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April 2017

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Which Way Will France Go? by Giulio Meotti

By on April 13th, 2017

After two years and 238 deaths at the hands of Islamic terrorism, what did France do to defeat radical Islam? Almost nothing.

If Emmanuel Macron wins, France as we have known it can be considered pretty much over. By blaming “colonialism” for French troubles in the Arab world, and calling it “a crime against humanity”, he has effectively legitimized Muslim extremist violence against the French Republic.

In just two years, Muslim organizations in France have dragged to trial great writers such as Georges Bensoussan, Pascal Bruckner, and Renaud Camus. It is the Islamists’ dream coming true: seeing “Islamophobes” on trial to restrict their freedom of expression. Charlie Hebdo’s physical massacre was therefore followed by an intellectual one.

It was a sort of farewell to the army. During a brief visit to the aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle last December, French President François Hollande honored the French soldiers involved in “Operation Chammal” against the Islamic State. After two years and 238 deaths at the hands of Islamic terrorism, what did France do to defeat radical Islam? Almost nothing.

It is this legacy of indifference that is at stake in the looming French presidential elections. If Marine Le Pen or François Fillon win, it means that France has rejected this autocratic legacy and wants to try a different, braver way. If Emmanuel Macron wins, France as we have known it can be considered pretty much over. Macron is, for example, against taking away French nationality from jihadists. Terrorism, Islam and security are almost absent from Macron’s vocabulary and platform, and he is in favor of lowering France’s state of emergency. By blaming “colonialism” for French troubles in the Arab world, and calling it “a crime against humanity”, he has effectively legitimized Muslim extremist violence against the French Republic.

As General Vincent Desportes wrote in his new book, La dernière Bataille de France (“The Last Battle of France”):

“President Hollande said on November 15 that it would be ruthless, we were at war … but we do not make war! History shows that in the eternal struggle between the shield and the sword, the sword is still a step forward and winning”.

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Time to Tackle the Muslim Brotherhood by Jagdish N. Singh

By on April 13th, 2017

The final report of the Senate’s “Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities before and after the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001” revealed that U.S.-stationed Saudi intelligence officers, who provided assistance to the hijackers ahead of the World Trade Center and Pentagon bombings, were in direct contact with senior members of the American branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.

During the Taliban regime in Kabul, the Brotherhood had training camps in Afghanistan for Kashmiri militants fighting against India and Central Asian states.

In his inaugural address on January 20, U.S. President Donald Trump vowed to “unite the civilized world against… and eradicate radical Islamic terrorism.” So far, however, the administration in Washington, like its predecessors, has done little to rein in one of the key sources of this growing global phenomenon — the Muslim Brotherhood.

Founded by Sheikh Hassan al-Banna in Egypt in 1928, the Brotherhood does not always openly advocate violence. But its main agenda is to establish a worldwide Islamic Caliphate by way of the sword. As its motto reads: “The Prophet is our leader; jihad is our way; death for the sake of Allah is our wish.”The Brotherhood’s hostility towards the United States has been clear. It not only backed the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, but founded al Qaeda, nineteen of whose operatives perpetrated the 9/11 attacks.

The final report of the Senate’s “Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities before and after the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001” — released in December 2002 — revealed that U.S.-stationed Saudi intelligence officers, who provided assistance to the hijackers ahead of the World Trade Center and Pentagon bombings, were in direct contact with senior members of the American branch of the Brotherhood.

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Spicer’s Mistake and the Democrat’s Over-Reaction by Alan M. Dershowitz

By on April 13th, 2017

Sean Spicer made a serious mistake when he compared Bashar Al-Assad to Hitler, and to make matters worse, he got his facts wrong. He quickly and fully apologized. There was no hint of anti-Semitism in his historical mistake and his apology should have ended the matter. But his political enemies decided to exploit his mistake by pandering to Jews. In doing so, it is they who are exploiting the memory of the six million during the Passover Holiday.

The Democratic National Committee issued a rebuke with the headline “We will not stand for anti-Semitism.” Its content included the following: “Denying the atrocities committed by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime is a tried and true tactic used by Neo-Nazis and white supremacist groups that have become emboldened since Donald Trump first announced his campaign for president.” By placing Hitler and Trump in the same sentence, the DNC committed a mistake similar to that for which they justly criticized Spicer. Moreover, the DNC itself, is co-chaired by a man who for many years did “stand for anti-Semitism” — namely Keith Ellison who stood by the notorious anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan, while denying that he was aware of Farrakhan’s very public Jew-hatred. It is the epitome of Chutzpah for the DNC to falsely accuse Spicer of standing by anti-Semitism while it is they who are co-chaired by a man who committed that sin.

Nancy Pelosi, the House Minority leaders, falsely accused Spicer of “downplaying the horror of the Holocaust.” But by leveling that false accusation, Pelosi herself is exploiting the tragedy.

Steven Goldstein, a hard-left radical who heads a phony organization that calls itself “The Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect,” accused Spicer of “engage[ing] in Holocaust denial.” He called Spicer’s mistake a “most evil slur” against the Jewish people. Goldstein claims to speak for the Jewish people, but he represents only himself and a few handfuls of radical followers who are not in any way representative of the mainstream Jewish community. He repeatedly exploits the Holocaust in order to gain publicity for him and his tiny group of followers. Shame on them!

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ON HOMELAND…WHO CAIRS?

By on April 12th, 2017

‘Homeland’ Actor: The Real ‘Guilty Ones’ This Season Are White Men, Not Islamic Terrorists By M.G. Oprea

‘Homeland’ has taken such a sudden turn toward political preaching and progressive tut-tutting that its story and characters barely resemble those of the previous five seasons.

“Homeland’s” season six finale will air on Sunday night. If you’re like me, at this point you couldn’t care less. That’s because the show has taken such a sudden turn toward political preaching and progressive tut-tutting that its story and characters barely resemble those of the previous five seasons. If you’ve been wondering what on earth happened, wonder no more.

On Thursday, the actor who plays Saul Berenson, Mandy Patinkin, explained everything on NPR. In an interview with “Here & Now’s” Jeremy Hobson, Patinkin discusses past accusations that the show is Islamophobic. He says that although the “Homeland” crew never meant to be Islamophobic, and certainly didn’t expect that kind of criticism, it is nevertheless true. According to him, the show became “part of the problem of the Islamophobia.”

He goes on to explain that the whole point of this season was to stop being the problem and start “trying to be part of the cure,” something Patinkin feels they were “tremendously successful” in doing. Patinkin, who is active in assisting with the Syrian refugee crisis in Greece, added that the “guilty ones” are “certainly not the Muslim community, certainly not the refugees or the immigrants that have come here, but the white male membership of, even members of the intelligence community and other parts of our government.”

So, there it is. “Homeland’s” monumental shift in narrative and tone this season wasn’t an accident. It was a 100 percent intentional effort to atone for the show’s previous sins. But the self-flagellation is so heavy handed, and such a departure from previous seasons, that it’s jarring for the viewer. It’s also boring.

Political Correctness Is Boring

Part of what made the first five seasons of “Homeland” so entertaining is that they were unconstrained by political correctness. They were at liberty to craft the most compelling terrorism-espionage story they could dream up. The main characters, Carrie Mathison (played by Clare Danes) and Saul, were realists about the dangers of the world, about who’s an enemy and who’s a friend—even if they weren’t always right. But season six is an exercise in pure political correctness.

Carrie has become a civil rights activist. She has renounced her previous views about terrorism, most notably that Muslims are ever terrorists. The show implies that prior to this season, she had been a racist and is now trying to right those wrongs to atone for her past sins. (By the way, this suggests that you’re a racist, too, for enjoying those seasons.)

Not only is the young Muslim-American in the show, Sekou Bah, not a terrorist, the real conspiracy is run by the white male CIA agent, Dar Adal, who is trying to make it look like Sekou blew up a truck in New York City. With the help of Mossad, Dar is also trying to convince the new president-elect that Iran is breaking the nuclear deal, which of course they’re not. Oh, and in case you weren’t getting the message, one episode features Saul visiting his sister in a West Bank settlement, which affords him a pulpit from which to preach on the evils of Israeli settlements.

Politicization Destroys Art And Entertainment

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ON HOMELAND…

By on April 12th, 2017

Homeland: Uh-oh, Hillary lost! Now what?By Patricia McCarthy

The writers of Season 6 obviously were so confident Hillary Clinton was going to be the next president their new narrative had a female Democratic Party candidate win the election. Elizabeth Marvel is a wonderful actress and a pretty fair doppelganger for Hillary Clinton. But the writers got it all wrong. In an interview, show creator Alex Gansa revealed that their scripts were by design following real events but “five or six episodes had been completed when the election happened.” Hillary lost and they were stuck with the wrong real-life president-elect. M.G. Oprea wrote a terrific article at The Federalist about the ridiculous turnaround that has characterized this season. All those involved with the production have apparently come to feel sufficiently guilty about their realistic focus on Islamic radicalism and terrorism over the first five seasons that they have reversed course and become submissively pro-Islam. What was for five seasons a very fair representation of the worldwide problem of Islamic terrorism became a televised apologia for all the good work that came before.

Carrie Mathieson is now a pro-Muslim activist living in New York. She becomes close to the president-elect, then not close, then close again, then not. Dar Adal, who from the beginning of the series was sinister and menacing, is gradually but finally revealed to be the mastermind of an odious cabal subverting the president-elect with the help of others in the intelligence community and special ops military. Think Burt Lancaster in Seven Days in May or Angela Lansbury in The Manchurian Candidate. (Adal even sees to it that Carrie’s daughter is taken from her by child protective services). He and his partners in crime plan to assassinate the new president. Why is never made clear, for nothing remotely disturbing is revealed about her until the last shot of the finale after she has justifiably had all those who plotted against her arrested. Then she then begins arresting even those who tried to protect her. Suddenly the people who have been running the CIA for years, the good guys who were trying to protect the country, set out to murder the president-elect! Did they construct the new direction after Donald Trump won? The latter must be true because the first woman president-elect, a Democrat, is by the finale somehow a female Donald Trump to be dealt with exactly in the manner the real left has been behaving since their loss to Trump in November. Total derangement. Consider all the leftists who have called for Trump’s assassination on Twitter and other social media, the chaotic protests, silly marches, etc.

The writers have inadvertently demonstrated exactly how the left functions, not the right. Now that we know the Obama administration functioned like a crime syndicate it is easy to surmise how easily they projected these tactics onto their own characters. They even created a character, (presumably based on radio conspiracy theorist Alex Jones), who operates a massive bot organization to propagandize by social media. He is clearly meant to be a right-winger who, along with Adal, unfairly maligns the reputation of the president-elect’s dead soldier son. She is at this point a person for whom the viewer feels sympathy.

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An Anti-Semitic Murder in a French No-Go Zone Colorful, vibrant, multicultural Muslim atrocities. Daniel Greenfield

By on April 12th, 2017

Sarah Lucy Halimi was thrown out of the window of the third floor Paris apartment while she begged her Muslim killer to spare her life.

The 66-year-old director of an Orthodox Jewish nursery was woken from her sleep when she was violently beaten by her twenty something Muslim neighbor who then dragged her to the window.

She died on the street outside the building where she had lived for thirty years.

The killer had allegedly shouted, “Allahu Akbar”. In the tragic comedy of denial that every Islamic terrorism investigation inevitably becomes, the authorities are still hunting around for his motive.

The media claims that her Muslim killer, like every other Muslim terrorist in the past two years, was mentally unstable. According to official reports, he was incoherent. According to other accounts, he told the police that he had followed the commands of the Koran. He certainly would not have been the first.

The street where Sarah Lucy’s broken body lay was the Rue de Vaucouleurs. It’s close to Belleville, a neighborhood whose name means “Beautiful town”, but which is better known these days as one of France’s “Zones Urbaines Sensibles” or “Sensitive Urban Zones.”

Or, without the euphemisms, parts of the beautiful town are really a “No Go Zone”. Or, if you prefer the official descriptions, a vibrant, colorful and multicultural community full of delightfully exotic foods.

Two years ago, smirking media reporters had a field day visiting Belleville to show that FOX News reports about No Go Zones in France were nonsense. “Look, at the couscous restaurants and colorful scarves, there’s nothing to worry about.”

Unless your delightfully multicultural Muslim neighbor decides to shove you through a window while shouting one of his religion’s exotic genocidal epithets about the Jews and all infidels.

Belleville was once home to many Jews. Then Jews from North Africa fled there after Muslim takeovers deprived them of the civil rights they had briefly enjoyed under French rule. And their Mohammedan oppressors followed. Some years back, the JTA ran one of its cheerful Islamophilic pieces about Belleville. “In one Paris neighborhood, Jews and Muslims live as they did in North Africa.”

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Metastasizing Academic Cancer Time for parents, donors and legislators to take action. Walter Williams

By on April 12th, 2017

The average American has little knowledge of the extent to which our institutions of higher learning have been infected with a spreading cancer. One aspect of that cancer is akin to the loyalty oaths of the 1940s and ’50s. Professors were often required to sign statements that affirmed their loyalty to the United States government plus swear they were not members of any organizations, including the Communist Party USA, that sought the overthrow of the United States government. Fortunately, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down loyalty oaths as a condition of employment in 1964.

Today we’re seeing the re-emergence of the mentality that gave us loyalty oaths, in the form of mandating that faculty members write “diversity statements,” especially as part of hiring and promotion procedures. They are forced to pledge allegiance to the college’s diversity agenda. For example, the University of California, San Diego requires that one’s “Contributions to Diversity Statement” describe one’s “past experience, activities and future plans to advance diversity, equity and inclusion, in alignment with UC San Diego’s mission to reflect the diversity of California and to meet the educational needs and interests of its diverse population (http://tinyurl.com/mm6vzzq).” George Leef, director of research at The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, has written an article titled “Loyalty Oaths Return with Faculty ‘Diversity Statements'” (http://tinyurl.com/mxy363c). His article documents the growing trend of mandated faculty diversity statements — such as that at Virginia Tech, in which “candidates should include a list of activities that promote or contribute to inclusive teaching, research, outreach, and service.”

College diversity agendas are little more than a call for ideological conformity. Diversity only means racial, sex and sexual orientation quotas. In pursuit of this agenda, colleges spend billions of dollars on offices of diversity and inclusion, diversity classes, and diversity indoctrination. The last thing that diversity hustlers want is diversity in ideas. By the way, the next time you hear a college president boasting about how diverse his college is, ask him how many Republican faculty members there are in his journalism, psychology, English and sociology departments. In many cases, there is none, and in others, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans might be 20-to-1. Nearly 100 percent of political campaign contributions from liberal arts faculty go to Democrats. At Cornell University, for example, 97 percent of contributions from faculty went to Democrats. At Georgetown University, it was 96 percent.

A study by my George Mason University colleague Daniel B. Klein, along with Charlotta Stern, titled “Professors and Their Politics: The Policy Views of Social Scientists” (http://tinyurl.com/qxne3db), concluded: “The academic social sciences are pretty much a one-party system. Were the Democratic tent broad, the one-party system might have intellectual diversity. But the data show almost no diversity of opinion among the Democratic professors when it comes to the regulatory, redistributive state: they like it. Especially when it comes to the minimum wage, workplace-safety regulation, pharmaceutical regulation, environmental regulation, discrimination regulation, gun control, income redistribution, and public schooling.”

The fascist college trend that we are witnessing today is by no means new. As early as 1991, Yale University President Benno Schmidt warned: “The most serious problems of freedom of expression in our society today exist on our campuses. The assumption seems to be that the purpose of education is to induce correct opinion rather than to search for wisdom and to liberate the mind.”

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‘May Allah Curse The Jews’: Watchdog Exposes Anti-Semitism Festering In Cleveland Professionals and student activists proclaim their Jew hatred loud and proud on social media. Ari Lieberman

By on April 12th, 2017

In the past few months, we’ve witnessed an assortment of leftist groups trying their best to advance a discredited and pernicious narrative that attempts to link the current administration with a spike in white nationalist anti-Semitism. There is little if any empirical data to support this contention. In fact, we now know that those responsible for the majority of bomb threats directed against Jewish community centers across the U.S. have absolutely no connection to white nationalist groups. One was a Bernie Sanders supporter while the other was a deranged teen who resides in Israel, whose motivation for making the prank calls still remains unclear. Their arrests have all but deflated the storyline peddled by the left.

Unfortunately, these very leftist groups – including the Southern Poverty Law Center and the fringe Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect – which did their best to derail Trump with hoaxes and false narratives pertaining to anti-Semitism have remained disgracefully silent in the face of real Jew hatred on college campuses across the United States.

Most of the anti-Semitism that Jewish students and students who support Israel must endure on a daily basis originates from campus groups like the Muslim Students Association (MSA), Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), and the Arab Students Union (ASU). These groups, are to varying degrees, affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood and routinely espouse rabid Jew hatred and vile anti-Semitic canards. According to the campus watchdog group Amcha, the probability of anti-Semitic activity is eight times more likely to occur on campuses where these pernicious groups maintain an active presence.

The left’s shameful silence in regards to the scourge of Muslim anti-Semitism is simple to understand. Exposure of this malevolency and its Islamo-fascist undertone runs counter to the narrative that the left wishes to project. Administration and academic officials at colleges and universities across the America, who have done their best to downplay the growing problem of Muslim anti-Semitism on their respective campuses are equally culpable in this disgraceful charade. To the extent that such anti-Semitic activity is recognized, it is usually lumped together with “Islamophobia” in a transparent effort to mitigate nefarious anti-Semitic activities spearheaded by the SJP, ASU and MSA and maintain a perverse moral equivalence.

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The Left’s New Cure-All: ‘Science’ The upcoming ‘March for Science’ is set to be all about identify politics and progressive hobbyhorses. By Heather Wilhelm

By on April 12th, 2017

Ah, science. If you’re even loosely engaged in the wild and dark art that is politics these days, you know by now that “science,” as a word, has taken on an almost mystical meaning. “Science,” in many of its modern incantations, now serves as a form of code, as vague and fuzzy as a Wiccan chant. For a growing number of political activists, the meaning is simple: Science, you see, is a lively mix of standard progressive hobbyhorses, tossed wild-eyed and cranky into one cantankerous bag.

Witness the upcoming March for Science, scheduled for Saturday, April 22. This also happens to be Earth Day, which is nice enough — and hey, who could object to a good old-fashioned rah-rah session for science? I, for one, always welcome a refresher on string theory, or the confounding conflict between the general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics, or that long, troubling episode in our planet’s history when a few impertinent continents apparently traipsed all the way over to the other side of the globe and no one was there to panic about it.

Alas, this March for Science does not appear to be largely about science, or about people who know a great deal about science, or even about people who want to know a great deal about science. (It would be kind of fun, in fact, to quiz earnest potential attendees about the details of the scientific method, or whether Johannes Kepler should finally win that well-deserved Oscar.) Keeping up with today’s hottest trends, the March for Science has wrapped itself in identity politics, cranked up the oven to “scorch,” and potentially set things on track to unceremoniously collapse into one giant intersectional soufflé.

The troubles brewing within the March for Science surfaced in January, marked by a now-deleted official tweet: “Colonization, racism, immigration, native rights, sexism, ableism, queer-, trans-, intersex-phobia, & econ justice are scientific issues.” Since then, the addled march has torn through four different diversity statements, shellacked by critics on both sides. (Harvard’s Steven Pinker bashed the march’s “anti-science PC/identity politics/hard-left rhetoric,” while others complained the statement didn’t go far enough.) The march’s latest set of “Diversity and Inclusion Principles,” when paired with its more shame-faced and apologetic sibling, the “Statement on Diversity and Inclusion,” tops out at over 1,000 words.

You might think that this amounts to a protest march protesting too much. But the hits keep coming. When Bill Nye, the children’s TV personality-turned-science-advocate, was announced as an honorary chair of the march last week, critics bemoaned his status as a white male. Oddly, no one seemed particularly riled up about the fact that Nye is not an actual “scientist” at all. “I was born a dorky white guy who became an engineer,” Nye told BuzzFeed, reportedly “baffled” at the brouhaha. “I’m playing the hand I was dealt. We can’t — this march can’t solve every problem at once.”

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The Russian Stooge Obama’s record on Russia By Rich Lowry

By on April 12th, 2017

The circumstantial evidence is mounting that the Kremlin succeeded in infiltrating the U.S. government at the highest levels.

How else to explain a newly elected president looking the other way after an act of Russian aggression? Agreeing to a farcically one-sided nuclear deal? Mercilessly mocking the idea that Russia represents our foremost geopolitical foe? Accommodating the illicit nuclear ambitions of a Russian ally? Welcoming a Russian foothold in the Middle East? Refusing to provide arms to a sovereign country invaded by Russia? Diminishing our defenses and pursuing a Moscow-friendly policy of hostility to fossil fuels?

All of these items, of course, refer to things said or done by President Barack Obama. To take them in order: He reset with Russia shortly after its clash with Georgia in 2008. He concluded the New START agreement with Moscow that reduced our nuclear forces but not theirs. When candidate Mitt Romney warned about Russia in the 2012 campaign, Obama rejected him as a Cold War relic. The president then went on to forge an agreement with Russia’s ally Iran to allow it to preserve its nuclear program. During the red-line fiasco, he eagerly grasped a lifeline from Russia at the price of accepting its intervention in Syria. He never budged on giving Ukraine “lethal” weapons to defend itself from Russian attack. Finally, Obama cut U.S. defense spending and cracked down on fossil fuels, a policy that Russia welcomed since its economy is dependent on high oil prices.

Put all of this together, and it’s impossible to conclude anything other than that Obama was a Russian stooge, and not out of any nefarious deals, but out of his own naivete and weakness. Obama didn’t expect any rewards when he asked then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev during a hot-mic moment at an international meeting to relay to Vladimir Putin his ability to be more “flexible” after the 2012 election; he was, to put it in terms of the current Russian election controversy, “colluding” with the Russians in the belief it was a good strategy. His kompromat was his own foolishness.

The cost of Obama’s orientation toward Russia became clearer during the past two weeks. When he pulled up short from enforcing his red line, an agreement with the Russians to remove Bashar Assad’s chemical weapons became the fig leaf to cover his retreat. This deal was obviously deficient, but Obama officials used clever language to give the impression that it had removed all chemical weapons from Syria. Never mind that Assad still used chlorine gas to attack his population — exploiting a grievous loophole — and that evidence piled up that Assad was cheating more broadly.

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