecca is the eternal city of Islam, the place from which non-Muslims are strictly forbidden. Very roughly speaking, [Mecca is to Islam] what Jerusalem is to Judaism.”

East Jerusalem was not annexed in June of 1967. Rather, Jerusalem was unified.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Can Trump Bell the Progressive Cat? The battle to shrink the last half-century of hypertrophied statism and leftist tyranny. Bruce Thornton

By on January 27th, 2017

As I listened to Trump’s Inaugural Address, I thought of Aesop’s fable about the mice who were being devastated by a ferocious cat. As they debated what to do, a brash young mouse proposed putting a bell around the cat’s neck. That way the mice would hear its approach and scurry to safety. All applauded until one greybeard mouse posed the question: “Who’s going to put the bell around the cat’s neck?”

Especially in politics, it’s easy to propose simple, if not impossible, solutions to complex problems.

Trump’s speech was a rousing catalogue of promises to “make America great again.” Infrastructure development, rebuilding the inner cities, bringing back jobs to America, securing the borders, returning the power usurped by the feds back to the people, making “America first,” and eradicating Islamic jihad “from the face of the earth” comprise an ambitious agenda, to say the least. Perhaps these are mere negotiating positions to be adjusted later, but politics isn’t business. What a candidate thinks is typical campaign hyperbole, the voting public often considers promises to be taken seriously.

Ask George H.W. Bush, who broke his promise “Read my lips: no new taxes,” and lost his reelection bid. And that was just one costly broken promise. Trump has named a whole pack of cats he has promised to bell.

Just consider Trump’s promise about “transferring power from Washington, D.C. and giving it back to you, the American People.” Sounds good, but he said nothing specific about reducing the size of the feds, or restoring citizen self-rule. Yes, on Monday he imposed a hiring freeze on federal workers. So did Ronald Reagan in 1981, but that didn’t slow down much the fed expansion in the long term. And Trump’s claim that he will reduce regulations by 75% is a consummation devoutly to be wished, but highly unlikely without a lot of help from Congress.

Trump needs to be more specific, and realistic, about how he will restore power to the citizenry by undoing the un-Constitutional concentration of powers in the executive and its metastasizing agencies, enabled over the years by compliant Congresses and activist Supreme Courts. The result is our country’s feral cat, the bloated federal government spawned and nourished by progressives for nearly a century, with significant help from Republicans. As the fed has waxed ever fatter, the intrusive reach of its agencies, councils, and bureaus into all aspects of our lives––corporations, small businesses, churches, schools, private organizations, state and local governments––subjects them to the coercive power of federal agencies to regulate, investigate, and punish anything that challenges their technocratic pretensions to greater intelligence and efficiency than the sovereign citizenry possesses.

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MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

20th Century Women Is a Stale Feminist Diatribe And Streep has won an Oscar nod for ranting against Trump. By Armond White

By on January 27th, 2017

The best thing about Mike Mills’s 20th Century Women is a title that immediately tells us two things: 1) Its sexual politics are dated, and 2) its story will focus on outmoded cultural ideals. This is the same erroneous basis of Millennial social protest, which always imitates past examples.

The worst thing about 20th Century Women is that it indeed looks at women through an archaic social lens — the peculiar Obama-era combination of guilt and arrogance that has been widely accepted without thinking, as last week’s unfocussed pink-hat parades demonstrated.

In 20th Century Women, Dorothea (Annette Bening), a 55-year-old widow from Santa Barbara, Calif., raises her 15-year-old son, Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann), amid the company of several lodgers in her big ramshackle house: two wayward young women (Greta Gerwig and Elle Fanning) and a sexy but nonthreatening man (Billy Crudup). The house, a Queen Anne antique that may as well be a social-justice museum, is the site of Dorothea’s social experiment — a homegrown conversion-therapy camp. Each of these idiosyncratic, slightly damaged individuals presents Jamie with life lessons (on menarche, abortion, menopause, masculine aggression) that are like a camp curriculum. This is no mere coming-of-age tale; Mills could also have titled his tearjerker “How to Build a Male Feminist.”

Bening’s Dorothea is a post–Betty Friedan, post–Gloria Steinem, post–Germaine Greer version of the Archie comics’ pedant, Miss Grundy. (Mills regularly digresses into anecdotes from the Seventies feminist bible Sisterhood Is Powerful.) Always wearing flowered blouses, with tousled hair and age-lined face and neck, Dorothea is Everymom, but with fascinating actorly props (primarily Bening’s throaty delivery). It’s a master class in laid-back dominance, a Ms. magazine cartoon contrived of equal parts maternal nostalgia and white career-woman regret. I admire Bening’s subtlety: She limits Dorothea’s arrogance to the delicate control she exerts over her tenants and the emotional sway she holds over her son (she salts their relationship with condescension by referring to him as “kid”). But I don’t admire Mills’s maudlin shift when nostalgia for Mom turns into sanctification of the sacrifices that feminist standard-bearers claim all females shared.

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IMMIGRATION, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Draft Executive Order on Detention and Interrogation: Much Ado About Nothing Trump is clear: Changes in law must be enacted through Congress. By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on January 27th, 2017

One should not be surprised at the Media-Democrat complex’s attempt to manufacture a scandal over a draft executive order on the detention and interrogation of enemy combatants that the Trump White House refuses to avow. After all, nothing united the Left and fueled the Democratic political ascendancy of 2005 through 2009 like the anti-torture crusade. It had all the necessary elements of a successful campaign: outsized progressive indignation, the collusion of influential Republicans (especially John McCain, whose personal history imbued him with a moral authority that deflected the incoherence of his contentions), and an enfeebled Republican administration too exhausted and too worried about the press to defend itself effectively.

Factor in some of now-President Trump’s most outrageous statements on the campaign trail — such as suggesting that he would have the families of terrorists killed and would employ interrogation techniques harsher than waterboarding — and it became a ripe dead certainty that the Left would mobilize at the first hint of policy deliberations over the handling of captured terrorists.

For now, however, it is much ado about nothing.

At most, what we’re seeing is another iteration of a problem I alluded to Wednesday in addressing President Obama’s negotiations over the now-defunct Trans-Pacific Partnership: the need for confidential deliberations versus the determination of the press (and of Democrats during any GOP administration) that there shall be no secrets.

The Trump administration has not yet announced a policy on the detention and interrogation of enemy combatants. Critics should hold their fire until that happens. The draft executive order is just that, a draft — even if we assume, based on reported indications from unidentified administration leakers, that it is part of the discussion in Trump’s national-security team.

It is not just a commonplace — it is an inevitability that major policy decisions and the memoranda that memorialize them go through numerous iterations before they are finalized. The Left’s tired playbook depicts all Republican presidents as imbeciles and their advisers as amateur hour. Thus, much is being made of the fact that the draft executive order gets the date of the 9/11 attacks wrong, placing them a decade after the fact, on September 11, 2011. Put aside that this mistake is clearly a typo. (I’ve done it myself a number of times; plus, the date of the 9/11 attacks is rendered correctly on page 2 of the document.) The error also occurs in the very first paragraph (near the beginning, on the fifth line). To a sensible, objective analyst, that would suggest that wherever this draft comes from, it must be a document produced very early in the deliberation process. It must not have been perused by too many people before the New York Times “obtained” it.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Obama Administration’s Ugly Legacy of Undermining American Electoral Integrity By selectively enforcing the law, Obama’s DOJ hurt efforts to stamp out voter fraud. By Hans A. von Spakovsky

By on January 27th, 2017

This Friday, the U.S. Justice Department, due to the prior actions of the Obama administration, will be conspicuously absent from a federal courtroom in Virginia as a lawsuit kicks off that could prove critical to protecting the integrity of American elections.

The lawsuit before the court revolves around the public’s right, under federal law, to examine election records. In this case, the specific records sought to identify thousands of aliens who were illegally registered to vote in Virginia. Many of these non-citizens actually cast ballots in prior elections.

During the Obama era, the Justice Department regularly went to court to back left-wing groups, such as Project Vote, which sought access to voter-registration records under the same federal law at issue in the Virginia case. But on Friday, the Justice Department will be nowhere in sight.

Section 8 of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA), 52 U.S.C. § 20507(i), gives the public — and the Justice Department — an unhindered right to inspect election records. Under Section 8, the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), a nonprofit law firm dedicated to election integrity, has been gathering records on aliens who registered and voted illegally in Virginia. Prior to the November election, it uncovered more than 1,000 illegal aliens registered to vote in just eight counties, and those were just the cases it caught by accident; its review was not comprehensive, because some counties refused to comply with the law and provide the records requested. PILF consequently took one of the recalcitrant jurisdictions, the City of Manassas, to federal court.

This time, the Obama Justice Department filed no briefs supporting transparency. It was left up to J. Christian Adams, PILF’s general counsel, to oppose the city’s effort to dismiss the suit and hide its records. (It’s worth noting that there is no indication Manassas forwarded these records to state or federal law enforcement for investigation and prosecution, despite the fact that registration or voting by a noncitizen is a felony under both state and federal law.)

This is the next battlefield for election integrity. Local officials are working to decide how or if to clean up their voter rolls, along with whether the public has a right to check their work. Counties across the country are resisting transparency. This has to stop.

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