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March 2017

If You Want Real Change, Start with Education Stopping the indoctrination of our children is a necessary first step. Bruce Thornton

The first eight weeks of Trump’s administration have been filled with executive orders attacking the unconstitutional excesses of the Obama presidency. He’s also pledged to kill the regulatory Hydra, increase defense spending, reform the tax code, and restore America’s prestige. And all these changes and promises have been met with vicious attacks and outlandish charges from the media, and scorched-earth obstructionism from Congressional Dems.

All of which is as entertaining as an MMA blood-fest. But to effect real change, we need to get beneath the telegenic food-fight and transient click-bait, and start dynamiting the foundations of the deep state. And that means going after higher education, the one institution that more than any other shapes the young and indoctrinates them with progressive ideology.

But it’s not enough to go after the ideologically biased professoriate and administrators, or ridicule the pretentious “research” churned out by pseudo-disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. No doubt such critical exposure of the “higher nonsense” is important, for those bad ideas trickle down from the research universities to the state colleges, where most of the K-12 teachers get their teaching credentials. And most of those teachers inflict these political prejudices and false knowledge on the impressionable young, who by the time they reach college will already have been primed for even more pernicious indoctrination.

Take, for example, the silly notion of “microagressions.” This is the preposterous idea that systemic racism, sexism, etc. are so pervasive that people can subconsciously inflict injury on women, homosexuals, “people of color,” and all the other certified victims due special treatment like “safe spaces.” This wacky idea got started back in 2007 with a scientifically dubious paper called “Racial Microagressions in Everyday Life.” An even more influential bad idea, “Islamophobia,” traces its origins to Edward Said’s 1978 Orientalism, a “work of malignant charlatanry,” as Middle East scholar Robert Irwin described it, and one of the most-assigned books in social science and humanities courses. Like bacilli, such ideological prejudices disguised as scholarship have infected curricula from grade school to university, and from there sickened the whole culture. And they replicate themselves through the education industry’s monopoly on training, hiring, and tenuring of teachers.

The Death of an Unrepentant Terrorist-Lawyer Convicted of providing material support for terrorism, Lynne Stewart was released early so she could die peacefully at home. Matthew Vadum

After a lifetime of radical anti-American activism and passionate legal advocacy for foreign and domestic terrorists, cop-killers, and gangsters, convicted terrorist enabler Lynne Stewart died at her home in Brooklyn – instead of in prison where she was supposed to be.

Her son said Stewart, 77, expired Tuesday from complications related to cancer and a series of strokes. Mourners who run the website of “Democracy Now!” ran a headline describing her as the “People’s Lawyer & [Former] Political Prisoner.” The article called her “[a] former teacher and librarian, [who] was known as a people’s lawyer who represented the poor and revolutionaries.”

That represents only part of the life story of the self-described “radical human rights attorney” and cheerleader for totalitarianism.

This outspoken, persistent, quick-witted woman didn’t look like a zealous subversive. She may have been a bit too extreme for many liberals but they gave her a pass because, after all, her heart was in the right place. To the Left, this Maoist who said she favored “violence directed at the institutions which perpetuate capitalism, racism, sexism, and at the people who are the appointed guardians of those institutions,” was an endearing, grandmotherly figure blessed with a disarming honesty.

“I’m not a pacifist,” she once said. “I have cried many bitter tears. There is death in history, and it’s not all rosebuds and memorial services. Mao, Fidel [Castro], Ho Chi Minh understood this.”

“I don’t have any problem with Mao or Stalin or the Vietnamese leaders or certainly Fidel [Castro] locking up people they see as dangerous,” Stewart told Monthly Review in 2002. “Because so often, dissidence has been used by the greater powers to undermine a people’s revolution.”

This lovable, folksy ball of fluff hailed the Black Lives Matter-inspired killers who gunned down police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge last year as noble freedom fighters.

“They are avengers,” Stewart said. “They spoke for some of us when they did that.”

“They are not brazen, crazed, you know, insane killers,” she said. “They are avenging deaths that are never and have never been avenged since the ’60s and ’70s.”

Stewart likened American conservatives to the theocratic totalitarians of the Islamic world who abuse women, treating them as chattel. “The American Right,” she said, “is certainly anti-woman, anti-inclusiveness, and I certainly oppose that here in my own country for my own sake, for my children’s sake, for the way I want to live.”

She was simply misunderstood.

How Democrats Brought a Muslim Child Molester to America Another young victim of the Left’s war against common sense immigration security.Daniel Greenfield

When Tanveer Hussain and Abid Khan weren’t allowed into the United States, they blamed President Trump. So did the media outlets that covered the story. The controversial Democrat mayor of Saranac Lake reached out to fellow New York party members Senator Charles Schumer and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand. They leaned on the local embassy and Hussain and Khan were waved through.

“Still a country that welcomes athletes from across the globe,” Senator Schumer’s statement read. The statement, shared on Hussain’s Facebook page, declared, “So proud of the town of Saranac Lake for their efforts and their open hearts.”

Below it was a photo of Tanveer Hussain surrounded by Saranac Lake Middle School students. The seventh graders had been drafted to write letters to Schumer and Gillibrand on Hussain’s behalf.

“We came in and talked to a small group of kids. I said, ‘This is bothering me. Is it bothering anyone else?’” Amy Jones, their teacher, had insisted.

There’s no way to know if it bothered the children, but it bothered Amy Jones. And before long the children were enlisted in the campaign to bring Hussain to America. The campaign worked. And now here he was. Mayor Clyde Rabideau moderated the session with the children and the accused abuser.

Abid Khan, Hussain’s coach, talked to them about Kashmir. He told them that Kashmir was just like Saranac Lake. “Pack your bags. Next year, you are coming to Kashmir,” he said.

Later Hussain’s brother would explain one difference between Saranac Lake and Kashmir. “In Kashmir, we have a tradition of showing love to children,” he said.

Kashmir’s idea of showing love to children was very different than that of Saranac Lake. Tanveer Hussain would be charged with molesting a 12-year-old girl who was a student at the school.

Palestinians: Fake News and “Alternative Facts” by Bassam Tawil

There is no shortage of Palestinian and Arab news websites that publish hoaxes, propaganda, lies and disinformation disguised as real news. This garbage is accepted as factual by many Palestinians and other Arabs.

This is a form of incitement to which the West is deaf, largely because journalists working for Western mainstream media do not wish to understand what is being reported in Arabic, or even in English.

Blood libels against Jews were once thought to be part of the dark past. They are not. What do such stories accomplish? Excuses for the murder of Jews.

Another “new” old blood libel that Palestinians have been spreading against Israel claims that Israelis are flooding Palestinian communities with narcotics in order to spread moral corruption and destroy the health of Palestinians. This lie helps Palestinians avoid responsibility for the smuggling of drugs (by Palestinians) into the West Bank and Gaza Strip from Jordan and Egypt.

That leaves us with some questions: Where is the international community’s exposure of the lies that fuel the Palestinian murder of Jews? And: Will the international community once again in history fail to speak the truth about the murder of Jews?

One after another, young Palestinians continue to carry out terrorist attacks against Jews. Why? We might start at the beginning: the campaign of incitement, indoctrination and lies that Palestinian media outlets wage against Israel. This campaign has poisoned the hearts and minds of millions of Arabs and Muslims. It ought to be no surprise, then, when the poisoned Palestinian youths grab a weapon and set out to do the death-work they are taught to cherish.

The anti-Israel incitement can even be quite subtle. Those injecting the venom do not always issue a direct call for Palestinians to go out and kill Jews. It is enough, for example, to tell Palestinians that Jews are “defiling with their filthy feet” Islamic holy sites, to drive a Palestinian to go out and stab a Jew.

France: The Taboo of Muslim Racism and Anti-Semitism – Part I by Yves Mamou

Since Bensoussan rejected “any idea of destiny or essentialization,” the judges denied any possibility that he could “be accused of having aroused or wished to arouse a feeling of hostility or rejection against a group of people [Muslims]”.

The Islamist CCIF said it would appeal the decision.

It is becoming more and more difficult in France to hide the fact that hate speech and anti-Semitic statements are coming mainly not from non-Muslims, but from French Muslims.

March 7, 2017, the 17th Chamber of the Tribunal Correctionel of Paris acquitted Georges Bensoussan, a Jewish Moroccan-born historian, of any “incitement of racial hatred” (“provocation à la haine raciale”).

On January 25, 2017, all of France’s “anti-racist” organizations — even the Jewish International League against Racism and Anti-Semitism (LICRA) — joined the Islamist Collective Against Islamophobia (CCIF) in court against Bensoussan. He was prosecuted for remarks he made in October 2015, during a debate on radio station France Culture about anti-Semitism among French Arabs. Benoussan said:

“An Algerian sociologist, Smaïn Laacher, with great courage, just said in a documentary aired on Channel 3: It is a shame to deny this taboo, namely that in the Arab families in France, and everyone knows it but nobody wants to say it, anti-Semitism is sucked with mother’s milk.”

The Islamist CCIF send the quote to the public prosecutor, who opened a case against Bensoussan. The charge was simple: “mother’s milk” was not a metaphor for cultural anti-Semitism transmitted through education, but a genetic and “essentialist” accusation. “Mother’s milk”, they claimed, means: “all Arabs are anti-Semitic” — in other words, that Bensoussan supposedly a racist.

The decision of the court to acquit of Bensoussan is a key moment for freedom of speech in France in general, and for the freedom to speak about Muslim anti-Semitism in France.

Cate Blanchett on Stephen Colbert: ‘My moral compass is in my vagina’ (??????!!!!!)

http://www.news.com.au/entertainment/celebrity-life/cate-blanchett-on-stephen-colbert-my-moral-compass-is-in-my-vagina/news-story/b6c1f0f3e5501d7379f18bf91f59265d

OSCAR-WINNING actress Cate Blanchett has joked about the surprising location of her moral compass.

The Australian star was a guest on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, where she was promoting her debut in a Broadway play, Anton Chekhov’s The Present.

Describing the themes of the play, she said: “It’s all about as you move forward in life, what’s your moral compass. Where does kindness and humanity sit in a really brutal world.”

When Colbert asked her where her moral compass lay, she said: “It’s in my vagina.”As the audience screamed and applauded, Blanchett pretended to leave the set while an embarrassed Colbert shook her hand.

TRAFFIC IN POLITICAL CORRECTNESS IN MELBOURNE AUSTRALIA

Skirting the issue by Roger Franklin

Ah, the joys of living in Melbourne, where the constant quest to cement the City on the Yarra’s reputation as ‘the world’s most liveable city’ invokes an exquisite sensitivity to the needs and yearnings of all our many demographic categories and sub-categories. Hence the new pedestrian ‘walk’ signs featuring the silhouette of a women striding boldly into traffic. Apparently, or so one gathers, legions of baffled ladies have been stranded on the kerb, unable to cross the street because they did not relate to the outline of a male pedestrian that formerly directed their footsteps.

Now that this shockingly sexist presumption has been remedied, what next next? In a word, trouble.

Consider the plight of transsexuals, who have been instructed by the Safe Schools curriculum to explore gender fluidity to the point where it may soon be necessary to re-name tuck shops, lest they be mistaken for centres of guidance in the art of genital obscuratanism. Where are the transsexual traffic signs, eh? No doubt they will be introduced in the near future, as the quest for social justice is a never-ending crusade.

And Presbyterians, what of their cultural needs? Surely we could adopt signs urging pedestrians to walk but never dance.

On Southbank, where the local ABC office makes its home, we will need to introduce walk signs that are not green but red. At the corner of Collins and Spencer streets, where the un-subbed Age is headquartered, the signs will need to say ‘WLAK’.

Clearly, the expense of meeting the needs and preferences of pedestrians of all varieties will be a costly exercise, so what to do?

Here is a modest proposal that advocates of multiculturalism, feminists and tokenists of all stripes are bound to endorse, as it will further encourage the cultural enrichment on which they are so keen. Atop this post is a pedestrian-crossing sign from Qatar that would be perfect for Melbourne.

Muslims will recognise one of their own and be happy. Women will construe the long robe as a dress and be no less satisfied. The figure’s short hair will please lesbians of the butch variety and, for that matter, short-back-and-sides crossdressers. What we will have is a simple, cost-effective palliative for the grievances of one and all.

Monica Crowley: Plagiarism Charges Were a ‘Political Hit Job’ By Debra Heine

Conservative columnist Monica Crowley, in her first appearance since a plagiarism scandal forced her to forgo a White House position as deputy national security advisor, told Fox News’ Sean Hannity Tuesday night that the allegations were a hit job that was part of a greater effort to destabilize and destroy the president.

“What happened to me was a despicable straight-up political hit job,” said Crowley. “It’s been debunked, my editor has completely supported me and backed me up.”

In January, Crowley’s publisher HarperCollins pulled all copies of her book, What The (Bleep) Just Happened?, from shelves following allegations of plagiarism raised by CNN.

“The book, which has reached the end of its natural sales cycle, will no longer be offered for purchase until such time as the author has the opportunity to source and revise the material,” the publisher, which is owned by News Corp., told CNN in a statement.

Former assistant U.S. attorney Andrew McCarthy recently defended Crowley at National Review, saying that the uproar over the plagiarism allegations took “an emotional toll” on his friend.

McCarthy said Crowley’s oversights had been “blown wildly out of proportion, to the point of smear,” citing copyright attorney Lynn Chu’s careful study of the plagiarism allegations.

Ms. Chu concluded:

I found CNN’s splashy “plagiarism” accusation to be ill-supported — a heavily exaggerated, political hit job. Instead, after reading texts side by side with footnotes, I came away impressed by the very high quality and care taken by Ms. Crowley in her writing, scholarship and research overall. Many parallels in fact read on the page as rather different even if certain content or phrases were the same, and they were largely short, fragmentary, and routine. Historical research inevitably draws heavily on the work of other scholars. Dissertations exist to synthesize. The relatively few examples of unsourced copying found was in my opinion de minimus, should just be corrected, and not allowed to besmirch Ms. Crowley’s reputation.

“There is a very toxic—and it’s getting increasingly toxic and poisonous—atmosphere of personal destruction in Washington and the media…It’s always sort of been there, but now it’s at a whole different level,” Crowley told Hannity.

“In some ways, I was something of the canary in the coal mine — the attack on me was a test,” she continued. “What happened to me, what happened to General Flynn, what’s happened to Attorney General Sessions and others is all of a piece. There is a very dangerous and very effective destabilization campaign underway against this president, his administration, and his agenda.”

Crowley warned that forces are not only trying to delegitimize Trump, they want to personally destroy him.

“They are out for blood,” she declared. “And the reason they have to destroy him is that Donald Trump is an alien organism that has been injected into the body politic by the American people to reform it. He must not be allowed to succeed. They have swarmed him, they have swarmed everyone around him, in order to reject him out of the system. Just like any alien organism.” CONTINUE AT SITE

MARITAL ADVICE FROM ISIS…

ISIS Warns of ‘Lack of Manliness’ in Marriage in Relationship Advice Column By Bridget Johnson
https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/2017/03/08/isis-warns-of-lack-of-manliness-in-marriage-in-relationship-advice-column/

The latest issue of ISIS’ Rumiyah magazine, which in the past has included how-to articles on terror tactics and calls to attack Western sites, wades into relationship advice with a new article warning husbands and wives against talking about their marriage behind their spouse’s back.

“Some spouses – be they men or women – are not careful when it comes to exposing their homes to gossip and idle talk. We often find husbands talking about the problems that happen between them and their wives in both private and public gatherings, and also find that wives do so as well. Each of them might mention the other, in the latter’s absence, with displeasing terms,” states the article titled “The Flesh of Your Spouse Is Poisonous.”

“Backbiting is a disease of the tongue that only incurs ruin and loss,” argues the terror group, adding that neither spouse “is allowed to backbite the other – even when one is right concerning his claims.”

The ISIS advice heaps particular scorn upon women backbiting “their husband and their co-wife” and wistfully noted “if some of them were to only limit themselves to listening!”

“When one woman complains against her husband, some of her friends react with incitement and provocation. Worse still, some women even guide their sister to the court and explain the procedure for divorce,” the terror group continued.

“…The same applies regarding one’s co-wife. Many women do not refrain from speaking ill of their co-wives. Instead, among them is she who would go as far as to insult her co-wife and curse her in her absence due to excessive jealousy. This happens during a meeting of women or in the presence of the husband, who often has no clue as to what he can do! Should he fight off the hostility of this sharp-tongued woman against himself or against his absent wife? Indeed, Allah’s help must be sought!”

Parsing Clapper What he said was probably true, but what he didn’t say was more revealing. By Andrew C. McCarthy

In Monday’s Morning Jolt, Jim Geraghty usefully outlined some intriguing statements made by former Obama national intelligence director James Clapper regarding the FISA surveillance controversy. Clapper’s remarks, in an interview by NBC’s Chuck Todd on Meet the Press on Sunday, are being taken as a blanket denial of the allegations that the Obama administration used the Justice Department and FBI to investigate Trump-campaign figures, potentially including Trump himself.

But what Clapper said is far from a wholesale rejection of the allegations. To be sure, General Clapper’s statements convincingly shoot down the claim that Trump himself was wiretapped by the government. But to my knowledge, no one has made that claim other than President Trump, in a series of controversial tweets on Saturday morning. Clapper’s statements do nothing to undermine the overarching allegation that the Obama Justice Department investigated associates of Trump who had varying connections to his campaign.

I’m going to assume the truth of General Clapper’s statements. Understandably, many commentators stress that, in the past, he has been caught testifying to things that were untrue (denying bulk metadata collection by intelligence agencies) or ridiculous (asserting that the Muslim Brotherhood is “largely secular”). Making false or misleading statements under oath is serious business, so obviously this history weighs on Clapper’s credibility.

Still, I’ve never believed he was fundamentally a shady character. On the metadata issue, he gave an untrue answer to a senator who intentionally asked an unfair question about classified information in a public setting (though that, of course, is no justification for answering falsely). On the Muslim Brotherhood, he was dutifully toeing the Obama line — not admirable, but not shocking. Those things aside, Clapper is a longtime soldier and intelligence pro, generally well regarded by his peers. I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt that, in the Sunday interview, he was trying in good faith to walk the difficult tightrope of answering questions accurately while not compromising sensitive or classified information.

Now, before parsing General Clapper’s statements, let’s rehearse the allegations that have been made about Obama-administration investigative activity against the Trump circle — understanding (as I underscored in yesterday’s column) that we are necessarily speculating based on reporting that we cannot verify because the relevant documents (if they exist) have not been disclosed.