Displaying posts published in

June 2018

EU and Palestinian Illegal “Facts on the Ground” by Bassam Tawil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12416/palestinian-illegal-building

The real story is the land. Building on it was key to taking possession of an otherwise unattainable piece of territory, and making this possession appear irreversible.

The basis of “The Fayyad Plan” (Official title: “Palestine: Ending the Occupation, Establishing the State”) was, and remains, the creation of a de facto state — without the need for negotiation with Israel — through facts on the ground in areas under full Israeli administrative and security administration.

Jahalin West would offer services that these Bedouin have never had — services the Palestinian Authority has never offered them: running water, electricity, permanent homes they themselves are free to design, health clinics, public transportation, schools, access to employment, and more.

What the Palestinian Authority, the European Union, Israel’s High Court of Justice, three Israeli towns, and the Jahalin tribe have in common is the Bedouin settlement of Khan al-Akhmar.

The battle for this Arab settlement has been waged in the international media and the Israeli Supreme Court for more than a decade, and its story is a microcosm of the Arab-Israel conflict, complete with alternative narratives, shifting alliances, unclear lines of responsibility and murky vested interests.

The first problem is that Khan al Akhmar is located in an area, unpoetically named Area C, where, according to the United Nations, “Israel retains near exclusive control, including over law enforcement, planning and construction.”

This small cluster of Bedouin homes is actually sitting on land in an Israeli township, Kfar Adumim, at a strategic crossroads between Jerusalem, the Dead Sea, and the outlying Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem, making it crucial both to the Israelis and the Palestinians.

Until fairly recently, the residents of the Arab settlement — a branch of the Jahalin tribe of Bedouin — had lived in southern Israel. At some point in the 1970s, a feud broke out between different branches of the tribe, and the Jahalin fled northward, and arrived in the Maaleh Adumim region in the late 1970s, where they have remained ever since.

Denmark Approves Burka Ban by Soeren Kern

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12420/denmark-approves-burka-ban

Denmark becomes the sixth European country to enact such a ban, after France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Bulgaria and Austria.

“The face is your passport. When you refuse me to see you, I am a victim.” — Jacques Myard, a former conservative MP who supported the ban in France.

“[S]ome people do not want to be a part of Danish society and want to create parallel societies with their own norms and rules.” — Danish Justice Minister Søren Pape Poulsen.

The Danish Parliament has passed a ban on Islamic full-face veils in public spaces. The new law, sponsored by Denmark’s center-right government, and backed by the Social Democrats and the Danish People’s Party, was passed on May 31 by 75 votes to 30.

As of August 1, anyone found wearing a burka (which covers the entire face) or a niqab (which covers the entire face except for the eyes) in public in Denmark will be subject to a fine of 1,000 Danish kroner (€135; $157); repeat offenders could be fined 10,000 Danish kroner.

In addition, anyone found to be requiring a person through force or threats to wear garments that cover the face could be fined or face up to two years in prison.

Rage and Race at Yale By Heather Mac Donald

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2018/06/11/yale-racial-grievances-university-bows-diversity-enforcers/

On the university’s latest kowtow to the diversity enforcers

Once again, a college president has chosen to fan the flames of racial grievance rather than to calm them. This time, that president is Yale’s Peter Salovey. No surprise there, since Salovey has rarely missed an opportunity to signal his racial virtue by declaring that he presides over a campus harboring “hate,” “exclusion,” and “discrimination.” Yale’s response to a recent incident of petty dormitory tyranny is a textbook example of how not to lead a university.

On May 8, at 1:40 a.m., a female graduate student at Yale turned on the light in the graduate-dorm common room and found another woman sleeping there, amid books, a laptop, a pillow, and a blanket. The first woman allegedly told the second woman that she didn’t have the right to sleep there and called the Yale police to report an unauthorized person in the common room. Three Yale Police Department officers showed up five minutes later.

For the next 15 minutes, two of the officers and the erstwhile sleeper, Lolade Siyonbola, a 34-year-old MA candidate in African studies, interacted warily on the landing outside Siyonbola’s dorm room, as the cops tried to corroborate her identity. On another floor, the third officer questioned the caller, Sarah Braasch, a 43-year-old Ph.D. candidate in philosophy. Confirming Siyonbola’s identity took longer than usual since the name on her campus ID did not match the name she had chosen to use in Yale’s student database. Once the discrepancy was resolved, the officers admonished Braasch that Siyonbola had every right to be in the common room and left.

As captured on Siyonbola’s smartphone video, Braasch appears to be an officious control freak, believing herself empowered to enforce her own private code of dormitory conduct. Ordinarily, this trivial incident would have passed without notice. But because Braasch is white and Siyonbola is black, the episode has become an international scandal, and Yale has gone into crisis mode.

First out of the gate with a racial mea culpa was the dean of Yale Law School, Heather Gerken. In an email to the “Law School Community” on May 10, Gerken claimed that the police check of Siyonbola represented a “corrosive” pattern: “We are well aware that this is not the first time that people of color, and African Americans in particular, have been questioned about their right to be in a building on the Yale campus. Similar incidents have happened over the years here at the Law School.” Gerken is right: Such questioning has happened at the law school — to black and white students. Several black law students complained on Facebook after the Braasch episode about being asked for identification when their family was visiting and taking pictures. A white Yale law student has had the identical experience: “I’ve been asked for my ID at the law school when I had my family enter the building with me to take pictures,” he told me via email. He has been asked for his ID when a substitute security guard was at the building’s front entrance and when walking into the library. All of these potential “incidents” occurred during the day, not in the middle of the night.

Yes, the FBI Was Investigating the Trump Campaign When It Spied By Andrew C. McCarthy

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/05/trump-campaign-spying-obama-administration-investigation/Trey Gowdy and Marco Rubio evidently paid little attention to testimony before their own committees on how Obama officials made the Trump campaign the subject of a counterintelligence investigation.

Well, well, well. The bipartisan Beltway establishment has apparently had its fill of this “Trump colluded with Russia” narrative — the same narrative the same establishment has lustily peddled for nearly two years. The Obama administration recklessly chose to deploy the government’s awesome counterintelligence powers to investigate — and, more to the point, to smear — its political opposition as a Kremlin confederate. Now that this ploy has blown up on the Justice Department and the FBI, these agencies — the ones that went out of their way, and outside their guidelines, to announce to the world that the Trump campaign was under investigation — want you to know the president and his campaign were not investigated at all, no siree.

What could possibly have made you imagine such a thing?

And so, to douse the controversy with cold water, dutifully stepping forward in fine bipartisan fettle are the Obama administration’s top intelligence official and two influential Capitol Hill Republicans who evidently pay little attention to major testimony before their own committees.

Former National Intelligence director James Clapper was first to the scene of the blaze. Clapper concedes that, well, yes, the FBI did run an informant — “spy” is such an icky word — at Trump campaign officials; but you must understand that this was merely to investigate Russia. Cross his heart, it had nothing to do with the Trump campaign. No, no, no. Indeed, they only used an informant because — bet you didn’t know this — doing so is the most benign, least intrusive mode of conducting an investigation.

Me? I’m thinking the tens of thousands of convicts serving lengthy sentences due to the penetration of their schemes by informants would beg to differ. (Mr. Gambino, I assure you, this was just for you own good . . .) In any event, I’ll leave it to the reader to imagine the Democrats’ response if, say, the Bush administration had run a covert intelligence operative against Obama 2008 campaign officials, including the campaign’s co-chairman. I’m sure David Axelrod, Chuck Schumer, the New York Times, and Rachel Maddow would chirp that “all is forgiven” once they heard Republicans punctiliously parse the nuances between investigating campaign officials versus the campaign proper; between “spies,” “informants,” and other government-directed covert operatives.

Tommy Robinson Drew Attention to ‘Grooming Gangs.’ Britain Has Persecuted Him. By Douglas Murray

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/05/tommy-robinson-grooming-gangs-britain-persecutes-journalist/The latest controversy is maddening for many reasons.

Tommy Robinson is a British political activist and “citizen journalist” who came to prominence in Britain almost a decade ago when he founded the English Defence League. The EDL was a street-protest movement in Britain whose aims could probably best be summarized as “anti-Islamization.” It emerged in the town of Luton after a group of local Islamists barracked the homecoming parade of a local regiment returning from service in Afghanistan.

From their earliest protests the EDL’s members sought to highlight issues including sharia law, Islam’s attitudes toward minorities, and the phenomenon that would become euphemistically known as “grooming gangs.” In reality these protests often descended into hooliganism and low-level violence (naturally helped along by self-described “anti-fascists”). The authorities did everything they could to stop the EDL, and the media did everything possible to demonize them. In a foretaste of things to come, very few people made any effort to understand them. And nobody paid any price for (indeed many people benefited from) claiming that the EDL was simply a fascist organization and that anybody who even tried to understand them must be a fascist too. The usual prohibition against sweeping generalizations doesn’t seem to apply if the generalization tilts in that direction.

I interviewed Tommy Robinson five years ago, after he had left the EDL (having by his own admission failed to keep extremists including actual neo-Nazis away from the movement). As he said then, one of the problems of everyone insisting that a particular movement is campaigning for the Fourth Reich is that the few people who think that sounds like a great idea will show up. Whatever his other faults, there is no evidence that Robinson thinks that way. Indeed he was once charged with assault for head-butting a Nazi sympathizer who wouldn’t leave an EDL protest. Not many people bothered with those details. The assault got reported, but not the cause. So the fact that Robinson had head-butted a Nazi became yet more evidence that he himself must be some kind of Nazi.

Anyhow — Robinson wised up slightly, and eventually began to plough his energies into a type of citizen journalism/activism. Some of this has been remarkably brave, some of it remarkably wrong (such as a video he made after last year’s Manchester Arena attack, in which he seemed to furiously suggest that everyone living around a particular mosque in the area must be some type of enemy combatant), and some remarkably ill-advised — not least because it has allowed him to be presented in the worst possible light.

President Trump’s September Surprise By Angelo Codevilla

https://amgreatness.com/2018/05/31/what-nevertrump-never-understood/
Imagine if, on the evening of Tuesday, September 4, President Trump delivered the following speech from the White House . . .

My fellow Americans,

Traditionally, this is the day when the country ends summer fantasies, gets back to work and to school—when we get serious. And it is high time for our political system to follow suit and get serious. Tonight we start.

Two months from now, we will vote for 435 members of the House of Representatives, 34 senators, and countless other officials. Since the last election, we’ve been bombarded with accusations from government officials acting in semi-secrecy and through friendly collaborators in the media that your votes were somehow tainted, and the election results were illegitimate.

Sadly, this outrageous campaign has abetted the Democratic Party’s near-unanimous refusal to accept the results of our election. Aptly, they call what they have been doing “the Resistance.” This open cabal of officials, of the media, of corporate America’s leadership, these upscale lords of the universe, are trying to overturn the results of the last presidential election.

They aim to convince you that you are stupid, unsophisticated, and at least a little racist. In short, they want you to know that you can’t govern yourselves as well as they would have you governed. They tell you that you must vote for Democrats, any and all Democrats, because if enough are elected, they will impeach Donald Trump who is responsible in part for the stupidity, racism, sexism, etc. that led you to vote as you did in 2016.

For what will they impeach me? For having done exactly what? They won’t say directly. They want an endless investigation producing more leaks and suggestions that the worst of the allegations about me may be true. And they want elections to be run on the basis of their smoke and mirrors campaigns.

But it’s time to get serious. That’s why, tonight, I’m telling them what Muhammed Ali told George Foreman after he had absorbed his best punches: Now it’s my turn.

So, tonight, hear this.

Robert Mueller, you’re fired. As of noon Eastern Daylight Time on September 5, along with every person you have hired, you are no longer an employee of the United States. The same goes for Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. I am canceling all security clearances of yours and of theirs as of that hour. By that moment, you and they will have delivered to the Justice Department’s inspector general every copy of every document connected with your investigation of anything having to do with the 2016 election, and every electronic instrument containing such documents. After that moment, your possession of any such documents, in any form, will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

Second, in the exercise of my authority under Article II of the Constitution, I hereby declassify, as of noon Eastern Daylight Time on September 5, any and all documents in the possession of the Department of Justice, the Department of State, the FBI, the CIA, and the National Security Agency relating in any way to the election of 2016.

The Carnivores of Civil Liberties By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2018/05/31/the-carnivores-

After a landslide loss in the 1972 presidential election, the Democratic Party was resuscitated the following year by the Watergate scandal. The destruction of the Nixon presidency powered the Democrats to make huge political gains in the 1974 elections.

Watergate also birthed (or perhaps rebirthed) modern investigative journalism. A young generation of maverick reporters supposedly alone had challenged the establishment in order to uncover the whole truth about abuses of power by the Nixon Administration.

Liberalism rode high during the Watergate era. It had demanded that civil liberties be protected from the illegal or unconstitutional overreach of the Nixon-era FBI, CIA, and other agencies. Liberals alleged that out-of-control officials had spied on U.S. citizens for political purposes and then tried to mask their wrongdoing under the cover of “national security” or institutional “professionalism.”

All those legacies are now eroding. The Democratic Party, the investigative media, and liberalism itself are now weirdly on the side of the reactionary administrative state. They have either downplayed or excused Watergate-like abuses of power by the former Barack Obama Administration.

Liberal journalists apparently have few concerns that the FBI apparently used at least one secret informant to gather information about the 2016 Trump campaign. Nor are they much bothered that members of the Obama national security team unmasked the names of U.S. citizens who had been improperly surveilled. Many of those names then were leaked illegally to the press.

Democrats seem indifferent to the fact that Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign paid a foreign agent, Christopher Steele, to compile dirt on Republican candidate Donald Trump—largely by trafficking in unverified rumors from Russian interests. Obama administration officials leaked details from that dossier.

Civil libertarians appear unconcerned that the Department of Justice sought to deceive the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, getting it to grant warrants to allow the surveillance of U.S. citizens based on the suspect and politically motivated Steele dossier.

College Freshmen’s Self-Reports Of Psychological Disorders Doubled Since 2010 Joy Pullman

You can’t tell me 20 hours a week of milquetoast make-work is so stressful that it causes two-thirds of college students to feel ‘overwhelming anxiety.’

Mental illness diagnoses have been increasing in the United States ever since big-money drugs for them were developed then taxpayer-funded through health welfare programs starting in the 1960s. Taxpayers now pay for the majority of U.S. mental health services, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Concurrently, colleges have for several years been reporting spikes in mental health problems among students, and the Wall Street Journal reports some new numbers:

As many as one in four students at some elite U.S. colleges are now classified as disabled, largely because of mental-health issues such as depression or anxiety, entitling them to a widening array of special accommodations like longer time to take exams…

Small, private schools have the greatest concentration of students with disabilities. Among the 100 four-year, not-for-profit colleges with the highest percentage of disabled students, 93 are private, according to a WSJ analysis of federal data.

Public schools have also seen a significant uptick in test accommodations. From 2011 to 2016, the number of students with special accommodations increased by an average of 71% among 22 flagship state schools, according to data obtained by The Wall Street Journal.

Report: Obama White House Tried to Intrude on FBI’s Russia Investigation By Debra Heine

https://pjmedia.com/trending/report-obama-white-house-tried-to-intrude-on-fbis-russia-investigation/

The Obama administration tried to take over the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign, The Hill’s John Solomon reported on Fox News Thursday night. And according Solomon, the FBI began spying on members of the Trump campaign to gather the intelligence that ultimately justified the collusion investigation, weeks or even months before the FBI had a formal predicate.

“That’s very important. The rules say you can’t use sources until you have a predicated investigation. The predication is July 31, 2016,” Solomon told Fox host Sean Hannity. The investigative reporter said he had sources and documents backing up his claim that he would be making public in his report in The Hill on Friday.

He stressed that informants were making contacts with the Trump officials and providing information to the FBI “much, much earlier than July 31.”

The second part of his bombshell report, Solomon explained, deals with internal FBI communications between former counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok, his mistress Lisa Page, and others discussing how the Obama White House was trying to take over the investigation.

“The words ‘the White House is running this’ are clear in the text message,” Solomon told Hannity, adding that “the FBI agents who opened this case feared that Barack Obama was weak on national security and wouldn’t do what they needed for Russia.”

When Is It Okay to Drop the C-Bomb on a Woman? By Jim Treacher

https://pjmedia.com/trending/when-is-it-okay-to-drop-the-c-word-bomb-on-a-woman/

When her dad is a POTUS from the wrong party.

It’s been a little over 24 hours since Roseanne Barr blew up her career (again) for saying something really stupid and hateful (again). And now, yet another alleged comedienne is in the news for being a loony, vulgar piece of garbage.

First, some background. On Sunday, Ivanka Trump tweeted the following with a picture of herself and her baby:
Ivanka Trump
✔ @IvankaTrump

My ♥️! #SundayMorning

If you think that’s just a nice photo of a mother with her baby, you’re obviously not #Resisting enough.

Ladies and gentlemen: the comedic stylings of Ms. Samantha Bee.

Samantha Bee’s response:
Jon Levine
✔ @LevineJonathan
Samantha Bee to @IvankaTrump on Full Frontal tonight:

“Let me just say, one mother to another, do something about your dad’s immigration practices you feckless cunt!”

As David Rutz at the Washington Free Beacon notes:

The remark came at the end of her weekly program “Full Frontal’s” A block, where the left-wing comic blasted the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy of separating illegal immigrant children from their parents at the border. Bee acknowledged this policy did not begin under President Trump, but she said he had made it worse.