Displaying posts published in

June 2018

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

My Attendance at a “Rally for Palestine” Something was missing. Hugh Fitzgerald

By on June 27th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270563/my-attendance-rally-palestine-hugh-fitzgerald

I recently attended a Rally for Palestine in the main square of a medium-sized French city close to Marseille. There were flags aflutter of the State of Palestine, two booths full of anti-Zionist propaganda, French middle-aged leftists, committed to the cause, concolorous in their political views with their American cousins of circa 1970, all granola and granny glasses. There were pamphlets of testimonies by “Palestinians” describing the unbelievable behavior of the Zionists, when they started the 1948 war, and then the 1956 Sinai war, and then the 1967 war, and the 1973 war, and several wars made on the peaceful citizens of Gaza — all entirely unprovoked attacks by the monstrous Israelis. There were flags of Palestine for sale. There were photographs of Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas. There was something — I couldn’t make out the title — by Noam Chomsky. But what attracted my attention the most were the four outline maps of “Palestine” that were spread out on the ground, depicting an ever-expanding seizure of Arab land by the Zionist “settlers.”

The first map of “Palestine” showed it in 1946 as almost entirely Arab, with a handful of diminutive Jewish islands in an Arab sea.

The other three maps told a tale of inexorable Zionist expansion. The second map showed Palestine according to the U.N. Partition Plan of 1947. Palestine is still overwhelmingly Arab, but with a little more land area — still discontinuous bits — than in the 1946 map, assigned to the Jews. Then a map showing Israel just before, and then just after, the Six-Day War. No discussion of what caused the Six-Day War. No display of the Sinai as part of the territory Israel won in that war, or mention of how it was given back to Egypt by the Israelis.

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BOOKS, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Honor Killing and Islam A new book documents the spread of a vicious practice into the West. Ibn Warraq

By on June 27th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270515/honor-killing-and-islam-ibn-warraq

Phyllis Chesler pioneered the study of violence against women in the late 1960s, concentrating on women living in North America and Europe. By 2003, she was writing about honor killings, based on newspaper accounts, Internet sources, interviews, and memoirs. She then embarked on a series of equally pioneering, meticulously researched, academic studies of honor killings in the West, but also in the Middle East and South Asia. These studies and over 90 articles on the same subject are collected for the first time in A Family Conspiracy: Honor Killing.

Chesler carefully distinguishes honor killings from “plain and psychopathic homicides, serial killings, crimes of passion, revenge killings, and domestic violence.” An honor killing is the murder of girls and women by their families because of supposedly disgraceful acts perceived to have brought public shame. Honor killings are a family collaboration and even considered by their perpetrators to be legally justifiable acts of self-defense, because the murdered girls’ dishonor is regarded as an aggressive act against their families. It demands a response.

In her second of four in-depth studies first published in The Middle East Quarterly, Chesler looked at 172 incidents and 230 honor-killing victims. She gathered most of her information from English-language media around the world. “There were 100 victims murdered for honor in the West, including 33 in North America and 67 in Europe,” Chesler found. “There were 130 additional victims in the Muslim world. Most of the perpetrators were Muslims, as were their victims, and most of the victims were women.” Indeed, while Sikhs and Hindus do commit such murders, the honor killings in her study, both those in the West and in the rest of the world, are mainly Muslim-on-Muslim crimes.

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The Iranian Spy Who Helped Create Two Terror States Inside Israel The price of peace is treason. Daniel Greenfield

By on June 27th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270545/iranian-spy-who-helped-create-two-terror-states-daniel-greenfield

When the Oslo deal that would create two Islamic terror states inside Israel came up for a vote in the Knesset, the legislator whose vote helped it pass is the same man now accused of spying for Iran.

The strange story of Gonen Segev, doctor, Minister of Energy, drug smuggler, Nigerian exile and now accused Iranian spy, is also that of the dirty politics behind the peace process. It wasn’t idealism that made the deal with the PLO. It was dirty backroom deals with dangerously unprincipled politicians.

Segev’s cousin had testified in court that he was “a pathological liar who makes excuses and evades responsibilities for his actions.” But the same is true of the Israeli left which brought Segev on board.

The alleged Iranian spy began his political career on the right. But 3 years after he became one of the youngest members of Israel’s legislature, he aligned with the left and helped pass an agreement with the PLO that is the second biggest threat to Israel’s existence after Iran’s nuclear weapons.

It’s only fitting that Gonen Segev, whose political life hit its terrible peak with the PLO deal, should climax his post-political criminal career by standing accused of spying for Israel’s worst enemy.

And the former politician and defrocked doctor has the same excuse for the latter crime as for the former one. He wanted to be a hero. But Gonen Segev doesn’t have a history of being a hero.

What he does have is a history of being willing to do anything for money.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

An update on surface-based temperature data By Dale Leuck

By on June 27th, 2018

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

It is helpful to update and evaluate temperature data occasionally. Accordingly, I have done so in the chart below, using data maintained by the Goddard Institute of Space Studies (part of NASA). The data is actually collected by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). It extends from 1880 and is typically cited as providing the most reliable surface temperature anomalies available, and is available here, While it has serious flaws, it is the best available, and has been cited by NASA and quoted in the Washington Post as demonstrating 2016 to be the warmest year on record, with each of the first six months setting new records (see red below). But, notice the heating had begun in late 2015, a period that also coincided with one of the strongest El Ninos on record, and arguably explains the spike in temperatures in early 2016. By 2017, temperature anomalies had dropped significantly, with the first five months being about average over the last six years. In total, temperature anomalies where below year-previous levels for a total of 20 consecutive months, from October 2016 through May of 2018.

Those who failed to emphasize the importance of El Nino in heat spikes were guilty of serious malfeasance. But, that has been the story of climate “science” at least since Michael Mann and others spliced several sets of data together, much of it “proxy” data tree rings, ice samples, etc. in order to get a long time series that would show a “hockey stick” effect in recent years. Climategate demonstrated the full depth of corruption, with emails revealing collusion among many involved.

A 123-page paper by Christopher Booker, published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), explains how a few strong personalities formulated and perpetuated what amounts to a hoax. The first of these was a Swedish meteorologist, Professor Bert Bolin (1925-2007). Bolin presented his views in 1979 at a first-ever meeting of the “World Climate Conference,” sponsored by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), a 191-member country agency of the UN headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland. Six years later, Bolin presented a longer paper for a 1985 conference in Villach, Austria, in which he concluded that “human-induced climate change” called for urgent action at the “highest level.”

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BOOKS, P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

Librarians without Chests: A Response to the ALSC’s Denigration of Laura Ingalls Wilder By Dedra McDonald Birzer

By on June 27th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/laura-ingalls-wilder-alsc-award-removal/

In favor of safe spaces and trigger-free zones, a network of professional librarians seeks to destroy a beloved literary heroine and malign her creator.

The Association for Library Services to Children (ALSC) decided on June 23 to strip Laura Ingalls Wilder’s name from an award established in 1954 to honor “the lasting contribution which [her] books have made to literature for children.” The telegram Wilder received on her 87th birthday informing her of the award continued, “In future years the award will be made in your name and be called the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award.” Overturning 65 years of honoring the most significant legacies in children’s literature with an award named for Wilder, the current ALSC noted “anti-Native and anti-Black sentiments in her work” when it called for a review of the award in February 2018. The decision this week followed that review process. “This decision was made in consideration of the fact that Wilder’s legacy, as represented by her body of work, includes expressions of stereotypical attitudes inconsistent with ALSC’s core values of inclusiveness, integrity and respect, and responsiveness,” according to the statement on the organization’s website.

The ALSC’s renaming of the Wilder medal to the Children’s Literature Legacy Award erases the fundamental role Wilder played in creating the genre of juvenile fiction. Wilder’s work and its lasting impact on every generation of children since the publication of Little House in the Big Woods (1932) served as the impetus for the establishment of the award. It would be more honest for the ALSC to just scrap the award altogether and start afresh. The stated “core values” are vague enough to allow the group to take this award in any direction the wind happens to be blowing. What is “responsiveness” in children’s literature, anyway? Responsiveness to what? And just who is included when “inclusivity” is touted as a core value? Whatever happened to children’s literature that told good stories that sparked children’s curiosity about history? Wilder’s books have certainly done this and more, inspiring a multitude of related works, both fiction and non-fiction.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

A Welcome Blow for Free Speech By The Editors

By on June 27th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/supreme-court-nifla-becerra-ruling-free-speech/

The Supreme Court has issued its decision in NIFLA v. Becerra, a 5–4 vote holding that the state of California cannot compel pregnancy-resource centers to advertise for the state’s abortion services. We applaud this decision, which represents a considerable victory for both the right to free speech and the conscience rights of pro-life Americans.

The case concerned California’s Reproductive FACT Act, which mandated that both licensed and unlicensed women’s-health clinics (crisis-pregnancy or pregnancy-resource centers) that don’t perform abortions must provide a pre-written notice to clients:

California has public programs that provide immediate free or low-cost access to comprehensive family planning services (including all FDA-approved methods of contraception), prenatal care, and abortion for eligible women. To determine whether you qualify, contact the county social services office at [insert the telephone number].

Though the law related specifically to abortion, free speech was the fundamental issue at stake. This being so, the vote should not have been a narrow one. Alas, four of the Court’s justices were so hell-bent on promoting the manufactured right to abortion that they were prepared to jettison a real, preeminent, foundational liberty.

Justice Clarence Thomas’s majority opinion cast the case more clearly, noting that there exists no such category in America as “professional speech” and concluding that to invent one would “give the States unfettered power to reduce a group’s First Amendment rights by simply imposing a licensing requirement.” In a short concurrence, Justice Kennedy dispensed with the idea that the First Amendment is outmoded. The viewpoint discrimination inherent in the FACT Act was “a matter of serious constitutional concern,” Kennedy concluded, and the law served as “a paradigmatic example of the serious threat presented when government seeks to impose its own message in the place of individual speech, thought, and expression.”

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Mexico — What Went Wrong? By Victor Davis Hanson

By on June 27th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/mexico-what-went-wrong-economy-based-on-exporting-poor-people/

Mexico gets a massive cash influx in remittances, American corporations get cheap labor, Democrats get voters . . .

Mexico in just a few days could elect one of its more anti-American figures in recent memory, Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

Obrador has often advanced the idea that a strangely aggrieved Mexico has the right to monitor the status of its citizens living illegally in the United States. Lately, he trumped that notion of entitlement by assuring fellow Mexicans that they have a “human right” to enter the United States as they please. For Obrador, this is an innate privilege that he promised “we will defend” — without offering any clarification on the meaning of “defend” other than to render meaningless the historic notion of borders and sovereignty.

Obrador went on to urge his fellow Mexicans to “leave their towns and find a life in the United States.” He has naturally developed such a mindset because he assumes as normal what has become, by any fair standard, a historically abnormal relationship.

Obrador is determined to perpetuate, if not enhance, the asymmetry. In the age of Trump, Obrador also reasons that the furor and hysteria of the American media toward the president represents a majority and a domestic grassroots pushback against the Trump administration — apparently because of Trump’s “restrictionist” view of enforcing existing immigration law. Polls, however, suggest otherwise, despite their notorious embedded anti-Trump bias.

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MEDIA Comments turned off

The First Amendment Is Not the ‘Be Nice to Journalists Act of 1791’ By Kyle Smith

By on June 27th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/first-amendment-donald-trump-journalist-attacks/

Describing Trump as uniquely antagonistic to the First Amendment among presidents is preposterous.

Members of the Fourth Estate, especially the TV reporters, have a curious view of the First Amendment. They seem to be under the impression that it says something like this:

Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; nor shall any president troll Jim Acosta or describe Katy Tur as “little”; nor shall any president draw undue attention to honest errors committed by the press in their noble pursuit of speaking truth to power; nor shall any president say the New York Times or Washington Post are failing when they totally aren’t; nor shall any president fail to ensure White House briefings are televised to maximize exposure of journalists who have put a lot of work into their hair and makeup; nor shall any mouthpiece of any such president bestow undue prominence in said briefings to reporters from Newsmax or the Daily Caller; nor shall any president be unduly mean to the press in general.

Last night a prominent TV journalist posted a take on the First Amendment of such breathtaking inanity that it amounted to pundit malpractice. It was as if the doctor who does your annual checkup failed to notice you have a knife sticking out of your abdomen. It was as if the mechanic you hired to rotate your tires forgot to put several of them back on your car. Report to accept chastisement, Kasie Hunt, Capitol Hill correspondent for NBC News: You said one of the dumbest things any Washington journalist has said in the Trump era, and that is saying something.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The VA Continues a Centuries-Long History of Scandal Fraud and waste plagued veteran pensions in 1820. Since then the problem has only expanded. By Rebecca Burgess

By on June 27th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-va-continues-a-centuries-long-history-of-scandal-1530052942

When Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin was ousted earlier this year, most of Washington wrote it off as another result of President Trump’s chaotic management style. Perhaps, but the change also reflects the state of pandemonium long associated with the VA. Caring for veterans has never been a straightforward task in the U.S.

Since its elevation to a cabinet-level department in 1989, the VA has shed secretaries faster than the Praetorian Guard knocked off Roman emperors. Seven of its nine confirmed secretaries have resigned out of frustration or over scandal. The secretary’s employment background hasn’t made a difference. Whether he came from the military, medicine, the corporate world or Congress, the result has largely been the same: Exit stage right, with little applause from veteran-service organizations or the broader public.

Scandals plagued veteran affairs before an official agency even existed. Fraud, overspending and waste nearly ended the relatively modest veterans pension program in 1820. The same trio of ills showed up in post-Civil War veterans programs. By 1921 Congress established the Veterans Bureau, which consolidated the majority of existing veterans programs. President Harding nominated Col. Charles Forbes to lead the bureau, and Congress tasked him with building hospitals. Forbes promptly squandered the bureau’s budget, was relieved of his duties, and served time at the U.S. Penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kan., for conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government.
A Department of Veterans Affairs health-care center in Ann Arbor, Mich. Photo: istock/getty images

In 1924 Brig. Gen. Frank T. Hines attempted reform, reorganizing the Veterans Bureau into six services—medical and rehabilitation, claims and insurance, finance, supply, planning, and control. By 1930, feeling political heat from the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars, President Hoover decided that more was necessary to “coordinate Government activities affecting war veterans.” He created the Veterans Administration as an independent federal body, replacing three bureaus then separately overseeing all veterans programs. Two years later tens of thousands of veterans protested at the Capitol in what became known as the Bonus March. CONTINUE AT SITE

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

JOAN SWIRSKY: HILLARY CLINTON THE HUMAN SPITOON

By on June 27th, 2018

https://www.thepostemail.com/

In Hillary’s cringe-producing appearances over the past year and a half––since she lost the U.S. presidency in 2016 to Donald J. Trump––she has offered upward of 38 excuses to rationalize her loss, which Amanda Prestigiacomo has documented here exquisitely.

Among those excuses were sexism, the mainstream media, the electoral system, the Democratic National Committee, the Democrat Party, suburban women, stupid Americans, technology, deplorables, and, laughably, that she was “too honest.”

You get the picture––a classic, clinical case of paranoia and delusional thinking.

Oops…did I say 38 excuses? Make that 39! At a Shared Value Leadership Summit in New York City this past April, Hillary told the audience that she lost because she was a capitalist!

Right…and Donald Trump won because he’s a Communist!

Oops…did I say 39 excuses? Here, lawyer and Fox News commentator Gregg Jarrett lists 56 of Hillary’s excuses…and counting!

Among that Mt. Kilimanjaro of Hillary’s excuses, Jarrett lists: racism, misogyny, James Comey, the FBI, Russians, Vladimir Putin, WikiLeaks, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Twitter, Netflix, Chief Justice John Roberts, and The Drudge Report.

You get the picture––a classic case of Hillary’s pathological inability to look in the mirror!

Actually, the genuinely pitiful and self-deluding Hillary is so blind to her own behavior and so clueless about even the concept of accountability that she has spent her entire adult life not seeing what is obvious to literally everyone in the world!

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