Displaying posts published in

February 2017

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Watch! Swedish migrant rioters set cars ablaze By David Frankenhuis

By on February 21st, 2017

Swedish police officers were last night forced to fire live ammunition at mobs of masked rioters that hurled stones at them in the Stockholm district of Rinkeby. The vicious attacks in the migrant-dominated neighbourhood followed the attempted arrest of a wanted criminal. Only eight days ago, similar worrying skirmishes took place in Rinkeby.

The authorities had initially reported on “warning shots being fired”, but a few hours ago, police stated that the officers actually tried to hit the stone-throwers, daily Aftonbladet reports. According to police, none of the attackers was hit by the officers’ bullets.

During this night’s riots, that lasted several hours, Rinkeby not only witnessed assaults on police but cases of larceny were registered as well. Furthermore, about a dozen cars have been set alight by the local youths, that subsequently blocked roads in order to prevent fire department units getting through. Shops were plundered and civilians were beaten, some of whom were also robbed, but no arrests have been made so far. Rinkeby is considered by many to be Sweden’s most notorious no-go zone.

Yesterday’s violence started after police tried to arrest a wanted person in Stockholm’s subway system. The situation escalated quickly when “a large number” of onlookers started hurling stones at the officers. According to the detective in charge, Sylvia Odin, police “felt vulnerable” and the situation was described as “highly threatening.” Eventually, police had to withdraw from the scene.

Lars Bystrom, who is the spokesperson for Stockholm’s police, told Expressen TV that eventually police even had to withdraw their patrols from the scene and subsequently retreated to a gas station after one of the officers was hit by a stone. Bystrom calls the attacks “planned and orchestrated.”

“A number of young men appeared at the location and they started throwing stones at the police. We don’t know how many there were.”

According to a witness, at least 30 persons were involved in the Rinkeby rioting.

Previous ‘incident’ in the no-go zone

About one week ago, 3 police officers ended up in hospital after being assaulted by some 30 Rinkeby youths. This attack as well started in response to an attempted arrest of a gangster. Youngsters beat and kicked police constables, while stones and bottles were hurled at the officers of the law. The authorities then stated:

“Of course it’s serious when police officers on duty are attacked in this way. Unfortunately, this is the reality… for officers.”

Update: photographer beaten and kicked

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NIKKI HALEY’S FIRST HURRAH; RUTHIE BLUM

By on February 21st, 2017

Four months ago, when South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley was nominated by the president-elect as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, I wrote that there was reason to hope she would live up to the legacies of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Jeanne Kirkpatrick and John Bolton as “shining beacons in the Midtown Manhattan snake pit.”

Though at the time I could not judge whether she was the right person for the job, it appeared that she possessed the kind of moral clarity and tough skin required in an arena filled with people whose key purpose is to cloud the distinction between good and evil. Indeed, it takes a special kind of envoy to maneuver the Orwellian universe in which the international body operates, where Western values are on a lower hierarchical rung than third-world culture, and where a mockery is made of the concept of human rights, the championing and upholding of which the organization was originally established to safeguard.

One indicator that Haley seemed to fit the bill was that she, the daughter of Indian immigrants who went through legal channels to become Americans, signed a law to crack down on illegal immigration. Another was her introduction of legislation to outlaw boycotts, divestment and sanctions “based on race, color, religion, gender, or national origin of the targeted person or entity.” Since Israel has been the focus of BDS campaigns everywhere, it was clear what she had in mind. No wonder her appointment caused Permanent Observer of Palestine to the United Nations Riyad Mansour to flinch.

Mansour was right to be worried, just as I now believe my high hopes were well-founded when Haley was confirmed.

On Thursday, after her first encounter with the U.N. Security Council, Haley told reporters that she had asked its members to help her understand “when we have so much going on in the world, why is it that every single month we’re going to sit down and have a hearing where all they do is obsess over Israel.”

Haley went on to describe the meeting, which she called “a bit strange,” as exactly what it was: a forum for bashing the Jewish state.

“The discussion was not about Hezbollah’s illegal build-up of rockets in Lebanon,” she said. “It was not about the money and weapons Iran provides to terrorists. It was not about how we defeat ISIS [Islamic State]. It was not about how we hold [Syrian President] Bashar al-Assad accountable for the slaughter of hundreds and thousands of civilians. No, instead, the meeting focused on criticizing Israel, the one true democracy in the Middle East.”

Asserting that the U.S. “will not turn a blind eye to this anymore,” Haley underscored America’s “ironclad support for Israel” and intolerance for the “U.N.’s anti-Israel bias.”

She pointed out that, “incredibly, the U.N. Department of Political Affairs has an entire division devoted to Palestinian affairs,” while it has “no division devoted to illegal missile launches from North Korea … no division devoted to the world’s number one state-sponsor of terror, Iran.”

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THE UPRISING AGAINST MORAL EXTORTION ” MELANIE PHILLIPS

By on February 21st, 2017

Join me here as I argue that people in the west are in revolt against the dictatorship of virtue that has sought for decades to enslave them. The transcript of my remarks follows beneath the video.http://melaniephillips.com/uprising-moral-extortion/

As we never stop being told by furious commentators, Britain and America are descending into a neo-Nazi, xenophobic, fascist hell on earth. Britain’s Brexit vote was anti-immigrant. President Trump is a fascist. Steve Bannon, his senior adviser and formerly of Breitbart news site, is a white supremacist.

None of these claims is true. Britain is not anti-immigrant but against uncontrolled mass immigration. President Trump is not a fascist but wants in fact to restore the rule of law and respect for the US constitution. Steve Bannon is not a white supremacist but someone who believes in western national identity based on Judeo-Christian values.

In other words, the opposite of fascism. But those making this charge aren’t just diminishing and trivialising the horrors of true fascism or bigotry. They are also demonising all those who voted for Brexit or Trump. Millions of people. One British columnist wrote:

“Compulsive liars shouldn’t frighten you. They can harm no one, if no one listens to them. Compulsive believers, on the other hand: they should terrify you. Believers are the liars’ enablers. Their votes give the demagogue his power. Their trust turns the charlatan into the president. Their credulity ensures that the propaganda of half-calculating and half-mad fanatics has the power to change the world.”

Listen up, folks: if you voted for either Brexit or Trump, he means you and me. We are the compulsive believers, apparently, enabling liars and charlatans and half-mad fanatics. Such as you-know-who. This writer went on: “We are now at the beginnings of a new opposition movement, a liberal version of backlash politics, which feels the urgent need to drive the right from power”.

In similar vein, the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has urged Britain to rise up against Brexit on the basis that the people didn’t understand what they were voting for. Please bear in mind that not only did the British people vote for Brexit but the House of Commons has overwhelmingly voted to trigger Britain’s exit from the EU. All that apparently counts for nothing. The public’s democratic choice must not be allowed to stand.

Now this isn’t just monumental arrogance and hubris. These anti-democrats are the real compulsive believers, the real demagogues. Everyone who opposes them is a fascist, it seems, and so they feel not just entitled but morally obliged to impose their own vision over the will of the people – who are of course all fascists too. How can this be?

This week, Britain’s Channel Four TV is to screen a documentary presented by Trevor Phillips, the former head of Britain’s Equality and Human Rights Commission. Once upon a time, Mr Phillips was a fully paid-up member of the metropolitan liberal set. Now, if I might use the well-known phrase, he appears to have become yet another liberal who has been mugged by reality.

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Yale Students Are Offended — Calhoun College’s Name Was Changed to Honor a White Woman Apparently that’s racist. By Katherine Timpf

By on February 21st, 2017

People were complaining that Yale University’s John Calhoun College was named after a slave owner, so they changed it to “Grace Hopper College,” in honor of the female computer scientist and rear admiral — but some people are still upset, because Grace Hopper was white.

“We are skeptical of the administration’s intentions in renaming the college after a white woman, regardless of Grace Hopper’s GRD ’34 accomplishments as a woman in STEM and in the military,” Yale Women’s Center officials Nicole Chavez and Rita Wang co-wrote in a piece for thecYale Daily News.

Yep, that’s right: Rear Admiral Grace Hopper may have made significant contributions to male-dominated fields like computer science and the military, and she may have earned her Ph.D. in mathematics at Yale during a time when it was very rare for a woman to do so, but . . . she was also white, which apparently means she does not deserve this honor.

Why? Because it’s like, kind of racist, duh.

“We recognize that white femininity has often been used as a tool to enforce racist and colonialist structures,” the piece continues. “As such, we hope to explain how this decision constitutes ‘whitewashing’ to the wider Yale community.”

No doubt, what Yale was trying to do was honor not just a woman but specifically a woman with achievements in science and math. Feminists commonly complain that our society doesn’t do enough to encourage women to pursue careers in STEM, and so Yale’s decision to honor a woman for her historical success in this area would seem like something that would please Women’s Center officials like Chavez and Wang.

But nope. No, instead Chavez and Wang accused Yale of making “an attempt to corrode and erase the long history of activism by students of color — particularly black women — on this campus” by giving “no recognition of the countless hours black students and students of color have put into the fight against the honoring of a white supremacist in their home.”

Of course, this isn’t the first time that something like this has happened. Last year, Southwestern University in Texas canceled its production of The Vagina Monologues because a white lady wrote it, and students at Scripps College got upset about Madeleine Albright’s being chosen as their commencement speaker because she’s a “white feminist.”

This story was previously reported on in an article on Heat Street.

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A Swedish Gaffe That Wasn’t The world guffawed when it thought Donald Trump was hallucinating about Sweden. But he wasn’t really wrong. By Jonathan S. Tobin

By on February 21st, 2017

Late-night television hosts got another gift from President Trump over the weekend, but it turns out the incident wasn’t so much comedy gold as it was an illustration of everything that is wrong about the colloquy between Trump and his critics on immigration and refugees.

On Monday evening, Stephen Colbert and Seth Meyers made a meal out of the latest Donald Trump gaffe. Trump was lambasted for saying that there had been a terror attack in Sweden on Friday night. Since there had been no such attack, it prompted the usual avalanche of mockery in the president’s direction. But while Trump’s vague language and willingness to fabricate facts to suit his talking points often justifies the brickbats thrown in his way, in this case there were two problems with the hilarity: Trump didn’t actually claim there had been a terror attack, and the facts about Sweden actually do back up his claim about a surge in violence by Muslim immigrants in Europe.

During the course of his campaign-style rally in South Carolina on Saturday, Trump said:

We’ve got to keep our country safe. You look at what’s happening in Germany, you look at what’s happening last night in Sweden. Sweden, who would believe this? Sweden. They took in large numbers. They’re having problems like they never thought possible. You look at what’s happening in Brussels. You look at what’s happening all over the world. Take a look at Nice. Take a look at Paris.

Given the context, in which he appeared to be referencing violence in Belgium, France, and Germany, it sounded as if Trump was saying there had been an attack the previous evening in Sweden. Except he wasn’t. In typical imprecise Trumpian fashion, he was actually referring to a segment broadcast on Fox News in which Tucker Carlson interviewed filmmaker Ami Horowitz about a video he had made about Sweden, which had been originally posted on YouTube in December.

Trump’s fan base may not care, but we still live in a world in which the words uttered by the leader of the planet’s sole superpower are a matter of great import. There’s a reason why presidents shouldn’t make offhand remarks about what’s going on in other countries. A more diligent commander-in-chief would first listen to information and advice from his staff and the intelligence community. Although we are getting used to government by tweet, there is a serious problem with Trump’s reliance on cable news channels as his sole source of information before he starts shooting off his mouth.

But as much as we should be appalled by the slapdash manner in which the leader of the free world spouts off about what he saw on television in his typical ordinary-guy manner, in this case Trump wasn’t playing the fabulist.

Horowitz is something of a film provocateur, and he may not have the prestige of a mainstream liberal documentarian, but he isn’t a liar. His short deals with the fact that a massive infusion of Muslim immigrants from the Middle East has created problems for Swedish society. Despite claims made by Trump’s detractors, sexual violence has spiked in the Scandinavian country, and the immigrant population bears a good deal of the responsibility. The culture clash between liberal Swedish society and the misogyny of some of the immigrants, combined with the creation of no-go zones there, bears all the signs of the same serious problems that have arisen in France and Germany, where it is no longer possible to pretend that nothing is wrong.

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Trump’s New Guidance Calls for Vigorous Immigration Enforcement In a fundamental shift from Obama, the Trump position is that simply being an illegal alien is unlawful and serious; thus, any additional indication of outlaw behavior is sufficient to warrant deportation. By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on February 21st, 2017

The immigration-enforcement guidance issued by President Trump Tuesday morning patently aims to shift the presumption against deportation created by President Obama’s guidance.

In 2014, under the guise of setting out “immigration enforcement priorities,” Obama’s Department of Homeland Security established a three-tier system for deportation. This was quite advisedly done under the rubric of “prosecutorial discretion.” Federal agents were instructed to apply prosecutorial discretion as early in the evaluation process as possible, mindful of how sparse were resources to arrest, detain, and deport removable aliens.

The message was clear: If an alien does not fit into the top tier, do not even bother to stop and question him, much less to arrest and commence deportation proceedings. While Obama’s two lower tiers were referred to, in an Orwellian way, as “priorities” (i.e., enforcement “Priority 2” and “Priority 3”), the reality was more like immunity.

Obama’s “Priority 1” was generally labeled “threats to national security, border security, and public safety.” It included aliens engaged in terrorism, espionage, or otherwise posing a national-security threat; involved in gang violence; convicted of serious felonies; or apprehended in the act of entering the country.

Notice the effort to undermine illegal immigration as a basis for taking action. Priority 1 involved offenders who either (a) would be sought by police and national-security agents for reasons having nothing to do with their immigration status, or (b) were not illegal aliens residing in the U.S. because they never (or barely) made it into the country. The underlying (though unstated) principle is that illegally entering or remaining in the United States is not a serious matter per se; rather, it is egregious criminal activity that warrants enforcement action.

Of course, the nature of criminal activity addressed in “Priority 1” was so heinous that law-enforcement would naturally take action without regard to whether the perpetrator was an American or a non-American (legal or illegal). The subliminal point was to eradicate illegal-alien status as a salient consideration — yet to be able to say that enforcement against it was considered a “priority.”

Obama’s second tier addressed the “priority” of “misdemeanants and new immigration violators.” The thrust of this tier, however, was to give the illegal alien a defense against enforcement action. For example, an alien convicted of two misdemeanors, far from being an enforcement priority, was given immunity — agents were told that, for action to be taken, there should be three or more misdemeanors — and that these crimes had to (a) be unrelated to the alien’s illegal status, and (b) involve three separate incidents (i.e., multiple misdemeanors arising out of the same criminal transaction would count as only one conviction). Here, it is important to note that many felony arrests are reduced to misdemeanors in plea bargaining. Thus, this system was designed to insulate from deportation habitual criminals who had managed to avoid felony convictions.

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French Presidential Candidate Marine Le Pen Refuses to Wear Headscarf on Lebanon Trip Country’s highest Sunni Muslim authority says politician had been informed she would need to cover her head By William Horobin and Stacy Meichtry

By on February 21st, 2017

ARIS—Marine Le Pen, the presidential candidate for France’s far-right National Front, seized on a trip to Lebanon to showcase her hard line on Islamic custom, refusing Tuesday to wear a head scarf and upending her plans to meet with the country’s senior Sunni Muslim cleric.

On the final day of a three-day visit, Ms. Le Pen refused to take a head scarf before meeting with Grand Mufti Sheik Abdel-Latif Derian at his office, saying Sunni officials hadn’t demanded she cover herself in meetings with Sunni leaders in the past.

Ms. Le Pen was making the visit to Lebanon in a bid to raise her international profile in a country at the doorstep of Syria’s war and its resulting refugee crisis.

“It doesn’t matter. Pass on my considerations to the Grand Mufti but I will not veil myself,” Ms. Le Pen told reporters before turning back to a waiting car.

The press office of Dar al-Fatwa, Lebanon’s highest Sunni authority, said it had informed an aide to Ms. Le Pen on Monday that she would need to cover her head for the meeting.

“When she arrived, the [staff] were surprised by her refusal to abide” by the protocol, Dar al-Fatwa said in a statement carried by the National News Agency.

In France, full-face veils are outlawed and headscarves are banned from schools and public-sector workplaces.

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Trump Isn’t the EU’s Problem Some Europeans want to use the U.S. President as a political excuse.

By on February 21st, 2017

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-isnt-the-eus-problem-1487723421 Vice President Mike Pence spent the past few days trying to reassure Europeans about America’s commitment to NATO, but in some continental precincts that isn’t enough. Europe’s mandarins are sore that Mr. Pence didn’t embrace the European Union with similar enthusiasm, as if an American Administration is responsible for the EU’s fate. Mr. Pence […]

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Supreme Court Shots Fired Does a foreigner on foreign soil have Fourth Amendment rights?

By on February 21st, 2017

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments Tuesday in a case that could decide whether foreign nationals outside the U.S. are entitled to constitutional protections. Such a ruling would unleash fresh opportunities for lawsuits against everything from drone strikes to interrogation, and the good news is that the Justices seemed skeptical of upending decades of settled law.

Hernandez v. Mesa started with a 2010 fatal shooting: A U.S. federal agent fired on Mexican teenager Sergio Hernandez-Guereca from across the border. The boy’s parents say their son was playing with friends, though Justice Department records revealed that Hernandez had twice been arrested for smuggling aliens into the U.S. Prosecutors concluded there was insufficient evidence to indict the agent.

Yet the parents filed a lawsuit, and one question before the High Court is whether Hernandez, a Mexican citizen shot on Mexican soil, is entitled to Fourth Amendment protection against the unjustified use of lethal force. The plaintiffs say the Court should consider the “totality” of the circumstances, including that Ciudad Juarez, Mexico and El Paso, Texas are one metropolitan community.

The plaintiffs rely on Boumediene v. Bush, the 2008 case in which a 5-4 majority ruled that enemy combatants detained at Guantanamo Bay have the constitutional right of habeas corpus. The plaintiffs know that Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote that opinion, and they are hoping he will expand the logic of Boumediene to open a new area of rights for foreigners. Thus they embrace the “functionalist” approach in that ruling in which the Justices look at more than merely where the conduct occurred.

But Boumediene turned on the reality that the U.S. has “complete and total control” over Guantanamo. In “every practical sense,” Justice Kennedy wrote, “Guantanamo is not abroad.” That’s not true of the sovereign nation of Mexico, and it’s hard to find a clearer dividing line of jurisdiction than the U.S.-Mexico border.

The better precedent is U.S. v. Verdugo-Urquidez, which held in 1990 that Fourth Amendment protections don’t apply to searches and seizures of aliens in foreign countries without a “significant voluntary connection” to the U.S. Applying the Fourth Amendment across the globe, the Court said in Verdugo, would “significantly disrupt the ability of the political branches to respond to foreign situations involving our national interest.”

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Politics in a Democracy Is War by Other Means Republicans may not be interested in war, but war is interested in them. Bruce Thornton

By on February 21st, 2017

Since the election of Donald Trump the “partisan divide” has escalated into a “Civil War,” according to many commentators. “The Fight for Washington” headlines a PJ Media column. The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman says Trump’s election was a political “Pearl Harbor.” The intelligence community is rumored to be at “war” with Trump. Progressive Democrats have organized a “Resistance,” as though their party is occupied France during World War II.

Apart from the hyperbole, such descriptions are essentially right. The problem is, too many Republicans don’t know they’re in a war.

That’s because many establishment politicians and pundits still cling to fantasies of “bipartisanship,” “civility,” “decorum,” “good manners,” and the “rules of good behavior.” Senators obsess over upholding “Senate tradition” and its sacred “rules,” and they miss their cloakroom bonhomie and gym-locker joviality with their Democrat counterparts. They bemoan the “partisan divide” and the failure to “reach across the aisle.” They agree with Obama minion Cass Sunstein, who has a new book out decrying what he calls “partyism,” a psychological disorder almost as bad as “racism.”

They all should be made to read the history of democracy starting with ancient Athens, and then write out Madison’s Federalist 10 a hundred times on the blackboard. A country as diverse as America has always been divided into “factions” whose “passions and interests” conflict with those of other factions, often creating a zero-sum conflict. To paraphrase Plato, every faction is by nature at war with every other faction, and peace is just a word.

Moreover, empowering the common people whatever their levels of education or social mores means free political speech will be anything but decorous or good-mannered. As Aeschylus said, “Free men have free tongues.” More typical of traditional democratic political speech is the vile description of Thomas Jefferson by a disgruntled writer Jefferson had hired to smear his rival John Adams as a “hideous hermaphroditical character.” The vengeful journo called Jefferson a “mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father.”

The “decorum” and “civility” ritually praised by Republicans are the political version of the disastrous ROE’s that have cost the lives of our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. We’ve watched for years as the Republicans fought by Marquess of Queensbury rules while the Dems donned brass knuckles and swung blackjacks. While some of our Senators fretted over “traditions of the Senate” and lost “bipartisanship,” Don Obama and his Luca Brasi Harry Reid filled the Senate chamber with legislative IEDs––Obamacare, now circling the drain; an $800 billion “stimulus” that spent from half a million to four million dollars on each job it created; the job-killing Dodd-Frank regulatory hydra that so far has cost $36 billion, and record-setting deficits and debts. All the while our country’s economy stagnates and our enemies and rivals flourish at the expense of our security and interests. And these Republicans still wonder how Donald Trump bested 14 Republican primary rivals and defeated the Democrats’ off-brand Eva Peron?

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