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June 2018

What Kim Is By Matthew Continetti

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/kim-jong-un-murderous-dictator-tyrannical-regime/Summits won’t change the nature of the North Korean tyranny.

‘This will not be just a photo op,” President Trump said Thursday of his meeting next week with Kim Jong-un. “This will be — at a minimum, we’ll start with, perhaps, a good relationship. And that’s something that’s very important toward the ultimate making of a good deal.” Later that day the president added that he might, if things go well, invite Kim to visit him in the United States, perhaps even at the White House. “He has also discussed [possibly] golfing with Kim,” a “senior Trump administration official” told the Daily Beast.

Golf? Too soon, Mr. President. Unless this is part of a strategy to get under Kim’s skin — he’ll be uncomfortable, after all, when he hits the links at Mar-a-Lago wearing charcoal fatigues. More likely it’s another example of the president’s view that relations between leaders are more important than the relationships between states, regimes, cultures, and ideas. You try to woo Xi Jinping with “a most beautiful” piece of chocolate cake, for example. Even if the results are not ultimately what you wished for.

Let’s remind ourselves of whom, exactly, President Trump plans to meet next week. For Kim Jong-un is no ordinary man. The Dear Leader occupies the summit of a hierarchical system of some 25 million people whose lives are controlled by his central government in Pyongyang. Some years ago, Christopher Hitchens described the ruling juche ideology this way: “It is based on totalitarian ‘military first’ mobilization, is maintained by slave labor, and instills an ideology of the most unapologetic racism and xenophobia.” He did not mention the troops and artillery North Korea has amassed on its southern border, and the engineers who toil in underground laboratories, building nuclear-tipped missiles capable of reaching South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and the United States.

College Course: ‘Objectivity’ Is among ‘White Mythologies’ By Katherine Timpf

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/objectivity-among-white-mythologies/Some progressives believe that the most important thing in any situation is to inject identity politics.

A course that will be taught at Hobart and William Smith Colleges next year will teach students that “objectivity” and “meritocracy” are examples of “white mythologies” and “social constructs.”

“This course explores the history and ongoing manifestations of ‘white mythologies’ — long-standing, often implicit views about the place of White, male, Euro-American subjects as the norm against which the peoples of the world are to be understood and judged,” states the description for the class, which is titled “White Mythologies: Objectivity, Meritocracy, and Other Social Constructions.”

“Students will explore how systematic logics that position ‘the West’ and ‘whiteness’ as the ideal manifest through such social constructions as objectivity, meritocracy, and race, and as justifications for colonial interventions, slavery, and the subordination of women,” the description continues.

As crazy as this story may sound, this is far from the first time that we’ve seen this kind of thinking on a college campus. In April of 2017, a group of students at Pomona College wrote a letter to the school’s outgoing president claiming that “the idea that there is a single truth . . . is a myth and white supremacy.” Also last year, a professor at Pennsylvania State University–Brandywine argued that “meritocracy” is a “whiteness ideology.” This year, two University of Denver professors claimed that scientific objectivity works to “spread whiteness ideology.”

Universities marking down students for using banned gender terms By Thomas Lifson

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

Gender madness is being enforced with the iron fist of bad grades at some of Australia’s leading universities. Natasha Bita of the Courier-Mail of Brisbane reports:

Queensland’s top universities all demand that “inclusive language’’ be used in essays, assignments, lectures and conversation, in “nanny state’’ policies rubbished yesterday by an angry federal Education Minister.

Other words – including “she”, “man”, “wife” and “mother’’ – are also off limits at some universities.

University of Queensland students have complained about academics docking marks for using the word “mankind’’ in essays.

A politics student was penalised for using the grammatically correct pronoun of “she’’ to describe a car.

“People are losing marks for using everyday speech because it’s not gender-neutral,’’ the student, who asked to remain anonymous, told The Courier Mail yesterday.

“I lost marks because I used ‘mankind’’ in my assignment, and I referred to a car I owned as ‘she is my pride and joy’.’’

A science student also lost marks for using “mankind’’ in an essay about the philosophy of scientific method.

Sirhan Sirhan, Forgotten Terrorist By Warren Kozak

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/sirhan-sirhan-forgotten-terrorist-assassination-of-robert-kennedy/He assassinated Robert F. Kennedy 50 years ago this week. Young Americans might not even know his name.

What was the first act of Arab terrorism committed inside the United States?

If you were thinking of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, which killed six people and wounded 1,000, you’d be off by almost a quarter-century. It actually occurred 50 years ago this week, when Sirhan Bishara Sirhan assassinated Senator Robert F. Kennedy — an act that subverted the American electoral process and altered the history of the United States.

Kennedy had just won the California presidential primary on the night of June 5, 1968, when he thanked a huge crowd of enthusiastic supporters at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles and made his way out through the kitchen. Waiting for him there was Sirhan, 24 years old, holding a .22 caliber revolver. Sirhan, a Palestinian Arab, shot the presidential candidate three times — twice in the back and once behind his ear. It was the last shot that proved fatal. Kennedy died 26 hours later at the young age of 42. Five other people in the crowd were wounded but survived.

Because the assassination came just over four years after his brother President John F. Kennedy was murdered in Dallas, and just two months after Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down in Memphis, the nation focused on gun violence and hatred of the Kennedy family in its aftermath. Many blamed right-wing racists, since the Kennedys had supported the civil-rights movement. I was in school back then, and I remember the most common phrase: “They killed another Kennedy.” The “they” was generic. It wasn’t an individual; it referred to a supposed violent streak that ran through American culture and mythology all the way back to our frontier days.

The Barbary Pirates: Islamic Terrorism and America’s First Military Victory By Raymond Ibrahim

https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/the-barbary-pirates-islamic-terrorism-and-americas-first-military-victory/

Many Americans erroneously trace the roots of Islamic terrorism against their nation to September 11, 2001. In reality, the United States’ very first conflict with Muslim terrorists was also its very first war as a nation — and it won that war 213 years ago, on June 10, 1805.

Centuries before that, the Barbary States of Muslim North Africa — specifically Tripoli, Algiers, Tunis — had been thriving on the slave trade of Europeans abducted from virtually every corner of coastal Europe, including Britain, Ireland, Denmark, and Iceland. These raids were so successful, “between 1530 and 1780 there were almost certainly a million and quite possibly as many as a million and a quarter white, European Christians enslaved by the Muslims of the Barbary Coast,” to quote American historian Robert Davis.

The treatment of these European slaves was exacerbated by the fact that they were “infidels” and their owners Muslims. As Robert Playfair (b. 1828), who served for years as a consul in Barbary, explained: “In almost every case they [European slaves] were hated on account of their religion.” Three centuries earlier, John Foxe (b. 1516) had written this in his Book of Martyrs: “In no part of the globe are Christians so hated, or treated with such severity, as at Algiers.”

From Rats to Rainwater, a Tour of New York Public Housing What began as a utopian New Deal dream is now a nightmare. Government should leave this business. By Howard Husock

https://www.wsj.com/articles/from-rats-to-rainwater-a-tour-of-new-york-public-housing-1528497745

Last week the story broke that the New York City Housing Authority, by far the nation’s largest system of public housing, will be forced to operate under a federal monitor. The city also will be required to spend $1 billion on repairs and renovations.

Crisis has come to NYCHA-land, as New York magazine once called the city’s public housing system to underscore the sheer isolation of many of its large projects. This past winter, more than three-quarters of the housing authority’s 400,000 tenants, in 176,000 apartments, went without heat and hot water. Mandatory lead-paint inspections were not performed, and then falsely claimed to have been done. The chairwoman of NYCHA’s board resigned under fire. Gov. Andrew Cuomo declared an official state of emergency and went to visit the projects for himself.

Readers may not be surprised, given the terrible reputation of public housing. But for years, a few utopian believers have insisted that New York is different. Take “Public Housing That Worked,” a 2009 book by Nicholas Dagen Bloom, a professor at the New York Institute of Technology. “The New York story provides a fresh perspective on familiar stories of housing failure,” Mr. Bloom writes, “by showing that, rare as it may be, a housing authority dedicated to everyday management can maintain housing even under trying conditions.” He describes NYCHA as having “comparatively tidy grounds” and “well-maintained high-rise buildings.”

That would be news to tenants such as Yajaira Cariani, a 36-year-old single mother of three who lives with her own mother in the Bushwick Houses in Brooklyn. She points to stained and leaking plaster and says there are days she must put out buckets in her living room to catch water pouring in from the roof. A woman on staff at a Baptist church in East New York monitors the Linden Houses, where, she says, “they just don’t pick up the garbage,” and thus rats abound. She tells of nonworking stoves and peeling paint—certified as lead-free, but who knows for sure?

Sharia Law for non-Muslims: Edward Cline

https://edwardcline.blogspot.com/2018/06/sharia-law-for-non-muslims.html

Bill Warner, a dissident author and advocate of the freedom of speech and an authority on the history of Islam, has provided us with a short, handy book (48 pages) on the chore of understanding Shania law as it applies to Kafirs, or non-Muslims. Sharia law for Non-Muslims is a must read for anyone confused by the jigsaw puzzle of Islamic priorities.

Warner cautions readers in the beginning that the book will treat Islam as primarily a political ideology, rather than as a religion. Islam, after all, is largely a political doctrine of supremacy over all other political doctrines, and is especially hostile to the doctrine of freedom in the U.S. One may see the imposition of Sharia as a political policy in Britain, Germany, and Sweden. Other European nations are steadily inching towards becoming Sharia dominated countries under the guise of “diversity.”

In the teaching program of The Center for the Study of Political Islam , Warner stresses that Sharia is intended to govern not only Muslims but non-Muslims, as well. That intention cannot help but be political.

The Climate-Change Tort Racket Liberal cities join the contingency-fee bar to shake down oil firms.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-climate-change-tort-racket-1528499384

Liberals want to use racketeering laws to prosecute so-called climate-change skeptics. But the real conspiracy may be between plaintiff lawyers and Democratic politicians who have ganged up to shake down oil companies.

San Francisco, Oakland, New York and Seattle have sued five global oil giants—BP, Chevron , ConocoPhillips , ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell —for billions in future damages from climate change. Brass-knuckled plaintiff firm Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro has been shopping around the lawsuit to other cities desperate for cash.

No court has recognized common-law claims for injuries supposedly caused by climate change, and the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in AEP v. Connecticut (2011) that the Clean Air Act pre-empts public nuisance torts against corporations for greenhouse-gas emissions. So the cities are now arguing that the mere production and promotion of fossil fuels create a public nuisance, and the suits are heading to court.

San Francisco and Oakland were counting on a home courtroom advantage with their choice of legal venue give that climate change is something of a religion in California. But Clinton-appointed federal Judge William Alsup is calling fouls as he sees them.

Marc A. Thiessen: Obama took lying to new heights with the Iran deal Marc A. Thiessen

https://www.annistonstar.com/opinion/columns/marc-a-thiessen-obama-took-lying-to-new-heights-with/article_3162e8c6-6b1c-11e8-bb09-83e6f2650005.html

When it comes to the Iran nuclear deal, the Obama administration increasingly appears to have been a bottomless pit of deception.

First, President Barack Obama failed to disclose to Congress the existence of secret side deals on inspections when he transmitted the nuclear accord to Capitol Hill. (They were only uncovered by chance when then-Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-Kan., and Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., learned about them during a meeting with International Atomic Energy Agency officials in Vienna.) Then, we learned that the Obama administration had secretly sent a plane to Tehran loaded with $400 million in Swiss francs, euros and other currencies on the same day Iran released four American hostages, which was followed by two more secret flights carrying another $1.3 billion in cash.

Now, in a bombshell revelation, Republicans on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, led by Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, have revealed in a new report that the Obama administration secretly tried to help Iran use U.S. banks to convert $5.7 billion in Iranian assets, after promising Congress that Iran would not get access to the U.S. financial system — and then lied to Congress about what it had done. (Full disclosure: My wife works for Portman).

The USA-North Korea-Iran strategic interconnection Ambassador (Ret.) Yoram Ettinger

The geo-strategic ripple effects of the 2018 US nuclear negotiation with North Korea and the 1994 US nuclear agreement with Pyongyang have been closely scrutinized by Iran’s Ayatollahs. Similarly, North Korea has studied the geo-strategic consequences of the 2015 US-led nuclear accord with the Ayatollahs (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action).

The track record of the nuclear negotiations with the Ayatollahs and North Korea verifies a clear and direct interconnection between the two processes. Moreover, the nuclear agreements with both the Ayatollahs and North Korea were largely shaped by the State Department establishment, in general, and Wendy Sherman, the former Chief Negotiator and Acting Deputy Secretary of State, in particular.

Furthermore, the overall conduct of both rogue regimes – as far as abandoning or advancing nuclearization, ending or expanding terrorism, subversion and ballistic capabilities – has been immensely impacted by the US negotiation posture. Thus, the less assertive and more eager is the US, and the more reluctant it is to use the military option, the less deterred and the more radicalized are Iran and North Korea.

They consider concessions made by the US and other Western democracies to be a sign of weakness, especially when the concessions are tangible and immediate – in return for future reciprocity – ignoring the tenuous, violent, unreliable and lawless track record of the two rogue regimes.