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December 2017

Let Us Sing of Greater Things ‘Messiah’ is a Christian masterpiece known by everyone. By Rich Lowry

It is surely possible to be somewhere in the United States in the Christmas season without ready access to a performance of Handel’s “Messiah,” perhaps in the middle of Denali National Park or the Mojave Desert.

The work is ubiquitous and deserves every bit of its popularity. It is a Christian masterpiece known by everyone, a soaring work of genius that never loses its ability to astonish and inspire, whether at a performance of the New York Philharmonic or at a local church singalong.

After hearing it performed on Christmas Day in 1843, Ralph Waldo Emerson described a common reaction, “I walked in the bright paths of sound, and liked it best when the long continuance of a chorus had made the ear insensible to music, made it as if there was none; then I was quite solitary and at ease in the melodious uproar.”

In his new book, Messiah: The Composition and Afterlife of Handel’s Masterpiece, Jonathan Keates traces the history of the work.

A native German who lived in London, G.F. Handel was extraordinarily prolific, composing roughly 40 operas and 30 oratorios. His towering status isn’t in question. Beethoven, born nearly a hundred years later, deemed him “the master of us all.”

Although the “Messiah” is invariably called “Handel’s Messiah,” it was a collaboration. The librettist Charles Jennens, a devout Christian, provided the composer with a “scriptural collection,” the Biblical quotations that make up the text.

Jennens wrote a friend that he hoped Handel “will lay out his whole genius and skill upon it, that the composition may excel all his former compositions, as the subject excels every other subject. The subject is Messiah.”

He needn’t have worried. Handel completed a draft score in three weeks in the summer of 1741. The legend says that while composing the famous “Hallelujah” chorus, he had a vision of “the great God himself.” There is no doubt that artist and subject matter came together in one of the most inspired episodes in the history of Western creativity.

An oratorio shares some characteristics of opera, but there is no acting. Handel was an innovator, writing English-language oratorios and giving the chorus a bigger role. Typically, leading characters anchored a dramatic plot. The drama in “Messiah” was the Christian story itself, the birth, passion, and resurrection of Christ told in scripture.

The work premiered in Dublin, at a performance so crowded that the ladies were urged to come without hoops in their skirts. A correspondent rendered a verdict that has stood up: “The Sublime, the Grand and the Tender, adapted to the most elevated, majestic and moving Words, conspired to transport and charm the ravished Heart and Ear.”

France’s Macron Submits to the Arab World A Gentle Christmas Day Word of Caution by Giulio Meotti

“This month alone, France voted twice in the United Nations to support Arab-sponsored resolutions against the US decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. ”

The tragic dead end of French fake “secularism” is that it allows public expressions of the Islamic religion in France, but prohibits the Christian ones.

Far from defending the Judeo-Christian values ​​on which France, the West and Europe itself was founded — such as individual liberties, freedom of expression, separation of the church from the state and the judiciary, and equal justice under the law — President Macron recently launched an apology for Islam before Arab-Muslim dignitaries.

The balance of Macron’s recent frenetic trips to the Arab world: lavish contracts, apologetic words to Islamists, repentance of the French colonial past and silence on anti-Semitism and radical Islam. Meanwhile, in France, authorities were busy dismantling its Judeo-Christian heritage.

Macron’s special envoy for heritage, Stéphane Bern, proposed charging a fee to enter French cathedrals and churches — as if they were museums.

In Abu Dhabi, members of the victorious Israeli judo team were recently made to mount the winners’ podium without their own anthem and flag. A few days later, French President Emmanuel Macron landed in Abu Dhabi, where he denounced as liars those who say that “that Islam is built by destroying the other monotheisms”. Macron did not raise an eyebrow about the anti-Semitism and racism displayed by the Emirati authorities. Macron merely praised Islam in a country that punishes with death those Muslims who convert to Christianity or profess atheism.

At the French naval base in Abu Dhabi on November 8-9, addressing some businessmen, Macron insisted on the importance of the alliance with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) as an “essential partner with whom we share the same vision of the region and obvious common interests”. Such effusion seems more than the usual language of diplomacy. Macron is now showing a strategic empathy and commitment to the Arab-Islamic world. Is this statement a prelude to submission?

Paul Collits Position Vacant: Australia’s Trump

The US President tapped a body of sentiment that repulses the mainstream political class, and that opportunity also exists here. If you want to shop safe from imported Muslim hell drivers, miss affordable electricity and think little kids should master sums before sodomy, all you lack is the right candidate.

One of my American conservative heroes, William F. Buckley, attempted over the decades to deliver the great right wing project, “fusionism”. This was the building of a right of centre coalition of the willing. Libertarians and conservatives together. His early political project was Barry Goldwater. His later project was Ronald Reagan. Bill was indefatigable, and lieutenants, such as Frank Meyer, set out to herd the cats of the right into something of a competitive political and philosophical force that would stand athwart history and yell “stop”. They would attain power and deliver broad conservative policy outcomes. And they would build this on the back of a philosophical synthesis.

Listening to Mark Steyn speaking recently at the Restoration Weekend organised by the great and courageous David Horowitz – that rare lefty who realised before it was too late he had been an idiot – and hearing the repeated boos at Mark’s every mention of Bill “Never Trump” Kristol, one was shaken to realise that the American right is now hopelessly fractured. The fracture is the result of Trump’s ascendancy and the growing, sullen realisation by his critics that he can actually run a productive, can-do government that is delivering real benefits to great swathes of the American people.

You won’t read that in the Guardian, the mentally enfeebled Fairfax Press or that endless spigot for inner-city received opinion, the ABC, but the fact that such agents of New Establishment orthodoxy all share that view demonstrates its truth. Is there one issue – wind turbines, the benefits of industry-killing electricity costs, the literary worth of all who get invitations to their mates’ writers festivals – on which the Left gets it right? Trump hatred is but more of the same.

The Clinton kleptocracy and its fellow travellers predictably are aghast at what they see in Trump. But this Clintonian regret is driven by self-interest, essentially. The Clintons are toast now; no longer useful, as Hillary will never be president, they have no influence to peddle and must now slouch towards their grim, shared sunset. The left-of-centre political class which they exemplify is being consumed by its own corruption, and, as we have seen recently, its lust.

4 Dead and 8 Wounded in Christmas Carol Festival Attack By Tyler O’Neil

On Friday, a gunman opened fire at a Christmas carol celebration, killing 4 people and injuring 8 others. The attack in Nindem — a village in the northern Nigerian state of Kaduna — cast a pall on a historic Christmas celebration recorded in the Guinness Book of World Records. The attack may be connected to Boko Haram, a Nigerian Islamist group that has formally allied itself with the Islamic State (ISIS).

“Nobody should be allowed to truncate the right of citizens to live in peace and enjoy safety, or thwart their legitimate expectations of celebrating Christmas and the New Year in peace,” Samuel Aruwan, senior special assistant on media and publicity to Governor Nasir El-Rufai, said in a statement on Sunday.

The attack took place while the village took part in the 2017 Akwa Ibom State Christmas Carol Festival on Friday. About 10 million people from over 45 countries across the world were expected to follow the festival, which made the Guinness Book of World Records in 2014 for being the largest choir ever assembled for a Christmas carol, with 30,000 participants.

The 2016 edition had more than 9 million people from 38 countries who logged on to the program’s official website and Twitter handle in the first four hours of the event, according to the state’s commissioner for information and strategy.

“The government condemns this incident, and calls on all stakeholders to help uphold peace by working to avoid escalation and by supporting the security forces,” Aruwan added. He said the office of the governor “commiserates with the families of the victims in this sad moment.”

“It is important that all communities stand firm against any threat to peace, and reject those who might want to reprise the terrible events of December 2016,” the spokesman said.

A closer look at the searing evil of Ted Kennedy By J. Marsolo

Teddy’s description of the Chappaquiddick “accident” was enough to convict him of involuntary and voluntary manslaughter and reckless endangerment.

Today you can add homicide by vehicle while intoxicated, a mandatory three-year prison term in most states.

The facts are simple. Kennedy drove fast, probably drunk, off a bridge at about 11:30 P.M. The pond was only about six feet deep. The front end of the car was angled down.

Kennedy walked away, went to his hotel, and waited until the next morning to report to the police. The car was discovered by two boys fishing in the morning. The boys, unlike Teddy, went to a nearby house to report the car in the water. Had Teddy done this instead of leaving, Mary Jo Kopechne probably would have been saved.

Kennedy spent the night at his hotel room drying out so there would be no alcohol in his system, and to fabricate with his fixers the statement he gave the police. During the time Kennedy was at his hotel with his fixers, Mary Jo died from suffocation.

It was negligence to drive too fast and off the road while drunk, which is involuntary manslaughter. But it was far more criminal to leave her in the car for eight or more hours, without calling for help, which may get into voluntary manslaughter and reckless endangerment. Kennedy had to explain why he waited almost eight hours to report to the police and had to explain why he left Mary Jo in the car.

The substance of the statement concocted by Kennedy and his fixers is that it took him until morning to realize what happened, and he did not know that Mary Jo was in the car when he left the pond.

This is Teddy’s statement to the police:

On July 18, 1969, at approximately 11:15 p.m. in Chappaquiddick, Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, I was driving my car on Main Street on my way to get the ferry back to Edgartown. I was unfamiliar with the road and turned right onto Dike Road, instead of bearing hard left on Main Street. After proceeding for approximately one-half mile [800 m] on Dike Road I descended a hill and came upon a narrow bridge. The car went off the side of the bridge. There was one passenger with me, one Miss Mary Kopechne, a former secretary of my brother Sen. Robert Kennedy. The car turned over and sank into the water and landed with the roof resting on the bottom. I attempted to open the door and the window of the car but have no recollection of how I got out of the car. I came to the surface and then repeatedly dove down to the car in an attempt to see if the passenger was still in the car. I was unsuccessful in the attempt. I was exhausted and in a state of shock. I recall walking back to where my friends were eating. There was a car parked in front of the cottage and I climbed into the backseat. I then asked for someone to bring me back to Edgartown. I remember walking around for a period and then going back to my hotel room. When I fully realized what had happened this morning, I immediately contacted the police.

RACHEL EHRENFELD: TURKEY IS NOT AN ALLY

On December 25, millions of Christians in countries whose leaders voted against the United States’ recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, as well as Pope Francis, who joined in the condemnation, will be celebrating the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem, in the Holy Land of Israel. We wish them and our readers a Merry Christmas!

Growing numbers of Christian-majority countries seem too willing to rewrite history by adopting the newly invented Palestinian state’s lies, which include the denial of more than two millennia of Jewish presence in the Holy Land, even claiming that Jesus was not a Jew, but a Palestinian, and a Muslim!

The Christian identity of Europe has been eroded not only by growing secularism, but also by the threat of Islamist terrorism. And it all started with the Palestinians who from the beginning were in the business of extorting concessions from the West. They did it again on Thursday. Only this time, they didn’t even have to hijack passenger planes of any of the 128 countries that voted against the U.S. at the General Assembly. By now, most of the 128 countries that endorsed the Palestinians condemnation of President Donald Trump’s decision to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem have learned to dread violence committed by the growing numbers of radicalized second-generation Muslims and refugees who often cite Palestinian lies – about Jerusalem, Israel, and the Jews – as a motive for terrorists’ attacks. Besides, their leaders oppose U.S. president Donald Trump and are mostly anti-Israeli. Then there is the financial motive. How can they justify spending billions of dollars on aid to the terrorists in Gaza and the West Bank? Moreover, they are greedy. They would rather do business with the mullahs in Iran, Turkey’s Muslim brother President Erdoğan, Qatar, and other Islamist entities.

The General Assembly’s condemnation of the U.S. for declaring the relocation of its Israel embassy to Jerusalem, the capital, came after several resolutions passed earlier by the anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian U.N. purportedly cultural body, UNESCO. Last May, as Israel was celebrating its 69th Independence Day, 22 of the 58 member-countries in UNESCO passed a resolution denying the Jewish State of Israel’s legal and historical rights anywhere in Jerusalem or at any other Jewish holy sites that have repeatedly been documented for more than 2,000 years as belonging to the Israelites. Twenty-three countries that lacked the courage to openly resist the Palestinian-led Arab-Muslim initiative abstained. Most of the ten countries that opposed UNESCO’s deplorable resolution lacked the courage to oppose the General Assembly’s resolution. Why?

Catalan elections: the ghosts that won’t go away Nationalism is an idea whose time has come, gone, and come back again David Goldman

Yesterday’s election victory for Catalan separatists, including
humiliating losses for the ruling center-right Partido Popular,
denotes yet another setback for the grand project of European
unification and a challenge for a continent divided between a strong
north and a lagging south. The Catalan separatists won a thin majority
in the regional parliament, leaving them precisely where they were
before the Oct. 1referendum on secession from Spain – with a small
plurality in favor of breaking away and a large minority determined to
stay. The election result, though, has dire implications for Partido
Popular leader Manuel Rajoy’s minority government, and for European
cohesion in general.

Nationalism is a ghost that refuses to be exorcised. As Annette
Prosinger wrote in a front-page commentary in the conservative German
daily Die Welt. “This election was in reality a referendum on the
independence movement. The result will astonish all of those who bet
on the disenchantment of the Separatists. The magic is more tenacious
than people thought: It has overcome everything: The drop in tourism
and economic investment, the flight of enterprise from Catalonia, and
the rejection that the independence movement received from the EC. The
supporters of the independence movement were not unsettled by the fact
that none of the glorious promises of Carlos Puigedemont and his group
came true, and that prospering Catalonia has become a crisis region.”

The term “disenchantment” (in German, Entzauberung) is deeply fraught
in the German language: it was the watchword of the Romantic movement
that incubated European nationalism during the 19thcentury, calling
for the “re-enchantment” of a world left disenchanted by the
Enlightenment.

Obama’s Alternative Facts on the Iran Nuclear Deal We’re getting a glimpse of what the U.S. gave away in order to win Tehran’s pledge of cooperation. by Eli Lake

When the Obama administration sold its Iran nuclear deal to Congress in 2015, one of its primary arguments was that the agreement was narrow. It lifted only nuclear sanctions. America, President Barack Obama told us, would remain a vigilant foe of Iran’s regional predations through sanctions and other means.

Thanks to stunning new reporting from Politico’s Josh Meyer, we can now assess these assertions and conclude that they are … well, “alternative facts.”

Meyer reports that while the U.S. and other great powers were negotiating a deal to bring transparency to Iran’s nuclear program, top officials in Obama’s government dismantled a campaign, known as Operation Cassandra, intended to undermine Hezbollah’s global drug trafficking and money laundering network.

A few months after the implementation of that bargain in January 2016, Operation Cassandra was ripped apart. Agents were reassigned. Leads and sources dried up. Bad guys got away.

Hezbollah is many things: a Lebanese political party, a militia and a Shiite religious movement. It is also an arm of Iranian foreign policy. Hezbollah shock troops fight alongside Iran’s Revolutionary Guard commanders in Syria and Iraq. Iran uses the group’s operatives for international terror attacks in Latin America. Hezbollah’s advanced arsenal is supplied by the Iranian state. Hezbollah’s drug trafficking provides the revenue it needs to spread mayhem. To curb that trafficking is to starve Iran’s primary proxy.

The Obama administration believed cracking down on Hezbollah’s trafficking would undermine nuclear negotiations. As David Asher, a former Pentagon illicit finance analyst and a key player in Operation Cassandra, told Meyer: “This was a policy decision, it was a systematic decision. They serially ripped apart this entire effort that was very well supported and resourced, and it was done from the top down.”

The details are troubling. One example involves Ali Fayad, whom DEA agents suspected was the Hezbollah operative who reported directly to Russian president Vladimir Putin as a weapons supplier in Iraq and Syria. In 2014 Fayad was arrested by Czech authorities. Meyer reports that even though Fayad was indicted by U.S. courts for planning the murder of U.S. officials, “top Obama administration officials declined to apply serious pressure on the Czech government to extradite him to the United States, even as Putin was lobbying aggressively against it.” Fayad eventually found his way back to Lebanon, and is believed today to be back at his old job, supplying Russian heavy weapons to Iranian-backed militants in Syria.

Rex Murphy: The real fake news of 2017 There has always been fake news. But the Fake News that we heard about for most of 2017 was something new and altogether more sinister

Contempt for Trump serves as a warrant for abandoning all disinterested judgment

The antipathy to Donald Trump, which in its keenest manifestations is fierce and relentless, is a disabling set of mind, nowhere more so than in the reporting on or about him.

Contempt for Trump—the conviction that he is some sort of dangerous historical “accident” in the presidential office—serves as a warrant for abandoning all disinterested judgment and analytic neutrality. To those who oppose him, particularly those in the news media, Trump is regarded as just SO bad that standards can be virtuously abandoned, and neutrality and dispassion set aside, so long as it helps (such is the hope) to hurt Trump, and, maybe, get rid of him.

The new rule is: anything that can weaken Trump’s standing, sever his connection with the populist base, and help to bring him down is fair game. Hence the sloppiness and one-directional nature of most Trump news. In just the last few weeks, Brian Ross at ABC, the Wall Street Journal, and CNN each had to correct or deny major stories that had all been wrong in the same direction. They hurt Trump.

Stories, however, that might hint at some aspects of competency or adroitness in Trump’s handling of affairs are either passed over or given the most desultory treatment. How many tins of Pepsi Trump drinks gets more coverage than the defeat of ISIS in Iraq, which has occurred under his watch. Under Obama that would have generated skyscraper headlines; under Trump you can search for it in the back pages and fine print.

When the majority of the American media failed in their coverage of the presidential election, they had to find some excuse for their massive incompetence. The New York Times, with all their resources, and after two full years of daily coverage of the campaign, was nonetheless projecting Hillary Clinton’s chances of victory at a full 92 per cent on election night itself. That was at least better than the pathologically anti-Trump HuffPost, which had Hillary’s chances set at a modest 98 per cent! Such was the state of American journalism, these companies barely allowed for the mere possibility that Trump could win. Under their professional eye, he was just a sideshow, even in the very hours before he actually won.

Faced with libel lawsuit, dossier drafter Christopher Steele hedges on linking Trump to Russia

Christopher Steele, the former British spy who fueled an ongoing investigation into President Trump’s administration, was a lot more confident of his charges when he wrote his now-notorious 2016 dossier than he is today in defending it in a libel lawsuit.

While Mr. Steele stated matter-of-factly in his dossier that collusion between Mr. Trump and the Russian government took place, he called it only “possible” months later in court filings. While he confidently referred to “trusted” sources inside the Kremlin, in court he referred to the dossier’s “limited intelligence.”

In recent weeks, the dossier of opposition research has taken on added importance in the debate over the FBI and special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into suspected Russia coordination and whether it is biased against Trump people. Congressional Republicans are demanding that the FBI explain how the deeply contested, Democrat-financed document took on such importance in a major government investigation.

Mr. Steele wrote 35 pages of memos in which he said Trump aides were part of a vast conspiracy with Moscow to interfere in the election against Hillary Clinton. The unverified charges were spread by Fusion GPS, the Washington-based political research firm that first commissioned the report. Mr. Steele bragged to Mother Jones magazine that he started the Mueller investigation by convincing FBI agents that summer about the credibility of his dossier.

It was later revealed that the campaign of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton helped fund the dossier, meaning that in essence her paid agent was spreading unsubstantiated charges to get to the FBI to investigate her opponent, critics say.

Now that Mr. Steele must defend those charges in a London courtroom, his confidence level has shifted down several

In the dossier, he stated without reservation that an “extensive conspiracy between Trump’s campaign team and the Kremlin” existed.