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June 2018

A Philosophy of Expedience The Left’s jurisprudence is whatever sounds good politically. John O. McGinnis

https://www.city-journal.org/html/philosophy-expedience-15961.html

Judicial appointments have proved the most successful aspect of the Trump presidency. Neil Gorsuch has begun where Antonin Scalia left off—as a committed originalist and eloquent textualist. Twenty-one appellate justices have been confirmed, a record at this point in a modern President’s term. And, like Gorsuch, these appointees have been schooled in formalist methodologies of judging. Confident of and committed to their judicial philosophy, they will not shift leftward, as have many Republican appointees in the past. These judges are the fruit of institutions like the Federalist Society and of the work of scholars who have carefully formulated the ideas of originalism and textualism. The Left is enraged because the Trump judges will leave their mark for at least a generation. Thus a group, Demand Justice, has been formed to spend millions to assail the Trump appointees and tout progressive judges for the future.

But however much money they spend, judicial progressives face an existential difficulty: the Left has no philosophy of jurisprudence to compete with originalism. Yes, progressives embrace a familiar set of specific legal positions tied to their agenda. They believe that Citizens United—the case that gave corporations the same right to speak at election time as the media—is an abomination. They believe that the Constitution’s enumeration of powers does not prevent the federal government from regulating anything that it wants to regulate. They believe that progressive programs, be they Obamacare or antidiscrimination law, should never yield to claims of religious liberty, and that discrimination is generally fine, so long as it favors minorities—and majorities, too, as long as those are women.

In answering a question about the Supreme Court in a presidential debate with Trump, Hillary Clinton characteristically subordinated law to a grab bag of progressive policy objectives. “I feel that at this point in our country’s history, it is important that we not reverse marriage equality, that we not reverse Roe v. Wade, that we stand up against Citizens United, we stand up for the rights of people in the workplace.” In contrast, Trump provided a general legal standard based on a principle: “Interpret the Constitution the way the Founders wanted it interpreted.” This is a rough but handy description of originalism.

Palestinians: No Place for Gays by Khaled Abu Toameh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12496/palestinians-gays

Mahmoud Ishtiwi was executed in Gaza by three bullets to the chest, because he lived among people who consider homosexuality a sin punishable by death — and who act on it.

What can one learn from the controversy? Basically, that it is safer to be a member of Hamas than to be gay. Palestinian leaders would much rather see young Palestinians trying to kill Israelis than talk about gays in their own society. In the world of Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, there is no room for comedy or satire.

On June 8, an estimated 250,000 people attended the Gay Pride Parade in Tel Aviv. Tourists from all around the world came to Israel to watch and participate in the event. The theme of this year’s event is “The Community Makes History” — a reference to the LGBT community in Israel.

Meanwhile, as the Israelis were celebrating tolerance on the streets of Tel Aviv, their Palestinian neighbors were busy doing precisely the opposite: they were demanding that people should be fired for producing a television comedy about gay people in the Gaza Strip.

The controversial program, called “Out of Focus,” has drawn strong condemnations from Palestinians, who are now calling for punishing those responsible for “insulting Arab and Islamic values.”

In Palestinian and Arab society, homosexuality is denounced and stigmatized. Homosexuality is illegal under Hamas rule in the Gaza Strip, and dozens of gay Palestinians have fled to Israel out of fear of persecution and harassment. In the West Bank, the laws of the Palestinian Authority also do not protect the rights of gay Palestinians.

In the past decades, several gay Palestinians have been killed in both the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

My School’s Imam: “We Love Western Anti-West Theories” by Majid Rafizadeh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12390/anti-west-imam

The purpose of brainwashing their students with inciting anger and hatred clearly seems to be to instill in them the notion that they are being victimized by the West.

Some members of the so-called “victim” community, such as Islamist leaders, take advantage of this victimhood status. They use it as a shield and then become the victimizers by crushing people in their own countries.

Such ideas and values prevent ordinary people and scholars from focusing on the crimes against humanity that Islamist leaders of state and non-state entities commit.

The accommodation of Muslim extremists by leaders in the West not only helps them recruit more people to target Westerners, incite anti-Western, anti-Christian, and anti-Semitic sentiments, but more importantly, it tramples the millions of ordinary Muslims who seek to promote in their homelands values such as the institutions of democracy, freedom of speech, separation of religion and state, the independence of education and the judiciary, and equal justice under the law.

In my high school in Syria, which was directed by the Iranian regime through its embassy staff in Damascus (Iran has several schools in Syria and sends teachers and imams there), every student was forced to attend daily prayer at noon. We were commanded to stand behind an extremist clergyman, mimic his actions, and recite the prayer. After the prayer, we had no choice but to listen to the preaching of a fundamentalist imam who was most likely employed by the regime to advance their ideological and political interests.

Paul Krugman’s Intellectual Dishonesty Always accuse the opposition of what you yourself are doing. Mark Tapson

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270364/paul-krugmans-intellectual-dishonesty-mark-tapson

The discourse of today’s political left is invariably marked by jaw-dropping degrees of hypocrisy and psychological projection. Case in point: last week columnist Paul Krugman posted an opinion piece at The New York Times titled “Intellectuals, Politics and Bad Faith,” in which he strove to smear the political right as intellectually dishonest – exactly the same sin of which Krugman was guilty in his own column.

Nobel Prize-winner Krugman long ago ceased being reliable as an economist but has maintained his political stature among the left as a race-obsessed smear merchant who habitually demonizes conservatives in his Times columns. As noted in his profile at DiscoverTheNetworks.org, the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s encyclopedia of the political left, Krugman’s “view of Republicans and conservatives as hate mongers has been on display again and again.” As an example, when Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and six others were shot in Tucson, Arizona in 2011 by an obsessed lunatic, Krugman falsely blamed it on “the rising tide of violence” in America stemming from “toxic,” “eliminationist” rhetoric “coming, overwhelmingly, from the right.”

In another instance, on Election Day in 2016, a bitter Krugman lashed out by attacking Donald Trump’s supporters as racist misogynists “who don’t share at all our idea of what America is about.” At least he got that last part right – Trump supporters most assuredly do not share Krugman’s Progressive vision of what America should be about.

“A Poison for Society” – German Editorial on Migrants and Murder Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/270412/poison-society-german-editorial-migrants-and-daniel-greenfield

I usually don’t do this. But I thought that this editorial from Germany’s Tagesspiegel was worth translating at least in part.

After the murder of Susanna Maria Feldman, a 14-year-old Jewish girl in Germany, Tagesspiegel takes its ‘spiegel’ and takes a hard look at the moral hazard of accommodating migrants.

The murder of Susanna F. – Poison for Society – Tagesspiegel

At the end of his remarks on the case, Müller, the head of the Police of Westhessen, finished a sentence with the word “but”, which suggests that he knows that this case has a meaning that goes beyond the specific criminal case…

Mueller spoke about the murder of Susanna , 14 years old, allegedly raped and murdered by a man who continued to live in Germany after his asylum application was rejected. An act that, like a cruel and cynical commentary on refugee policy, becomes public in just these days, in which the treatment of migrants and asylum seekers is also top priority at the political level.

The chief of police speaks of a ” repugnant crime, ” and then says “but.” “But” it was a 13-year-old refugee who had contributed significantly to solving the case. In an effort not to link the words murder and refugee, he has linked Solution and Refugee, as if it were the same thing. With that, he’s just tapped into the generalization trap he was trying to warn against.

The country looks after the murders in Freiburg and Kandel , after Maria and Mia, now turns in horror to Wiesbaden, to Susanna…

The feeling of insecurity will continue to increase, and with it the resentment of the authorities, of politicians, of all whom they believe are allowing it to take place. The anger at those refugees who instead of being grateful for food, lodging and lodging turn criminal – especially when the victims come from the society that welcomed them.

The Strange Case of Maajid Nawaz And the hypocrisy of the UK media. Joshua Winston

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270396/strange-case-maajid-nawaz-joshua-winston

First of all, let me clearly define my terms – Islamism is essentially synonymous with terrorism in my mind, because their goals are the same. Islamism is the political element of Islam which seeks to establish a global caliphate that sees everyone living under sharia. Sharia, as we know, in spite of the lies that are continually told by the Muslim darlings of the UK’s media, does not take kindly to gays, women, and people of other faiths.

Maajid Nawaz was once part of Hizb ut-Tahrir, which I consider to be a terrorist organization for the reasons given above. Hizb ut-Tahrir is banned in all Arab Muslim countries, with the exception of Yemen, the UAE, and Lebanon. It is also banned in some other countries, too: Germany, China, Russia, Egypt, Turkey, etc. Yet Hizb ut-Tahrir still holds demonstrations in Central London to this day. This is a terrorist organization that Mr. Nawaz was part of, promoted, and helped grow to its size today. Nawaz also allegedly spent time in jail because of his participation with Hizb ut-Tahrir and his other Islamist activities.

Today Maajid is the darling of the UK’s media. Apparently being an ex-member of a terrorist organization makes one an expert on how best to spread Islam peacefully across the UK. Maajid is still a fierce promoter of Islam. He is still looking to spread it worldwide, but he’s hoping that he can reform Islam and give us the soft version, the version without all the calls to violence and the need to establish a caliphate. To that I say, good luck, and, further, you can keep it, because I’m not buying into it. I do not want Islam in any of its guises.

Islamic Insanity in the Netherlands When crazy is the new normal. Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270354/islamic-insanity-netherlands-daniel-greenfield

On a pleasant Wednesday in Schiedam, a Dutch city near Rotterdam’s sizable Islamic population, a 26-year-old Syrian refugee stood on a balcony waving an axe and shouting, “Allahu Akbar.”

The police arrived at the modernistic dark and gray building, limned in steel and glass, where the nameless Syrian was shouting about the supremacy of his religion and its axe to all others in Schiedam.

The Dutch cops tried to calm him down. Instead he attacked a police dog which later died of its injuries. After some failed attempts at negotiating his surrender, the Syrian was shot in the leg. Paramedics loaded him into one of two yellow ambulances dispatched for the occasion and maneuvering past a police Volvo took him off to be an even bigger burden on the taxpayers of the Netherlands.

Even before murdering a police dog, the Syrian refugee had been in contact with various aid agencies. By the time he’s done being treated, evaluated, counseled, tried, defended, prosecuted and judged, he will have cost the Netherlands enough money to feed an entire Syrian city for a day.

“It is certain that he had no religious motives,” Mayor Lamers insisted. “The most important thing is that he first receives the right care, that also applies to his father. As soon as he is recovered, there will probably be a long-term admission to a clinic.”

Make that two Syrian cities for a week.

Trump Loosens Gulliver’s Ropes Strong American leadership puts the world in shock. Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270421/trump-loosens-gullivers-ropes-bruce-thornton

Donald Trump left the G7 meeting early to head for Singapore and meet with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. He left behind a disgruntled gaggle of Lilliputian states who have grown accustomed to U.S. leaders accepting the institutional ropes binding the world’s greatest power, and now are shocked and angry that an American leader is putting America’s interests first.

We don’t know how Trump’s high-stakes negotiating on trade and tariffs will turn out, or whether the American people can take any economic pain that may attend the correction of trade imbalances that have tended to favor our partners and rivals at the expense of our own economy. But we have long needed to concentrate our partners’ minds on the wisdom of changing their assumption that the United States will put itself second in order to uphold the “postwar world order” that frequently camouflages the subordination of our interests to theirs.

This “global order” is made up of the transnational institutions built on the rubble of two World Wars. The most important include the UN, NATO, the General Agreements on Tariffs and Trade, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, and the G7 group of the world’s richest economies representing 62% of global wealth, a total of $262 trillion. These multinational groups are supposed to keep the global peace, and manage the globalized economy so that it runs smoothly and equitably.

This network of institutions, however, rests on some dubious ideas. One particularly tenacious one is that the old balance of power among sovereign nations failed, leading to the 20th century’s spectacular carnage. Nations that look first to their parochial interests and distinct identities threaten the global unification and “harmony of interests” that can better create and protect prosperity, democracy, human rights, and peace.

Historic Kim-Trump Summit Kicks Off Will the world soon see a denuclearized North Korea? Lloyd Billingsley

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270432/historic-kim-trump-summit-kicks-lloyd-billingsley

President Trump has assured North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un that the long awaited summit that started today in Singapore is a “one-time shot” and repeatedly told reporters “we’ll see what happens.” Democrats couldn’t stand the wait. Before the two men even met, Democratic strategist Mary Anne Marsh told Fox News the summit was “a win for Kim.”

Trump and Jong-un shook hands in an historic meeting and the president told reporters “we will have a terrific relationship, I have no doubt.” At this writing, the two have entered a meeting with only translators present, to be joined later by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Advisor John Bolton.

It remains unclear whether Kim will dump his nuclear program, as Trump wants, or whether the United States will reduce its military presence with ally South Korea, as Kim Jong-un wants. Sanctions and economic issues are also in play. As the negotiations play out, observers might keep some realities in mind.

North Korea is the first hereditary Stalinist dictatorship, the most oppressive regime ever to exist, with the possible exception of Enver Hoxha’s Albania and the Cuba of Fidel and now Raul Castro. Under Kim Il Sung, who launched the 1950 invasion, North Korea built up nuclear reactors, but it was his son Kim Jong Il, who took over in 1994, who advanced the nuclear weapons program while denying that the regime even had one.

De Blasio’s Plan to Destroy New York’s Best Schools By Kyle Smith

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/bill-de-blasio-education-new-york-best-schools-destroyed/These are some of the last bastions of absolute meritocracy left in America.

Let’s take some of the best public high schools in the United States and tweak their admissions policies, argues New York City mayor Bill de Blasio. Instead of admitting students solely by merit, de Blasio says, they should accept the top 7 percent of students from every middle school in New York City.

Most of these middle schools are the educational equivalent of Superfund sites. De Blasio’s proposal makes about as much sense as Google announcing that henceforth 5 percent of its engineers will be graduates of Stanford, 5 percent of Harvard, 5 percent of Muleshoe State Technical College, 5 percent of Vidal Sassoon’s Hairdressing Academy, and 5 percent of Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane. It’s as if the Golden State Warriors announced that in the interest of sportsological diversity, they will no longer ruthlessly screen for gifted basketball players but instead will set aside spots for one golfer and one bowler on next year’s starting five.

Stuyvesant High School, the Bronx High School of Science, Brooklyn Tech, and five other specialized schools have a rich history of service as oases from the miserable norms that define most precincts of the New York City Department of Education. Stuyvesant’s graduates include four Nobel laureates, Eric Holder, David Axelrod, and Tim Robbins. Bronx Science, as it is known, boasts eight Nobel winners, more than any high school in the country, and six Pulitzer Prize winners.