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November 2017

Rutgers President Defends ‘Academic Freedom’ of Three Professors Blasted for Comments on Israel, Jews by Shiri Moshe

The president of Rutgers University in New Jersey defended the free speech rights of three faculty members who have recently come under intense criticism for their comments on Israel and Jews.https://www.algemeiner.com/2017/11/20/rutgers-president-defends-academic-freedom-of-three-professors-blasted-for-comments-on-israel-jews/

Speaking in a town hall sponsored by the Rutgers student government on Thursday, President Robert Barchi noted ongoing media attention focused on Michael Chikindas, a microbiology professor who published multiple antisemitic, homophobic and misogynistic social media posts; Jasbir Puar, a women’s studies professor whose latest book accuses Israel of injuring Palestinians “in order to control them”; and Mazen Adi, an adjunct professor of international law who accused Israeli officials of trafficking children’s organs while serving as a spokesperson for the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Barchi began his address by illustrating the difference between free speech and harassment, noting that placing “a swastika on the side of a building on campus” would not be a violation of the First Amendment, even if it might breach university policies against vandalism.

His argument drew an objection from a woman in the crowd, who said to applause, “it is not free speech.”

Trump: The Art of the Insult A new documentary shows exactly how Donald Trump took the White House. Mark Tapson

A full year after the election of Donald Trump to the presidency, the left is still trying to comprehend – as Hillary Clinton titled her post-mortem book – what happened. How did the matriarch of the Clinton crime syndicate – er, political dynasty, riding the promise of an historic victory as the country’s first female president, lose the White House to a brash, unpolished, shoot-from-the-hip reality TV mogul with no political experience? For that matter, how did the upstart Trump, whom the media and his competitors dismissed early on as an unserious candidate and fraudulent conservative, emerge as the party nominee from a field of seventeen established Republican politicians to challenge Hillary in the first place?

The answer lies in filmmaker Joel Gilbert’s latest documentary, Trump: the Art of the Insult, the title of which is an obvious nod to Trump’s 1987 business advice book, The Art of the Deal. Gilbert’s previous work includes Dreams From My Real Father, which presents the case that Barack Obama’s real father was Communist propagandist Frank Marshall Davis, and There’s No Place Like Utopia, in which Gilbert sets off across the country in search of the Progressive dream.

In his newest work, the filmmaker has compiled an hour and a half of campaign and interview footage of Donald Trump using a verbal flamethrower to lay waste to the media landscape, to the other Republican presidential candidates, and to Democrat opponents Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, on his way to a stunning election victory.

The film includes no commentary or narration – Gilbert simply lets Trump speak for himself. And speak he does. Trump has no politician’s filter, as one interviewer says of him, which freed him to hurl insults relentlessly at targets unaccustomed to dealing with an opponent on that level of discourse. Trump went after competitors who were used to polite, orderly policy debates, and instead of engaging them on that level, pegged them with demeaning nicknames and called them schmuck, idiot, stupid, nuts, nut job, doofus, loser, clueless, incompetent, and lacking enough charisma to intimidate other world leaders. The implication was that Trump was everything they were not – especially a winner.

Border agent killed, another wounded at Texas border By Rick Moran

A border patrol agent was murdered in the Big Bend sector of the US-Mexican border yesterday. His partner was severely injured.

Agent Rogelio Martinez, 36,died of injuries while responding to reports of “activity” near Interstate 10 in the Van Horn Station area. His unidentified partner was taken to an area hospital where his condition is listed as serious.

Martinez is the second agent killed this year.

Fox News:

President Trump pushed the need for his proposed U.S.-Mexico border wall Sunday night following the incident, tweeting: “Border Patrol Officer killed at Southern Border, another badly hurt. We will seek out and bring to justice those responsible. We will, and must, build the Wall!”

Elaine Duke, the acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, released a statement Sunday calling Martinez’s death a “tragic event.”

“Earlier this morning, I was notified that Border Patrol Agent Rogelio Martinez died as a result of serious injuries suffered while on patrol in the Big Bend Sector of our southern border in Texas. Agent Martinez was responding to activity while on patrol with another agent, who was also seriously injured,” the statement read.

“We are fully supporting the ongoing investigation to determine the cause of this tragic event. On behalf of the quarter of a million frontline officers and agents of DHS, my thoughts and prayers go out to the family and friends of Agent Martinez and to the agent who is in serious condition.”

Records show the Big Bend sector of the border has been relatively quiet:

Border Patrol records show that Big Bend accounted for about 1 percent of the more than 61,000 apprehensions agents made along the Southwest border between October 2016 and May 2017.

The region’s mountains and the Rio Grande make it a difficult area for people to cross illegally into the U.S. from Mexico.

A recent audit by the GAO showed that the border patrol is short about 2000 agents and is losing them faster than they are being hired.

More than 900 agents leave each year on average but the Border Patrol only hires an average of 523 a year, the Government Accountability Office said in a broad survey of staffing and deployment challenges at the key border law enforcement agency.

The law requires the agency to have a minimum of 21,370 agents on board, but it had just 19,500 agents as of May.

That’s an even bigger problem when stacked up against President Trump’s call for hiring 5,000 more agents, to reach a workforce of 26,370.

Turkey Is No Ally By Brandon J. Weichert

Turkey has turned its back on the West. To be fair, we in the West didn’t do much to prevent it.https://amgreatness.com/2017/11/19/turkey-is-no-ally/

When Turkey sought entry into the European Union, other members balked and resisted—though not without reason. Many Europeans were alarmed by the rise of Turkey’s Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP). The AKP sought to undo the reforms that made Turkey a modern, secular nation upon its independence in 1923. Up to that point, Turkey had been the seat of power for the Ottoman Empire—the last, great Islamic empire—and was dismantled after World War I. From 1923 onward, the country was ruled by a secular autocracy and became an integral component of NATO’s southern flank during the Cold War.

Now, Turkey is becoming fast friends with Russia and pushing the West away.

The move away from the West in Turkey began around 2002. Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his AKP Party burst onto the political scene, taking advantage of deep divisions within Turkish society. Erdogan supplanted the autocratic, secular junta that had ruled the country for decades.

Once firmly ensconced in power, Erdogan’s Islamists began methodically enacting “reforms” to make Turkey comport with traditional Islamic values. In the intervening years, Turkey has banned the sale of liquor, cracked down on any form of political opposition, and instituted a requirement for Turkish women to wear a headscarf—not exactly the stuff of European liberalism or Western freedom.

Today, Turkey is strengthening ties with China, as the Chinese carry out their One-Belt-One-Road-Initiative to link Eurasia as never before (under Beijing’s control, of course). In fact, President Erdogan has repeatedly said that Turkey’s future lies to its east, with the Turkish population in China and Central Asia, rather than in Europe and the West.

Turkey is currently purchasing Russian S-400 air defense batteries instead of Western-made systems, such as the U.S. Patriot missile, thereby complicating NATO’s collective defense measures. The Turkish government insists that it is only buying Russian-made air defense systems because Western governments balked at selling Patriot missiles to Ankara in 2015. That’s true. The reason is Turkey has a long history of doing illicit business with Iran and funding jihadist terror groups operating in Syria, including ISIS. The United States doesn’t want some of its best weapons falling into Iranian or jihadist hands.

Turkey Islamizes Denmark with More Mosques by Judith Bergman

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan clearly sees Turks living in the West as a spearhead of Islam.

“Yes, integrate yourselves into German society but don’t assimilate yourselves. No one has the right to deprive us of our culture and our identity”, Erdogan told Turks in Germany as early as in 2011.

This assessment of Milli Görüs, however, does not seem to bother Danish authorities, who appear to see no problems with their cities becoming Islamized by the Turks. How many more mosques will it take?

“Islam cannot be either ‘moderate’ or ‘not moderate.’ Islam can only be one thing,” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on November 9. “Recently the concept of ‘moderate Islam’ has received attention. But the patent of this concept originated in the West… They are now trying to pump up this idea again. What they really want to do is weaken Islam…”

Erdogan is working on strengthening Islam in the West, something he does, among other ways, by building Turkish mosques in Western countries. It is hardly surprising that he does not want the West to “weaken Islam”, but at the moment there seems little risk of that happening. The establishment of Turkish mosques in Western countries appears to be proceeding apace with very little opposition. Conversely, building Western churches in Turkey is inconceivable.

Erdogan clearly sees Turks living in the West as a spearhead of Islam. “Yes, integrate yourselves into German society but don’t assimilate yourselves. No one has the right to deprive us of our culture and our identity”, Erdogan told Turks in Germany as early as 2011. This year, he told Turks living in the West:

“Go live in better neighborhoods. Drive the best cars. Live in the best houses. Make not three, but five children. Because you are the future of Europe. That will be the best response to the injustices against you.”

When Was the “Palestinian People” Created? Google Has the Answer. by Jean Patrick Grumberg

All people born in British Mandatory Palestine between 1923-1948 (today’s Israel) had “Palestine” stamped on their passports at the time. But when they were called Palestinians, the Arabs were offended. They complained: “We are not Palestinians, we are Arabs. The Palestinians are the Jews”.

After invading Arab armies were routed and the Arabs who had fled the war wanted to return, they were considered a fifth column and not invited back. The Arabs who had loyally remained in Israel during the war, however, and their descendants, are still there and make up one fifth of the population. They are known as Israeli Arabs; they have the same rights as Christians and Jews, except they are not required to serve in the army unless they wish to.

“The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality, today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese.” – PLO leader Zuheir Mohsen, interview in the Dutch newspaper Trouw, March 1977.

In an op-ed in the Guardian on November 1, 2017, ahead of the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas called on the UK to “atone” for the century of “suffering” that the document allegedly wrought on the “Palestinian people.” Abbas reiterated the claims he has been making since 2016, to justify a surreal lawsuit he has threatened to bring against Britain for supporting the “creation of a homeland for one people [Jews], which, he asserted, “resulted in the dispossession and continuing persecution of another.”

“Palestinians” were the Jews who lived, along with Muslims and Christians on land called Palestine, which was under British administration from 1917 to 1948.

All people born there during the time of the British Mandate had “Palestine” stamped on their passports. But the Arabs were offended when they were called Palestinians. They complained: “We are not Palestinians, we are Arabs. The Palestinians are the Jews”.

Bernard Lewis explains:

“With the rise and spread of pan-Arab ideologies it was as Arabs, not as south Syrians, that the Palestinians began to assert themselves. For the rest of the period of the British Mandate, and for many years after that, their organizations described themselves as Arab and expressed their national identity in Arab rather than in Palestinian or even in Syrian terms.”

When Israel declared independence on May 14, 1948, five Arab armies joined up to try to kill the infant nation in its crib. After they were routed, some of the local Arabs who had fled the war wanted to return, but they were considered a fifth column and most were not allowed back. The Arabs who had loyally remained in Israel during the war, however, and their descendants, are still there and make up one-fifth of Israel’s population today. They are known as Israeli Arabs; they have the same rights as Jews, except they are not legally required to serve in the army. They may volunteer if they wish to.

Israeli Arabs have their own political parties. They serve as members of Knesset and are employed in all professions. The moral is, or should be: Do not start a war unless you are prepared to lose it — as the Arabs in and around Israel have done repeatedly, in 1947-48, 1967 and 1973.

Robert Mueller Is the Cover-Up By James Lewis

Friendship is a beautiful thing, and it’s really good to know that Robert Mueller, Comey, Brennan, and Clapper have known each other for many years. They’re loyal friends.

Mueller is a former top FBI dude, who helped to clear Bill Clinton after that impeachment mess, and like Mr. Comey, he did his very best. Clapper was the single most powerful man in the “intelligence” “community,” a centralized directorate (as the Soviets used to call it), which was George W. Bush’s principal response to 9/11/01.

Now don’t get me wrong: I’m sure all these brave men (or persons, I should say) made great contributions to the safety and welfare of all of us. But here they are at the peak of their careers, each one of them, and Democrat candidate Hillary is suddenly exposed to the world with her email fiasco as SecState. Violating the very first rule of intelligence and statecraft, to protect your country’s secrets. And she obviously sold secret and sensitive information to Clinton Foundation “donors” around the world, including old friend Vladimir Putin (who now owns 20 percent of U.S. uranium, or possibly more), the Muslim Brotherhood (friends of Huma), the Iranians (who sponsor half the terror attacks in the world), the Chinese (who want more of our secret high tech), and probably the French (who understand bribery and just wanted to get access to Hillary as POTUS).

We’ve seen how Bill sold U.S. rocket-launching secrets to the Chinese for campaign money…or personal money. It’s so hard to tell the difference.

Well, skip that.

So the wife of the perp becomes a senator from the State of New York, which is well known for the purity of its politics. Why did she become senator? Was she a resident of N.Y. State? Was she the best qualified person to represent the Great State (etc.)? Or did the N.Y. machine just pick her and scare everybody else away?

So Hillary has violated any number of laws all of her adult life, ever since she was hired by the Senate Watergate Committee to lynch Richard Nixon – which worked just as it was meant to. Nixon resigned, but for the Democrats, he should have been hanged, drawn, quartered, waterboarded, and made to read the NYT op-ed page for extra punishment. I know Democrats who still hate Richard Nixon with a hellish fury. Nixon is the gift that keeps on giving. Hillary’s major role in the persecution of President Nixon – a duly elected POTUS – was to urge that all his constitutional rights be taken away. That was the young Hillary right after law school.

The major difference from Watergate today is that no sane and sentient human being believes the NYT or the WaPo anymore. They have permanently blown their cover.

And yet the Axis of NYT-WaPo tells us that Donald Trump is just suspected of nefarious dealings with the Russians, which presumably caused the Russians to break into Hillary’s ridiculous emails and the DNC file system, sending truthful (but wicked) information to WikiLeaks, to be dumped at strategic moments of the election campaign.

Notice well that nobody claims that the Hillary dumps were false. They were true enough. That’s why they hate Trump and his imaginary Russian sources. It’s the truth that hurt Hillary.

August 2017: Stalingrad at 75, the Turning Point of World War II in Europe By Ian Johnson see note please

At a recent luncheon promoting his new book, Victor Davis Hanson spoke of Russia’s decisive battles and losses in World War 2. Read Victors Davis Hanson-The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won rsk
Three quarters of a century ago, the most famous battle of the Second World War [2] began. More than four million combatants fought in the gargantuan struggle at Stalingrad between the Nazi and Soviet armies. Over 1.8 million became casualties. More Soviet soldiers died in the five-month battle than Americans in the entire war. But by February 2, 1943, when the Germans trapped in the city surrendered, it was clear that the momentum on the Eastern Front had shifted. The Germans would never fully recover.

Fourteen months before Stalingrad began, Hitler had launched Operation Barbarossa, the largest military offensive in human history. After two years of decisive victories over France, Poland and others, Hitler and the German High Command (Oberkommando des Heeres, or OKH), were confident that the Soviet Union would fall within six weeks. At first, their prediction seemed correct: the attack in June 1941 caught Stalin [4]unawares, and the Red Army unprepared. By December, the Red Army had suffered nearly five million casualties.

But despite enduring staggering losses, the Red Army continued to resist. In August 1941, senior members of the Wehrmacht began growing increasingly uneasy. The Chief of the OKH staff, General Franz Halder, noted in his diary that ““It is becoming ever more apparent that the Russian colossus…. Has been underestimated by us…. At the start of the war we reckoned with about 200 enemy divisions. Now we have already counted 360… When a dozen have been smashed, then the Russian puts up another dozen.”

In October, the Wehrmacht launched Operation Typhoon, the effort to take Moscow and end the war by Christmas. But as the weather grew bitterly cold, the German offensive ground to a halt, and was then pushed back by a Soviet counteroffensive. The front line froze in place some two hundred kilometers west of Moscow – and 1400 kilometers east of Berlin.

During the bitter winter months, the OKH began planning for a renewed counteroffensive in the spring, hoping to achieve the decisive victory that had evaded them in 1941. Thus was born Operation Blue, an attack to seize the oil fields of the Caucasus, and then drive on to the Volga. Launched in June 1942, it caught the Red Army off-guard, as they had expected a renewed push towards Moscow. Within two weeks, the Wehrmacht advanced more than 300 miles.

Hitler, increasingly directing military operations in Berlin, decided to shift his offensive in early August. For both symbolic and strategic reasons, he ordered the Sixth Army under General Friedrich von Paulus to advance towards the city of Stalingrad. By August 23, the Germans were in the suburbs, where fighting turned ferocious. Bombed into rubble by German aircraft and artillery, the city became impassable to tanks and ideal terrain for defenders.

As the Germans approached Stalingrad, Stalin issued Order No. 227, with its famous command: “Ni Shagu Nazad!” [Not One Step Backwards!]. This meant a horrific price for the Soviet defenders within the city of Stalingrad. Outnumbered and without air cover, the 62nd and 64th Soviet Armies suffered enormous losses: the 13th Guards Division, entering the battle with over 10,000 men, virtually ceased to exist; it suffered 80% casualties in its first week in the city alone.

In September, Stalin sent General Vasily Chuikov to take command of the embattled survivors of the 62nd Army in the city itself. They were tenaciously clinging to rubble on the west bank of the Volga, with only a few hundred meters between its front lines and the river to its back.

The media is giving up its place in our democracy see note please Chris Wallace

The media feeds anti-Trump bias disguised as news which is taken up by Facebook and social media and then taken as absolute truth…..and Fox, while more nuanced is part of the problem…..Note Tucker Carlson’s obsequious interview of rabid leftist Max Blumenthal….rsk
Chris Wallace is anchor of “Fox News Sunday.” This op-ed is adapted from a speech he gave Nov. 9 to the International Center for Journalists.

Whatever side you’re on in the debate over journalism these days, you’re not going to like some of what I have to say. Let’s start with a basic fact. President Trump is engaged in the most direct, sustained assault on the free press in our history. Since early in the campaign, he has done everything he could to delegitimize the media — attacking us institutionally and individually. And I think his purpose is clear: a concerted campaign to raise doubts over whether we can be trusted when we report critically about his administration.

According to the Trump Twitter Archive, between Jan. 10 and the end of October, Trump tweeted about “fake news” 141 times. One stands out. On Feb. 17, the president tweeted this: “The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy. It is the enemy of the American People!” And that was precisely his point. If we report negatively about something he’s doing, we are hurting the country.

Reince Priebus, then the White House chief of staff, was my guest on “Fox News Sunday” two days later. When I asked him about the president’s tweet, he complained that, yes, we covered what Trump did, but that “as soon as it’s over, the next 20 hours is all about Russian spies.” I answered: “You don’t get to tell us what to do any more than Barack Obama. He whined about Fox News all the time. But he never said we were the enemy of the people.”

But don’t take it from me. Listen to William H. McRaven, a Navy SEAL for 37 years, the man in charge of the missions that captured Saddam Hussein and killed Osama bin Laden. McRaven graduated from the University of Texas with a degree in journalism. He’s now the chancellor of the University of Texas system. And after the president’s tweet, he told students: “This sentiment may be the greatest threat to democracy in my lifetime.”

Remember, this is a man who fought the Soviet Union, who fought Islamist terrorism. But when I asked him about his comments, he said, “Those threats brought us together. Both the president and I swore an oath to the Constitution. And the First Amendment of that Constitution is freedom of the press. When the president says the media is the enemy of the people, to me that undermines the Constitution. So I do think it is a tremendous threat to our democracy.”

It turns out McRaven may have understated the threat. A Politico poll a couple of weeks ago found that 46 percent of voters believe that major news organizations make up stories about Trump. A Newseum Institute poll in May found that 23 percent think the First Amendment “goes too far.” And 74 percent don’t think “fake news” should be protected by the First Amendment.

But there is another side to this debate, as there usually is. There’s an old saying: “Even hypochondriacs sometimes get sick.” And even if Trump is trying to undermine the press for his own calculated reasons, when he talks about bias in the media — unfairness — I think he has a point.

Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas District 10): Reclaiming the mantle of leadership on the world stage

In the absence of American leadership, dangers gather in far-away lands and terrorist threats against our homeland grow. This became explicitly clear as the Obama administration wrapped up its second term, leaving behind a foreign policy legacy that included the establishment and explosion of the Islamic State, a reckless nuclear deal that enriched a terror-sponsoring regime in Iran, and an emboldened tyrant in North Korea committed to bullying, blackmailing, and possibly attacking the United States with nuclear weapons.

Our allies didn’t trust us and our enemies did not fear us.

However, because of efforts by the current administration and actions taken in the House of Representatives, we are no longer pushing the most pressing problems to the next generation. Instead, we are confronting them head-on.

Earlier this year our military began implementing a new strategy that has empowered our battlefield commanders to hunt terrorists more aggressively. This is in stark contrast to the Obama era, which saw American planes drop leaflets ahead of an attack, warning our enemies to flee. This approach has allowed American-backed forces to liberate key ISIS strongholds that include Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria. We are finally on the verge of destroying the so-called caliphate.

After two years of implementation, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action has turned out to be exactly what critics predicted — an extremely flawed accord that left key components of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure in place. The JCPOA has not only strengthened the oppressive government in Tehran with planeloads of cash and sanctions relief, it has also failed to alter Iran’s destabilizing and anti-American behavior.

Around the entire Middle East, Iran has been fomenting chaos through the formation of a “Shia Crescent” by supporting Houthi rebels in Yemen, Shi’ite militias in Iraq, Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Last month, after careful evaluation, the president rightly chose not to recertify the disastrous nuclear deal and sanctioned the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.