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March 2018

Tyranny of Shaming American Race Wars as Seen by an Immigrant by Nonie Darwish

The bias of many Americans against American values has blinded them from seeing the reasons we immigrants went through hell to come to this country. Many Americans believe that those who criticize the culture from which we escaped must be “Islamophobic.” They seem not to understand why we never again want to see what we have gone through so much to escape from.

Such attacks on the white majority in Americans are, bluntly, racist. It is a shame that so many Americans are unable or refuse to see what many immigrants see: that it was under this white majority that millions of oppressed people — of all colors and creeds — from around the world were rescued from tyranny, Sharia law, slavery, discrimination, Islamism and a miserable existence under corrupt, war-torn and famine-stricken nations. Instead, many seem to want to bring all that here.

We watched American freedoms as a dream: to be able to smile back at a man who opened the door for you without accusations of being a loose woman for smiling. To be able to wear what you want, go out when you want, work or get an education or not, and venture to hope one day to live under a system that respects monogamy and equal rights for women and minorities. Yes, it is the American culture where whites are the majority, no problem with that, that made our dreams come true. Despite its shortcomings no other country in the world offers its citizens the chance to be whatever they would like. We might never get back what we already have.

Every day we hear on television, “We need an honest discussion about race in this country”.

Many well-meaning Americans, however, may have had enough of this endless, empty and dysfunctional discussion of race. To an outsider, Americans seem obsessed with race; and the discussion always deteriorates to shouting, insulting, blaming, finger-pointing, distorting reality and removing any hope of taking responsibility for oneself. The goal of the discussion always seems to be to try to claim that “I am holier than thou.”

We immigrants, on the other hand, the minute we land in the US, we feel the political struggle for our vote.

The day I got my citizenship and went out to register to vote, some people in the room told me to register as a Democrat because the Democrats would protect my rights from the racist establishment and give me “stuff.” Many of the people who had come with me did register that way, but I found the urging alarming. I grew up under a socialist, totalitarian system under the leadership of President Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt — a nanny state that also gives you “stuff’.” What many Americans do not realize is that the free stuff can be too expensive

Will Putin Ever Leave? Could He if He Wanted? A Stalin biographer contemplates Russia’s weakness today, which makes its current ruler such a threat to the West. By Tunku Varadarajan

Russia votes on March 18 in a presidential election that is, let’s agree, lacking in any competitive tension. In fact, says Stephen Kotkin, Vladimir Putin’s re-election is “preordained, a superfluous, if vivid, additional signal of Russia’s debilitating stagnation.”

Few Americans understand Russia better than Mr. Kotkin, who late last year published “ Stalin : Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941,” the second of an intended three-volume biography of the Soviet dictator Mr. Kotkin describes as “the person in world history who accumulated more power than anyone else.”

President Putin, by comparison, is a dictatorial lightweight. “We wouldn’t want to equate Putin with Stalin,” Mr. Kotkin says. The Soviet Union—which Stalin ruled for three hair-raising decades, until his death in 1953—had “one-sixth of the world’s land mass under its control, plus satellites in Eastern Europe and Northeast Asia.” There were also communist parties in scores of countries, which did Russia’s bidding. “We talk about how Russia interferes in our elections today,” says Mr. Kotkin, “but Stalin had a substantial Communist Party in France, and in Italy, inside the Parliament. And when Stalin gave instructions to them, they followed his orders.”

The Soviet economy, at its peak in the 1980s, reached about a third of the size of the U.S. economy. Russia’s economy today, Mr. Kotkin points out, “is one-15th the size of America’s. Russia is very weak, and getting weaker.” Not long ago, Russia was the eighth-largest economy in the world. Today, Mr. Kotkin says, “you’re lucky to get it at 12th or 13th, depending on how you measure things. Another two terms of Putin, and Russia will be out of the top 20.”

But don’t be reassured by Russia’s feebleness. Mr. Kotkin says this weakness is what makes Mr. Putin such a threat to the West. CONTINUE AT SITE

MARK STEYN ON THE OSCARS

“Charmless and unlikeable” seems to be the consensus, and not just re me on “Tucker”. We’ll get to that in a moment. But first a couple of observations from our comment sections that I thought deserved a wider airing:

~An Arizona member of The Mark Steyn Club notes what he calls the “most revolting, hubris-laden” quip from Jimmy Kimmel’s Oscar monologue:

The world is watching us. We need to set an example, and the truth is if we are successful here, if we can work together to stop sexual harassment in the workplace, if we can do that, women will only have to deal with harassment all the time at every other place they go.

As our Club member added:

In other words, everybody else is every bit as bad as we used to be, but we’ve cleaned up our act and you haven’t. Truly odious.

It’s also not true. The most famous (and Oscared) movie producer of the last thirty years has been credibly accused of rape by at least thirteen women and of sexual assault by dozens more. I’m somewhat astonished to find that, in the course of my not terribly glamorous life, I’ve met at least eight of them. It’s quite something to have encountered, in various countries across the decades, eight women all physically attacked by the same man. And those actresses who refused to put out and managed to escape from the room had their careers vaporized – as happened to Mira Sorvino and Rosanna Arquette.

This is Hollywood. Harvey Weinstein co-opted dozens of his colleagues, from executive vice-presidents to lowly interns, to assist as part of their normal business routine in the management of his appetites, whether through laundering payouts or procuring erectile-dysfunction medication. This was an open secret, acknowledged and accepted by everyone from secretaries to Meryl Streep.

But, pace Kimmel, it’s an aspect of the movie business that has no real equivalent in, say, the accountancy business or the feed-store business.

Hollywood is worse. But their sense of their moral superiority is so indestructible that Jimmy Kimmel couldn’t resist lecturing the world that, even as the veil is lifted and the bathrobe cord is unknotted, they’re still better than you – and always will be.

The Insidious Obama Administration By Julie Kelly

This week delivered two bits of very bad news for the Obama Administration: Top Republican lawmakers formally requested the appointment of a special counsel to investigate the Justice Department’s conduct in 2016 and 2017, and long-withheld documents related to the Operation Fast and Furious scandal will finally be released to Congress.

It couldn’t have happened to a more deserving bunch.

The public behavior by several Obama officials since Donald Trump’s election has been shameful and shameless. It would be easy to write it off as sour grapes, to treat them like a sad group of ex-wives grumbling about why they got dumped. But their actions are more insidious—and unprecedented—than that. Bitter about their unexpected defeat in November 2016 and terrified that their Trump-Russia conspiracy scheme will be exposed in full by Congress, Obama loyalists have been working overtime to discredit the president, smear Republican lawmakers, and keep the focus on Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Trump campaign.

Just days after Trump won the election, Josh Earnest, Obama’s press secretary, openly began to question the legitimacy of Trump’s victory and peddled Trump-Russia conspiracy tales to an eager, Trump-hating press corps. Obama holdover Sally Yates refused to enforce Trump’s travel ban in her position as acting Attorney General. (She is now emerging as a central figure in the case against Michael Flynn.)

Loretta Lynch, Obama’s last attorney general, recorded a video advocating violence to resist the new administration, comparing it to other great American struggles. “It has been people, individuals, who have banded together, who simply saw what needed to be done, who have made the difference,” Lynch said. “They’ve marched. They’ve bled. Yes, some of them have died. This is hard. Every good thing is.”

Former FBI director James Comey, who was fired by Trump in May 2017, routinely tweets cryptic—if not childish—political messages aimed at the president and Congress while defending the agency whose credibility he helped degrade:
James Comey
✔ @Comey
All should appreciate the FBI speaking up. I wish more of our leaders would. But take heart: American history shows that, in the long run, weasels and liars never hold the field, so long as good people stand up. Not a lot of schools or streets named for Joe McCarthy.

And ol’ Uncle Joe Biden told CNN’s Chris Cuomo last month that Trump is a “joke.”

On Trade, Trump Is Acting in the Best Interest of the USA By Howard Richman, Jesse Richman, and Raymond Richman

On Thursday, President Trump, surrounded by steel workers in the Oval Office, signed a memo imposing tariffs on steel (25%) and aluminum (10%) that are imported to the United States.

He carved out two exceptions to the tariffs:

Canada and Mexico would be temporarily exempted from the tariffs, pending the outcome of the ongoing renegotiation of NAFTA. The U.S. will likely insist that products imported tariff-free into the U.S. use steel produced within NAFTA.
He directed USTR (U.S. trade representative) Robert C. Lighthizer to negotiate with those military allies that want to be excluded from the tariffs, but such exclusions would require trade reciprocity. The Trump administration is expert at using economic leverage to produce negotiated outcomes that benefit the United States.

This announcement marks a victory for the trade deficit hawks in President Trump’s inner circle of economic advisers, including Wilbur Ross, Trump’s secretary of commerce, and University of California at Irvine economics professor Peter Navarro, who was recently elevated to the ranks of the president’s top-level advisers.

The economic recovery being produced by President Trump’s tax cuts and deregulation is at stake. During the fourth quarter of 2017, real GDP grew at a 2.5% clip, which is good compared to growth rates during the Obama years, but it could have been much better. Here are the contributions to growth during the fourth quarter:

‘Believe All Women’ at Your Peril By David Solway

We’ve heard it all before: “start by believing.” “Believe survivors.” At a recent panel discussion at the Ottawa City Hall, where my wife, Janice Fiamengo, was one of three featured participants, the subject of #MeToo and “Believe All Women” came up during the Q&A. (See 1:35:34 to 1:38:27 of the embedded YouTube video below.) An audience member claimed that it behooved us in most cases to give credence to women bringing forth their stories of sexual abuse. The young woman was skeptical of the court process as a way of resolving issues of sexual violence in women’s favor and contended that we need “non-criminal” forms of restorative justice, some form of “healing or accountability.”

Janice and her co-panelists, authors Paul Nathanson and David Shackleton, quickly put paid to that notion. Non-legal judgments via social media and public shaming could be as onerous and punitive as legal sentencing, turning men who had not been proven guilty into social lepers and bankrupts. The legal system may be flawed, but, as Shackleton remarked, it is the best we have and is theoretically capable of improvement.

In fact, an argument against #MeToo and the concomitant pursuit of non-legal incrimination is often put forward by the subtler variety of feminists, such as Josephine Mathias in the National Post and Bari Weiss in the New York Times, but for a completely different reason. They maintain that false allegations in the public sphere, such as the Duke Lacrosse and Rolling Stone moments, may discredit the “Believe All Women” movement; in the words of Weiss, such fictions “will tear down all accusers as false prophets.” It is not the harm to innocent men that concerns Weiss, but the damage to female credibility. The movement must be maintained.

Here I would indicate that, contrary to the young questioner who distrusted the cumbersome apparatus of the courts, which lead only to “re-victimization,” as well as Shackleton’s faith in a self-corrective justice system, court judgments in our SJW era tend to favor women – and when they don’t, the cry goes up for a quasi-legal system based on the “preponderance of evidence” rather than the “presumption of innocence” model – that is, on whatever narrative the judge or adjudicator tends to believe as more persuasive, evidence be damned. After all, women who lie or collude are only victims too troubled to get their stories straight.

Offend ‘Diversity,’ Lose Your Job By Michael Walsh

The combination of academic social-justice Leftism and Islam is getting nastier by the day:

An Ohio music professor who said Muslim women and girls are safer in the U.S. than in any Middle Eastern country has been forced to retire. The Cincinnati Enquirer reports University of Cincinnati assistant professor Clifford Adams has been placed on administrative [leave] for the remainder of the semester and will retire May 1.

He made the comment online to a Muslim student who had criticized Donald Trump’s presidency and spoke about freedom and diversity. Adams wrote “how dare” she complain.

Adams didn’t respond immediately Friday to a request for comment. He earlier wrote a letter to The Enquirer saying he was “deeply sorry” and was trying to have a “lively, provocative, scholarly argument.” School spokesman Greg Vehr says the university is “committed to excellence and diversity.”

Excellence and diversity… right. Well, that’s certainly a funny way of showing a commitment to the former, at least. But “diversity,” now that’s a different story. Over the past 20 years or so, academic has been overwhelmed by the “diversity” fetish, which posits that a racially diverse student body is a desirable end in itself, rather than the byproduct (or not) of colorblind admissions procedures. The result is that “diversity” has become the single most important goal of the modern American university, with the educational standards and course offerings dumbed down accordingly.

Anti-Hijab Protest in Iran Picking Up Steam Despite Arrests By Rick Moran

There is a growing movement among the women of Iran to defy authorities and remove their headscarves, or hijabs.

Women remove their hijabs in the street and attach them to poles, waving them like flags. Some post their defiant acts on social media.
Amy Mek @AmyMek
Iranian Police push woman off box who is protesting Hijab
While Brave Iranian women protest the sharia misogynist slave Hijab, western libs pretend Hijab is symbol of freedom & fashion.In Iran, to walk around without the Hijab could mean over a year in a prison with TORTURE!

In an interview with CBN News, Taleblu, explained what’s fueling the actions of these women.

“Young Iranian women are casting off their veils as a show of defiance against both the corrupt and discriminatory political and religious system in Iran,” he said.

He added, “This anti-Hijab movement is actually not new. It began in 1979, mere months after Khomeini returned to Iran and began Islamizing the country. Since 1979, Iranian women have found creative and brave ways to contest this policy of mandatory veiling. This is only the latest iteration of that push back.”

The ayatollahs are trying hard to control the Internet and access to outside news sources. But it appears they are fighting a losing battle:

Since December, more than 30 Iranian women have been arrested for publicly removing their scarves in defiance of the Islamic regime’s strict law.

RACE BAITING REP. MAXINE WATERS,(D-CA-District 43)

Maxine Moore Waters represents California’s 43rd congressional district. She has been in Congress since 1991, and previously served the 35th and 29th districts. The anti-Israel Arab America Association loves her….. rsk
‘Please Welcome Demonized Maxine Waters,’ Says Waters at D.C. Event By Nicholas Ballasy

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/please-welcome-demonized-maxine-waters-says-waters-d-c-event/

WASHINGTON – Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) said President Trump is not going to change and become “more presidential,” arguing that members of his administration “insincerely appeal” to minority communities.

“Those of us who stand up for the kinds of issues we’re dealing with today are often demonized, so please welcome demonized Maxine Waters,” she said at the start of her speech during the VOICES Coalition’s briefing on “The FCC’s War on the Poor” on Capitol Hill.

“Part of the FCC’s mission is to ensure that all Americans can access communication networks and to ensure that these networks offer diverse programming and are operated and owned by people from diverse backgrounds,” Waters said. “One of the main ways we can achieve these goals is through net neutrality, which guarantees a free and open Internet.”

Waters said she’s received “thousands of calls” from constituents who said they value net neutrality. The congresswoman said she supports efforts to overturn the FCC’s repeal of the Obama-era net neutrality rules.

“This administration is doing everything it can to roll back years of progress,” she argued. “This administration’s attack on net neutrality is yet another attack on communities of color and we just can’t stand for it.”CONTINUE AT SITE

Holocaust remembrance law puts Poland on the wrong side of global Left No Polish family was left untouched by the Nazi death machine. As a result, when Poles hear the words “Polish death camps” or “Polish Holocaust” they bristle. By Matthew Tyrmand

As the global media has highlighted ad nauseam, Poland recently passed through the legislature a bill that seeks to criminalize the holding of the Polish state complicit for the German Nazi crimes of the Holocaust and the attendant German atrocities during WWII. Currently the bill is being looked at by Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal after Polish President Andrzej Duda sent it for review to make sure it complies with the Polish Constitution.

This bill, known as “Ustawa IPN” (“Institute of National Remembrance Law”), was motivated by Poles’ desire to correct historical inaccuracies regarding Poland’s image and the purported role Poland played during this dark time in history. Poland suffered more than any other country during this period as the Nazi plan was to extinguish Polish-ness and Poland from the map in the hegemonic expansion of the Third Reich, in addition to their “Final Solution” vis a vis European Jewry.

Widely accepted estimates of loss of life in Poland suggest six million Poles perished – three million Jewish and three million non-Jewish Poles. No Polish family was left untouched by the Nazi death machine. As a result, when Poles hear the words “Polish death camps” or “Polish Holocaust” they bristle. Only in recent years did the international media formally change their style guides to strike “Polish death camps” from the press lexicon (and in a fitting display of how widespread this ignorance was, even such a supposedly liberal, sensitive, worldly, cosmopolitan, nuanced ivory-tower academic elite as Barack Obama used the term, referencing Auschwitz in a speech in 2012, to such widespread consternation that it served as a final straw on this issue).

Poland was literally the only country in Nazi-occupied Europe that never demonstrated any complicity with the fascist Nazi occupiers (we all remember the Vichy regime in France and the Quisling one in Norway, which were closer to the norm than the exception in continental Europe). Poland operated a government in exile in London, never had a single SS volunteer, and saw penalties for hiding Jews more severe than anywhere else (whole families, such as the Ulma family in Markowa, Poland, were executed for doing the right and honorable thing).

The government in exile made it a crime for Poles to give up Jews to the Nazis, under penalty of death, and the “Council to Aid Jews” (Zegota) was set up by the Polish resistance in 1942. Poland had more “Righteous Among the Nations” than any other nation according to Yad Vashem – which makes sense as Poland was ground zero for European Jewry for many centuries, which in turn is why Hitler’s Final Solution was so predicated on a network of death camps being built in Poland. To this day there are more stories of the hiding and saving of Jews by Poles in Poland being continually unearthed and honored.