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March 2018

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Passover and Islam Eileen F. Toplansky

By on March 24th, 2018

The Jewish holiday of Passover beckons mankind to the promise of freedom. As the late Holocaust survivor, Simon Wiesenthal said, “freedom is not a gift of heaven, you have to fight for it every day.” During the seder or festive meal, Jews the world over are enjoined to remember how difficult their lives were under the yoke of Egyptian slavery and they thank G-d for giving them the choice to be free, responsible, and independent people.

The central motif of the haggadah or text read during the seder is to answer the question “what makes this night different from all other nights?” Peppered with rabbinic ideas, in-depth questions, and insightful commentary, the text is an effort to “learn, study and analyze the events” surrounding the time in ancient Egypt when Hebrews were not free, but were slaves.

Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik classifies “two slave systems: slaves owned by individuals, as in ancient Greece or the United States, and slaves owned by the state, as in Nazi Germany, China, and the former Soviet Union where the state is the absolute master.” Slaves in a state system exist in a depersonalized prison. There is no personal relationship imaginable.

As each day brings new horrors emanating from the Islamic world against Muslims and non-Muslims, I am struck by the stark contrast between the message of Passover and the inhumane and slave-like treatment of so many human beings in the Muslim world. The other progeny of Abraham must begin asking their own questions. It will require a sea change of major proportions for Muslims and a realignment of reason over emotion for liberal non-Muslims.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Palestinians Tortured; Media Silent by Bassam Tawil

By on March 23rd, 2018

The real story now is no longer about what the foreign correspondents are reporting related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Rather, it is about what they are not reporting.

In its report — which so far appears to have been of less than no interest to both the foreign media and international human rights groups — the Palestinian Independent Commission for Human Rights states that it has received complaints of torture and mistreatment from 46 Palestinians detained by the Palestinian Authority and Hamas during the month of February 2018 alone.

Both Palestinian dictatorships, the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, therefore have nothing to worry about; they can go about their business of torturing and illegally detaining their own people. No one is watching.

What happens when Palestinians make allegations of torture and assaults on their public freedoms? If the finger is being pointed at Israel, the international media falls over itself to bring the story to the broadest possible audience.

The story would not even end there. Human rights organizations and United Nations agencies would blast Israel for “abusing” Palestinian human rights and the Security Council would hold an emergency session to condemn Israel.

The response, however, when Palestinians fall victim to the practices of their own governments — the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank and Hamas in the Gaza Strip — is a completely different one. That is when silence descends upon the international media community hides behind a blue wall of silence

How can one account for this sinkhole in communications? Simple: when the story is not about alleged atrocities committed by Israel, from the point of view of the Western media outlets it is presumably not a tale worthy of being told.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Gatestone Chairman, Ambassador John R. Bolton, Selected by President Trump as National Security Advisor

By on March 23rd, 2018

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12080/john-bolton-national-security-advisor

Gatestone Institute is so proud that its chairman, Ambassador John R. Bolton, will be leading the United States’ National Security Council. We warmly congratulate both him and President Donald J. Trump on an appointment that is great for America, great for its allies and great for the free world.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Sara Dogan:Texas SJP and MSA Activists Revealed as Neo-Nazis in Poster Campaign Students advocate violence against Jews, praise Adolf Hitler.

By on March 23rd, 2018

Continuing its campaign to expose the campus organization Students for Justice in Palestine as neo-Nazis, the David Horowitz Freedom Center placed posters this week on the campuses of the University of Texas-San Antonio and the University of Texas-Arlington. The posters document comments that student activists affiliated with SJP have made on social media praising Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and calling for the extermination of the Jews. The posters also expose Berkeley Professor Hatem Bazian, a co-founder of SJP, as an anti-Semite and supporter of the anti-Israel terror group Hamas.

Statements shared by SJP activists on social media, which are documented on the posters include:

“How many Jews died in the Holocaust? Not enough”

“Wow White Jews are so entitled LMFAOOO Please die.”

“Had to write about a leader for DCL class. Wrote about Hitler. Cuz he’s a boss.”

Students for Justice in Palestine was co-founded in 2001 by Hamas-supporting Berkeley professor Hatem Bazian who has openly called for an intifada, or violent uprising, in America, and has shared anti-Semitic memes on social media. One of the posters placed on the campuses exposes Bazian’s recent anti-Semitic tweet which featured a caricature of an Orthodox Jew with the caption “MOM LOOK! I IS CHOSEN! I CAN NOW KILL, RAPE, SMUGGLE ORGANS & AND STEAL THE LAND OF PALESTINIANS *YAY* ASHKE-NAZI.”

SJP employs funds from the terrorist party Hamas—funneled to American campuses through an intermediary group, American Muslims for Palestine, chaired by Professor Bazian—in order to launch an all-out political assault on the Jewish state and to create a climate of hatred towards Jews and students who support Israel on campus.

As a result of this support and funding from Hamas, SJP has become the principal collegiate organization in the Hamas terror network and the campus propaganda war against Israel. It heavily promotes the Hamas-endorsed and funded Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel, a form of economic terrorism which seeks to weaken, delegitimize, and ultimately destroy the Jewish state.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Time to End Mueller’s Investigation About Nothing By Bob Calco

By on March 23rd, 2018

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s sprawling investigation into “Trump-Russia collusion” has devolved into a ludicrous media spectacle, a meandering situation comedy “about nothing” that is in quest of something, anything to be about.

If, after all of these months of investigation, he has no evidence of Trump colluding with Russia, then the conclusion is clear: it simply didn’t happen.

In recent weeks and months, the media has been busy dumpster-diving in Moscow for Russian Facebook bots, and chasing hot tips from a Russian prostitute turned part-time sex seminarist resisting extradition to Russia from a Bangkok jail.

They have been faithfully “reporting” as fact every illegal, anonymous leak from the conflicted special counsel’s office about its supposed next moves, which they assure their viewers and readers are getting closer and closer to Trump’s inner circle. Because OMG! RUSSIA!

Meanwhile, Mueller’s crack team was reduced to scouring the seashores of Seychelles for the next nothingburger “bombshell,” and then (when that didn’t blow up) they promptly pivoted to investigating the ominous possibility that some officials in the United Arab Emirates may have sought political influence with the new administration. Can you imagine?

The absurdity of it all has finally reached a point where it is doing irreparable harm to the reputation of America’s once-vaunted justice system. (The reputation of the press is too far gone at this point to hope for rehabilitation.)

Mueller’s partisan inquisition is based on a pack of lies. Its remit isn’t tied to a particular statute believed to have been violated and it is written in an open-ended way that it is, in fact, unprecedented for invocation of the special counsel law.

It is time, somehow, to end it. Now.

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Border Patrol Fights Back U.S. officials are refusing to hand over criminal aliens to California. Matthew Vadum

By on March 23rd, 2018

The U.S. Border Patrol is reportedly fighting back against California’s openly seditious statewide sanctuary laws by refusing to hand over illegal aliens with felony warrants to police in California.

This makes perfect sense, according to the law of unintended consequences. It is an appropriate, tactically innovative way to counter California’s ridiculous laws that seek to nullify federal immigration legislation.

Rodney Scott, the chief patrol agent in the Border Patrol’s San Diego sector, previously said that the Golden State’s sanctuary laws were making normal cooperation between his agency and local law enforcement difficult.

This is because California now largely forbids cooperation with federal immigration authorities, a violation of the U.S. Constitution’s Supremacy Clause. State law there now imposes draconian restrictions on communication between local police and federal immigration enforcement, including information regarding when criminal aliens are scheduled to be released from local jails.

According to the Daily Caller, Scott recently entered into evidence a declaration in support of the U.S. Department of Justice’s lawsuit aimed at California’s reckless sanctuary state laws.

In the declaration Scott recounted several instances in which San Diego sector border agents determined that they could not hand over custody of a criminal alien to local law enforcement because local officials could not be trusted to return the alien to federal custody after processing by the courts.

According to the news report:

“In each instance, the Border Patrol Agent determined it was not appropriate, consistent with his or her federal responsibilities to ensure the enforcement of immigration law, to release a criminal alien to the state and local law enforcement,” Scott said in a court declaration. “This was because, although the alien was subject to removal, if released to California law enforcement, the alien would ultimately be released into the public.”

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ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Israeli Choreographers Banned From Oslo Festival Anti-Semitism takes center stage. Bruce Bawer

By on March 23rd, 2018

To judge by their Facebook profiles, Margrete Slettebø and Kristiane Nerdrum Bøgwald are a couple of busy young ladies. Together, they manage Feminine Tripper, an annual dance festival in Oslo, Norway, that focuses on “femininity and gender identity.” They both also work at the “Butoh-laboratorium” in Oslo, which sounds like something scientific but turns out to be a self-styled “collective” specializing in the Japanese dance style known as Butoh. A glance through the Oslo phone book shows that both women live in a couple of Oslo’s nicest neighborhoods. In addition, Bøgdwald, whose father is a noted psychiatrist and researcher, belongs to a theater company called “Grusomhetens Teater” (The Theater of Cruelty). Slettebø, for her part, is a “Dance Artist at ACTS-laboratory for performance practices” and a communications adviser to Arts Council Norway, a government agency that, its website explains, “provides grants to art and culture throughout the country” and “advises the state on cultural questions.” And, to name a couple of activities that seem especially relevant to our story, Slettebø worked for several years as office manager for the youth wing of the Socialist Left Party (an ardent supporter of Palestinians and the BDS movement) and was also an active member of the Joint Committee for Palestine (“an umbrella organization for Norwegian organizations that support the Palestinians’ cause”).

Anyway, here’s the story. On Wednesday, the Jerusalem Post reported that the Feminine Tripper festival, which this year is being held from March 19 to 25 and which professes to welcome participants from around the world, had rejected an application by six Israeli choreographers – Eden Wiseman, Roni Rotem, Nitzan Lederman, Maayan Cohen Marciano, Adi Shildan, and Maia Halter – who had received letters from Bøgwald and Slettebø stating that Israel “uses culture as a form of propaganda to whitewash or justify its regime of occupation and oppression of the Palestinian people” and that they could not, therefore, “with a clear conscience invite Israeli participants when we know that artists from the occupied Palestinian territories struggle with very restricted access to travel to international art venues and that they have little opportunity to communicate their art outside of the occupied territories.” The Israelis did not take the rejection lightly. “Would you reject a Saudi artist for Saudi restrictions on women’s rights?” they wrote back. “Would you reject an American artist for the American policies regarding the ‘Muslim ban’ regulations?”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trump’s Choice of Bolton Reflects American Greatness The political warriors from the Freedom Center’s events are Trump’s newest fighters. Daniel Greenfield

By on March 23rd, 2018

Fifteen years ago, North Korea banned John Bolton from the useless nuclear talks. “Such human scum and bloodsucker is not entitled to take part in the talks,” its foreign ministry declared.

North Korea had freaked out because then Undersecretary of State Bolton had called Kim Jong Il, a “tyrannical dictator” and life in the socialist hellhole, a “hellish nightmare”.

Bolton would later describe that as one of his proudest moments.

Back then, North Korea had defended the move by pointing out that Bolton’s views differed “from the recent remarks of the U.S. president”. And so it could claim that he didn’t represent the United States.

Fifteen years later the game has changed. Kim Jong Il is dead and the President of the United States has called his successor, “little rocket man”, a “madman” and “short and fat”.

John Bolton very definitely does represent the views of this president.

And to prove it, President Trump has appointed him as his new National Security Adviser.

Bolton knew then that appeasing the North Korean dictatorship would never work. Bill Clinton’s bad North Korean deal paved the way for the even worse Iran deal. It took a decade and a half for an administration to actually listen to him. And his appointment sends a clear signal to North Korea.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Going for Broke, the Canadian Way By David Solway

By on March 23rd, 2018

It is no surprise that the new budget tabled by Justin Trudeau’s Liberals is permeated through and through by the feminist mentality. Writing on LifeSiteNews, Lianne Laurence argues that Trudeau’s federal budget “institutionalizes feminism, panders to left-wing interest groups, patronizes women, and is long on ideology and bureaucratic meddling, but short on economics.” It includes, among other spending measures, a “feminist foreign aid agenda,” as well as “billions to boost women in the workforce,” as the Toronto Star reports. One recalls the late Senator Everett Dirksen, who reportedly joked: “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.”

Indeed, so pronounced is its feminist bent that the budget “appears to have been written out of Status of Women Canada … or perhaps a campus gender studies course: this is surely the world’s first ‘intersectional’ budget,” wrote National Post columnist Andrew Coyne. It is, in his words, merely a “mix of ideological cant and bureaucratic busywork known as ‘gender-based analysis,’” rendering us graphically uncompetitive with the U.S. and “any other OECD country.”

As I pointed out in an earlier article, Trudeau has assigned his minister of foreign affairs, the ineffable Chrystia Freeland (of “100 years ago pretty much all women were beaten by their husbands” fame), to represent the country in the ongoing NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) talks with the United States. Freeland wants to expand the agreement to include gender and social justice goals. This is not going to work for Canada. Moreover, Freeland, a card-carrying feminist prone to tears when trade talks are about to collapse, is simply no match for a tower-building business-minded tycoon like Donald Trump. Rebel Media host Ezra Levant had it exactly right: Freeland, “an emotional-wreck quota-token,” did not much impress the tough European negotiators at CETA (Canada-European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement) with her brand of lachrymose naiveté. Unless we get lucky, Freeland will succeed at doing what she does best: harm.

The embarrassments continue to mount up. Canada’s minister of environment and climate change, Catherine McKenna (aka “Climate Barbie”), instructs us to “consider the gendered impacts of climate change on women, girls and children.” Presumably the rest of the natural creation, including men, is of no account. Moreover, the possible relation that might exist between climate change and gender has baffled most observers, apart from the fact that the hypothesis of man-made climate change has been pretty well discredited.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Uber’s Death Car and the Cracks in Liberal Culture By David P. Goldman

By on March 23rd, 2018

Video of Uber’s self-driving car killing Elaine Herzberg is available on YouTube. It will–or at least should–produce shock waves in the culture. The Silicon Valley cult of Artificial Intelligence (AI) — and the related cult of brain science — is a main source of today’s cultural despair. If the brain is merely a machine that white-coated lab techs can measure and manipulate like any other machine, and if machines can be programmed to emulate the human brain, then human existence has no purpose. Our destiny is fixed in the same way that the paths of the planets and the orbits of electrons are fixed, and our free will, moral responsibility, devotion to the past and regard for the future are the random effluvia of a deterministic process.

If that is the case, then it doesn’t matter what we do. We can pursue whatever pleasures or perversions strike our fancy at the moment, because nothing really matters. We are alone in a hostile universe and find our humanity, if such a thing there be, in arbitrary acts of self-assertion. The highest virtue is to define one’s own identity, because only the willful assertion of individual particularity answers the emptiness of the universe, and the next-highest virtue is to reinforce other people’s arbitrary self-assertion (for example by eliminating offending male-and-female pronouns in order to protect the sensibilities of transgender people).

That’s why Hollywood grinds out movie after movie about computers coming to life, programmers falling in love with their avatars, and so forth, starting with Steven Spielberg’s ghastly “AI” (2001). The liberal techno-utopians of Silicon Valley believe they are beneficent Dr. Frankensteins, creating the New Man.

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