BACK ON MONDAY MAY 1
A few months after lefty activists crowded Washington D.C. for the Women’s March, activists from many of those same organizations went to bat for a serial rapist and murderer.
Ledell Lee’s victims were all women. While he was on trial for the rape and murder of Debra Reese, the testimony of three of his rape victims was presented. Lee had made a habit of knocking on doors and asking to borrow some tools to see whether a woman’s husband might be home.
Debra Reese called her mother and told her that a strange man had tried to borrow some tools. A few minutes later, Ledell Lee had beaten her to death with a tire thumper. Marks on her neck showed that the former baby boutique worker had also been strangled.
Then Lee headed out to spend the $300 he had stolen from her.
Three years earlier, Ledell Lee had attacked a 17-year-old girl while she was rocking her 3-month old niece to sleep. Lee hit her, dragged her out of the house, held her head under water until she lost consciousness and raped her.
A year after that atrocity, Ledell Lee attacked a 50-year-old woman walking home from the grocery store. He strangled her repeatedly, dragged her to the back of a building and raped her.
When Lee was caught after murdering Debra Reese, the evidence tied him to these assaults and two murders. He was convicted of two rapes and sentenced to death for his crimes against Debra Reese. Justice would be done. But first justice had to elbow past the ACLU and the pro-crime lobby.
In a Supreme Court dissent written on April 20, 2017, Justice Breyer whined, “Why now?” “The state is rushing to put him to death,” complained Nina Morrison of the badly misnamed Innocence Project.
On April 13-15, the King Fahd Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Arkansas held a symposium on so-called “honor violence,” as exemplified by honor killings, forced marriage, and other such delightful acts. I’ll get back to this – but first of all, am I the only person who still finds it jarring to see words like “King Fahd Center for Middle East Studies” in the same sentence as words like “University of Arkansas”?
The Center, as its website informs us, “was founded with a $20 million endowment from the Saudi government in the mid-1990s. An initial endowment of $2 million, dedicated toward language, literary translation and publication was followed by a much larger $18 million gift designed to spark the foundation of a comprehensive Middle East Studies program at the undergraduate and graduate levels.”
Of course, this isn’t the only so-called “Middle East Studies” shebang based at a Western university, named for a Saudi royal, and funded by Saudi cash. Georgetown University famously boasts the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding – which, when you stop to think about it, is a strange name for a unit of a university, where you’d imagine that the idea would be not “understanding” in the touchy-feely sense suggested by the phrase “Muslim-Christian Understanding” but, rather, “understanding” in the sense of becoming informed about a subject. But anyway.
Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, the regal moneybags behind Georgetown’s lavish propaganda operation (as of last year he was the 41st richest person in the world) is also responsible for the Alwaleed Centre at the University of Edinburgh, the Alwaleed Bin Talal Islamic Studies Program at Harvard, and the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Islamic Studies at Cambridge, plus centers for American Studies bearing his name in Beirut and Cairo. In addition, according to Wikipedia, he’s “Citigroup’s largest individual shareholder, the second-largest voting shareholder in 21st Century Fox, and owns Paris’ Four Seasons Hotel George V and part of the Plaza Hotel,” presumably the one in New York.
A quick look at the prince: he’s tweeted that he wouldn’t “visit Jerusalem…until its liberation from the Zionist enemy.” He’s the guy who, after fifteen of his fellow Saudis laid down their lives for their God on September 11, 2001, gave then New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani a $10 million check and a lecture about the terrorist attack’s supposed roots in U.S. policies. (Giuliani, to his everlasting credit, turned down the check, in response to which the prince suggested that he’d done so out of fear of “Jewish pressures.”)
Israeli society was nearly torn apart in the one year and eight months between Sharon’s surprise announcement and the expulsion of Gaza’s Jews in August 2005.
The day after Israel celebrates its 69th Independence Day, US President Donald Trump will greet PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas at the White House. The date of their meeting, May 3, is notable not least for its timing.
The timing of the meeting presumes a linkage between the establishment of Israel and the establishment of a Palestinian state. This is not merely obnoxious, it is also blind to reality.
In reality, an independent state of Palestine has existed for the past 12 years in Gaza. Rather than build that up and declare independence, Abbas and his comrades surrendered Gaza to Hamas in 2007.
Hamas, in turn, transformed independent Palestine into a base for jihad.
Abbas’s failure to declare independence in 2005 – and the subsequent failure of his US-trained forces to defend their control over Gaza in June 2007 from Hamas terrorists – is generally overlooked. But it is critical that Trump understand the significance of his behavior before he meets with Abbas.
Since the inception of the peace process between Israel and the PLO in 1993, the professed goal of the PLO has been to establish an independent Palestinian state on any territory over which it was able to take control from Israel. Yet 12 years ago, when Israel withdrew its citizens and military from Gaza, the PLO refused to take responsibility for the area insisting ridiculously that Gaza was still controlled by Israel.
Then 10 years ago, US-trained PLO forces fled to Israel rather than defend their control of Gaza when Hamas took up arms against them.
There are, it seems, two main reasons for Abbas’s behavior. The first is directly related to how he understood Israel’s decision to withdraw.
In December 2003, then-prime minister Ariel Sharon stunned the country when he adopted the platform of the Labor Party – which he had just massively defeated in the general elections – and removed all Israeli communities and military installations from Gaza, including from the border with Egypt, by the end of 2005.
Israeli society was nearly torn apart in the one year and eight months between Sharon’s surprise announcement and the expulsion of Gaza’s Jews in August 2005. The media hemorrhaged with continuous propaganda that demonized the Israeli residents of Gaza and the religious Zionist community in general.
A reminder of that toxic period came earlier this month, when Haaretz published a column by veteran reporter Yossi Klein in which he alleged that religious Zionists posed a graver danger to the State of Israel than Hezbollah.
Abbas and his lieutenants viewed the domestic chaos that engulfed Israel at the time as proof of Israel being on its way off the stage of history.
The Trump administration unveiled an ambitious overhaul of federal tax laws yesterday that it is touting as the “largest tax cut for individuals and businesses in U.S. history.
Republicans on Capitol Hill seem cautiously optimistic about the plan even though it was immediately attacked by the hateful class-warfare-mongering Left.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) predictably described the plan as a “wish list for billionaires,” in a statement.
“The same Trickle Down Economics that undermined the middle class are alive and well in the President’s tax plan,” she said, without noting that the bogus concept of “Trickle Down Economics” was invented by the Left to mock market-based economics. “True to form, President Trump’s tax plan is short on details and long on giveaways to big corporations and billionaires.”
One of the House of Representatives’ most acute sufferers of Trump Derangement Syndrome, Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), tweeted that the plan is “Voodoo Economics on steroids. If you believe in magic, unicorns or Batman, this plan is for you.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said the plan would make “life easier for the wealthy and special interests” and “harder for middle class and lower income Americans.”
“This plan will be roundly rejected by taxpayers of all political stripes,” Schumer said. “The American people, once again, are learning that what President Trump promised in his campaign and what he’s doing are totally at odds.”
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), ranking member on the Senate Finance Committee, attacked the plan. “Light on details for people who work for a living, yet very detailed for the elite,” Wyden tweeted. “No estate tax, cut in capital gains and cut in top rate? All an #EliteGiveway. And yet the Trump team couldn’t tell you what the tax plan means for the typical American family. Self-serving & elitist.”
Socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said the plan would help big businesses and the affluent. “We have a rigged economy designed to benefit the wealthiest Americans and large corporations,” Sanders huffed on Twitter. “Trump’s tax plan would make that system worse.”
GOP congressional leadership issued a lukewarm, open-ended endorsement of the tax reform plan. “The principles outlined by the Trump administration today will serve as critical guideposts” as lawmakers and the White House work on tax changes, House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said.
Daniel McCarthy is editor at large of The American Conservative. This article first appeared in The National Interest and has been republished with permission.
The populist Right that seems to be rising throughout the advanced world has two goals. One, obviously, is to win office. But the second, which can be achieved short of actually taking power, is simply to replace the center-right. Marine Le Pen will almost certainly lose to Emmanuel Macron in a few weeks’ time. She and her supporters can count it as a victory, however, that there will be no center-right candidate in the second round of France’s presidential election for the first time since Charles de Gaulle founded the Fifth Republic.
The Left has been undergoing a shakeup of its own. Macron represents a tendency toward the pro-market center that bears some comparison with the direction in which Bill Clinton and Tony Blair took the Democrats and Labour in the 1990s. But unlike Clinton and Blair, Macron does not lead an established party. He was formerly a finance minister in the Socialist Party government of Prime Minister Manuel Valls. In picking a nominee earlier this year to succeed the disastrous incumbent Socialist president, François Hollande, the party ultimately faced a choice between the center-left Valls and a left-wing candidate, Benoît Hamon. Hamon won, but so deep is the disaffection with the Socialists that another, independent leftist, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, outperformed him in Sunday’s first-round general election.
The hard Left can take comfort in the thought that the votes for Mélenchon and Hamon together exceeded those for Macron. But this only means that the French Left’s civil war—like the backbiting between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders supporters in the Democratic Party, or between Jeremy Corbyn and his Blairite critics in the Labour Party—will continue.
As different as France, Britain and the United States may be, the similarity of ideological struggles within—as well as between—the Left and Right in all three countries suggests a profound realignment in the politics of the West. Yet where the Right is concerned, the nature of that realignment is all too often misunderstood. There is more than one kind of right-wing populism, and the kind associated with France’s National Front has so far been the least successful. The country’s traditional center-right might even chalk up its failure to get a candidate into the second-round election as a mere fluke—though this would be dangerously overconfident.
Certainly what happened this year to France’s major center-right party, the Republicans, was unusual. The leading contenders for its nomination were two former prime ministers—Alain Juppé, who had served in that role from 1995 to 1997, and François Fillon, who held the office from 2007 to 2012. Fillon prevailed and briefly became a sensation in French politics, before a financial scandal suddenly made him seem virtually unelectable. He stayed in the race and still finished less than 2 points behind Le Pen. Were it not for the scandal, he would now be headed to a runoff with Macron, and the National Front would once more have failed to repeat its performance in 2002, the only other time it advanced to the second round. Even Juppé would have had a solid chance of getting beyond round one. Only the combination of Fillon’s initial appeal and unexpected detonation doomed the Republicans—or so they might tell themselves.
This would, however, overlook the inroads that the National Front has made under Marine Le Pen. She has already improved upon her party’s previous best showing (when she ran in 2012 and received 17.9 percent of the vote) and her father’s high-water mark in the 2002 election, where he received 16.86 percent in the first-round election; this year, she won over 21 percent. Her father won less than 18 percent of the vote in the second round against Jacques Chirac, who swept to re-election by a 64-point margin. Marine Le Pen is certain to improve upon those numbers in her showdown with Macron, though he can still be expected to win easily. (Fillon and Hamon have already endorsed Macron for the second round, and while Mélenchon has not, his left-wing voters can be counted on to prefer Macron to Le Pen. Macron goes into the second round with the center-left and most of the Left and center-right behind him.)
The United Nations Study titled “The Origins and Evolution of the Palestine Problem: 1917-1988” (“Study”) has coughed up yet another piece of false information following that exposed in my last article – which indicates increasingly that the United Nations has been complicit in disseminating false information on the Arab-Jewish conflict for almost the last forty years.
The Study was published in June 1978 by the Division for Palestinian Rights of the United Nations Secretariat (DPRUNS) for, and under the guidance of, the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People (CEIARPP)
I had only reached the third paragraph of the 275 page Study when the following statement caught my attention:
“The decision on the Mandate [for Palestine] did not take into account the wishes of the people of Palestine”
I could scarcely believe this dishonest statement had actually originated in a United Nations official publication – especially as the evidence contradicting this falsehood was sitting in the United Nations own archives.
That evidence comprises:
1. Meetings of the Palestine Arab Delegation (Delegation) with the recently appointed Secretary of State for the Colonies – Winston Churchill – on 12, 22 and 23 August 1921
2. Letters from 21 February 1922 to 23 June 1922 between the Delegation and the Secretary of State for the Colonies during which the Delegation was housed in the Hotel Cecil in London.
The letters disclose that:
1. The Delegation failed to persuade Britain to abandon the Mandate for Palestine providing for the reconstitution of the Jewish National Home in Palestine.
2. The British Government had adopted a fresh definition of policy to finally allay the Delegation’s apprehensions as to the scope and purport of British policy.
The Study’s failure to disclose this evidence is breathtaking.
DPRUNS and CEIARPP clearly sought to hide this evidence to create the false impression that the Palestinian Arabs had been unfairly treated and never been consulted in contrast to the Zionists who had.
In the world of the Palestinian Authority (PA) leadership, a journalist’s loyalty to his leaders and their cause supersedes his loyalty to the truth. In a word, it is the truth vs. Abbas’s security forces.
As the international media relies heavily on Palestinian journalists and “media assistants” in covering Palestinian affairs, this intimidation of Palestinian journalists heavily colors the reporting of Western journalists. The stories Palestinian journalists tell their Western colleagues are limited to ones that will not endanger their own lives. This censorship, whether by the Abbas’s security forces or self-imposed, explains why one rarely reads or sees a story in Western mainstream media about negative things happening in the PA-controlled territories.
Even when their Palestinian colleagues are beaten and arrested by Abbas’s security forces, these “journalists” fail to report such incidents. This makes some sense: should they open their mouths with the truth, Abbas and his cohorts might indeed stop inviting them to press conferences and banquets in the fancy restaurants of Ramallah, Bethlehem and Jericho.
Seven Palestinian journalists are the latest victims of the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) continued crackdown on the media.
The repressive measures are aimed at silencing critical voices among the journalists and deterring others from reporting stories that reflect negatively on the Palestinian leadership in particular and Palestinians in general.
In the view of President Mahmoud Abbas and his PA, Palestinian journalists exist to write stories slamming Israel or praising PA leaders. Media, for them, is defined as a mouthpiece for Abbas, the PA leadership and the Palestinian cause.
Any journalist who dares to think outside this checkpoint is subject to severe punishment. Under Abbas and the PA, there is no room for an independent media.
The three major Palestinian newspapers — Al-Quds, Al-Ayyam and Al-Hayat Al-Jadeeda — are controlled, directly and indirectly, by the PA.
Although Al-Quds, the largest Palestinian daily, is privately owned and published in Jerusalem, it too serves as a mouthpiece for the PA. The newspaper’s publisher and editors know that if they publish any story that is critical of Abbas or the PA leaders, they will face punitive measures, such as banning the distribution of Al-Quds in PA-controlled territories. As such, the editors and journalists have long resorted to self-censorship. This forced silencing explains the absence, for example, of any news items about Palestinian corruption or human rights violations in Al-Quds and the two other newspapers.
Al-Quds suffered heavy financial losses after Hamas banned its distribution in the Gaza Strip several years ago. The newspaper was banned from sale in Gaza because of its affiliation with the Palestinian Authority and criticism of Hamas.
During a meeting between the former Papal Nuncio to Cairo, Archbishop Jean-Paul Gobel, and Grand Imam Sheikh Ahmed el-Tayeb, the Grand Imam warned Gobel that “speaking about Islam in a negative manner was a ‘red line’ that must not be crossed.” If there are any condemnations of violence against the Coptic Christians, they are likely to be articulated only by the Grand Imam and the Egyptian President.
If the Pope’s humble bearing is excessive, however, it might be interpreted even by peaceable Muslims as a submission. If Francis is asked by the Grand Imam to pray at al-Azhar’s mosque, that is a piety that el-Tayeb would not likely reciprocate in a Coptic Church in Egypt.
Facilitating the establishment of an Islamic-Christian relationship that excludes Judaism can only serve the Islamist goal of isolating Jews and Israel. Although relations between the Vatican and al-Azhar will improve in the near future, the honeymoon will not. The Grand Imam will doubtless protect his own theological power base and keep his distance from both the Vatican and the Egyptian regime.
The twin Palm Sunday bombings at Coptic Christian Churches by Islamic terrorists in Egypt, which killed 44 worshipers, draws attention to what is probably the principal reason for the upcoming visit of Pope Francis to Cairo on April 28-29. The Pontiff will likely seek the assistance of Egypt’s Muslim hierarchy to help protect Egypt’s Coptic Christians, the indigenous inhabitants of the country who now number about 9 million and constitute at least 10% of the population.
During his stay, Francis will meet with the Grand Imam of Cairo’s al-Azhar Mosque, Sheikh Ahmed el-Tayeb. Al-Azhar’s theological complex, which houses Islam’s oldest university, is considered the most influential center of Sunni Islam.
The Pope possibly hopes that the meeting with el-Tayeb will fully repair relations between the Vatican and al-Azhar. These were restored as a result of a letter sent by Pope Francis to the Grand Imam last year. The Papal letter was followed up by a visit to the Holy See by el-Tayeb in May 2016. Relations between the Holy See and al-Azhar had been severed in 2011 by el-Tayeb after he took offense at comments made by the previous Pope, Benedict XVI, on the persecution of Christians in Muslim countries.
Grand Imam el-Tayeb now appears more disposed towards normalizing relations with the Vatican, especially since his amicable visit to the Holy See in May 2016. Al-Azhar’s Grand Imam is likely to be more agreeable toward Francis than he was toward Benedict. This show of flexibility might possibly also be an effort by el-Tayeb to get in line with President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi’s own call for reform within Islam. However, Al-Azhar, determined to maintain its authority over theological matters, has initiated no substantive, doctrinal reforms in response to President Sisi’s declaration. In fact, Al-Azhar has pushed back against attempts by some Muslim reformists who have suggested a more liberal policy concerning women’s rights, including the ability to divorce.
It would seem that sanctions should be enforced and the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) placed on the U.S. list of Designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations — to show that the U.S. stands for human rights, protects the innocent and tries to save the lives of those sentenced to death by Iran’s corrupt government.
Bills to sanction Iran that are being presented in Canada or other Western countries are, in fact, receiving scant attention. Canada has been talking about reopening its Iranian embassy, and pro-Iran advocates, such as the Iranian Canadian Congress, are pushing back against legislation that condemns Iran.
Would any modern Western country really wish to appear to be on the side of this barbaric regime, or in any way to assist it?
A subtle, but dangerous force is spreading throughout the West. It has been seeping into the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, the Middle East, the United States, South America and much of Europe.
Who are they?
They are pro-Iran regime advocates. They appear to be Westerners, but pursue a unique agenda. Under the guise of being average Western citizens, they have been infiltrating the social, political, economic and religious sectors of most Western societies.
These are not my words. They came directly out of the mouth of Iran’s Minister of Intelligence, Mahmoud Alavi. In a rare, recent interview on Iran’s state media, he stated that many Westerners with a dual citizenship “have a lobby group for the Islamic Republic of Iran.”
“We should not accuse them and say things that discourage them about the ancestral homeland, this is not good, and losing this capital is not good for the regime… It is wrong to say that all dual nationals are traitors, spies, or foreign agents; many of these dual nationals love Iran, and are a capital for Iran.
“Many who live in Canada, London, or the United States [are devoted] to the [Islamic] revolution and the supreme leader … In those places some attend religious ceremonies. [Those people] love the [Islamic] Revolution.”
