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August 2017

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Reconstruction Ended in 1877, but It Isn’t Finished It took almost a century to end segregation, and Charlottesville showed the divisions that remain. By Allen Guelzo

By on August 19th, 2017

First there was the Civil War, which ended in 1865, and then there was the postwar era of Reconstruction, which is generally said to have ended in 1877. The war concluded with the surrender of the Confederate armies, but there’s a real sense in which Reconstruction is still a work in progress. And if the Charlottesville confrontation is any measure, Reconstruction won’t be over soon.

Civil War historians enjoyed four tremendous years between 2011 and 2015, when almost every day was the occasion for some Civil War sesquicentennial event. But so far no similar celebrations have followed to mark the sesquicentennials of Reconstruction.

One reason for this is that Reconstruction simply doesn’t have the cinematic fizz of Pickett’s Charge or Appomattox. But far worse is the sense that the Reconstruction years were somehow one long, uninterrupted botch. White Southerners denounced Reconstruction as the imposition of corrupt Northern rule by bayonet. White Northerners grew tired of paying the costs and wanted an exit strategy. Southern blacks, newly freed from slavery, stood for a brief moment in the sunshine of freedom, casting their first votes and owning their own property, until they were dragged into the new bondage of segregation.

A better question to ask is whether Reconstruction could have turned out differently. There is a deep temptation to blame the entire mess on white racism and wonder why Americans in the 1860s couldn’t have shown the same gumption in tackling race issues that Lyndon B. Johnson and Robert F. Kennedy did a century later. But race was only one of several obstacles in Reconstruction’s path, and the others were enough to make even the flintiest pessimist weep.

The first obstacle to a different Reconstruction was economic. The Civil War clobbered the Southern economy, costing the South $13.6 billion (U.S. national debt at the end of the war was $2.7 billion). Abolishing slavery alone wiped out between $1.6 billion and $2.7 billion in capital investment. But the South still produced the finest species of the world’s most marketable commodity, cotton, and cotton swiftly returned to its old prewar profitability. So did the prewar owners of the land on which it grew.

In an area known as the “black belt” in western Alabama, 236 landowners possessed at least $10,000 in real estate in 1860; by 1870, 101 of those same landowners still owned that land. This was about the same rate of persistence that had prevailed before the war.

Radical Republicans hoped the war would allow them to end not only slavery but the entire plantation system, and replace it with New England-style capitalism, characterized by manufacturing, finance and small-scale commercial farming. They understood that confiscating and subdividing the plantations of Confederate leaders as traitors was the only way to break the stranglehold of the South’s feudal elite. But the Constitution prohibits permanent property confiscation—“bills of attainder”—even in cases of treason. The war ended, the old masters came back, and the master class spent freely in organizing restless whites to suppress black votes. The labor system changed—but only from slavery to serfdom. CONTINUE AT SITE

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How HIV Became a Cancer Cure The immunologist behind the revolutionary new treatment set to win approval from the FDA.By Allysia Finley

By on August 19th, 2017

When Ben Franklin proposed in 1749 what eventually became the University of Pennsylvania, he called for an academy to teach “those Things that are likely to be most useful.” Today the university lays claim to having incubated the world’s biggest cancer breakthrough. In 2011, a team of researchers led by immunologist Carl June, a Penn professor, reported stunning results after genetically altering the T-cells of three patients with advanced chronic lymphocytic leukemia, a cancer that affects white blood cells.

The patients had failed to respond to many different traditional therapies. Yet two of the three patients experienced miraculous recoveries after Dr. June and his team gave them infusions of their own doctored white blood cells. Seven years later they remain cancer-free. The third patient died after showing improvements, though might have been saved had the treatment begun earlier.

The results, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in August 2011, opened the field of cancer immunotherapy. “It was a tipping point,” recalls the 64-year-old Dr. June. “There was an amazing outpouring because we showed for the first time that it could work.”

And it worked spectacularly well—more than 90% of pediatric patients with acute lymphoblastic leukemia in a subsequent clinical trial went into remission after being infused with Dr. June’s CAR T-cells (the acronym stands for “chimeric antigen receptor”). Last month an advisory committee of the Food and Drug Administration unanimously approved the therapy to treat acute lymphoblastic leukemia. The FDA is likely to give final approval within weeks.

Dr. June sat down at his office at Penn Medicine’s Smilow Center for Translational Research—near where then-Vice President Joe Biden launched the U.S. government’s cancer “moon shot” initiative in 2016—to discuss the development of CAR T-cell therapy, its potential to cure other cancers, and the challenges ahead—both scientific and regulatory.

“Cancer immunotherapy isn’t a new idea,” he says. “It’s been around for 100 years, but everybody has always snickered at it because it had always failed, and we didn’t understand the complexity.” Scientists once thought cancers were usually caused by viruses: “It wasn’t until the 1970s that we understood that most cancers are caused by mutations.”

Dr. June graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1975 and was trained as an oncologist. But while serving in the Navy Medical Corps, he studied infectious diseases. “My first research was with HIV,” he says. Later he would use the virus as a tool to treat patients.

The characteristic that makes HIV so deadly—it incorporates its DNA directly into host cells’—also makes it pliable for gene therapy. In the 1990s, Dr. June’s lab at Penn experimentally treated HIV patients using a re-engineered form of the virus. The researchers used modified HIV cells as a tool to alter the DNA of T-cells, which prevented the virus from replicating. Dr. June calls the cut-and-paste job “an anti-HIV molecular scissors.”

About 15 years ago he first considered using HIV to kill cancer cells. At the time, he says, “the rest of the community that did cancer immunotherapy had all been using viruses out of mice, called gammaretroviruses. And it turns out the HIV works better with human T-cells than the mouse virus does.”

Dr. June pauses for a quick tutorial on the human immune system: “There are two major cell types in our acquired immune systems that distinguish us from flies, and those are B-cells and T-cells.” T-cells are a sort of offensive weapon, destroying viruses and bacteria. B-cells are more like a shield. They produce antibodies that detect and swat down foreign invaders based on unique molecular characteristics. A CAR T-cell is a “chimera”—Greek for a fusion of two animals. It combines the “killing machinery” of T-cells with the precise antibody targeting of B-cells.

A CAR T-cell is designed to bind to a particular site on the cancer cell. That means, unlike with chemotherapy and radiation, other cells in the body aren’t damaged when patients receive CAR T-cell infusions. The result is fewer unpleasant long-term side effects.

When a CAR T-cell binds to the target, the immune system responds the same way it does to a virus: T-cells kill the cancerous cells and then proliferate. Once all the cancer is destroyed, CAR T-cells remain on what Dr. June calls “memory level”: “They are on surveillance, we now know, for at least seven years.”

There is, however, a hitch or two. After being cured, patients must receive blood infusions every few months to prevent their immune systems from killing off their B-cells. And about a third of patients undergoing treatment with CAR T-cells experience a violent immune-system reaction known as cytokine-release syndrome. When cancer cells die, they release inflammatory proteins called cytokines that can cause high fevers and leave patients comatose.

Cytokine-release syndrome almost ended the therapy in its infancy. In 2012, Dr. June’s first pediatric patient, 6-year-old Emma Whitehead, developed a 106-degree fever and experienced multiple organ failure. “We thought she was going to die,” he recalls.

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Two Killed in Finland Stabbing Spree Police shoot, detain man who allegedly stabbed at least eight people in downtown Turku By Zeke Turner

By on August 19th, 2017

Police in Turku, Finland, shot and detained a man who they allege stabbed at least eight people in the city’s center, killing two. Authorities said it was unclear if it was terrorism.

The attacker was being treated for gunshot wounds, said Stephan Sundqvist, superintendent for the police in Finland’s southwest region. He didn’t name the attacker.

“It might be a terror attack, and it might not be,” said Mr. Sundqvist, describing the rampage in the port town a two-hour drive west of Helsinki. “We won’t speculate about that at this point.”

Finland’s National Bureau of Investigation was looking into the matter and would be responsible for classifying the incident as a terror attack, Mr. Sundqvist said.

Finnish Interior Minister Paula Risikko said the attacker didn’t appear to be a Finnish national. The police said this was still unconfirmed.

Nordic countries have largely avoided the kind of terror attacks that have struck other European countries such as Germany, France, the U.K. and, this week, Spain. But the Turku stabbings echoed recent attacks that were executed with improvised means and targeted random victims.

At the end of last month, a migrant in Germany allegedly committed a knife attack at a supermarket in Hamburg, killing one person and injuring six.

The largest terror attack in recent years in the Nordic region came in April when a rejected residency applicant from Uzbekistan allegedly plowed a hijacked beer truck into a Stockholm shopping promenade, killing four.

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Gilmer: We Should View The Permian Basin As A Permanent Resource David Blackmon

By on August 19th, 2017

The Permian Basin is a sedimentary basin largely contained in the western part of the U.S. state of Texas and the southeastern part of the U.S. state of New Mexico.

the experts in our industry have historically massively underestimated the resource potential.

Allen Gilmer, chairman and CEO of Drilling Info, speaks at the Hart Energy DUG Eagle Ford Shale conference in San Antonio, Texas. Photographer: Eddie Seal/Bloomberg

Allen Gilmer, Co-Founder and Executive Chairman at DrillingInfo, Inc., is not a man who minces words, an attribute that has served him well during a long career in the oil and gas industry. When it comes to the Permian Basin and the amount of oil and gas resource contained in it, he becomes positively loquacious.

“We should view the Permian Basin as a permanent resource,” he says, “The Permian is best viewed as a near infinite resource – we will never produce the last drop of economic oil from the Basin.”

No one disputes that the resource in the Permian is huge, but ‘infinite’ is a big word. I asked him to expand on that concept. “That is the practical reality with the amount of resource that is in the ground,” he says, “The research we’ve done indicates that we have at least half a trillion barrels in the Permian at reasonable economics, and it could be as high as 2 trillion barrels. That is, as a practical matter, an infinite amount of resource, and it is something that has huge geopolitical consequence for the United States, in a very good way. It has a huge consequence in terms of GDP, and right now it is creating an American energy global ascendancy.”

Obviously, it is also a practical matter that the pace at which the industry produces the crude resource that underlies the Permian region in multiple formations will be constrained to some extent by commodity prices, costs, infrastructure and other potentially limiting factors. We have seen the Basin go into another boom over the last 12 months despite relatively low prices and, more recently, rapidly rising costs. Gilmer believes that infrastructure will be the most significant constraint going forward.

“The biggest thing that will get in the way of the Permian’s growing to its full potential is infrastructure,” he says, “I’m not sure you can really put any more trucks on that main highway [US 285] that goes up from Fort Stockton to Carlsbad.” He relates a story of a recent trip he and his wife took to Ruidoso, where his family has a home, and sitting at single highway intersection for more than 45 minutes because there was a mile-long backup of mostly oilfield service trucks trying to get through. “That used to be the back road I would take to go home to Ruidoso when I was a kid. Those roads can’t take that – you literally cannot put 50%, or even 20% more traffic on them. So we are reaching infrastructure limits in the basin.”

I had the idea for this interview when I saw Gilmer give a presentation at a conference in April, during which he discussed his view of the Permian, classifying it as America’s “Super Basin.” The data he presents to support his findings was stunning, and compelling. Gilmer says one of the main reasons he’s been giving a series of presentations this year was as a response to the current “Keep it in the Ground” movement coming from the anti-fossil fuel community.

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THE EMPIRE IS WEARING WHOLE CLOTH: JULIA GORIN

By on August 19th, 2017

If Vice President Pence is Trump’s pro-establishment decoy, it’s a stroke of brilliance. Unfortunately, Mr. Pence seemed all too sincere in his remarks to the NATO hopefuls at the Adriatic Charter summit in Montenegro this month. http://dailycaller.com/2017/08/18/the-empire-is-wearing-whole-cloth/

He was on “a tour designed to reassure Eastern Europe of Washington’s commitment to its security despite doubts sowed by President Donald Trump’s lukewarm support for the Western military alliance,” reported Reuters.

The alliance assuring Eastern Europe security is the same NATO that not long ago bombed the region into submission, dismembering Yugoslavia into mono-ethnic statelets that would then need us for defense, and in the process saturated them with Wahhabis–who’d been eagerly awaiting that Islamic Christmas known as Western Intervention.

Now we’re assuring our pawns security. And against whom? Not the jihadists traversing the Bosnia-Kosovo-Sandzak corridor we delivered, but Russia. Which had tried to prevent our stripping away the security and stability in the first place but was too weak in 1999 to defy the new order. And when it tried to contain, via international institutions, the aftermath and breathtaking victor’s justice Washington-Brussels was ramming through, we called it “obstructionist, adversarial, aggressive, imperialist, and Soviet-revivalist.”

No, anyone who has paid attention to the Balkans beyond the start-and-stop cues of the ’90s Clinton media knows it’s not Russia that has “destabilized” the region, as the vice president parroted the Swamp.

In June, Montenegro became the most recent Yugoslav appendage to be recruited by NATO for our encirclement of Russia which, like everyone else in 1991, thought it and the U.S. were heading toward an era of friendship and mutual cooperation against a common global menace, a threat darker than any imaginings of man. Who could have foreseen—especially with 9/11 explaining what’s what—that Washington would instead view the darkness as a stick with which to hit rival powers? And would choose the jihadist over the Russian.

“As you all know, Russia continues to seek to redraw international borders by force,” Pence told the audience of the NATO-snatched: leaders from Montenegro, Croatia, Albania, and Slovenia, along with the NATO-curious: Bosnia, Macedonia, Kosovo, and Serbia. (Indeed, such a mind freak have we pulled on Serbia that it’s considered membership into the NATO mafia that dismembered it.)

“Redrawing international borders by force” is something we started, in Kosovo, incidentally setting a precedent for where Russia has followed suit with less force, more legality, and more national interest than America in Kosovo. Undeterred by history, however, or his audience’s certain grasp of it, Mr. Pence continued without a hint of irony: “I can assure you the United States of America rejects any attempt to use force, threats or intimidation in this region or beyond.”

Richer still, the swamp speaking through Mr. Pence added that Russia was also seeking “to undermine democracies and divide you from each other and from the rest of Europe.” The dividing, of course, had started in 1991, when we backed secessionists in Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia undermining constitutional protocols and usurping borders—which was what led to war.

The speech was of a piece with a Wall Street Journal op-ed just days earlier, in which CFR fellow Walter Russell Mead reduced Russian actions in the Balkans to “stirring up trouble,” via its “proxy Serbia” (a term that ignores Serbia’s subservience to virtually every Washington-Brussels diktat in its 20-year struggle to please us). Mentioned nowhere was the trouble-stirring by Washington, London, and Berlin when they designated Albanians as proxies, trained and armed them, and turned a blind eye as they kidnapped, tortured, beheaded, burned, drowned, vivisected, and drew-and-quartered Christian Serbs aged one to 80. This was the macabre list we topped off with the first NATO war that created the first NATO colony out of Serbia’s Jerusalem. Then into the middle of it we plunked Europe’s largest U.S. military base whose name no one knows (Camp Bondsteel).

Surely one can imagine there might be some pushback—maybe even some consequences–to such anti-civilization interventions? The unquantifiable terrorist blowback aside, is it inconceivable that by now Russia—which our barbarism directly has made great again—won’t sit back ala Yeltsin’s yes-man Russia?

But we’re to believe it’s Russia that’s “meddling” in the region, premised on the mantra that Russia acts to reestablish its “historical great-power role.” It couldn’t be, could it, that Russia was at least initially motivated by our common existential need for someone to curtail the chaos into which Washington and its jihadist proxies have plunged the world?

Ah, but by definition there can be nothing genuine in any Russian action, including the impulse to support the region’s Christians we helped cleanse. Why that’s just anti-American. Meanwhile, the by now global Christian-decimation we’ve effected is to be taken at face value as earnest humanitarian intervention.

“The West says Russia is increasingly engaged in the former Yugoslavia,” read the Reuters item on the veep’s trip, “particularly among fellow Orthodox Christians in Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia and Bosnia.”

Yes, that nefarious Eastern-Orthodox solidarity that fingers have wagged at since the ’90s while handing the region on a silver platter to the ‘Islamic solidarity’ that fomented the conflicts in the first place. It’s a laugh anyone still asks, “Is the U.S. at war with Islam?” While Islam may be at war with the U.S., the U.S. is at war with Orthodox Christianity.

This explains why we prefer Islamic and Catholic nations despite their historical flirtations with Fascism, while never forgiving the Orthodox their one Communist stupor. Which brings us to the whipped cream and cherry of Mr. Pence’s visit. The vice president hauled out what by now can be called ‘the Estonia punchline,’ telling leaders of NATO members Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania they “could count on U.S. support if they faced aggression from Russia,” Reuters paraphrased. One wonders if there’s a WWII Axis sympathizer we’re not ready to die for? As early as 2010, Professor Serge Trifkovic explained, “Former Soviet satellites have…[an] acute psychological need to treat Russia as the enemy…The United States is serious about risking a thermonuclear war for the sake of, say, Estonia’s border with Russia.” Sure enough, here we are.

Prof. Trifkovic went on to cite an anecdote: “‘NATO poses no threat to Russia,’ we were told in Lisbon [2010 summit], with which it seeks ‘a true strategic partnership.’…[Dep. Prime Minister] Dmitry Rogozin offered an apt reply: ‘The NATO gamekeepers invite the Russian bear to go hunting rabbits together. The bear doesn’t understand: why do they have bear-hunting rifles?’”

“Russia hates NATO,” Mr. Mead ‘explained’ in his op-ed. On the contrary, it’s NATO that hates Russia. And a “game” is precisely what it is to our oh-so-serious-faced military, intelligence and political leaders. Serbia’s foreign affairs minister Ivica Dacic pointed out that this was the first time the summit was held at the head-of-state level. All to celebrate the latest in-Russia’s-face notch on our belt, Montenegro. And for making the ‘right’ choice, Montenegro was hailed by Mr. Pence as playing “the leading role in advancing stability and security of the Western Balkans.”

But stability is the last thing the Washington puppeteers want in that experimental theater known as the Balkans, lest they lose justification for continued engagement. The U.S. showing leadership where it isn’t needed—in distant Lego Lands where it purports to promote stability but does the opposite–is all part of the game.

Sadly, so hungry for a crumb of unity is our good vice president that he hailed the destructive sanctions bill his boss was forced to sign as a show of solidarity against Russia. In other words, we can’t get the suicidal left to go along with us on jihad, so let’s go along with them on Russia. Now there’s mature statecraft.

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The Unseen Dutch Resistance: This 90-Year-Old Woman Seduced Nazis as a Teenager and Led Them to Their Deaths Ramsey Mohsen Ramsey Mohsen

By on August 18th, 2017

It turns out there were all sorts of ways to join the resistance against the Nazis during WWII. Even before Freddie Oversteegen and her sister Truus joined up at the request of the Dutch military, she and her family were hiding people – Jewish and Lithuanian – in their home. Her mother had divorced their father because he contributed little to the household (a pretty ballsy move for the time), so perhaps the fact that she allowed her 14 and 16-year-old daughters to decide for themselves whether they’d like to sign up to resist the Nazis shouldn’t come as a surprise.

http://didyouknowfacts.com/unseen-dutch-resistance-90-year-old-woman-seduced-nazis-teenager-led-deaths/?utm_source=Web&utm_medium=Partner&utm_campaign=AOLHP&utm_term=pubexchange-did_you_know-aol

And when a gentleman visited her family one day, arguing that no one would suspect two young girls of being resistance fighters, that’s exactly what Freddie and Truus Oversteegen did.

The teenaged girls said yes, and after some training in firearms and wilderness survival, the sisters began their missions – to flirt with or seduce Nazi collaborators in bars and restaurants and then invite them to walk in the woods…where resistance fighters would be waiting. Although the girls never shot anyone themselves, they led many a randy man to his death, and, according to Freddie, their naked corpses are likely still buried in those woods.

Freddie worked with the famous Hannie Schaft, the “girl with the red hair,” who had afeature film made about her life. Schaft was buried with honors in the presence of the King and Queen of the Netherlands, and over 15 Dutch streets are named after her.

Freddie’s sister Truus made the rounds as a public speaker at memorial services after the war, then became a well-known artist.

Freddie’s part in the story was more muted until recently, when Dutch filmmaker Thijs Zeeman made the Oversteegen sisters the subject of his latest documentary, Two Sisters in the Resistance. As far as her time in the war, Freddie and her sister, who is now suffering from dementia, talk about it often:

“We never had to say remember when,’ because it was always at the top of our minds.”

Here’s to all of the forgotten stories. May they all be told one day.

Images Courtesy of Vice Netherlands

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Barcelona is not Charlottesville Ruthie Blum

By on August 18th, 2017

Last weekend’s car-ramming in Charlottesville, Virginia immediately became upstaged on ‎Thursday when scores of people were mown down by a speeding van on a bustling street in ‎Barcelona. The terrorist attack in Spain, on a packed tourist promenade, not only claimed the ‎lives of many innocent people, but served as a bloody reminder of what Islamic State terrorists ‎have been up to while Americans continued to scream about the ostensible rise of neo-Nazism in ‎the United States, and bicker over the question of whether President Donald Trump has been ‎encouraging white supremacism and anti-Semitism.‎

According to unfolding reports in the Spanish and international press, at least 14 tourists and ‎locals were killed, and another 100 were injured, when they were run over ‎by a van plowing down the iconic Las Ramblas thoroughfare. The vehicle was rented by 28-year-‎old Driss Oukabir, a Moroccan with a Spanish passport. When his photo was released after the ‎attack, however, Oukabir entered a nearby police station to declare that his documents had been ‎stolen, perhaps by his 18-year-old brother.‎

Nevertheless, according to Spanish media reports, Oukabir’s Facebook page included a video ‎about a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world and angry posts about the metal detectors that ‎had been placed on — and removed from — the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, the site of the July 14 ‎terrorist attack outside of Al-Aqsa mosque. The page has since been deleted.‎

While the details of two suspects in custody and a third who apparently committed suicide were ‎being investigated and sorted out, the Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the carnage. This may have ‎included one death in a possibly related accidental explosion on Wednesday night of a house that ‎served as a makeshift bomb factory or storage facility, full of propane gas tanks. It is now ‎believed that the canisters were intended for the van, which would have made Thursday’s attack ‎even more lethal. ‎

The pattern is a familiar one by now, particularly in European capitals. ISIS, which is being ‎pushed back in Syria and Iraq, is increasing its calls on sympathizers residing in the West to go ‎out and kill “infidels.” After conducting a cost-benefit analysis, the terrorist group realized that it ‎was no longer worth it for would-be jihadists to travel to the Middle East to be trained and then ‎return to their countries to commit random slaughter; they can simply, and more cheaply, stay ‎home and do it on their own, with a little help from instructional videos from more experienced ‎killers.‎

The November 2016 issue of the Islamic State publication Rumiyah outlined the advantages of ‎car-ramming, for example. “Though being an essential part of modern life, very few actually ‎comprehend the deadly and destructive capability of the motor vehicle and its capacity of ‎reaping large numbers of casualties if used in a premeditated manner,” it stated. No kidding.‎

It is interesting to note that more recently, in February this year, a British government report ‎revealed that last summer ISIS began recruiting Spanish-speakers and translators to spread the ‎jihadist message and issue “direct threats” on tourist hot spots in Spain. The Barcelona massacre, ‎then, could have been predicted. At the very least, it should have been anticipated.‎

Indeed, with ISIS openly using the web — promoting jihad through its online magazine in several ‎languages, and through Telegram, a network with more than 100 million active users — it is ‎unbelievable that European security forces are caught off guard with each new Islamist ‎bloodbath. ‎

It is not surprising at all, however, that Trump’s statement of solidarity with Barcelona and ‎condemnation of the terrorists would be ridiculed, and not only by the liberal media. French ‎President Emmanuel Macron took the opportunity of the van-ramming to tweet: “We stand ‎beside those who fight racism and xenophobia. It is our common fight, in past and present. ‎‎#Charlottesville.” ‎

Even in the midst of defeat on the battlefield, ISIS fighters paused to have a good laugh.‎

Ruthie Blum is an editor at the Gatestone Institute.

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Anti-Israel pro-BDS profs organizing Antifa campus network Posted by William A. Jacobson

By on August 18th, 2017

The teaming of BDS and Antifa is the single most dangerous development I have witnessed in many years
Anti-Israel pro-BDS profs organizing Antifa campus network

The anti-Israel Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement is notorious for campus violence and disruption directed at Israelis and pro-Israeli students and faculty.

We have featured dozens of incidents of shout-downs and disruptions of events, including physical acts of intimidation. Many of these incidents are discussed in our post, With campus shout downs, first they came for the Jews and Israel.

In an extremely dangerous development, anti-Israel pro-BDS faculty are organizing a nationwide campus Antifa network.

Inside Higher Ed reports, Campus Antifascist Network (h/t Cam Edwards on Twitter):

Given that college campuses have been central to activism by the so-called alt-right, is it time for a campus-based countermovement? Scholars behind the proposed Campus Antifascist Network, or CAN, think so.

“The election of Donald Trump has emboldened fascist and white nationalist groups nationwide, on campus and off, and their recent upsurge requires antifascists to take up the call to action once again,” reads an invitation to join the group, posted on social media this week by David Palumbo-Liu, the Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor and professor of comparative literature at Stanford University….

Network co-organizer Bill Mullen, a professor of American studies at Purdue University, on Wednesday called CAN a “big tent” that “welcomes anyone committed to fighting fascism.”

“We are diverse in our political points of view but unified by our fight against fascism,” he said. The idea is “to drive racists off campuses and to protect the most vulnerable from fascist attack.”

And of objections made by some that Trump is not a fascist? Palumbo-Liu said that is “literally an academic argument in the worst sense of the word. We need to pay attention to what is happening, not the labels that we feel are most fitting.” ….

Since Charlottesville, the network has jumped to 200 members and 1,000 followers on its Facebook page, Mullen said. Antifascist branches are being formed on campuses and the group is preparing teach-ins and self-defense materials for faculty and students who may meet with white supremacist protesters.

The network has been endorsed by writers Junot Díaz and Viet Nguyen, as well as graduate student unions. In addition to faculty members, graduate students and some undergraduates have joined.

According to the Inside Higher Ed article, they claim they are not seeking violence, but the wording of their responses is ambiguous:

Mullen said CAN’s approach to protests will be to protect those most vulnerable to attack and “to build large, unified demonstrations against fascists on campuses when they come.”

Asked specifically about the possible use of violence, Palumbo-Liu said antifa activists include those whose tactics CAN would reject. “We would advocate self-defense and defense in various forms of those who are being threatened by fascists, but not violence,” he added, saying his group can’t control the antifa label or who ascribes to it.

Palumbo-Liu and Mullen, the organizers of the campus Antifa network, are two of the most aggressive anti-Israel pro-BDS faculty members in the country. They each have long histories of demonizing Israel and supporting the academic boycott of Israel.

Palumbo-Liu, who was once dubbed Stanford’s Most Radical Professor, was featured in a post we did about the dangerous blockade of the San Mateo Bridge by anti-Israel protesters, Anti-Israel activists caused car crashes on San Mateo Bridge.

. Palumbo-Liu expressed pride that some of this students were involved:

https://twitter.com/palumboliu/status/557394707970420736

Mullen also is one of the most aggressive BDS faculty activists, well known for his BDS activitiesat Purdue.

This fits a pattern of anti-Israel activists co-opting and hijacking other movements, something we explored in If you are surprised #BlackLivesMatter joined war on Israel, you haven’t been paying attention.

Under the leadership of anti-Israel, pro-BDS faculty, expect the campus Antifa network to be re-directed against Israel, Israelis and Jews. We’ve seen this in Chicago, where Jewish symbols were banned at an LGBT event, and Jewish LGBT groups have been attacked.

Yesterday, before learning of this campus Antifa network, I warned that I expect violence on campuses this semester.

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Confederate statues gives the Democrats another lost cause Wesley Pruden,

By on August 18th, 2017

To arms! The Confederates are coming! The Confederates are coming!

Union scouts have already discovered Robert E. Lee at the gates of the city, lining up the gallant Pelham’s artillery to fire the opening round, and Stonewall Jackson and Jeb Stuart are expected to arrive on a night train from the Shenandoah Valley.

Not since First Manassas, when the Yankees fled the battlefield in blind panic, after taking a licking in the first battle of the Cruel War of Northern Aggression, has the Capital quailed in such fear and trembling.

This time it’s only an army of marble, but marble men are apparently enough against a foe of the weak and the weary of combat. Cities, counties and states across the nation have been taking down Southern statuary for days — brave Baltimore waited for the cover of night to do the deed — all in hopes of being spared the wrath of the regiments of bronze and marble regiments. Californians scoured graveyards for evidence of insurrection and finally found something in Hollywood, of all places.

These were the graves of dead Confederates exiled from formerly Confederate states from Virginia to Texas who repaired to the balm of mild and gentle California to live out their final days, only to die forgotten in an alien land. The searchers found a plaque, overgrown with moss and soil, identifying those who sleep there. The plaque, though not a trophy as valuable as statuary of Lee or Jackson, was nevertheless removed as a prize of combat with the dead. The Los Angeles Times reports that “the bodies will not be disinterred.” Well, not now, anyway. Maybe next week, when the remains can be properly flogged and assigned to the city dump.

Back among the living, you might think the Democrats would be in Hog Heaven, intoxicated with the prospect of slaying Donald Trump at last. Metaphorically speaking, of course. (We think.) But months of malaise — the French call it “ennui,” or lassitude for lack of excitement — have made havoc of Democratic fundraising.

Even with the prospect of a riveting candidate for 2020, someone like Elizabeth Warren, Maxine Waters, Bernie Sanders or even Hillary retrieved from the mothballs for a third try, Democratic fundraisers report that Democratic donors are exhausted. Throwing good money after bad, even in pursuit of Donald Trump, is not ringing bells and blowing whistles where big money dwells. The targets for next year’s congressional races look more inviting, but apparently only in Washington and other haunts of campaign consultants.

The raw numbers are enough to alarm Pollyanna and her friends. The Democratic National Committee raised $38 million in the first half of this year, and while that sounds like a lot, the Republicans raised almost twice that, with $75 million. At the end of June, the debt-free Republicans had $45 million in the bank; the Democrats have only $7 million in the bank and $3 million in debt. “We really should be kicking them in the [hindquarters],” a glum Democratic donor tells the Capitol Hill political daily The Hill.

If the Republicans are embarrassed by the stumbling Republicans in Congress and Donald Trump’s continuing struggle with foot-in-mouth disease, the Democrats can only mimic the misery of Casey Stengel as he managed the New York Mets through their inaugural year when they couldn’t win for losing, often by boxcar numbers: “Can’t anybody play this game?”

By the numbers on the money, apparently not, though the fundraising numbers don’t tell the whole story. Mitch McConnell can’t seem to find a way to keep his senators marching in cadence to the music, enabling John McCain, who dreams of becoming the pet Republican of the mainstream media again, and a couple of others from co-operating with the Democrats in recycling Harry Truman’s famous campaign label, “the do-nothing Congress,” and affixing it firmly to the party that once nominated Mr. McCain for president.

President Trump has become a Republican pinata, inviting everyone to take a whack. But he continues to draw crowds and money, both big money and small money. His approval ratings hover just below 40 percent, but it’s the most faithful 40 percent anywhere.

He collected $10 million for his re-election at a fund-raiser at his hotel in Washington this summer, and the Republican National Committee continues to outraise the Democrats among small-dollar donors — under $200 — and by a big margin.

The Democrats, with big help from not only the media but establishment Republicans who just can’t get over November, are counting now on backlash over Charlottesville to do what Robert Mueller was only yesterday counted on to do.

But killing dead Confederates won’t do it, either. Democrats tempted to fight a Lost Cause of their own should find romance somewhere else. Bernie Sanders or Pocahontas on a bronze horse won’t thrill anyone.

• Wesley Pruden is editor in chief emeritus of The Times.

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CAROLINE GLICK: TRUMP AND THE JEWS

By on August 18th, 2017

On Wednesday, President Reuven Rivlin sent a letter of support to the American Jewish community in the wake of the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, last Saturday.

On the surface, his move made sense – the largest Diaspora community is concerned about the growing profile of viciously antisemitic forces on the Right. But at a deeper level, Rivlin’s move was detrimental.

Rivlin’s letter channeled a communal posture that ignores the actual state of the Jewish community. In so doing, it made it more difficult for Jewish Americans to recognize and surmount the dangers they face.

The American Jewish community is rightly concerned about neo-Nazis and other white supremacist groups that are gaining more and more attention these days. The fact that antisemitism was the dominant theme of a rally ostensibly organized to oppose the removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee from a public park reveals the potency and centrality of Jew-hatred as an organizing tool for white supremacists in America.

President Donald Trump’s remarks on Tuesday, where he claimed that only some of the people participating in the protest were white supremacists and the rest were just there to protect a monument, were hurtful. On Thursday, The New York Times published interviews with rally participants that bore out Trump’s claims. They said they were only at the rally to protect the statue and do not harbor white supremacist views.

Maybe they were telling the truth. But it is hard to believe people who oppose white supremacism and Jew-hatred would willingly march under swastika flags to the roar of Nazi chants.

Whatever the case, Trump’s equivocation was distressing.

But then, it wasn’t unprecedented for a president to obfuscate the potency of antisemitism in political violence.

In February 2015, a terrorist aligned with Islamic State entered the Hyper Cacher kosher supermarket in Paris on a Friday afternoon and held the Jewish shoppers hostage while killing four of them.

When asked about the event, then-president Barack Obama denied the massacre was an antisemitic attack. He referred to the victims as “a bunch of guys in a deli.” The perpetrators were merely “a bunch of violent, vicious zealots.”

When asked to clarify if Obama really meant to deny the attack was an antisemitic assault, both the White House and State Department spokespeople insisted, repeatedly, that the attack was not antisemitic.

The administration only deigned to acknowledge the truth in clarifications on Twitter, which it belatedly released, and which included the outright lie that the administration had said the attack was antisemitic all along.

The Obama administration’s mind-melting refusal to acknowledge the attack was anti-Jewish bespoke its larger policy of denying that Jews are specifically targeted for annihilation by Islamic terrorists. The implications of the policy of denial for the safety of Jews throughout the world, including in the US, were self-evident.

And yet, the American Jewish community preferred to ignore the whole thing.

Jeffrey Goldberg, Obama’s favored Jewish journalist, tweeted, “FWIW [for what it’s worth], the Obama Administration has been pretty clear in its condemnations of European antisemitism over time.”

Today, the same Goldberg who underplayed and denied what can at best be called Obama’s diffident response to anti-Jewish violence, has been leading the charge against Trump.

Among other things, Goldberg likened the counterprotesters at Charlottesville to the American soldiers who stormed the beaches at Normandy.

In Goldberg’s conflation of neo-Nazis with real Nazis and the far-left counterprotesters in Charlottesville to US forces, we see the real issue at the heart of the maelstrom now dominating US public life.

The real taboo Trump broke in his remarks following last weekend’s deadly riot was not his equivocation about the relative badness of the neo-Nazis. His real offense was his insistence that the counterprotesters – the ones Goldberg and his colleagues liken to World War II partisans and Allied forces – were also violent.

And yet they were. And Goldberg and his colleagues know they were.

In an ironic twist of history’s knife, the day of the riots, the September issue of The Atlantic monthly, where Goldberg serves as editor, hit the newsstands. The cover story, written by Peter Beinart, one of the stars of the American Jewish Left, was inconveniently titled, “The rise of the violent Left.”

Beinart’s article chronicled the violence and lawlessness of Antifa, the radical group that organized the counterprotest in Charlottesville. Antifa is a group of radical goons who stand behind the violence that has plagued US college campuses for the past several years. All the violent protests – from Vermont to California – where conservative speakers were blocked from addressing students by rioting students who burned buildings and assaulted their fellow students who wished to attend the lectures – were Antifa productions.

And Antifa’s operations go well beyond the walls of campuses. As Beinart notes, it was Antifa rioters who physically assaulted Trump supporters as they walked to their cars at the end of a Trump rally in San Jose, California, last summer.

The purpose of Antifa’s violence is not merely to deny freedom of speech to those whose positions it opposes. It is also to prevent normal relations between Democrats and Republicans and between progressives and conservatives.

Hence, as Beinart noted, this past April, Antifa threatened to use physical violence against participants in Portland, Oregon’s annual Rose Festival parade where the local Republican Party was, as usual, scheduled to march along with their Democratic counterparts. The event, which has taken place annually since 1907, was canceled.

Antifa is problematic for American Jews specifically because it operates in a coalition of far-left groups that all hate Israel and believe that just as Republicans and conservatives should be banned from participating in public life, so American Jews who support Israel should be silenced. All of its coalition partners support the destruction of Israel and castigate the Jewish state as criminal. All bar Jews who support Israel – or even are proud of their Jewish identity – from participating in their events.

Hence, Linda Sarsour, the BDS leader who was elevated to the top of the US feminist movement when she served as co-chairwoman of the Women’s March against Trump, insists that Zionists cannot be feminists.

Hence Black Lives Matter, the anti-police group that is a core member of the Antifa coalition, libeled Israel in its mission statement. Israel, BLM declared, is an “apartheid” state which is carrying out a “genocide” against the Palestinians.

Hence, Democratic Socialists of America, another core group in the Antifa coalition, just passed a resolution at its annual convention to officially join the BDS movement. The vote was reportedly greeted with jubilant chants of “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free.”

The fact is that the rhetoric of white supremacists on Israel and Jews is largely indistinguishable from the language of the far Left. Both insist that “Zionists” control the US government, media and banking system and use their control to advance the fortunes of the illegitimate “Jewish ethno-state.”

David Duke, one of the leaders of the white supremacists in the US, wrote a fan letter to Roger Waters, the far-left, openly antisemitic musician who leads the BDS movement.

So from the American Jewish community’s perspective, there ought to be no distinction between its abhorrence and concern over the white supremacists and its concerns and abhorrence of the radical Left. Indeed, the community should be more concerned over the latter because its assaults are more direct and more frequent.

And even more ominously, whereas no Republican leaders – including Trump – wish to be associated with white supremacists, mainstream Democratic leaders are increasingly supportive of the BDS movement and other anti-Israel groups. So it is that formerly pro-Israel New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and formerly pro-Israel New Jersey Sen. Corey Booker are embracing the BDS movement.

And yet, rather than sound the alarms or fight the growing power and influence of the anti-Jewish far Left in their political home, the American Jewish leadership is ignoring the danger and devoting itself to criminalizing Trump, his advisers and supporters.

Whereas the Anti-Defamation League had nearly nothing to say about either Sarsour or Cong. Keith Ellison, with his anti-Jewish record of statements from his service in the antisemitic Nation of Islam, ADL leader Jonathan Greenblatt insisted Monday that Trump must investigate his closest advisers for alleged ties to white supremacists.

The alleged “ties” of the likes of Trump aides Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka to white supremacists are the invention of The Forward newspaper, which has relentlessly libeled both men – and particularly Gorka – without ever producing a shred of evidence to back up its allegations.

Rather than acknowledge its errors, this month the Forward took its campaign a step further when it published an extraordinary op-ed titled “19 people Jews should worry about more than Sarsour.”

Prominently placed between Gorka and Bannon and the neo-Nazis on the one side and the leaders of Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas, and Trump himself on the other, was Mort Klein, the president of the Zionist Organization of America.

In other words, for the Forward, pro-Israel American Jews of the type assaulted by Antifa and its comrades, and pro-Israel presidential advisers are more dangerous to the community than Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, and of course, Sarsour herself who embraces Jew-killing terrorists and says that Jewish Israel-supporters must be shunned.

Trump’s electoral victory was a revolutionary event in US history. Tens of millions of American voters supported Trump because he promised to “drain the swamp” in Washington and serve the needs of the people who the swamp cast asunder.

A big part of that swamp is the Left that insists it is above criticism while its opponents on the Right are deplorable racists unworthy of consideration. When Trump called out the far Left along with the neo-Nazis for their violence at Charlottesville, he was keeping his pledge to his voters and upending one of the most cherished myths of the hated “establishment.”

Given that the white supremacists and radical leftists converge in their hatred of Jews, it is important for the American Jewish community and for America as a whole to embrace Trump’s actions. He is not engaging in moral equivalence between good and evil. He is exercising moral clarity. Without such clarity, the forces of Jew-hatred in the US will never be defeated. Without such clarity, the political position, security and freedom of American Jews will grow increasingly imperiled.

Israel’s job, to the extent it has one in the current fight plaguing the US, is to point out this truth, not join the bandwagon in obfuscating it. Trump is far from a perfect mouthpiece for this essential battle against Jew-haters on the Right and the Left.

But at least he is using his mouth to sound the battle cry. For this he should be applauded by Israelis and American Jews alike.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

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