Displaying posts published in

June 2018

Trump’s approval rating just reached its highest level yet in the gold standard of presidential indicators Grace Panetta

https://www.aol.com/article/news/2018/06/18/trumps-approval-rating-just-reached-its-highest-level-yet-in-the-gold-standard-of-presidential-indicators/23462168/

President Donald Trump’s approval rating is at an all-time high of 45% in the Gallup weekly tracking poll.
And his disapproval rating has hit a near-low of 50%.
His current approval rating at his point in his presidency lines up with the ratings of other presidents at similar points in their first terms.
His new spike in approval could take a hit due to the backlash against the administration’s controversial policy that has led to separating families at the border.

President Donald Trump’s approval rating has reached an all-time high of 45% in a Gallup poll released on Sunday.

Iran, Syria, and Israel’s Red Line By Jacob Nagel

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2018/06/18/iran_syria_and_israels_red_line_113543.html

The recent skirmishes between Israel and Iranian forces in Syria raise important questions about the “rules of the game,” interests, and red lines of the primary players. Israel claims there can be no arrangement in Syria that allows Iran and Hezbollah forces to remain on Syrian soil, and that includes Shiite militias. The Israelis also insist Syria cannot be a transshipment point for advanced, game-changing weapons, especially Precision Guided Munitions (PMGs) en route to Hezbollah in Lebanon. Terrorist threats on Israel’s borders will not be tolerated.

Of course, Israel realizes the important role Russia plays in Syria and the country’s significant influence with the regime of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. As such, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has invested considerable time and effort to convince Russian President Vladimir Putin and his advisors that it is in Russia’s national interest to ensure that the Iranian access abides by Israel’s red lines. After the latest meetings between Israelis and Russians (held at military, executive and working levels), Russian statements suggest these efforts are beginning to bear fruit. The Russians are apparently beginning to understand that Iran’s presence in Syria is a liability – particularly if Israel continues to keep its “red lines,” including (according to foreign sources) airstrikes against Iranian assets in the heart of this important Russian sphere of influence.

Et tu, Laura? By Thomas Lifson

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/06/et_tu_laura.html

Laura Bush is publicly supporting the Democrats’ BS propaganda effort, hand-wringing over the poor “immigrants” (make that illegal immigrant law-breakers) who are arrested and therefore separated from the children. She wrote a column for the Trump-hating Washington Bezos Post that is getting major attention from all the other Trump-haters:

On Sunday, a day we as a nation set aside to honor fathers and the bonds of family, I was among the millions of Americans who watched images of children who have been torn from their parents. In the six weeks between April 19 and May 31, the Department of Homeland Security has sent nearly 2,000 children to mass detention centers or foster care. More than 100 of these children are younger than 4 years old. The reason for these separations is a zero-tolerance policy for their parents, who are accused of illegally crossing our borders.

The reason for the separations is that their parents have been arrested for violating our law. Just like American citizens who are arrested. As Bre Payton of The Federalist reminds us:

Putting a child in temporary housing or foster care when their [sic] parent engages in illegal activity is standard practice – even for U.S. citizens. A bit of information that’s been largely ignored is that there are an unknown number of American children who’ve been seperated [sic] from their parents and placed in foster care when their parents are incarcerated.

Gaza Media Coverage: Snipers and Lies by Ruthie Blum

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12516/gaza-media-israel

“We will take down the border [with Israel] and we will tear their hearts from their bodies.” — Yahya Sinwar, Hamas political leader.

“[W]hen we talk about ‘peaceful resistance,’ we are deceiving the public. This is a peaceful resistance bolstered by a military force and by security agencies, and enjoying tremendous popular support.” — Mahmoud Al-Zahar, senior Hamas official, on Al Jazeera.

When a doctor in Gaza announced that a congenital heart defect was likely the cause of her death, the Gaza health ministry removed her name from the list of those killed in clashes with Israel, pending an autopsy.

“Hamas’ goal is to have Israel kill as many Gazans as possible so that the headlines always begin, and often end, with the body count. Hamas deliberately sends women and children to the front line, while their own fighters hide behind these human shields.” — Alan Dershowitz, Esq.

On May 14, as United States officials ceremoniously relocated the American Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza — many of them members of Hamas and Iran-linked Islamic Jihad, along with other residents paid to participate — engaged in violent demonstrations along the Gaza-Israel border fence. Dubbed the “Great March of Return,” these protests were launched on March 30 and timed to crescendo six weeks later, on the day of the U.S. Embassy move, which coincided with the 70th anniversary of the establishment of the state of Israel.

Turkey: Glorification of Murder, Martyrdom and Child Soldiers by Uzay Bulut

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12548/turkey-murder-martyrdom

The celebrations are not just about the glorification of guns and killing for national or religious purposes. The events are also marked by historic revisionism in which the genocide victims are blamed for their own extermination.

There are many factors that drive the hysteria in Turkey extolling deaths, killings and attempts to brainwash children and turn them into “voluntary martyrs”: Systematic racism, ultra-nationalism, Islamic jihad and belief in martyrdom as well as the denial of the Christian genocide combined with pride in having waged it.

The 2015 “Islam Law” of Austria, which Erdogan was protesting, states that “The freedom of religion is secured in the Austrian Constitution – individually, collectively and cooperatively” — and that this freedom should not be allowed to be exploited by those who incite hate or violence for any group.

Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz recently announced that the government was shutting down a Turkish nationalist mosque in Vienna and dissolving a group called the Arab Religious Community that runs six mosques, according to the Associated Press. “Parallel societies, political Islam and tendencies toward radicalization have no place in our country,” Kurz told reporters.

“The move comes after images appeared on Twitter in April of children in a Turkish-backed mosque playing dead and reenacting the World War I battle of Gallipoli (in which an allied invasion of Ottoman Turkey was defeated). Their “corpses” were then covered in Turkish flags. The mosques association called the event ‘highly regrettable,'” according to the CBN News.

Post-Ramadan Reflections on the Muslim World by Salim Mansur

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12540/reflections-muslim-world

Muslims, in effect, are trapped in a state of bewilderment over how to repair their broken cultures, or how to build them anew — when they are full of doubts about what is new, what is modern and what has been built by others belonging to a different faith and culture.

Muslims in general are a “third world” people whose understanding and practice of Islam remain fixed in their pre-modern cultures. To many Muslims, due to their pre-modern worldview, this paradox is mostly incomprehensible. It is also hugely obstructive in easing their transition to modernity.

The fury of the internal upheaval inside the Muslim world will eventually exhaust itself when a sufficiently large segment of the Muslim population reconciles reason and revelation to discover that God never meant any religion, including Islam, to be a burden preventing man from threading a relationship with Him in harmony with human nature. Embracing modernity does not mean abandoning God.

As Ramadan drew to a close this year, the spectacle of a contrived Muslim rage on the last Friday of Islam’s sacred month — branded “Al- Qud’s [Jerusalem] Day” by Iran’s late leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini – was on display across the Muslim world and in the West.

The Trans-Atlantic Class Struggle By Angelo Codevilla

https://amgreatness.com/2018/06/18/the-trans-atlantic-class-

At the recent G7 summit, President Trump differed with the leaders of Britain, Germany, France and Canada on a host of issues. But the real reason why he and the leaders of longtime allied countries treated one another as enemies is that they belong to socio-political classes engaged in a cold war.

Since World War II, a remarkably uniform ruling class has grown throughout Western Europe as well as in the United States and Canada. It now occupies government bureaucracies, the media, education, big business, and international institutions as well as traditional political parties. Rebellious voters are besieging that class on both sides of the Atlantic. Prime Ministers Theresa May, Angela Merkel, Emmanuel Macron, and Justin Trudeau represent that class. Their political forces have experienced narrow electoral escapes.

President Donald Trump and Italy’s newly installed PM Giuseppe Conte represent rebellious voters who have brought wholesale rejection of that class to their countries’ top office. Within these countries, the old ruling class refuses to accept electoral defeat. In waging this resistance, they find solidarity with their homologues from the Bering Straits to the Oder. What happened at the G7 was one instance of that struggle.

Herewith, an explanation of this dynamic.

As the size of the Western world’s economy has grown nearly nine-fold, the size of government more than doubled. By the hiring, regulations, contracts, and contacts through which they have steered trillions of dollars—even more successfully than they might have done through laws—the people in charge of Western governments have shaped their societies according to their preferences, foremost of which has been to accommodate and advance people like themselves.

In Europe and in America, as more and more activities, educational, commercial, etc. have come under government’s aegis, the boundary between public and private has faded. Already in his 1960 farewell, President Dwight Eisenhower thought it necessary to warn that connection to government was superseding even criteria of scientific truth.

The Dream and the Nightmare of Globalization By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2018/06/18/the-dream-and-the-nightmare

After World War II, only the United States possessed the capital, the military, freedom, and the international good will to arrest the spread of global Stalinism. To save the fragile postwar West, America was soon willing to rebuild and rearm war-torn former democracies. Over seven decades, it intervened in proxy wars against Soviet and Chinese clients, and radical rogue regimes. It accepted asymmetrical and unfavorable trade as the price of leading and saving the West. America became the sole patron for dozens of needy clients—with no time limit on such asymmetry.

Yet what would become the globalized project was predicated on lots of flawed, but unquestioned assumptions:

The great wealth and power of the United States was limitless. It alone could afford to subsidize other nations. Any commercial or military wound was always considered superficial and well worth the cost of protecting the civilized order.

Only by piling up huge surpluses with the United States and avoiding costly defense expenditure through American military subsidies, could the shattered nations of Asia and Europe supposedly regain their security, prosperity and freedom. There was no shelf life on such dependencies.

American popular culture, democracy, and free-market consumer capitalism would spread beyond the West. It created a new world order of sameness and harmony—predicated on the idea that the United States must ensure, at great costs, free trade, free commerce, free travel, and free communications in a new interconnected global world. The more American largess, the more likely places from Shanghai to Lagos would eventually operate on the premises of Salt Lake City or Los Angeles. The world would inevitably reach the end of history as something like Palo Alto, the Upper West Side, or Georgetown.

The Real Resistance Lessons for America from gun control in Nazi-occupied France Lloyd Billingsley

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270491/real-resistance-lloyd-billingsley

Unlike Americans, Germans had no legal right to keep and bear arms and the liberal Weimar Republic sought to register, regulate and prohibit firearms. When Hitler’s National Socialist (Nazi) Party took power, they used those records to disarm and oppress the people, and that is why there was no armed resistance movement in Germany.

That is the story of Stephen Halbrook’s masterful 2013 Gun Control in the Third Reich: Disarming the Jews and “Enemies of the State.” Halbrook’s new book, Gun Control in Nazi-Occupied France: Tyranny and Resistance, charts the same process in occupied France. As he notes, of the many books on the occupation, “not one focuses on the repression of gun owners.” So Halbrook, who earned his JD at Georgetown and taught political philosophy at George Mason University, wrote the first authoritative account.

Pierre Laval, prime minister in 1935, decreed the registration of firearms for the first time in modern French history. The registration was “aimed at firearms owners at large and did not focus on those responsible for fomenting political violence.” Halbrook shows how it worked in great detail but the main effect “was to enhance the power of government over the citizens.”

Little did anyone anticipate that “just five years later, France would be conquered by Nazi Germany,” and the author provides the back story to that as well.

How to Talk to a Leftist Friend about Tommy Robinson Free speech and feminism are liberal values, aren’t they? Danusha V. Goska

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270478/how-talk-leftist-friend-about-tommy-robinson-danusha-v-goska

A cozy wood fire burns in an open-face brick oven. Soft piano music floats through a smooth jazz repertoire of American standards. Porsches and Maseratis cruise past the window. Two women approach, embrace, and kiss each other’s cheeks.

RACHEL: Wanda, it’s been too long. Great to see you. You have to tell me all about your new book.

WANDA: Great to see you, too! I love your new glasses. And I want to hear all about your youngest. She just bought a condo with her fiancée, no? It seems like just yesterday they were playing with dolls.

WAITRESS: Have a look at our menu.

WANDA: Thank you. Listen, Rachel, you know me. Always obsessed with current events. I want to ask you to sign a petition requesting that British Prime Minister Theresa May free Tommy Robinson from prison.

RACHEL: So, what looks good? I think I’m going to try the arugula and pistachio pesto pie. You?

WANDA: Oh, I’ll just get the usual. I see you have your laptop with you. I can find the Tommy Robinson petition and you can sign right now.

RACHEL: Aren’t you going to tell me about your book? And don’t you want to hear about the condo?

WANDA: Of course, of course. But I thought we’d get this signature out of the way so we could relax and talk about fun things.

RACHEL: Sigh. So, who is Tommy Robinson? (Rachel opens her laptop and Googles “Tommy Robinson.”)

WANDA: Tommy Robinson is a human rights activist and a citizen journalist. He’s now a political prisoner, imprisoned for exercising his free speech. He’s a champion of victimized women. You care about women’s rights. You care about free speech. I know you do. I know you’d want to sign this petition.

RACHEL: Wanda, are you serious? Look at this. Is this the Tommy Robinson you are talking about? Nazi? White supremacist? Far-right extremist? Wanda, what gives? Why are you supporting this man? This is not like you.