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March 2018

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Jericho, We Have Not Forsaken You An excursion to the ancient city reveals its historic and spiritual Jewish nexus. Ari Lieberman

By on March 29th, 2018

We departed from Kochav Yair, a quaint, affluent town in central Israel, at precisely 7 a.m. Our destination was the ancient city Jericho, one of civilization’s oldest and the first to be liberated by the Israelites when they crossed the Jordan River some 3,400 years ago. Our guide was former Deputy Chief of Staff of the Israel Defense Forces, Uzi Dayan. Ironically, he also happens to be nephew to the late Moshe Dayan, who as Israel’s Minister of Defense, led the IDF to victory during the 1967 Six-Day War and returned the city of Jericho to its rightful owners.

Dayan’s manner of speaking is authoritative and deliberate, likely a product of his years of service in the military. His spiritual and nationalistic connection to the land is obvious. And his knowledge of its history and geography is impressive. This is a man who wanted to impress upon us the historical and spiritual nexus of Jericho to the Jewish people and the Land of Israel. He succeeded beyond expectation.

Jericho is located in Judea & Samaria near the strategic Jordan Valley, about 70km south of the Israeli city of Bet She’an. We approached the city from the north driving along Route 5, which cuts across part of the breathtaking Samarian landscape and then took a number of smaller roads until reaching Route 90. At Route 90, we traversed southward toward Jericho.

In 1994, The Israeli government handed the city over to the entity known as the Palestinian Authority as part of the calamitous Oslo Accords. The Accords, which were supposed to usher in an era of peace, instead resulted in an orgy of Palestinian terrorism and the dismemberment of parts of ancient Israel.

Judea & Samaria is currently divided into three distinct districts – Areas A, B and C. Area C is currently under full Israeli control and constitutes some 40% of Judea & Samaria. Area B is under PA civilian control and Israeli military control. Area A is under full Palestinian civilian and security control. Together, Area A and B constitute 60% of the landmass of Judea & Samaria.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Confronting Golden West College on its Enforcement of Sharia A lame response from the public information office. Gary Fouse

By on March 29th, 2018

Gary Fouse is retired from the Drug Enforcement Administration (1973-1995). From 1998-2016, he was an adjunct instructor of English as a Second Language at the University of California at Irvine Extension. During the last ten years of that period, he was an activist fighting anti-semitism at UCI as well as other UC campuses. He has his own blog (Fousesquawk) at http://garyfouse.blogspot.com, which deals with national and international issues from a conservative perspective.

‘….Last week, I received a standard, template response from the public information office at Golden West College in response to my letter to their administration complaining about the conduct of Golden West staff in trying to silence questions about Islam from the audience at their Islam 101 event on March 14. It was an event to which campus cops were actually called in order to enforce Islamic blasphemy laws. Here is the response:

We have received your comments and appreciate your voiced concerns. As you know, Golden West College recently opened a scheduled class to the public which included a presentation and opportunity to engage in questions and answers. The event was intended to be an introductory educational overview of Islam as part of an intercultural program for students in the class. We understand that the presenters and audience members have varying views about the effectiveness of the event. We are regretful that when campus security was called to help ensure the safety of the environment, that anyone may have felt uncomfortable, singled out, or discouraged from expressing their opinions.

We work hard to ensure that faculty and staff on campus treat others with dignity and engage in respectful interaction with others. We fully support free speech and the right to express diverse thoughts. We are apologetic that the event did not serve the intended purposes for all. We remain committed to the inclusive values and mission of Golden West College. Thank you.

Not even a name was attached to this letter (email). And whoever wrote this response had the gall to state, “We fully support free speech and the right to express diverse thoughts. ”

And yet, campus police were called in because they didn’t like certain questions.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Time to Get Tough with Turkey The U.S. has lots of leverage – let’s use it. Kenneth R. Timmerman

By on March 29th, 2018

The Trump administration is trying to walk a fine line between Turkey, which it still refers to as a NATO ally, and our Kurdish allies on the ground in northern Syria, and it has become increasingly painful and disheartening to watch.

For the past two months, as Turkish troops have pounded civilians in the northern Syrian city of Afrin, Turkish President Recip Tayip Erdogan has verbally assaulted and taunted America.

After initially threatening to kill U.S. liaison officers working with the Kurds, Erdogan then warned the U.S. commander in Syria, LG Paul Funk, to beware an “Ottoman slap.”

The fact that U.S. commanders – undoubtedly under the direction of Defense Secretary Mattis – continued to avoid any direct contact with Turkish troops only emboldened Erdogan. Just before the final assault on Afrin last week, he taunted: “NATO members are not powerful enough to stand up to Turkey… [T]hey do not have the cheek.”

Once YPG fighters withdrew from Afrin on March 15, and civilians evacuated in the following days, Islamist militias backed by the Turkish army swooped into the city, destroying Kurdish cultural sites and plundering homes and businesses.

These were exactly the people the U.S. has been trying to defeat on the battlefield. And here Turkey has made them their allies and is training and equipping them.

As I argued in these pages two months ago, Turkey has long since stopped behaving like a NATO ally. It’s time that the Trump administration faced these facts and got tough on Turkey.

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Leftist Rage Over Citizenship Question Asking Census respondents if they’re Americans is unconscionable, progressives fume. Matthew Vadum

By on March 29th, 2018

Left-wingers have been throwing an extended temper tantrum across the nation after the Trump administration announced it plans to ask individuals responding to the 2020 U.S. Census if they are American citizens.

Racist. Sexist. Xenophobic. That’s what you are if you dare to believe it is perfectly reasonable in a Census questionnaire to ask respondents if they’re citizens of this country, according to Democrats.

The U.S. Department of Commerce, which administers the decennial, constitutionally required head count, said the surprisingly controversial question will be added to Census forms at the request of the U.S. Department of Justice to help identify possible violations of the Voting Rights Act, something left-wingers claim to care about.

That any sane person would be outraged at this commonsense proposal is a depressing reminder of the power of the leftist, multiculturalist indoctrination that has robbed generations of Americans of the ability to think for themselves. The Left has been trying to blur the lines between citizens and non-citizens for years and it’s clear their hard work has paid off.

Democrat office-holders from blue states could be found shrieking and hyper-ventilating on cable news programs about this supposedly nightmarish assault by President Trump on the rights and self-esteem of illegal aliens and on the left-wingers at groups like National Council of La Raza, ACLU, and NAACP that go to great lengths to help them vote illegally in elections.

These people don’t care about the U.S. Constitution or the rule of law. The only thing they care about is power, and anything that dilutes the power of U.S. citizens in order to privilege foreigners and illegal aliens is a good thing in their eyes.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) wrote on Twitter, “The census must count every person. Our Constitution demands it. Our democracy requires it. @realDonaldTrump is jeopardizing its accuracy by adding an unnecessary citizenship question. I stand with former Census directors from both parties in opposing this terrible decision.”

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Reject the Diversity Mandate Whatever his Interior secretary actually said, President Trump should make clear his administration’s commitment to colorblind merit. Heather Mac Donald

By on March 29th, 2018

President Donald Trump is facing a revolt from his base for having signed the bloated omnibus spending bill that torpedoes his “drain the swamp” pledges. But the president now has an opportunity to achieve a small measure of redemption: he should offer loud and unequivocal support to Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, who is being hammered for reportedly having rejected identity politics in favor of meritocracy.

Zinke is facing a storm of media criticism from liberals for allegedly saying that diversity is “not important,” though his office denies that he said this. The same sources that reported Zinke’s comments say that he followed up by stating that what he cared about was excellence—and that by hiring the best people, he would in fact put together the most diverse group anyone has ever had. This second statement is a cowardly concession (as is his denial of his initial diversity observation, assuming that he made that initial statement). Sometimes meritocracy will yield diversity; sometimes it won’t. The point is that it doesn’t matter. Diversity should not be an end in itself; excellence is the goal.

Rejecting the primacy of diversity constitutes a head-on assault on the received wisdom of Washington and elite American culture. Gender and racial quotas have been the order of business for the last three decades. The #MeToo movement has only intensified pressures on public and private organizations to hire based on sex and skin color. The result: wasted resources, the sidelining of merit, and ever more virulent and irrational identity politics. The rule of the diversity regime is that you’re required to be fanatically obsessed with race and gender until you aren’t—because at that unpredictable moment, whenever it comes, noticing race and sex becomes racist and sexist.

What’s fantastic about the Zinke story, which appears to be gaining momentum, is that the Interior Secretary is being condemned for allegedly saying that he discounts racial categories in hiring, and prefers “having the right person for the right job.” This position, uncontroversial for decades, was the essence of Martin Luther King’s vision of a colorblind, merit-based society. Treating people the same way regardless of their race or sex used to be considered the definition of fairness; now it is understood to be vicious and intolerable. Kristen Clarke, president of the National Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, writes of Zinke, “the racist views harbored by members of this administration and their failure to ensure diversity must be condemned.”

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Progressive Extinction of Freedom of Speech Edward Cline

By on March 29th, 2018

There was a headline recently about the death in Kenya of the last captive northern white rhino.

This item has not yet made the MSM, but give it time. The bloviating MSM is pretty desperate for news of any kind that will shoot down Trump, and I’m certain that a determined “reporter” will come up with ambiguous and verbose parallels between Trump and the dead rhino. Perhaps the rhino shed his yellow hair?

At the moment, however, the MSM is gathering steam to make a major impeachment-worthy story over Stormy Daniels’ claim that over a decade ago (or more) she hugged Donald Trump in amorous and scandalous collusion. It is supposed that no American president ever had “relations” with a “loose” woman; one supposes that JFK was a chaste Catholic, and that FDR was a pillar of sexual propriety, as well, and that having such a tête-à-tête proves that a man who so dallied was not qualified to sit in the Oval Office. Name me a president who never had sex with any women outside his family circle. Jimmy Carter, perhaps. The MSM is no doubt hoping that Stormy will help to accomplish what Humpty Dumpty Robert Mueller failed to do after a year of “investigating” the existence of a prancing unicorn. The Mueller investigation, amounting to likely thousands of pages of useless documents, has the credibilityof the Steele Dossier, with the consistency of a dandelion puff.

The subject here is not Trump’s extracurricular adventures, which I think most Americans care very little about, but rather, freedom of speech, here and abroad. Germany’s outlawing freedom of speech concerning the opposition to and criticism of Islam is by now old hat.

The MP for the hard-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party detected in the force’s multilingual new-year greeting a bid “to appease the barbaric, Muslim, rapist hordes of men”. The next day her tweet—and, for 12 hours, her entire account—vanished from Twitter. In the subsequent political storm Alice Weidel, co-leader of the AfD, came to Ms von Storch’s defence: “Our authorities are subordinating themselves to imported, rampaging, groping, punching, stabbing migrant mobs,” she tweeted. That, too, was promptly deleted.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Distortions of Our Unelected Officials By Victor Davis Hanson

By on March 29th, 2018

On March 17, ex-CIA Director John Brennan tweeted about the current president of the United States: “When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history. . . . America will triumph over you.”

That outburst from the former head of the world’s premier spy agency seemed a near threat to a sitting president, and former U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power tweeted that it probably was: “Not a good idea to piss off John Brennan.”

If there is such a thing as a dangerous “deep state” of elite but unelected federal officials who feel that they are untouchable and unaccountable, then John Brennan is the poster boy.

Immediately after the 2008 election of Barack Obama, the careerist Brennan quickly reinvented himself as a critic of the very methodologies that he once, as a George W. Bush administration official, had insisted were effective. Brennan was initially appointed Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser, and then took over the CIA after the abrupt and mysterious resignation of Gen. David Petraeus following the 2012 election.

Brennan claimed that intelligence agencies had not missed clear indications in 2009 that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the so-called “underwear bomber,” would try to take down a U.S. airliner. Just days later when his denials were ridiculed, Brennan flipped and blasted intelligence agencies for their laxity.

In 2011, Brennan falsely alleged that the Obama administration’s drone program had not caused a single civilian death in Pakistan over the previous year. In truth, around 50 civilians had been killed by drones since the 9/11 attacks.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

AT THE VA 2 YEARS AGO: WHO EARNS HOW MUCH, FOR WHAT AND WHERE

By on March 29th, 2018

Two years ago, Americans were horrified to learn that as many as 1,000 of our nation’s veterans had died while waiting for medical care at Department of Veterans Affairs facilities.

Any hopes of reforming the dysfunctional VA culture were dashed two days ago when Secretary Robert McDonald made an appalling comparison to waiting in line at Disney parks.

“When you go to Disney, do they measure the number of hours you wait in line? What’s important is, what’s your satisfaction with the experience.”
Today, nearly half a million veterans still wait to see a VA doctor.

So, we opened the books on the VA. Here’s just a sample of our findings:

The VA spent $1.7 million on ’employee engagement’ and other satisfaction surveys with Gallup (2010-2014). There is no indication these polls found, flagged or identified the most egregious scandal in VA history.
The VA paid $303 million in salaries to non-essential positions: Painters ($185 million), Interior Designers ($64 million), and Gardeners ($54 million). While veterans were dying, the VA managers were rewarding the efficiency of these positions with bonuses (2012-2015.)
$751.1 million spent on ‘household’ and ‘office’ furniture including furniture rental, draperies, curtains, carpeting, modification, repair and maintenance (2010-2015). Much of from luxury, upscale manufacturers.

While the veterans wait weeks to see a doctor, we found:

The VA lawyered up and added 175 attorneys.
Dramatically increased their spending on public relations (PR).
Reformed bonuses’ so millions of dollars continued to flow to many of the same employees who gamed-the-system during the scandal.

and much more…

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Donald Trump Ousts VA Secretary David Shulkin President said he’d nominate Rear Adm. Ronny Jackson, his physician, to the post By Rebecca Ballhaus and Ben Kesling

By on March 29th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/donald-trump-ousts-va-secretary-david-shulkin-1522274017?mod=cx_politics&cx_navSource=cx_politics&cx_tag=collabctx&cx_artPos=2#cxrecs_s

WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump on Wednesday said he had ousted his Veterans Affairs secretary, David Shulkin, and tapped the White House physician, Ronny Jackson, as his replacement.

“I am pleased to announce that I intend to nominate highly respected Admiral Ronny L. Jackson, MD, as the new Secretary of Veterans Affairs,” Mr. Trump tweeted Wednesday. He said Robert Wilkie, who currently serves as under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness at the Department of Defense, would serve as acting secretary “in the interim.”

In a statement issued by the White House, Mr. Trump praised Dr. Shulkin’s work and “the many great things we did together at Veterans Affairs, including the VA Accountability Act that he was helpful in getting passed.” The president called Dr. Shulkin a “great supporter of veterans across the country and I am grateful for his service.”Dr. Shulkin didn’t return a request for comment on Wednesday.

Dr. Jackson is a U.S. Navy rear admiral who has served as a White House physician during the past three administrations. In that role, he has overseen health care for the cabinet and senior staff, served as a physician supervisor at Camp David and led the White House Medical Unit, the White House said.

Dr. Jackson, if confirmed by the Senate, would take over the second-largest federal agency, which has more than 370,000 employees. The agency is responsible for, among other duties, providing health care services to veterans. The agency has struggled in recent years following a 2014 scandal over wait-times for VA hospital appointments.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

G-Men Under Subpoena Christopher Wray promises Congress a more cooperative FBI.

By on March 29th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/g-men-under-subpoena-1522278053

Director Christopher Wray said Tuesday that he is doubling to 54 the number of FBI agents working to respond to documents subpoenaed by House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte, and it’s about time.

Mr. Goodlatte is looking into the FBI’s investigation of Hillary Clinton’s private server and its use of the Steele dossier to spy on former Trump campaign associate Carter Page, among other things. The FBI has been notably uncooperative, and news reports say Mr. Wray’s latest cooperation came only after Attorney General Jeff Sessions told him no more slow-walking information.

What matters now is whether the FBI provides Congress the records in a timely way—and without the sneaky redactions that have been used to keep the American people in the dark. One example: the text messages between FBI paramours Peter Strzok and Lisa Page regarding Rudolph Contreras. Federal Judge Contreras presided over the case against former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. He and Mr. Strzok knew each other, so Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page were excited when Judge Contreras was appointed to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in 2016.

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