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June 2017

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

London Attacks Followed by Same Old Stale Arguments We are in a rut. By Jonah Goldberg

By on June 7th, 2017

The saddest part about the recent terrorist attacks in the U.K. — aside from the actual horror for the victims and their families, of course — was that there was so little new to say about it.

But that didn’t stop anyone. Everyone backed into their usual rhetorical corners, filling in the blanks on the familiar post-terror conversation like it was a game of Mad Libs, only none of the answers were particularly funny.

I, for one, could easily recycle one of umpteen columns on how the Left’s response is wrong and why we have to shed our dysfunctional aversion to speaking plainly about the nature of the threat and what is required to fight it. Or I could note that President’s Trump’s response to the attack was less than helpful. But to what end? Who hasn’t heard the arguments a thousand times already?

Watching cable news and surveying the algae blooms of “hot takes” on Twitter, it’s hard to imagine anything will dramatically change. We are growing numb to the problem as it becomes part of the background noise of daily life. One of the attackers in London was even featured in a 2016 TV documentary titled The Jihadi Next Door.

Contrast the reactions to the London attacks and to Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris accord. A writer for The Nation spoke for many when he assured readers that “this is murder” and a “crime against humanity.” No sane liberal condoned the terrorist attacks, but the condemnations seemed rote, while passion was reserved for admonishing those who made too big a deal of them or flirted with “Islamophobia.”

In 2014, Jeremy Corbyn, who has a remote but possible chance of being the next British prime minister, argued that supporting the Islamic State is just another “political point of view” and that the government shouldn’t put up “legal obstacles” to Islamic State fighters trying to return to England. This perspective hasn’t cost him much with his admirers on the left, but I have to wonder what the reaction would be if he described climate-change “denial” as just another political point of view.

But there I go, falling into the familiar trap of scoring ideological points rather than dealing with the larger truth. And what truth is that? Simply that we are in a rut when it comes to terrorism.

The Ariana Grande concert attack in Manchester did generate more than the usual passion because lots of pundits and policymakers, never mind television viewers, have teenage daughters they could imagine attending an event like that.

But did you hear about the bombing of a popular ice-cream parlor in Baghdad last week? Families taking their kids there for a post-fast treat were blown to bits by the Islamic State.

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Fake Security Is More Dangerous Than No Security How the “Improved Visa Waiver Program” creates the perilous illusion of security. Michael Cutler

By on June 7th, 2017

Once again terrorists have attacked and wounded and killed innocent civilians in London, England.

On June 3rd a terrorist attack at London Bridge and Borough Market was carried out by three apparent Jihadists who used a rented van to mow down pedestrians, whereupon the three emerged from that van and attacked still more victims with their knives.

The terrorists have applied to their attacks the principle behind Occam’s razor, that postulates that in attempting to understand how something is accomplished, the simplest solution is most likely the correct solution.

In the case of terrorists, using a simple strategy and crude weapons such as motor vehicles and knives that are readily available, decreases the likelihood that such plots can be discovered and prevented before they are carried out.

While the TSA, was created in the wake of the terror attacks of 9/11 and its FY 2017 Budget of $7.6 billion and more than 42,000 employees exist to safeguard transportation, with particular emphasis on airliners, most terror attacks do not involve airliners.

Continuing with the concept of Occam’s razor, the United States needs to do whatever is possible and reasonable to prevent international terrorists from entering the United States in the first place.

All vulnerabilities must, therefore be effectively addressed.

If an ounce of protection is worth a pound of cure, preventing the entry of such terrorists represents a ton of cure.

As I have noted in a recent article, Border Security Is National Security.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

The Treasonous Secession of Climate Confederacy States Prosecute Governor Daniel Greenfield

By on June 7th, 2017

After President Trump rejected the Paris Climate treaty, which had never been ratified by the Senate, the European Union announced that it would work with a climate confederacy of secessionist states.

Scotland and Norway’s environmental ministers have mentioned a focus on individual American states. And the secessionist governments of California, New York and Washington have announced that they will unilaterally and illegally enter into a foreign treaty rejected by the President of the United States.

The Constitution is very clear about this. “No state shall enter into any treaty.” Governor Cuomo of New York has been equally clear. “New York State is committed to meeting the standards set forth in the Paris Accord regardless of Washington’s irresponsible actions.”

Cuomo’s statement conveniently comes in French, Chinese and Russian translations.

“It is a little bold to talk about the China-California partnership as though we were a separate nation, but we are a separate nation,” Governor Brown of California announced.

In an interview with the Huffington Post, the radical leftist described California as “a real nation-state”.

Brown was taking a swing through China to reassure the Communist dictatorship of California’s loyalty to an illegal treaty at the same time as EU boss Juncker was bashing America and kissing up to Premier Li Keqiang at the EU-China summit. It’s one thing when the EU and China form a united front against America. It’s quite another when California and China form a united front against America.

The Climate Alliance of California, New York, Washington, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Oregon, Colorado, Hawaii, Virginia and Rhode Island looks a lot like the Confederacy’s Montgomery Convention. Both serve as meeting points for a secessionist alliance of states to air their grievances against the Federal government over an issue in which they are out of step with the nation.

“We’re a powerful state government. We have nine other states that agree with us,” Brown boasted.

Two more and Jim Jones’ old pal could have his own confederacy.

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HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

FBI Raids Dearborn Home in Connection with National Security Investigation By Debra Heine

By on June 7th, 2017

The FBI conducted a raid in Dearborn, Michigan, last Thursday night, taking one person into custody in connection with a national security investigation. Federal investigators reportedly blocked off the street and spent several hours at the home gathering evidence. They also told the local media that there was no immediate threat to public safety in metro Detroit.

Neighbors told Fox 2 that a Lebanese family consisting of a husband, wife, two kids, and an elderly woman moved into the house only about a month ago.

The multi-jurisdictional investigation started in New York, and according to sources, involved a target who might have been giving support to a terrorist organization.

Via Click on Detroit:

Residents watched and wondered what the FBI SWAT team was doing at the home on Jonathan Street. Several neighbors said dozens of law enforcement officials from multiple agencies blocked the street and searched the home.

Nobody answered the door, but Ken Donaldson, who cuts most of the lawns on Jonathan Street, said everyone on the street is nice. He said it shows that a national security operation can happen anywhere.

“Every time we catch one person, it’s a plus for the overall goal,” Donaldson said. “If they eliminate that kind of terrorism, every step is a plus.”

Former Detroit FBI boss Andy Arena said the fact that neighbors weren’t evacuated, and that there was no imminent threat, means there weren’t terrorist bombs or weapons in the home.

“If that was there, if there was a threat, the FBI would have gotten the neighbors, the people in the neighborhood, out of there,” Arena said.

Sources said the raid was a joint terrorism task force case of “providing money and/or material support to a terrorist organization.” The target lived in New York, but recently moved to Dearborn.

According to Arab America News, a local outlet in Dearborn, the man taken into custody is Samer ElDebek, who works as a truck driver.

Dennis Michael Lynch reported:

He was returned to New York “on federal charges of providing material support or resources to foreign terrorist organizations, and receiving military-type training from them,” the AAnews stated.

ElDebek reportedly had lived in New York, then went to Lebanon eight years ago. AAnews said he returned to New York last year, then moved to Dearborn about 10 months ago.

A warrant issued a day before the raid stated that the FBI believed ElDebek had explosive materials, and/or a manual on how to make them. Included in the dozens of boxes the agents seized from the home were reportedly “over 90 sparkling birthday candles and several high-powered Shot Grizzly fireworks.” The family denied owning the fireworks, claiming they belonged to a neighbor who shared the same garage.

Contrary to some reports from alt-right outlets, the raid had nothing to do with Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The ‘Private’ Jim Comey Some good questions the former FBI chief prefers not to answer.

By on June 7th, 2017

The media are pitching James Comey’s Thursday testimony as the biggest since Watergate, and the former FBI director may provide high Trump ian drama. Let’s hope Congress also challenges Mr. Comey on matters he’d rather not talk about.

The politically savvy Mr. Comey has a knack for speaking in congenial forums such as the clubby Senate Intelligence Committee he’ll address Thursday. By contrast he is refusing to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee—where he came under a grilling in May, days before he was fired—though there is no bar to him testifying more than once.

Circa News is also reporting (and we have confirmed) that Mr. Comey is refusing to answer seven questions sent to him in a letter from Judiciary on May 26. The bipartisan request is from Republican Chairman Chuck Grassley and ranking Democrat Dianne Feinstein, as well as the chairman and ranking Member of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism.

The questions are aimed at discovering how the contents of Mr. Comey’s famous “memo” to himself came to be splashed across the press. This still private memo reportedly says President Trump asked Mr. Comey to back off an investigation into former National Security AdviserMichael Flynn, and its contents surfaced in the New York Times not long after Mr. Comey was fired—courtesy of an unidentified Comey “associate.”

The Judiciary letter asks if Mr. Comey created other memos about interactions with Justice Department officials or Mr. Trump; if he shared the contents of his memos with people inside or outside the Justice Department; if he retained copies of the memos, and if so to turn them over to the committee.

We’re told Mr. Comey replied via email that he didn’t have to answer the questions because he is now a “private citizen.” But that same private citizen will be opining in front of a national TV audience before a committee investigating serious questions of law and intelligence. Mr. Comey shouldn’t be able to pick and choose which of his memos he sends to Congress and which he can keep for his memoirs. If Mr. Comey wrote those memos while FBI director, as his talkative pals claim, the memos are government work product and he has a duty to provide them to investigators.

The “private citizen” excuse is useful in that it exposes that Mr. Comey’s main goal will be providing testimony against Mr. Trump while reviving his own reputation. Tip for Thursday viewing: Notice if Mr. Comey answers questions selectively, ducking those he doesn’t like behind the cover of Robert Mueller’s special-counsel investigation.

The Intelligence Committee shouldn’t let him get away with it. If Mr. Comey wants a public stage to tell his side of the Trump story, fair enough. But he should also be required to provide actual copies of his memos (if they exist), disclose with whom he shared them, and where they are now stored. He should also tell the country if President Trump was a target of the Russia investigation while he supervised it at the FBI.

Oh, and someone should also ask Mr. Comey if it’s true, as the Washington Post has reported, that the FBI probe of Hillary Clinton’s emails was triggered by a phony document provided by Russian intelligence. The point of this Congressional oversight is to help the public understand how Russia tried to meddle with American democracy, and Mr. Comey’s duty didn’t end with his dismissal.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Are You Sitting Down? John Manning, the new dean of Harvard Law, is a conservative.

By on June 7th, 2017

These pages have been reporting on the intellectual decline of American higher education, but maybe all is not lost. One near-miraculous sign of life is the appointment of constitutional law professor John Manning as the next dean of Harvard Law School.

Mr. Manning, who joined the law school faculty in 2004, takes over a post on July 1 that is typically held by a liberal, most notably by current Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan. He is a well-known expert on administrative law and statutory interpretation who doesn’t hide his jurisprudential conservatism.

The new dean has served two stints at the Justice Department and clerked for the late Justice Antonin Scalia, as well as the late Judge Robert Bork on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. Following that distinguished tutelage, Mr. Manning has become one of the premier textualists in the legal academy, meaning that he emphasizes the importance of lawyers and judges reading and interpreting the plain text of a law.

Mr. Manning has been deputy dean and perhaps his competence in that role made him a natural choice for promotion. But in an academy that usually treats conservatives like the walking dead, credit Harvard for promoting on merit regardless of ideology.

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EDUCATION, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

50 Years After Loving v. Virginia, Colleges Embrace Segregation Students have demanded free tuition and housing for blacks as well as black-only dorms. By Jason Riley

By on June 7th, 2017

June 12 marks the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s 1967 ruling in Loving v. Virginia, which held that states could no longer prohibit marriages on racial grounds.

“Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State,” wrote Chief Justice Earl Warren. Like an earlier landmark decision on race, Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the Loving opinion was unanimous and brief—just 10 pages long. It was also unsurprising.

For starters, nearly two decades earlier, in 1948, the California Supreme Court had already ruled that the state’s antimiscegenation law violated the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment. Court rulings aside, polling showed that racial attitudes among whites nationwide had shifted significantly in the postwar period. Between 1942 and 1963, white support for school integration grew to 62% from 30%, and white backing for neighborhood integration jumped to 64% from 35%. By the early 1960s, 79% of whites supported integrated public transportation, up from 44% in the early 1940s.

As Harvard Law Professor Randall Kennedy wrote in “Interracial Intimacies,” his book on the history of cross-racial romance, the high court’s Loving decision helped to further an existing (and welcome) trend. “Although a large majority of whites continued to disapprove of interracial marriage throughout the 1960s—in 1964, 60 percent of adult whites polled declared their support for antimiscegenation laws—the matrimonial color bar eventually suffered the same fate as all the other customs and laws of segregation.” Nor were white views the only ones evolving. In 1968 only 48% of blacks approved of mixed marriages.

The Loving decision was handed down amid a civil-rights movement in full swing. The 1963 March on Washington had already occurred. The 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act had already passed. In 1967 Hollywood released “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” about an interracial couple planning to marry, and it became a box-office hit. In 1967 Peggy Rusk, daughter of President Lyndon Johnson’s secretary of state, Dean Rusk, married Guy Smith, a black man. Time magazine called it “a marriage of enlightenment” and featured a wedding photo of the couple on its cover.

The irony is that we will mark the 50th anniversary of Loving at a time when race-consciousness is once again ascendant, not only among “alt-right” types, but more tellingly among self-styled progressives and left-wing institutions that once worked so hard to combat Jim Crow policies. The liberals who are cheering the recent removal of Confederate monuments to racial separatism also indulge the separatist rhetoric of groups like Black Lives Matter. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. ’s calls for colorblind policies seem as dated as concerns about interracial hookups. CONTINUE AT SITE

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Left Celebrates a Terrorist—Again It took a backlash for Oscar López Rivera to lose his ‘hero’ status. By Jillian Kay Melchior

By on June 7th, 2017

When the fourth bomb exploded in lower Manhattan on New Year’s Eve 1982, Detective Richard Pastorella took shrapnel from his stomach to his scalp. It blinded him, maimed his right hand, left him nearly deaf. Surgeons used 22 titanium screws to hold together his ruined face.

“When my granddaughters present me with crayon drawings and are pleased to show them to me, I have to pretend that I can see them and enjoy their effort,” Detective Pastorella later testified. “I have sacrificed my pride, my dignity and will never be free.”

Now the leader of the terrorists who maimed him is free. President Obama granted Oscar López Rivera clemency in January. This weekend he will march in New York’s Puerto Rican Day Parade.

López Rivera was the “prime recruiter” for the terrorist group FALN, as well as “a key trainer in bombing, sabotage, and other techniques of guerrilla warfare,” according to his presentencing report. From 1974 to 1983, his group carried out more than 130 bombings, killing six. He has shown little remorse. Last month he insisted that “colonized people” have the right to use “all methods within reach, including force.”

The Puerto Rican Day Parade had originally designated López Rivera its first-ever National Freedom Hero. After massive backlash, organizers tried to save face. He stepped down from his “formal role,” they announced, but will still march.

So will the city’s far-left political elite. Although both of the state’s U.S. senators said they wouldn’t march, Mayor Bill de Blasio was willing to do so even when the terrorist was the official parade honoree. His office called the uproar “needless controversy.” City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito overtly supported López Rivera.

That’s part of a broader trend: Over the past year, the far left has repeatedly venerated terrorists and murderers. Take Rasmea Odeh. In 1969 her group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, murdered two college students by planting a bomb in a box of sweets in a Jerusalem grocery.

Odeh awaits deportation after lying about her terrorism conviction on U.S. immigration papers. According to the feminist website Jezebel, she “epitomizes the progressive left movement and exemplifies the women to whom we should be listening.” The Women’s March gave Odeh a prominent role as it orchestrated the Day Without Women strike. She has also gone on the campus speaking circuit.

Another leftist cause célèbre: Leonard Peltier, serving a life sentence for murdering two FBI agents at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota in 1975. He and other assailants ambushed the men, riddling their cars with at least 125 bullets. As one agent lay wounded and another tried to surrender, Peltier shot both point-blank.

The Standing Rock alliance of environmentalists, Hollywood progressives and Native American activists have fought for Peltier’s release, portraying his conviction as a legacy of the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre.

The progressive media insists that it’s conservatives who are violence-prone—especially in the era of Trump. But it’s the left that champions monsters like Oscar López Rivera, Rasmea Odeh and Leonard Peltier.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Why kids can’t think By Jack Hellner

By on June 7th, 2017

Even though manipulated computer models and predictions of global warming/climate change have been demonstrated to be completely inaccurate, children are taught almost from the womb that the science is settled and anyone who questions the agenda is stupid and shouldn’t be listened to. No wonder they don’t ask any questions.

Kids are also indoctrinated to believe that anyone who wants to require photo IDs to vote is trying to oppress the vote and is a racist. I wonder why the kids won’t question the professor as to why those same people who can’t get photo IDs are required to have them for so many other things by the government.

The kids are taught that sanctuary cities are good and that people who want to enforce the borders are anti-immigrant, racists, xenophobes and want to harm women and children who just want to improve their lives. They should be taught that the U.S is a nation of laws, that politicians should uphold their oath to enforce the laws and that nations are not nations without borders and laws.

Students are repeatedly taught that capitalism and profits are bad, corporations are greedy and the rich don’t pay their fair share. They are taught that government is a benevolent entity that helps the poor. They should be taught that capitalism is what caused the United States to lift people up and that socialism destroys countries and holds people down, such as Venezuela, Cuba, and the Soviet Union.

They are rarely taught that the main reason for terrorism is that they want to destroy our way of life. It is not because of climate change, poverty, or lack of education. The leaders of terrorist organizations are idealists.

Colleges are almost wholly staffed by liberals with a few conservatives sprinkled in. Conservatives have been blocked frequently from speaking on campus. That is intentionally keeping alternative views from the students.

The reason students, Democrats and most reporters don’t seem to have any critical thinking ability is because they have been taught that to get along they must go along.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Rewriting the Six-Day War By Dr. Gabriel Glickman

By on June 7th, 2017

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: When Israeli officials seemingly questioned their country’s narrative of the Six-Day War, politicized historians and commentators seized on their words as vindication of their claim that Israel had been the aggressor. But what these officials had actually said was abridged, misrepresented, and taken out of context. This distortion provided fodder for a tendentious rewriting of history. https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/rewriting-six-day-war/

In 1972, retired Israeli general Matityahu Peled sparked a public debate when he claimed that in the run-up to the June 1967 war, the Israeli government “never heard from the General Staff that the Egyptian military threat was dangerous for Israel.” British journalist John Cooley described it as “newer evidence” that Israel was culpable for the war, while another prominent British journalist, David Hirst, observed that “Peled … committed what … seemed nothing less than blasphemy.”

What made Peled’s “revelations” particularly odd is that at the time of the prewar crisis, he was one of the generals who argued most forcefully for a preemptive strike to stave off the Arab threat. According to one account, Peled used “aggressive, highly pejorative language” to entice the Israeli government into a decisive blow against the Arab armies massing on Israel’s doorstep. To delay, he argued at the time, was to cast doubt on the abilities of Israel’s armed forces, and Peled was particularly concerned with protecting the military’s reputation as a deterrent against future Arab aggression. “We deserve to know why we have to suffer this shame!” he demanded of Israel’s civilian leadership.

In his post-army incarnation, Peled became a well-known leftist activist and politician. This swerve could, of course, neither change his actual behavior in the run-up to the war nor give him carte blanche to rewrite history to accord with his later political agenda. Nevertheless, the Peled thesis continued to be promoted as vindication of Israel’s supposed culpability for the 1967 war.

In 1982, the argument was amplified by another statement, this time coming from then Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, who had been a member of the national unity government formed by Levi Eshkol shortly after the mobilization of the Arab armies in May 1967. In a speech at Israel’s National Defense College, Begin made a passing reference to the 1967 War in order to justify his own controversial decision to wage war against the PLO in Lebanon. Some Western observers, however, saw it as another confessional moment. According to one account: “In Israel itself … a little of the truth about the June war has seeped out over the years.”

To be sure, Begin seemed to contradict Israel’s moral justification for 1967 when he said, “The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.” However, while most historians stop there when quoting Begin, his reference to the Six-Day War went on. The crux of the speech was that there are two types of war: “[W]ar without choice, or a war of one’s choosing.” Begin classified the Six-Day War as the latter, because Israel decided to preempt rather than absorb the Arab attack (as happened in October 1973).

Yet he viewed the war as a fight for survival – i.e., there was, in fact, no choice involved, because Israel faced the threat of annihilation at the hands of multiple Arab armies. Thus, he went on to say: “This was a war of self-defense in the noblest [sense]. The Government of National Unity … decided unanimously: we will take the initiative and attack the enemy, drive him back and thus assure the security of Israel and the future of the nation.”

Indeed, it was common knowledge in 1967 that the Arab wartime strategy was predicated on Israel’s taking the first shot. Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser was confident that his forces could take on and outperform the IDF, and his mouthpiece at the Egyptian daily al-Ahram, Muhammad Heikal, openly taunted Israel in widely publicized editorials.

In short, Begin’s comments were abridged and taken out of context by historians and commentators seeking to score political points.

The false narrative of Israeli “confessions” gained further traction on the 30thanniversary of the war, this time involving a posthumously published interview with wartime minister of defense (not to mention one of the most universally recognized heroes of the war) Moshe Dayan. However, the authenticity of the interview is unclear, since it was allegedly adapted from a series of private conversations with Dayan in 1976 of which there is no original record. Nonetheless, this has not stopped Israel’s critics from quoting its most striking portion and hailing it as another key admission.

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