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November 2017

POLITICS Comments turned off

Want to Spice Up Thanksgiving Dinner? Talk Politics Some families have a rule: no politics at Thanksgiving. But why not? With a few guidelines, it might just be the excitement your dinner needs By Jason Gay

By on November 18th, 2017

Thanksgiving is coming—and with it, two big, annual, wildly contentious questions:

1. Is canned cranberry sauce actually a food product that should be consumed by human beings?

2. Can we talk politics at Thanksgiving dinner?

I want to go on the record: I like canned cranberry sauce, and I am at least 31% sure it is food.

At the same time, I believe if you shake cranberry sauce out of a can—with a big, disgusting THWUUUPPPPP —and leave it on a chair in the backyard until the year 3012, it will look exactly the same. By then the canned cranberry sauce may even be sentient and raising a family of its own.

Also: I think it’s OK to talk politics at Thanksgiving.

I realize the latter position is controversial. Many reasonable American families try at all costs to avoid politics at the Thanksgiving dinner table.

Some families actually have a rule: no politics at Thanksgiving, and it’s strictly enforced, like the way Mom made you and your spouse sleep in separate rooms until you were married. If you even say the word “politics,” the host will begin wildly waving his or her arms, as if a grizzly bear has rumbled into the kitchen.

Other families simply flee the table when Uncle Billy’s had a few cocktails and gets going about something he heard on talk radio.

It’s definitely safer to leave the conversation to more easygoing topics, like:

Weather.

Netflix shows we’re all watching.

Possible salmonella poisoning.

Serial killers loose in the neighborhood.

In-laws we don’t like.

Watching football has traditionally been an easy way to escape Thanksgiving political chitchat. The Detroit Lions were basically invented to help Americans avoid speaking to their families at Thanksgiving.

Thanks, Lions!

But even football is political this season. You’ve seen the headlines. You’ve read the tweets.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Germany’s Green Energy Meltdown Voters promised a virtuous revolution get coal and high prices instead.

By on November 18th, 2017

American climate-change activists point to Europe, and especially Germany, as the paragon of green energy virtue. But they ought to look closer at Angela Merkel’s political struggles as she tries to form a new government in Berlin amid the economic fallout from the Chancellor’s failing energy revolution.

Berlin last month conceded it will miss its 2020 carbon emissions-reduction goal, having cut emissions by just under 30% compared with 1990 instead of the 40% that Mrs. Merkel promised. The goal of 55% by 2030 is almost surely out of reach.

Mrs. Merkel’s failure comes despite astronomical costs. By one estimate, businesses and households paid an extra €125 billion in increased electricity bills between 2000 and 2015 to subsidize renewables, on top of billions more in other handouts. Germans join Danes in paying the highest household electricity rates in Europe, and German companies pay near the top among industrial users. This is a big reason Mrs. Merkel underperformed in September’s election.

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ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Saudi Arabia, Israel and Realpolitik How Obama’s appeasement policies have prompted a fundamental realignment in Mideast alliances. Ari Lieberman

By on November 17th, 2017

The Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff, Lt.-Gen. Gadi Eisenkot, revealed this week that Israel was prepared to share intelligence with Saudi Arabia in an effort to combat Iran’s expansionist agenda and malign regional influence. The unprecedented statement was made during the course of an interview with the London-based, Saudi online publication, Elaph.

Israel and Saudi Arabia have historically been bitter enemies. In 1967, just prior to the Six-Day War, King Faisal added his voice to the endless chorus of Arab leaders calling for Israel’s destruction. When asked by a British interviewer what sequence of events he’d like to see happen in connection with regional developments, he answered bluntly: “The first thing is the extermination of Israel.”

During the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Saudi Arabia used oil in an effort to blackmail countries from engaging with Israel, causing long lines at the pumps and sending fuel prices skyrocketing. And over the years since, the Kingdom has pumped an untold fortune of petro dollars into the coffers of Israel’s genocidal enemies.

But the changing times have made for strange bedfellows. Saudi Arabia no longer sees Israel as its enemy. Indeed, the Saudis now grudgingly view the Israelis with favor. The threat to the Kingdom now emerges from the east in the form of the malignancy known as the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Shia Iran has been waging a relentless proxy war with Sunni Saudi Arabia on several fronts and appears to be succeeding. The Islamic Republic has succeeded in creating a land bridge extending from Teheran through Baghdad, Damascus and Beirut and out to the eastern Mediterranean.

They’ve also been fomenting unrest on the Arabian Peninsula by deploying proxy militias and agitators in Bahrein and Yemen, prompting Saudi Arabia to intervene militarily on behalf of those countries. Particularly troublesome is the situation in Yemen where the Iranians are backing the Shia Houthi rebels against the internationally-recognized government of President Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi.

Thus far, the Iranian inspired Houthi insurgency has claimed 10,000 lives and over 40,000 injured. An Iranian success there could give the Islamic Republic control over the Mandeb Strait, a major maritime choke point. Iranian control over the Strait of Hormuz and the Mandeb Strait would have instant negative global ramifications. Much of the world’s maritime traffic would be held hostage to the whims of the mullahs. Oil prices would skyrocket while stock markets would crash.

The Yemen civil war has been a major headache for the Saudis. On January 30, a suicide boat packed with explosives, and piloted by Houthis, plowed into a Saudi frigate on patrol near the Mandab Strait, killing 2 sailors and injuring 3. Houthis have also fired missiles – which were either intercepted or fell short of their target – at U.S. warships.

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EDUCATION, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Report: Students for Justice in Palestine Threatens Free Speech on Campus SJP activists have applauded terrorists, engage in violence and intimidation Rachael Frommer

By on November 17th, 2017

The anti-Israel national campus organization Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) is a terror-affiliated, anti-free speech organization endangering American campuses, according to a new report from a Jerusalem research institute.

Co-authored by Dan Diker and Jamie Berk of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, “SJP Unmasked” claims SJP “operates under mysterious auspices and receives monetary and material support from organizations and individuals connected to Palestinian terror groups and associates.”

“Students for Justice in Palestine is a byproduct of American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), an organization whose leaders were former members and supporters of Palestinian and Islamist terror organization,” according to the report. AMP was formed after several U.S.-based Muslim organizations dissolved between 2001 and 2011 following a federal case that found the groups had funneled money to Hamas, write Diker and Berk.

This reflects congressional testimony last year from Jonathan Schanzer of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, who said the Hamas-linked AMP bankrolled the anti-Israel activism movement.

One AMP board member, Saleh Sarsour, served jail time in Israel for his Hamas activities, according to Schanzer. Sarsour used his Milwaukee, Wis., furniture store “to pass money to Adel Awadallah, the leader of the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’ armed wing,” explains the JCPA report.

SJP activists have applauded terrorists and their methods, inviting terrorists to speak and lauding Palestinian murderers as “martyrs” on social media.

SJP at American University in Washington, D.C., organized a talk via Skype from Khader Adnan Mohammed Musa, a spokesperson for Islamic Jihad, a U.S. designated terrorist organization, notes the report. Additionally, activists at “Bowdoin College, Tufts University, Union Theological Seminary, Ryerson University, and Columbia University have expressed solidarity with Adnan on social media.”

Before her deportation to Jordan, Rasmea Odeh was a popular figure on the campus circuit, finding strong supporters in SJP during her bid to fight the immigration fraud charges levied against her.

SJP activists have also reportedly engaged in violence and physical intimidation.

At Temple University in 2014, a man tabling for SJP “punched a student in the face and called him a ‘kike’ and ‘baby-killer’ for asking to discuss Israel,” states the report. Jewish students have reported being assaulted, harassed and spat on by their SJP peers at Cornell, Loyola University in Chicago, and Stanford.

Diker told the Washington Free Beacon that it is not his intention with the report to attack individual characters, alluding to a tactic taken up by some pro-Israel activists in recent years to publicly name faculty and students who have made statements seen as anti-Semitic.

Instead, he said he worried that SJP’s behavior constituted a threat to the character and safety of the American campus.

“SJP is engaging in intellectual tyranny, a terrorism of the mind,” said Diker. “They threaten the principles of democracy in this country.”

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Next Big Middle Eastern War Saudi Arabia vs. Iran. Daniel Greenfield

By on November 17th, 2017

The Syrian Civil War killed hundreds of thousands and displaced millions. Its ripple effects brought terror to Europe and dragged the United States into the fighting. And it’s just the appetizer for the coming war.

The real war is the one that the Saudis and the Iranians have been maneuvering toward for years. Those maneuvers included everything from Iran’s nuke deal, the fighting in Yemen, the Syrian Civil War, the Iraqi suppression of Kurdish independence, the rise of ISIS, and the Qatari embargo.

The death toll from the buildup to the Sunni-Shiite regional war is approaching a million. And the war hasn’t even begun yet. It may never become an actual war as we understand it. It’s possible that there will be a hundred little wars exploding across the region. These wars will tear apart more of the region and the talking heads on television will blame global warming or Israeli settlements.

Those progressive excuses make much more sense to the media than an Islamic religious war.

And it will almost certainly drag us in.

Obama’s policies lit the fuse. The withdrawal from Iraq, the Arab Spring, the Iranian Nuke deal and the alliance with the Shiite regime in Baghdad did a great deal to increase Iranian power. When the United States left Iraq, Iran took control. The Arab Spring tore apart the region. And Iran used the opportunity to expand its power over Yemen, Iraq and Syria. The nuke deal signaled that Obama wouldn’t do anything to stop Iran from becoming a nuclear power or a regional power. And by outsourcing the fight against ISIS to Shiite terrorist militias, Obama allowed Iran to consolidate control over Iraq and Syria.

The Saudis and the Iranians are both assembling their coalitions. And they’re coloring outside the lines. Qatar’s billionaire Sunni Islamists are aligned with Iran. That’s why the Saudis slapped an embargo on the terror state. Meanwhile Israel is loosely aligned with the Saudis. That may sound strange, but Israel’s biggest threats, from Iran’s nukes to Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists, can be traced back to Tehran.

The Saudis are no slouches when it comes to funding Islamic terrorists. But Qatar’s fellow Sunni oil tyrannies looked at the way that its allies, the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda variants, were tearing apart entire countries, and decided that the little terror state had become too powerful and dangerous.

Iran and Qatar aggressively expanded their influence by using Islamist militias to tear down and take over countries. And between them, the two Islamic terror states were transforming the Middle East.

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IMMIGRATION, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Taking English Seriously Requiring new Americans to learn the language will encourage them to assimilate to their adopted home. Mark Krikorian Jason Richwine

By on November 17th, 2017

Jovita Mendez of Escondido, California became an American citizen in October. Ordinarily, this would be cause for celebration, as we welcome a new member of the American family. Mendez may struggle to fit in, though, because the native of Mexico still can’t speak English; in fact, she can’t read or write in any language.

Legislation passed by Congress in 1990 exempts certain individuals, based on age and length of residence in the United States, from the requirement that they speak, read, and write English before obtaining citizenship. Lawmakers put this exemption in place because so many immigrants were not acquiring even a rudimentary grasp of English (which is all that the citizenship test requires), even after decades of living in the U.S. The latest Census Bureau data show that the number of people speaking a foreign language at home reached 65.5 million last year—double the number in 1990 and triple that of 1980.

Between 2012 and 2014, the U.S. participated in the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), which assesses literacy skills across the industrialized world. The PIAAC’s definition of literacy stipulates “understanding, evaluating, using, and engaging with written text to participate in society, to achieve one’s goals, and to develop one’s knowledge and potential.” In the U.S., the tests were administered in English, and the sample (over 8,000 American adults) was large enough to analyze immigrant scores separately from those of native-born Americans. The results show a large and persistent English-literacy deficit among immigrants. Overall, immigrants score at just the 21st percentile of the distribution, and 41 percent of immigrants are “below basic”—a level sometimes described as functional illiteracy. Problems with English-language acquisition in the U.S. most often involve Hispanic immigrants, many of whom live in Spanish-speaking enclaves that slow assimilation. The average Hispanic immigrant scores at just the 8th percentile on the English literacy test, and 63 percent score below basic.

More troubling than the deficit itself is its persistence. Among immigrants who arrived more than 15 years prior to the test, the results were largely the same—43 percent scored below basic, including 67 percent of Hispanics. As for the children of immigrants, the good news is that their average score is close to the average of the general population. The bad news is that the average disguises a persistent inequality. While the children of non-Hispanic immigrants score at the 60th percentile, the children of Hispanic immigrants score at just the 34th. In other words, low English literacy is a multigenerational problem.

These results may be surprising in light of the positive news that we often hear about English acquisition. “Latino immigrants acquire English as quickly as, or more quickly than, Asian and European immigrants,” wrote Dylan Matthews in the Washington Post. “Fully 89 percent of U.S.-born Latinos spoke English proficiently in 2013,” according to a Pew Hispanic Center report. These numbers are based not on an objective test of literacy, but rather on a Census question that asks, simply, “How well do [you] speak English?” Researchers then assume that anyone who answers “very well” (or speaks only English at home) is proficient. Unfortunately, the PIAAC data show that Hispanic immigrants who say that they speak English “very well” score at just the 33rd percentile on the literacy test—about the same as U.S.-born Hispanics score, despite their “proficiency,” as defined by Pew.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Princeton and Slavery Leave it to a university not to know its history. Myron Magnet

By on November 17th, 2017

Since our universities have become intellectual black holes—dead stars which no longer radiate light but instead suck enlightenment into darkness by the irresistible gravitational pull of their collapse—little wonder that whatever they have to say about their own history and slavery is mere obscurantism. But Princeton, for the moment, wins the palm and the laurel for militant ignorance. Here’s an educational institution that, more than any other, could boast of giving us our Constitution and Bill of Rights. Instead, it is engaged in today’s apparently gratifying (if perverse) self-flagellation of counting the ways in which it was complicit with slavery—minor, compared with the ways in which it gave us our liberty.

Yes, lots of slave-owning Southerners attended the College of New Jersey in its early days. And yes, the university’s first six presidents, from the time of its foundation in 1746, owned slaves—not astonishing when you consider that New Jersey did not abolish slavery until 1804, and that even such a vehement abolitionist as John Jay, a founder of the New York Manumission (anti-slavery) Society, also owned a slave or two at one point in his life. America was—to its everlasting shame—a slave-owning republic, until the northern states outlawed it out of a sense of justice and then fought a Civil War to extirpate it from the rest of the nation—not, as W.E. B. Du Bois rightly says, to assert states’ rights, or to adjust borders, but simply out of the moral recognition that slavery was wrong.

Every slave-owning Founding Father knew that it was wrong, including Thomas Jefferson, who wrote into the Declaration of Independence the immortal words that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with the unalienable right to liberty, and who wrote later in his life that “When the measure of [the slaves’] tears shall be full, when their groans shall have involved heaven itself in darkness, doubtless a god of justice will awaken to their distress, and . . . by his exterminating thunder, manifest his attention to the things of this world, and that they are not to be left to the guidance of a blind fatality.” And so He did, with His terrible swift sword.

One of those early Princeton presidents—the sixth, John Witherspoon, a signer of the Declaration of Independence—was a Scotch Presbyterian minister who brought to these shores the Scottish Enlightenment that also produced Adam Smith and David Hume, and that bristled with a belief in independence of thought and conscience and radical republicanism. And to whom did this great man impart these beliefs? None other than his favorite pupil, Virginia slave-owner James Madison, who went back home to the Piedmont on fire with the idea of liberty of conscience, an idea that, it so happened, ends only in political liberty for the intellectually consistent, as Madison emphatically was. And so Madison sat in his library overlooking the Blue Ridge Mountains, reading history and political philosophy, until he arrived at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 with a fully formed plan for the Constitution—which, with remarkable political flexibility, he was able to compromise into something that all the representatives could sign and all the states ratify. And when he understood, as leader of the first Congress under the new Constitution, how avid was the nation’s thirst for a Bill of Rights, he wrote one, and passed it through the legislature, sorry that he hadn’t made it his first piece of business.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Anti-Trump Chihuahuas Overlook the President’s Many Achievements By Roger Kimball

By on November 17th, 2017

I am told that on that this day in 1933, Franklin Delano Roosevelt opened diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. Despite Walter Duranty’s protestations to the contrary in The New York Times, that was while Stalin was systematically starving millions—yes, millions—of his own people. He went so far as to seal the windows of trains running through the areas he wished to devastate so that passengers could not throw out food to the starving multitudes. FDR knew this. So: was his diplomatic action a good thing or a bad thing?

On this day in 1985, Ronald Reagan travelled to Geneva to meet with Mikhail Gorbachev. The Cold War was still raging. So: was Reagan’s action a good thing or a bad thing?

Fun archival project: go back to the 1980s and read what The New York Times (and kindred outlets) had to say about Ronald Reagan. He was a moron. He was a war monger. He was being played by Gorbachev.

Fast forward to today. Andrew Rosenthal, writing in The New York Times, wants us to know how “grown-ups” deal with Vladimir Putin. His proffered adult is Prime Minister Theresa May, who, in her address at the Lord Mayor’s banquet, gave a tart (and accurate) assessment of Putin’s hostile actions, from his annexation of Crimea to his propaganda war and “weaponization” of information technology. Spot on, Mrs. May!

Andrew Rosenthal contrasts May’s blast against Putin with Donald Trump’s diplomatic efforts.

Let’s leave aside the hypocrisy of a reporter for The New York Times stepping onto his high horse to deliver anti-Russian salvos. Shameless: he even invokes Reagan’s “tear down this wall” speech in Berlin. Go back and read what the Times had to say about that phrase at the time.

You do not have to convince me that Vladimir Putin is a nasty piece of work. Indeed (commercial break), I am just about to publish Putin on the March, Douglas Schoen’s brilliant book on that subject.

The world is full of bad guys. But if you are president of the United States, you should understand that the interests of peace and the interests of prosperity demand that you get along with other nations, if at all possible, especially powerful nations. Donald Trump was quite right when he tweeted a few days ago that “having a good relationship with Russia is a good thing, not a bad thing. . . . I want to solve North Korea, Syria, Ukraine, terrorism, and Russia can greatly help!”

It is “a good thing, not a bad thing” to have a good relationship with Russia. Ditto on China, Vietnam, South Korea, and the Philippines.

Yesterday, just back from his 12-day, 20,000-mile whirlwind trip through Asia, the president gave what posterity will regard as a turning-point speech. The master word of this speech was “confidence.” “When we are confident in ourselves,” the president said, confident in

our strength, our flag, our history, our values—other nations are confident in us. And when we treat our citizens with the respect they deserve, other countries treat America with the respect that our country so richly deserves.
During our travels, this is exactly what the world saw: a strong, proud, and confident America.

Donald Trump displayed, in a way we have not seen since the heyday of Ronald Reagan, what foreign-policy leadership looks like. We have serious differences with Russia and China. We also have areas of agreement and potential agreement. To address the former a canny leader endeavors to exploit the latter. This Donald Trump is doing.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Back to bolted down industries By Viv Forbes

By on November 17th, 2017

Enviromentalists are pushing Australian industry back into the 19th century.

Once upon a time Australia was attractive to processing, refining, and manufacturing industries using our abundant mineral and food resources, our reliable low-cost coal-fired electricity and a workforce trained in technical skills.

No longer.

Australia used to have 11 oil refineries, spread around the country. There are just four left, all over fifty years old, and all in danger of closing down. Green barriers to oil exploration have forced most of them to rely on costly imported crude oil.

Now, for the first time in at least 60 years, Australia no longer produces motor vehicles.

China and India have about 430 coal power plants under construction, but Australia has not built a single coal-fired power station for seven years — some politicians even rejoice when they manage to close and demolish one.

Brisbane’s new trains are being made in India, Victa mowers are made in China and most coastal shipping died decades ago. Steel works and refineries producing aluminium, copper and zinc are under stress. All these industries are being pushed overseas by costly unreliable electricity and other government barriers and burdens.

Red-green policies being pushed by all major parties are making Australia more dependent on bolted-down industries such as mining and farming that can’t be sent overseas because their basic resources are here. And green opposition to nuclear power increases Aussie reliance on coal.

A century ago Australians relied on wool, wheat, gold, silver, copper, lead-zinc, butter, beef and timber — all products of bolted-down industries.

Red-green policies are pushing us back to those days. Politicians need to remember Newton’s Law of Bureaucracy — whenever the government tries to use the force of law to achieve economic goals the long-term results will be equal and opposite to those intended.

So in the long run, red-green energy and environmental policies will make us more dependent on the industries they now attack — mining, farming, forestry, and fishing.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

A Game-Changer in the House of Saud? By Alex Alexiev

By on November 17th, 2017

The dramatic events in Saudi Arabia of the past few days portend a game change in the Middle East not seen in decades. Predictably, the mainstream media, desperate as they are to find something, anything to blame on President Trump, have completely missed it. Instead, they have babbled about the market implications of the arrests of Prince Alwaleed bin Talal and Co., Saudi Arabia ‘emerging’ as an arms manufacturer, conflict with Hezbollah, palace intrigue, etc. etc. Few have put their finger on the actual events – a palace revolution in Riyadh that could change the Middle East in profound and possibly positive ways. For the logic of what’s taking place in the House of Saud is a revolt against the medieval obscurantism that has been the lifeblood of radical Islam and indeed terrorism since the middle of the 20th century. There is no guarantee that it will succeed, for the forces arrayed against it are formidable, but fundamentally, as with the demise of any long-lasting obscurantism, the more appropriate question to ask is: ‘What took so long?’

To seasoned observers, what is taking place in Riyadh is not a complete surprise and some inkling of changing attitudes was on hand as far back as the Arab Spring in 2011, when the Saudis appeared to end their longtime support of the Muslim Brotherhood, and take the side of the military in Egypt, quite unlike the Obama administration which remained wedded to the myth that the MB was a ‘moderate’ organization. Three years later, the UAE declared 82 Islamic organizations, including two prominent American ones (CAIR and MAS) long supported by the Saudis, to be terrorist and this past summer came the break with Qatar for its support of radical jihadists in Syria and elsewhere.

Much more important are the unmistakable signs that the new Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known as MbS, is turning on the reactionary Wahhabi establishment that has long supported radical Islam and terrorism. While his ostensible drive against corruption has received much ink, it has largely escaped notice that caught in the ‘corruption’ purge were senior Wahhabi clerics like Salman al-Awdah, Awad al-Qarni and others. And there is a good reason for their detention, if MbS is serious about “preventing extremism” and “crimes under the name of Islam,” as he has said time and again. It is a fact that the belief system of the dominant Wahhabi ulema is ideologically indistinguishable from that of the ISIS zealots. As an example of the kind of pushback he can expect, no less a figure that the former imam of the key Mecca mosque, Adel al-Kibani, continues to argue publicly that ISIS draws it inspiration from Saudi salafism.

Nonetheless, MbS has continued and accelerated his assault on Wahhabism. Not only has he promised to do away with the Wahhabi ban on women driving and reined in the religious police, but he has now forced the ‘Shura Council’ a hardline Wahhabi ulema outfit, heretofore, to approve an anti-hate law, apart from setting up a “Hadith Complex” in Medina, tasked with “monitoring interpretations of Islamic teachings used to justify violence or terrorism.”

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