Displaying posts published in

December 2017

MY SAY: THE U.N. AND THE U.S.

On November 10, 1975, While the late Senator Daniel Moynihan was ambassador to that vile organization, the U.N. passed Resolution 3379 which declared that Zionism is a form of Racism. Moynihan rose after the resolution passed and proclaimed:

EXCERPTS : FOR FULL TEXT GOT TO https://www.unwatch.org/moynihans-moment-the-historic-1975-u-n-speech-in-response-to-zionism-is-racism/

“The United States…does not acknowledge, it will not abide by, it will never acquiesce in this infamous act…… There will be time enough to contemplate the harm this act will have done the United Nations. Historians will do that for us, and it is sufficient for the moment only to note the foreboding fact. A great evil has been loosed upon the world. The abomination of anti-semitism — as this year’s Nobel Peace Laureate Andrei Sakharov observed in Moscow just a few days ago — the abomination of anti-semitism has been given the appearance of international sanction. The General Assembly today grants symbolic amnesty — and more — to the murderers of the six million European Jews. Evil enough in itself, but more ominous by far is the realization that now presses upon us — the realization that if there were no General Assembly, this could never have happened.As this day will live in infamy, it behooves those who sought to avert it to declare their thoughts so that historians will know that we fought here, that we were not small in number — not this time — and that while we lost, we fought with full knowledge of what indeed would be lost…… The lie is that Zionism is a form of racism. The overwhelmingly clear truth is that it is not.”

Palestinians: Another “Reconciliation” Bites the Dust by Khaled Abu Toameh

The idea that Hamas would disarm and stop digging tunnels and hand the Gaza Strip on a silver platter to Abbas and Fatah is pure fantasy.

Westerners are either ignorant and naïve or they are willfully deluding themselves.

Hamas simply cannot accept a situation where it is being asked to accept the so-called two-state solution….As made clear by the Hamas leaders, their goal remains to seek the “liberation of all of Palestine, from the [Mediterranean] sea to the [Jordan] river.” This is Hamas’s mantra.

For more than two months, the Hamas-Fatah “reconciliation” agreement that was reached in Cairo in October has been hailed by many Arabs and Westerners as a sign that the Palestinians were finally marching forward together.

It turns out, however, that the dramatic announcement of the agreement, which was reached with the sponsorship of the Egypt, was all a bluff.

Those in the know about the Palestinian world predicted that the latest “reconciliation” deal would fail. At least five previous agreements between Hamas and Fatah, reached under the auspices of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Yemen over the past ten years, likewise failed. Every one of these agreements was stillborn, not worth the time it took to uncap the pen.

The latest “reconciliation” agreement, then, has just joined this impressive list of defunct accords. Moreover, it is not too speculative to suggest that any truce struck in the foreseeable future between Hamas and Fatah would also swiftly join its predecessors in the graveyard of agreements.

So, why do these “reconciliation” agreements between the two rival Palestinian parties keep failing? Why has it become impossible for the Palestinians to reunite themselves and work together for the sake of a better life for their people? Who is responsible for the divisions and internal bickering among the Palestinians and who are the biggest losers and winners from the continued power struggle between Hamas and Fatah?

These questions prod at one as Palestinian leaders continue to call for “days of rage” and incite their people in response to President Donald Trump’s announcement recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. The small protests that have swept some parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip (but were exaggerated by mainstream media in the West) served as a distraction from the failure of Hamas and Fatah to implement their “reconciliation” agreement.

Simon Haines An Education Manifesto for Western Civilisation

Our research- and rankings-driven universities oblige arts academics to teach their research in order to justify their existence. This makes it very hard to establish coherent, overarching disciplinary perspectives, as opposed to an assemblage of research programs with teaching spinoffs.

“Western civilisation” shouldn’t be a contentious concept. If “civilisation” refers to the communal arrangements of relatively large or dense populations, broadly affiliated by enduring practices, rules and beliefs, and embellished and facilitated by characteristic arts, techniques and individuals, then that term seems uncontroversial. No one objects to the study of Chinese, Persian, Mesopotamian, Arab, Indian, Aztec, Inca or classical Greek civilisations.

As for “Western”, we are happy to speak of Western Australia, or the Western Isles of Scotland. Something being west of something else doesn’t seem intrinsically objectionable. We all have to be west of somewhere. Europe is west of Asia and the Middle East (although north of Africa). It has a civilisation with distinctive features and inheritances (although some of these derive from its closest neighbours). The Americas are west of Europe and in turn inherited many of these features, and “Euro-American civilisation” is a bit of a mouthful, as well as incomplete seen from New Zealand and points west.

Furthermore, many of these distinctive features are recognised worldwide as uncontroversially “Western”, as opposed to Chinese, Aztec and so on. Homer and Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe, Jane Austen and Joan of Arc, Plato and NATO, Beethoven and Bartok, Leonardo and Picasso, the Parthenon and the Pantheon, Napoleon and Julius Caesar, Botticelli’s Venus and the Mona Lisa, the Roman empire and Christianity, the Enlightenment and its revolutionary American, French, industrial and scientific heirs, democracy and human rights. Most educated Chinese people, for example, would recognise much of this list as “Western”, are interested in its features, and where feasible would like to photograph themselves standing in front of one of them.

“Civilisation” is an unremarkable concept, then, and so is “Western”. But there’s a nuclear reaction when the two are put together. The idea of “Western civilisation” is contentious. Criticism of it is constant, and is of two kinds. The first comes mainly from scholars and intellectuals, who offer some version of the argument that the concept is empty or meaningless. The second criticism (censure, really) is of the thing, “The West” and all its works. In its domestic or endogenous form this also comes mainly from intellectuals, less scholarly ones on the whole, including especially students. But there is also an exogenous form, from people all over the world with radical non-Western or anti-Western attitudes and agendas, either covert or overt. Taking the two broader types of criticism together: either Western civilisation is nothing, or it is wicked. Either it doesn’t exist, or it shouldn’t.

The denial of its existence is an example of a common intellectual propensity to scrutinise some familiar object more and more closely until the object itself disappears, as under a microscope. Max Planck and Erwin Schrödinger led quantum physics into seeing the visible world as fundamentally made of invisible energy. The harder scholars look at “Western civilisation”, the more fine-grained their analysis becomes, the less aware they are of the larger entity. Instead, they see its important sources and analogues in the Middle East or Africa (if Egypt is Africa), or the Arab scholars of the so-called “early middle ages” (a golden age for them) who were such vital transmitters of Greek thought to Europe. They see “Europe” and “the West” as concepts with identifiable provenance, so that almost by definition they once “didn’t exist”. They see the concept as embracing so many dissimilar or conflicting elements that it has no real meaning any more. They have difficulties with calling its essential elements “Western”, properly speaking (Christianity arose in the Middle East and so many of its adherents are now African or Asian). Above all, they can’t see “Western civilisation” as having any single, essential defining feature.

Peter Smith Mistletoe or Not, Trump Deserves a Kiss

Lowering taxes, as presidents Kennedy and Reagan demonstrated, boosts economic growth. What is important is not that some rich people get richer, but that the vast majority of people benefit. How many Americans who despise Trump will revel in the extra wealth he has now allowed them to retain?

In Australia, and I suspect the UK and in Western Europe more generally, Donald Trump is widely despised. I try to cajole people. OK, I say, you don’t and never will like him, but can you at least look to see whether you like any or some of his policies. It is a forlorn endeavour. I will tell you why.

The vast majority of people get their news and views from the mainstream media or, if younger, from social media. Thus, the tax-reduction Christmas present that he and the US Congress are delivering to the American people (alas we are not getting one) is portrayed as benefiting the rich at the expense of the poor. That this is complete and utter tendentious drivel is by the way. Repeated often enough, it is a factoid in the making.

In fact, all but a few American taxpayers will benefit. Some with very high deductions which have now been removed or capped might not but, in the main, this will affect only the well-heeled. But here comes the rub. Those now paying most tax will on the whole gain the most benefit in absolute dollar terms. That’s the awesome power of arithmetic which so befuddles leftist minds.

In the United States, according to the Tax Policy Centre, 45% of households pay no federal income tax and, therefore, will not benefit from rate reductions. To illustrate the picture differently, the top 20% of individual income earners pay 87 percent of federal income taxes while the next 20 percent pay the rest. The bottom 60% pay a net zero percent.

For the edification of the left, halving taxes for those who pay little gives them little. Taking just five percent off taxes for those who pay an awful lot gives them much more. Democrats being Democrats, leftists being leftists, resist this unavoidable outcome with as much sanctimony as they can muster.

The real problem, of course, is that those on the left live in a static world of haves and have-nots, within which the division of the pie is the be-all and end-all. Once you are stuck in this world; as, say, is Bill Shorten, there is no exit point and around and around in circles you go preoccupied with inequality. In the end result, forcing more equal outcomes undermines market forces. The pie never grows to its potential.

The prime purpose of lowering taxes, as presidents Kennedy and Reagan argued, is to boost economic growth. What is important is not that some rich people get a lot richer out of this, but that the vast majority of people benefit.

Business taxes fall on owners or shareholders, on employees, and on customers. The incidence of benefit for any reduction in such taxes is hard to gauge. But rich and not-so-rich owners and shareholders are likely to benefit as are customers. Importantly, workers will potentially benefit though the creation of more jobs and higher pay. This is the main game. When it comes to lowering business taxes, the only question worth asking is how much lift will it likely give to jobs and economic growth. Unless you detest Trump, of course.

The Iran Echo Chamber Smears Politico Josh Meyer is not an ideologue, not a partisan, not a quack. By Matthew Continetti

Nothing has been more tedious over the last year than the constant reminders that good journalism is “now more important than ever.” The implication, of course, is that solid, groundbreaking reporting was not as essential so long as a liberal Democrat was in power. I’ve long assumed that the factotums mouthing such clichés lack the self-awareness to understand the true import of their words. But maybe I’ve been wrong. Recent days brought evidence that, no, liberals really mean it: The only meaningful investigative work is that which reflects poorly on Republicans.

Earlier this week, for example, Politico Magazine published a story by Josh Meyer headlined “The secret backstory of how Obama let Hezbollah off the hook.” This epic and copiously sourced piece relates how, “in its determination to secure a nuclear deal with Iran, the Obama administration derailed an ambitious law enforcement campaign targeting drug trafficking by the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah, even as it [Hezbollah, not the Obama administration] was funneling cocaine into the United States.”

The law-enforcement program in question is called Project Cassandra, which for eight years “used wiretaps, undercover operations, and informants to map Hezbollah’s illicit networks, with the help of 30 U.S. and foreign security agencies.” However, as investigators came closer to unraveling the globe-spanning conspiracy, “the Justice Department declined requests by Project Cassandra and other authorities to file criminal charges against major players such as Hezbollah’s high-profile envoy to Iran, a Lebanese bank that allegedly laundered billions in alleged drug profits, and a central player in a U.S.-based cell of the Iranian paramilitary Quds force.” Linger over that last item for a second.

Meyer cites “dozens” of interviews and documents as evidence. He quotes a veteran U.S. intelligence operative — the sort of guy whose every utterance is anonymously paraded in the newspapers and magazines so long as it’s anti-Trump — who says, “This was a policy decision, it was a systematic decision.” And the reason for this systematic decision, presumably, was to make Hezbollah’s Iranian backers more willing to deal with the Obama administration on nukes.

Meyer points to congressional testimony from former Treasury official Katherine Bauer, who said last February, “These investigations were tamped down for fear of rocking Iran and jeopardizing the nuclear deal.” President Obama, in other words, slow-walked counter-narcotics efforts for the inane “greater good” of paying Iran billions to pretend to shut down its nuclear program for ten years. This is the very definition of “stupid stuff.”

Meyer is not an ideologue, not a partisan, not a quack. He worked for the Los Angeles Times, for NBC News, and for the Medill National Security Journalism Initiative before joining Politico as a senior investigative reporter. His Twitter feed contains plenty of criticisms of President Trump and congressional Republicans. And his story is solid. He explores different angles and gives his subjects fair comment. He’s produced a classic example of the good journalism that our betters tell us we need more than ever.

Was the Steele Dossier the FBI’s ‘Insurance Policy’? Clinton campaign propaganda appears to have triggered Obama administration spying on Trump’s campaign. By Andrew C. McCarthy

The FBI’s deputy director Andrew McCabe testified Tuesday at a marathon seven-hour closed-door hearing of the House Intelligence Committee. According to the now-infamous text message sent by FBI agent Peter Strzok to his paramour, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, it was in McCabe’s office that top FBI counterintelligence officials discussed what they saw as the frightening possibility of a Trump presidency.

That was during the stretch run of the 2016 campaign, no more than a couple of weeks after they started receiving the Steele dossier — the Clinton campaign’s opposition-research reports, written by former British spy Christopher Steele, about Trump’s purportedly conspiratorial relationship with Vladimir Putin’s regime in Russia.

Was it the Steele dossier that so frightened the FBI?

I think so.

There is a great deal of information to follow. But let’s cut to the chase: The Obama-era FBI and Justice Department had great faith in Steele because he had previously collaborated with the bureau on a big case. Plus, Steele was working on the Trump-Russia project with the wife of a top Obama Justice Department official, who was personally briefed by Steele. The upper ranks of the FBI and DOJ strongly preferred Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton, to the point of overlooking significant evidence of her felony misconduct, even as they turned up the heat on Trump. In sum, the FBI and DOJ were predisposed to believe the allegations in Steele’s dossier. Because of their confidence in Steele, because they were predisposed to believe his scandalous claims about Donald Trump, they made grossly inadequate efforts to verify his claims. Contrary to what I hoped would be the case, I’ve come to believe Steele’s claims were used to obtain FISA surveillance authority for an investigation of Trump.

There were layers of insulation between the Clinton campaign and Steele — the campaign and the Democratic party retained a law firm, which contracted with Fusion GPS, which in turn hired the former spy. At some point, though, perhaps early on, the FBI and DOJ learned that the dossier was actually a partisan opposition-research product. By then, they were dug in. No one, after all, would be any the wiser: Hillary would coast to victory, so Democrats would continue running the government; FISA materials are highly classified, so they’d be kept under wraps. Just as it had been with the Obama-era’s Fast and Furious and IRS scandals, any malfeasance would remain hidden.

The best laid schemes . . . gang aft agley.

Why It Matters
Strzok’s text about the meeting in McCabe’s office is dated August 16, 2016. As we’ll see, the date is important. According to Agent Strzok, with Election Day less than three months away, Page, the bureau lawyer, weighed in on Trump’s bid: “There’s no way he gets elected.” Strzok, however, believed that even if a Trump victory was the longest of long shots, the FBI “can’t take that risk.” He insisted that the bureau had no choice but to proceed with a plan to undermine Trump’s candidacy: “It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40.”

3rd US Imam Preaches Mass Murder of Jews Daniel Greenfield

He’s not actually the third. But this is the third major scandal of this sort this year. And that was only because Memri has been highlighting and translating some of these mosque videos. This is only a fraction of what’s out there.

In his Friday, December 8, 2017 sermon titled “Our Duties Towards Al-Quds [Jerusalem]” at the Tajweed Institute’s Houston, Texas branch, the institute’s imam and founder, Sheikh Raed Saleh Al-Rousan, speaking in a combination of Arabic and English, referenced the widely quoted Hadith stating that on Judgment Day, the Muslims will fight the Jews and kill them, saying:

“My brothers, the Prophet Muhammad brought the good tidings, when he said: ‘Judgment day will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews. The Muslims will kill the Jews, and the Jews will hide behind the stones and the trees, [which] will say: Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him… This is the promise of Allah.” He added: “The hour [i.e. Judgment Day) will not start until Muslims fight the Jews there, in Palestine.”

According to its Facebook page and its website, the Tajweed Institute, which Sheikh Al-Rousan established in Florida in 2013, with its Houston branch opening in mid-2017, is “a non-profit, 501(c)(3), institute that strives to teach and spread the authentic knowledge of the Glorious Quran. Our goal is to spread the skills of Tajweed [correct recitation of the Koran]to all Muslims, young and old, so they can carry on this knowledge to future generations.​”

…and not misunderstand Islam.

In this week’s piece, I delved into two recent cases, in California and New Jersey. Now we have a third case in Texas.

It was another Friday night in the Islamic Center of Jersey City. And its imam, Sheikh Aymen Elkasaby, had some thoughts about the Jews.

“So long as the Al-Aqsa Mosque remains a humiliated prisoner under the oppression of the Jews, this nation will never prevail,” he screamed belligerently in the World Trade Center bomber’s old mosque.

“Count them one by one, and kill them down to the very last one. Do not leave a single one on the face of the Earth.”

On another Friday this year, in the Islamic Center of Davis, Imam Ammar Shahin implored, “Oh Allah, liberate the Al-Aqsa Mosque from the filth of the Jews.”

“Oh Allah, count them one by one and annihilate them down to the very last one.”

The Islamic Center of Davis’s initial response was, “If the sermon was misconstrued, we sincerely apologize to anyone offended. “

You can expect the same routine again. We apologize if you misunderstood our genocidal threats.

A Great Week for the President and a NeverTrump Crack-up By Julie Kelly

This week has been a vindication for much-maligned Trump supporters. Not only did the president have the best week of his administration, an internecine feud erupted within the “NeverTrump” tribe.

First, the great week. The president fulfilled a key campaign promise with his signing this morning of the tax reform bill that also eliminated Obamacare’s individual mandate and opened up the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge to drilling. He reprioritized our national security interests with his National Security Statement issued Monday And finally, who can’t be proud of the the announcement that the United States would finally be “taking names” of our foes at the United Nations? There is palpable satisfaction among Trump voters and even reluctant supporters.

Though ultimately less important, on one level, the “NeverTrump” infighting may be even more delicious than the solid week of accomplishments. Before the primary elections, an influential and vocal group of conservatives loosely banded together to oppose Trump’s candidacy; this included the editors of National Review and The Weekly Standard, conservative columnists for the Washington Post and New York Times, authors such as Tom Nichols, and the presidential ticket of independents Evan McMullin and Mindy Finn. But since Trump won (and subsequently amassed a record any legitimate conservative would have hailed had it come from a different Republican) a growing rift has developed between the various factions in NeverTrumpland. On one side are influencers who gradually, if begrudgingly, acknowledge Trump is governing in a way far more palatable to their “principled conservatism” than they expected. While they still bemoan his temperament and approach, they commend his achievements.

On the other side are opportunists who have become traitors to the “conservative” cause they once championed as they shrewdly trade their integrity for air time on MSNBC or CNN to rant about the president. (I have written about them here and here.) They have publicly speculated—or hoped, to put it more accurately—that Trump would not survive the first year of his presidency, and encouraged his staff and Congressional Republicans to abandon the Trump Titanic before the Mueller iceberg took it down. Their message has become inchoate and unhinged, and decidedly not conservative.

The widening rift between the two camps turned into a chasm this week. On Monday, National Review Online published a column by its editor, Charles C. W. Cooke, denouncing the hyperbole and hypocrisy of Jennifer Rubin, the Washington Post’s allegedly conservative blogger. Cooke, not exactly a fan of President Trump, compared Rubin to Trump’s most “unprincipled acolytes” who demand blind loyalty to the MAGA cause: “Rubin has become precisely what she dislikes in others: a monomaniac and a bore, whose visceral dislike of her opponents has prompted her to drop the keys to her conscience into a well.”

Cooke identifies several issues on which Rubin has flip-flopped since Trump was elected, including the Paris Climate Accord, Obama’s Iran deal, the U.S. embassy move to Jerusalem, and gun control. To illustrate her reversals, Cooke cited Rubin’s own words and columns. (Cooke also linked to my recent article about Rubin.) Cooke calls her byline “tragically misleading,” noting “she is not in fact writing from a ‘conservative perspective,’ but as just one more voice among a host of Trump-obsessed zealots who add nothing to our discourse. In so doing, she does conservatism a sincere disservice.”

California’s Political Fires The state’s wildfires are overwhelming its anticarbon pieties.

Wildfires continue to ravage California, and the bravery of firefighters trying to prevent damage to homes and property has been inspiring. But this being 2017 in America, the state’s progressive politicians are blaming the fires on humanity’s sins of carbon emission. To the contrary, the conflagrations should be a wake-up call to regulators and politicians who have emphasized acts of climate piety over fire prevention.

This year’s wildfires have consumed about 1.2 million acres in the Golden State—more than the state of Rhode Island—and caused tens of billions of dollars in damage. Some four dozen people were killed amid the blazes through Northern California in October. Large sections of coastal Ventura and Santa Barbara counties have been charred this month while a Los Angeles brushfire threatened the Getty Center and the University of California, Los Angeles.

“The fires are burning in California. They’ll be burning in France, burning all around the world,” fire-and-brimstone Governor Jerry Brown proclaimed recently in Paris. The world is “on the road to hell.”

Yet this fire season appears to be a black swan. One of the wettest winters on record followed a five-year drought and a bark-beetle forest infestation. The result has been a buildup of deadwood and dry brush. The U.S. Forest Service this month said it had found 129 million dead trees in California. Santa Ana and Diablo winds have been particularly persistent, strong and erratic this year, making the fires spread faster and harder to contain.

Loath to let a natural disaster go to political waste, the California Air Resources Board used the fires to promote a new climate-change “scoping plan” aimed at doubling the rate at which it cuts carbon emissions. The irony is that the emissions from wildfires could negate all of the state’s anticarbon policies.

Next Year in Jerusalem The U.N. reveals the depth of its anti-U.S., anti-Israel politics.

When Donald Trump made good this month on his campaign promise to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, it changed almost nothing on the ground: The reality is that Jerusalem has been Israel’s capital for decades.

Likewise for the United Nations’ vote Thursday to condemn the U.S. for the move. It changes nothing, because the U.N. doesn’t get to decide which capitals America recognizes and where it puts its embassies. But the resolution is a reminder of how deep anti-American and anti-Israel sentiment runs at Turtle Bay.

Only seven countries—Guatemala, Honduras, Togo, Nauru, Palau, Micronesia and the Marshall Islands—were willing to stand with Uncle Sam and Israel and vote against the resolution. Thirty-five nations abstained, including Canada and the Czech Republic, which is at least better than outright condemnation. But 128 countries voted yes, with Britain, France, Japan and Germany joining Iran, Russia, China and North Korea to condemn the U.S.

The question is what comes next. Before the measure passed, Nikki Haley, the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., delivered a speech reminiscent of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s rebuttal in 1975 when he was the American Ambassador and the U.N. passed a resolution declaring Zionism a form of racism.

“We will remember [this vote],” Ms. Haley said, “when we are called upon to once again make the world’s largest contribution to the United Nations. And we will remember it when so many countries come calling on us, as they so often do, to pay even more and to use our influence for their benefit.” President Trump said something similar at his cabinet meeting, that “we’ll save a lot” by cutting aid to countries that went against us.

These are welcome reminders to an assembly that has long been an embarrassment to its founding principles. Ms. Haley was joined in her reaction to this insult by some members of Congress. Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) also said the U.S. ought to reconsider the money the U.S. pays to keep the U.N. going.

The feeling is understandable, and we hope the Trump Administration finds ways to make clear its displeasure to the friends who abandoned the U.S. A complete pullout from the U.N. is unlikely, if only because the U.S. is a member to serve America’s interests, not the U.N.’s. Without the U.S. as a check, the United Nations would allow the Palestinians and others to write their own terms for the Middle East, and denunciations of America would be as common as denunciations of Israel. This is the reason Israel remains in the body, notwithstanding the routine insults from countries with obscene human-rights violations.

The best way for America to show the hollowness of this U.N. stunt is by proceeding with its plans to build an Embassy in Jerusalem—and demonstrate to the U.N. that America is one nation that stands by its friends.