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May 2017

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Inflating Muslim Claims To Jerusalem A new UNESCO resolution denies Israel’s Jewish history and sovereignty. Morton A. Klein and Daniel Mandel

By on May 17th, 2017

Last Tuesday, coinciding with Israel’s 69th Independence Day, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) passed a resolution entitled ‘Occupied Palestine.’ The resolution denies Israel any sovereign claim to its own capital city, Jerusalem, and falsely describes Israel as the city’s “occupying power” and speaks of the “cultural heritage of Palestine and the distinctive character of East Jerusalem.”

Clearly, the intention of the UNESCO resolution is to achieve internationally the direct repudiation of Israel’s Jewish history and sovereignty in favor of Arab claims.

Lying behind this Arab diplomatic offensive is an Arab street and Muslim world, neither of which have reconciled themselves to Israel’s existence nor even the peoplehood of the Jews and thus the Jewish immemorial association and claim to Jerusalem.

However, this clamor and fixation on Jerusalem, quite recent in Muslim history, has led many to conclude that Jerusalem is holy to Islam and central to Palestinian Arab consciousness. This is, however, a propaganda fiction.

Though possessing important Muslim shrines, such as the Dome of the Rock and the Al Aqsa mosques, Jerusalem holds no great significance for Islam, as history shows.

Jerusalem rates not a single mention in the Quran, nor is it the direction in which Muslims turn to pray. References in the Quran and hadith to the ‘farthest mosque,’ in allusion to which the Al Aqsa Mosque is named, and which has sometimes been invoked to connect Islam to Jerusalem since its earliest days, clearly doesn’t refer to a mosque which didn’t exist in Muhammad’s day.

Indeed, the site of the biblical temples is called Temple Mount, not the Mosque Mount and –– in contrast to innumerable Palestinian Authority statements today –– was acknowledged as such for decades by Jerusalem’s Muslims.

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The Flaws of “Oslo” Are the Same as the Flaws of Oslo In its embrace of social psychology and “process over politics,” the new hit drama mirrors the mentality that helped produce the disastrous Oslo Accords themselves.

By on May 17th, 2017

Nearly a quarter-century has passed since Yitzḥak Rabin and Yasir Arafat shook hands on the White House lawn. The agreement signed on September 13, 1993 established the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) as the official representative body of the Palestinian people and permitted its chairman, Yasir Arafat, to return to the West Bank after his extended isolation in Tunisia. Committing Israel and the Palestinians to negotiate a final-status agreement, the so-called Oslo Accords opened the era of the peace process. https://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/2017/05/the-flaws-of-oslo-are-the-same-as-the-flaws-of-oslo/

It is worth recalling the buoyant atmosphere that characterized not only that particular moment on the South Lawn but, more generally, the period in world history in which it occurred. Most dramatically, the cold war with the Soviet Union had ended in a triumph for the United States and its form of liberal democracy. If this was not quite the “end of history,” as a major public-policy essay had conjectured, the fall of the mighty Soviet empire raised similarly exuberant expectations for other arenas of conflict. Why, after all, couldn’t Israelis and Palestinians make peace?

To some, all the elements were in place. The Palestinians, it was averred, were willing to come to the table, and Israel was open, forward-looking, and “hopeful.” Its Labor-party leadership—not only the war hero Rabin but also Shimon Peres and Ehud Barak—had set aside any remaining illusions of permanent occupation. Having marginalized the “territorial maximalists,” Israelis were prepared to make the painful compromises for peace—a dynamic that President Bill Clinton, a friend of Israel, could help push along.

As even ardent supporters of the ensuing peace process will admit, things did not—to put it mildly—go according to plan, and the final-status agreement never came about. Today, notwithstanding Donald Trump’s (quite possibly fleeting) enthusiasm for the project, even the beginning of direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority seems highly unlikely. The optimism that greeted the apparent breakthrough of 1993, however understandable in light of the cultural atmosphere of the time, in retrospect seems downright delusional. Yet many Westerners, Jewish and gentile alike, still look back at the Oslo years as a kind of golden age, one that shines only the brighter in contrast to the allegedly dark present.

Was Oslo a golden age? Those inclined to that belief now have the gift of a cleverly constructed drama that supports, and flatters, their view. Written by the New York playwright J.T. Rogers, Oslo tells the backstory of the Norwegian-brokered talks between informal envoys of the Israeli foreign ministry and the PLO over a ten-month period in 1992-93. Nearly three hours long, the play is heavy on dialogue and mostly lacking in the bells and whistles of many major New York productions. Nevertheless, by any non-Hamiltonstandard the play has been a hit, having moved from its debut last year at a small off-Broadway venue to the much bigger Lincoln Center Theater. On the evening I saw it, the crowd, more Upper West Side than Upper Midwest, gave the performers a rapturous standing ovation.

One might attribute this fervor at least in part to our own, highly fractious times, in which political, not to say partisan, drama is ripe for a comeback. But Oslo, which has been nominated for a 2017 Tony Award, is also an effective piece of indoctrination, mirroring, to a subtle but powerful degree, the dominant political mentality that helped produce the disastrous Oslo Accords themselves.

Aside fromthe iconic Rabin-Arafat handshake, the whole story of the Oslo negotiations is not especially well known, and Rogers deserves credit for telling it with relative fidelity. The events are seen from the perspective of a Norwegian deputy foreign minister named Jan Egeland and his wife and fellow bureaucrat, Mona Juul. Thanks to a shared zeal, whose motive is never examined, the two navigate all manner of obstacles in order to bring Israelis and Palestinians together in secret negotiations at a country house south of Oslo, where the play is largely set.

Indeed, the play quite artfully stresses the single most astonishing fact about the Oslo talks: not only were they secret, but, on the Israeli side, they were at first completely unauthorized. At the time, Israelis were forbidden by law from having direct contact with PLO officials. It was Yossi Beilin, Israel’s deputy foreign minister, who unilaterally decided that flouting the law was justified by the end he sought. In December 1992, Beilin asked Yair Hirschfeld, a University of Haifa economist, to meet in London with the PLO’s finance minister, Ahmed Qurei, also known as Abu Ala. In January and early February, at further meetings in Norway, Hirschfeld and another economist, Ron Pundak, began drafting with the PLO team a document offering an Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and Jericho, the establishment of an autonomous Palestinian administration in the West Bank, and direct negotiations regarding a final-status accord.

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Making Sense of the News about Trump, Comey, and Russia Charles Lipson

By on May 17th, 2017

The two big stories are about Pres. Trump:

(1) The discussion with then-FBI Director Comey about the Mike Flynn investigation, and

(2) The discussion with the Russians about ISIS.

Let me offer comments on each, rather than a regular news roundup.

My goal is to say what we know and don’t know about each and put their importance and potential consequences in some perspective.

◆ Comment on FBI Director Comey’s private meeting with President Trump

The meeting was in mid-February, the day after Flynn was fired as National Security Adviser

The most grievous possibility is that Trump was asking Comey to stop the investigation, which could be seen as obstruction of justice. That’s a very serious charge.

Comey claims to have written a memo-to-self after the meeting. He held it secretly for three months and then had friends leak it to the press on Tuesday. The anonymous friends read excerpts from the memo and did not release it to the press. They kept their own identities secret, as well.

Since it was Comey’s own memo, the leak had to come from him. No one besides Comey and the friends though whom he is leaking has actually seen the memo. We don’t know if he wrote memos on other meetings with Trump (or with others), but he probably did.

I suspect this memo and any others he wrote will be subpoenaed. That could get very interesting. The Democrats, in particular, will enjoy the circus and the stench of scandal, using it to block the Trump presidency.

Personally, I am disturbed Trump even broached the subject of the Flynn-Russia investigation with Comey.

Excluding Attorney General Jeff Sessions from the meeting casts further doubt on the propriety of the President’s behavior.

But there are problems with interpreting the information we currently have as an attempt to obstruct justice, which is how the Democrats and their favorite media are spinning it.

First, if there was an attempt to obstruct justice, Comey had a clear legal obligation to report it. He did not. That suggests he thought it was not such an attempt.
Second, Comey never discussed this potential obstruction with the second-in-command at his agency, which he presumably would have done if it were a disturbing issue or a close call.
Third, Comey never threatened to resign, a threat he famously made during the George W. Bush administration over a DOJ decision. He presumably would have done so–or told his associates about his doubts–if he thought Trump was trying to block an FBI investigation.
Fourth, Comey gave very detailed briefings to senior Congressional investigators about the Russian investigation and never mentioned it.
Fifth, Comey did not leak this bombshell memo while he was employed at the FBI. He kept it private for three months and only disclosed it after being fired. That means he either did not think the information sufficiently damning or else he thought it was his “job insurance” in case Trump wanted to fire him (a very disturbing possibility, reminiscent of J. Edgar Hoover). Right now, we simply don’t know why he kept it secret, especially if he thought it was so important.
Sixth, it is possible that Trump’s statement was less a request to kill the investigation of Michael Flynn (which would be obstruction, if that was Trump’s specific intention) and more a vague aspiration that he hoped this mess would end soon with Flynn cleared. (Again, I do not think the President should say any such thing to the leader of that investigation. That’s true even if his statement falls well short of obstruction.)

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Slain DNC Official Contacted WikiLeaks? The late Seth Rich, not Russia, may have leaked the internal DNC documents. Matthew Vadum

By on May 17th, 2017

It was the Obama administration in 2009 that talked about a reset with Russia and a desire to reset relationships. It was Hillary Clinton who signed off on the deal that gave a Russian company one-fifth of the U.S. uranium supply. Where is the questioning about that? What did they get?
The federal gumshoe told Fox that Rich transferred 44,053 emails and 17,761 attachments between DNC leaders, dated from January 2015 through late May 2016, to MacFadyen before May 21 last year. On July 22 last year, 12 days after Rich’s death, WikiLeaks published internal DNC emails that seemed to indicate senior party officials colluded to prevent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont from securing the Democratic presidential nomination.

The emails revealed, among other things, that DNC officials threatened to out Sanders as an atheist to hurt his candidacy in believer-rich Kentucky and West Virginia. One problem: Sanders, unlike most of his fellow Marxists, isn’t an atheist. He is a Jew who has made statements indicating he is religious and spiritual and that these things are important to him.

Outrage over the DNC rigging the primaries on behalf of eventual nominee Hillary Clinton cost DNC chairman Debbie Wasserman Schultz her job.

Rich’s family, D.C. police, the DNC, an anonymous former federal law enforcement official, and a current FBI official deny Wheeler’s claims. Rich’s laptop “never contained any e-mails related to WikiLeaks, and the FBI never had it,” the former official told NBC News. The current FBI official told NBC Washington’s Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) never gave Rich’s computer to the FBI.

Of Wheeler’s claims, DNC flak Xochitl Hinojosa said, “We know of no evidence that supports these allegations. We are continuing to cooperate with investigators and have no further comment.”

Rich was 27 when he was shot twice in the back by a person or persons unknown near his Washington, D.C. home at 4:20 in the morning on July 10, 2016. Apparently there was a struggle but his wallet, credit cards, cellphone, and wristwatch were not stolen. Even though the evidence doesn’t suggest he was robbed, the MPD has characterized the unsolved case as a botched robbery, reportedly because Rich’s Bloomingdale neighborhood had recently seen several muggings.

Rich had been active in Democratic Party politics since high school and graduated from Omaha, Nebraska-based Creighton University in 2011 with a degree in political science and history. At the time of his death, he served as the DNC’s Deputy Director-Data-for-Voter Protection/Expansion.

The police won’t say if Rich was able to identify his attackers or offer any information before he died in a hospital. A surveillance video reportedly shows Rich being followed by two men, but police refuse to make it public.

After the murder, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange made the claim that he had been working with Rich and seemingly implied he was killed because he was the source of the hacked DNC emails. At least $150,000 in rewards have been offered for information in the case. WikiLeaks is offering $20,000. The MPD is offering $25,000. Republican lobbyist Jack Burkman, who has worked with the Rich family, is also offering a reward. Fox News and other media outlets report Burkman’s reward is $130,000 but Washingtonian magazine gives the figure as $105,000.

Although the received wisdom in Washington is that Russia, absolutely, positively, hacked the DNC and gave WikiLeaks the DNC documents, Assange has long insisted neither the Russian government nor any “state party” handed his group those documents.

The question of who or what hacked into the DNC’s servers – if there were cyber-attacks at all – isn’t as clear-cut or settled as the mainstream media suggests.

Hacker “Guccifer 2.0” claimed credit for the attacks on DNC servers.

A private cyber-security firm hired by the DNC claimed Russia was the culprit. But the Central Intelligence Agency reportedly now has the ability to mimic foreign intelligence agencies’ hack attacks by leaving electronic “fingerprints” creating the false impression of a foreign intrusion into computer networks.

According to WikiLeaks, “[t]he CIA’s Remote Devices Branch’s UMBRAGE group collects and maintains a substantial library of attack techniques ‘stolen’ from malware produced in other states including the Russian Federation.”

With UMBRAGE and related projects the CIA cannot only increase its total number of attack types but also misdirect attribution by leaving behind the “fingerprints” of the groups that the attack techniques were stolen from. UMBRAGE components cover keyloggers, password collection, webcam capture, data destruction, persistence, privilege escalation, stealth, anti-virus (PSP) avoidance and survey techniques.

Come to think of it, the DNC’s certainty that it was hacked by Russia and only by Russia has always seemed a bit suspect.

James Bamford, a columnist at the left-wing magazine Foreign Policy, raised concerns about the claim last August.

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LePage’s Welfare Reform: Good for Maine, a Model for the Nation Under the governor, fewer Mainers are on welfare and more are working. By Sam Adolphsen

By on May 17th, 2017

Maine, which once led the nation in dependence on government welfare, is taking yet another step forward to fix its welfare system.

After six years of tackling tough welfare problems, Maine’s governor, Paul LePage, recently introduced a bill to further overhaul taxpayer-funded benefits programs. The Welfare Reform for Increased Security and Employment (RISE) Act would reinvent Maine’s welfare system to put work first, protect benefits for the truly needy, and make welfare a temporary hand up, not a lifetime handout.

LePage is no stranger to poverty himself. One of 18 children, LePage fled home at eleven to escape an abusive father. He spent time living on the streets and in cars, working odd jobs, and learning English as a second language. LePage’s rise from the streets to the Blaine House taught him broad lessons that he has applied to Maine’s welfare programs.

Governor LePage learned firsthand that the way out of poverty is not government welfare but personal responsibility, employment, and community support.

Applying these lessons learned, LePage has transformed Maine into a national leader tackling the welfare-dependency crisis. In 2011, one out of three Mainers was on welfare, and Maine was leading the way in many measures of dependency; it ranked in the top six for percentage of the population on food stamps, cash welfare, and Medicaid enrollment.

Governor LePage and his health and human services commissioner, Mary Mayhew, implemented time limits, work requirements, and anti-fraud programs that have already moved tens of thousands of Mainers from welfare back into the work force, helping businesses grow.

Nearly 250,000 Mainers (out of a total population of about 1.3 million) were dependent on food stamps when LePage assumed office in 2011. By 2016, that number had dropped to 180,000. While other states are crashing headlong into budget crises caused by Medicaid expansion, Maine has transitioned more than 80,000 people out of Medicaid, refocusing the program on the truly needy — all while the uninsured rate has declined. Maine now has $1 billion in the bank and a 40-year low in unemployment.

Now LePage wants to make sure that this trend continues for generations to come. The RISE Act focuses on work and individual responsibility — the key to moving people out of poverty and onto a more secure path. When LePage required able-bodied adults on food stamps to work, train, or volunteer, their average income more than doubled in just one year. That higher income more than offset the food stamps they lost, leaving them better off. Employment increased, incomes rose, and poverty declined. The research is clear: Jobs do a much better job of putting food on the table than an EBT card does. The RISE Act, if passed, will make sure that this work requirement continues in Maine.

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Fake News, Real Consequences Those who lie or exaggerate to weaken Trump may harm national security in the process. By Michael Brendan Dougherty

By on May 17th, 2017

Donald Trump’s presidency feels like it is in crisis. Reading the Washington Post is almost comical now. At least once a week we are treated to at least 18 — now 24, now 31! — sources within the White House reporting that Donald Trump had another very Trumpish day. He’s berating advisers. He’s cursing Barack Obama and the Deep State. He’s making decisions based on fake news. He’s bungling even routine jobs, such as an introductory phone call with the Australian prime minister. Everyone who works for him hates him. The press has the whiff of blood in their nares. They might just be able to take this guy down.

But it’s not Trump’s attempts at self-enrichment, the rank amateurism of his staff, or even his mismanaged relationships with his own party that are dragging him down. From the media’s perspective, it’s the Russia stuff that’s working. It flummoxes Trump, unmans him, and people love to share the latest conspiracy.

Granted, Donald Trump hasn’t helped himself. Russia and Trump seem to collect the same shady and deluded co-conspirators, and real second-raters at that. His former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, and his national-security adviser, General Michael Flynn, were pushed out over their dealings with Russian politicos. Trump’s habit of talking about foreign leaders in overly familiar ways — he has “great chemistry” with some — leads him to say too many admiring things about Vladimir Putin. And Trump Tower was notorious for leasing apartments to shady Russian characters associated with organized crime. Every time Trump tries to cauterize the wound, for example by firing the FBI director for not clearing his name, he makes things worse.

But now almost all of the justifiable anxiety about Trump’s character and behavior is transmuted into the Russian story. And frankly, we should be worried about how that plays out. For all the talk about how Russia is an unpleasant Eurasian gas station with a stunted economy, it’s still a nuclear power that feels itself humiliated. Our last two presidents both tried to improve relations with Moscow. And there are geopolitical situations where a president of the United States, Trump or someone else, would desperately need Russian help and cooperation. If the “get Trump” hysteria impedes that, it could do more harm than good.

And it is a matter of hysteria right now. Amateur conspiracy theories proliferate across Twitter and in the media. A viral story at the Washington Post alleged Russia had been involved in a sophisticated campaign to spread fake news. The evidence amounted to little more than what the Kremlin-funded RT network had tweeted over a few months. Another viral story alleged a secret back-door computer communication between the Trump campaign and its Russian masters; it was most likely a server sending spam and hotel promotions. There was the entertaining and prurient “dossier” on Trump, a document in which it seems intelligence agents shared rumors and fantasies about Donald Trump’s bizarre private forms of revenge on Barack Obama.

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Trump’s Russia leak: The real scandal behind the Washington Post story Fred Fleitz

By on May 17th, 2017

The Washington Post started a new anti-Trump firestorm late Monday when it reported that President Trump revealed highly classified information on terrorist threats from ISIS in Syria to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak. The Post’s sources, current and former U.S. officials, portrayed this as a major scandal that put sensitive intelligence sources and methods at risk.

The Post claims it did not reveal all the details of the disclosures from its sources because U.S. officials said this would “jeopardize important intelligence capabilities.”

Yes, there’s a scandal here. It concerns former and current U.S. officials leaking classified information to the press to undermine a U.S. president.

Did President Trump slip and accidently tell the Russians something classified? Other U.S. participants in the meeting denied this. National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster told the press Monday evening: “I was in the room. It didn’t happen.”

But keep in mind U.S. officials unfamiliar with intelligence sometimes make such mistakes. For example, in 2014, the Obama White House accidently revealed the name of the CIA Station Chief in Afghanistan to the press. The Obama White House also reportedly revealed sensitive intelligence to the media concerning the Stuxnet virus to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program and details of the Usama bin Laden raid. Where was the outrage by the mainstream media and Congressional Democrats over these leaks?

Senator Dianne Feinstein accidently leaked classified sensitive information on drone strikes in 2009 during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing. Nothing happened to her.

And of course there is Senator Patrick Leahy who deliberately leaked classified information to hurt President Reagan in 1987. As a result, he was thrown off the Senate Intelligence Committee and earned the nickname “Leaky Leahy.”

Furthermore, under U.S. law, the President of the United States is our nation’s ultimate classification authority. He can declassify information as he sees fit to conduct his national security policy.

The real scandal here concerns the current and former U.S. officials who spoke to the Washington Post to generate this story. We don’t know if these sources lied, misrepresented what went on in the Trump meeting with the Russians, or were second-guessing what Trump told them.

We do know that current U.S. officials – possibly with the NSC and intelligence agencies – originated this story and revealed highly classified intelligence to the Post as part of their leaks. They were joined by former U.S government officials who I assume worked for the CIA and the Obama NSC. These people committed felonies. They must be identified and prosecuted.

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Arkansas Joins Ranks of States Standing Up to Protect Constitutional Rights Against Foreign Law Christopher Holton

By on May 17th, 2017

Thanks to the tenacity and persistence of two key legislators in the Arkansas state capitol, Arkansas has joined the growing ranks of states that have moved to protect their citizens and residents from foreign laws and foreign legal doctrines, including Shariah, in state courts.

Representative Brandt Smith and Senator John Cooper combined to author American Laws for American Courts legislation, similar to legislation that has passed previously in Tennessee, Louisiana, Arizona, Kansas, Oklahoma, North Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, and Washington.

The U.S. Constitution especially under the Bill of Rights, the first Ten Amendments to the Constitution, has a unique set of rights that are truly unique around the world. Rights like Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom of Expression covered under the First Amendment, the Right to Bear Arms in the Second Amendment, Due Process, Equal Protection-all of these rights are uniquely American and are specified in our Constitution. Many foreign laws and foreign legal doctrines, including Sharia as just one example, as practiced around the world are in direct contravention of these rights. In fact, such rights do not exist in many foreign laws and foreign legal doctrines. When court cases arise in the United States involving foreign laws, there are inevitable conflicts with the U.S. Constitution.

The objectives and principals of American Laws for American Courts legislation are basically to ensure that a state court will not apply a foreign law or foreign legal doctrine if the application of that foreign law or foreign legal doctrine in the case at hand would result in the violation of any of the parties’ fundamental Constitutional Rights. American Laws for American Courts is not a blanket ban on foreign law. It is not even a ban on Sharia. It is a protection of individual fundamental Constitutional Rights. That is what American Laws for American Courts is all about.

American Laws for American Courts is necessary because we have seen over and over again cases involving foreign law and foreign legal doctrines appearing in U.S. Courts. Those who say that because we have Article VI of the U.S. Constitution we don’t need American Laws for American Courts are just ignorant about what is actually happening in our court systems. Article VI clearly is not protecting the fundamental Constitutional Rights of our citizens and residents in the United States against foreign laws and foreign legal doctrines. If it was, these cases wouldn’t be coming up and they are, by the dozens.

The need for an effective law preserving constitutional rights against the enforcement of unconstitutional foreign law is both real and urgent. The Center for Security Policy’s 2015 study, Shariah in American Courts: The Expanding Incursion of Islamic Law in the U.S. Legal System. The Center found 146 cases in 32 states in which a party to litigation attempted to have the matter resolved by applying shariah, rather than the statutes of the state in question. Included in this number were some appellate and several trial court cases in which the judges actually ruled for sharia over U.S. law.

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Sweden: A Qatari Protectorate by Judith Bergman

By on May 17th, 2017

At the opening of the mega-mosque, Malmö City Councilor Frida Trollmyr gave a speech in which she continued to use the term “cultural center”, never using the word “mosque”, as if — Soviet-style — the use of certain words could alter reality.

The mega-mosque was never supposed to be a mosque, according to the Wakf’s own application for building permits, but merely a “cultural center” (the application talks about “an activity center for youth and families in Malmö with a focus on Rosengård”).

When the journalist asked Khaled Assi whether his organization was in fact building a mosque, he told her that “there already is a mosque in Malmö” and that the “cultural center” would just contain a “small prayer room”.

On April 28, the Ministry of Awqaf and Islamic Affairs of the State of Qatar opened the Umm Al-Mu’minin Khadijah Mosque in Malmö, Sweden. Qatar — the epicenter of Muslim Brotherhood and the base of its proselytizing megaphone, Al Jazeera — paid more than 3 million euros to build the mosque, which is almost 2,000 square meters and accommodates up to 2,000 people, making it the largest mosque in Scandinavia.

One astonishing fact about this new mega-mosque is that, according to Swedish mainstream media, the opening never happened. Not a single Swedish news outlet mentioned the opening. Swedish authorities were also completely silent on the topic. On her Facebook and Twitter accounts, Malmö’s Mayor, Katrin Stjernfeldt Jammeh, wrote about the opening of a new office for army recruits in Malmö and the Swedish coast guard moving its activities to Malmö harbor, but failed to mention the opening of the largest mosque in Scandinavia. The website of Malmö municipality was also silent on the topic.

For information on what goes on in Sweden, therefore, one has to turn to Qatar News Agency, which reported:

“Director of the Islamic Affairs Department at the Ministry of Awqaf and Islamic Affairs Khalid Shaheen Al Ghanim said that the mosque was built and furnished by the State of Qatar at a cost of over 3 million euros, under the supervision of the Ministry of Awqaf and in collaboration with the Wakf of Scandinavia in Malmo, Sweden

“He added that the Umm Al-Mu’minin Khadijah Mosque is the largest mosque in Scandinavia and is located on the first and second floors of the four-story building of the Wakf of Scandinavia in Sweden. The mosque is equipped with facilities for people with special needs to perform prayers and others for children and women.

“The opening ceremony was attended by representatives of Swedish local authorities, representatives of Islamic institutions in Sweden and Denmark, as well as a number of businessmen.”

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German Companies Boycott Breitbart, Not Ayatollahs by Stefan Frank

By on May 17th, 2017

Sadly, there seems to be no benefit in opposing this extortion: No one in Germany will praise anyone for protecting freedom of speech — on the contrary. As far as the American market is concerned, they seem to think: America is far away, no one will ever know about it.

For those who do not like self-appointed “morality police” entering the political arena and taking part in “boycott” actions against freedom of opinion, they themselves may consider boycotting those companies or reporting about them on Twitter.

The Breitbart boycotters seem to have no qualms about dealing with dictatorial regimes that habitually imprison and torture their citizens. In Iran, Daimler (owner of Mercedes-Benz) wants to become market leader in commercial vehicles. Lufthansa, which allegedly opposes “violence-glorifying, sexist, extremist as well as radical political content,” not only offers flights to Tehran, but praises the torture- and stoning-metropolis on its website.

Reports in January noted how Gerald Hensel, a high-ranking employee of Scholz & Friends, one of the two largest advertising agencies in Germany, used his professional position to launch a private war against the freedom of expression, under the slogan “No Money for the Right Wing!”

“Right wing” websites — those which have criticized the German government for its policies on, for example, Muslim mass-migration, the euro rescue or climate policy — should, according to Hensel, be cut off from advertising revenues. If they have no more money, so the thinking goes, it will be more difficult for them to stay in business; perhaps they would give up, and opinions differing from the mainstream would not be put into circulation.

Hensel explained his strategy on his private blog, which featured a red Soviet star: Large conglomerates that want to advertise on the Internet usually do not directly contact specific websites. Instead, computer programs recognize who is interested in a particular product or service, based on the user’s search behavior. The advertisement is personalized: a car maker will only approach users who are looking for cars. The advertisement, however, will not only appear on car websites, but on all sites the user visits in the following hours or days.

Hensel urged all of those who are disturbed by diverse views on the internet to exert pressure on companies, by branding particular websites as “right wing.” This pressure alone, according to his calculation, would ensure that the company would block the website in question.

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