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September 2018

Hungary Defiant in the Face of EU Censure by Soeren Kern

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12998/hungary-eu-censure

“We need a new European Commission that is committed to the defense of Europe’s borders.” — Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
“A few months ago … there was an election in Hungary. The Hungarian people decided what should happen, and during the election campaign we discussed all of the issues — including CEU, the NGOs, and all of the important political issues. And the people decided on these issues. And now the European Parliament is taking upon itself the task of overruling the decision made by the people of Hungary and forcing the Hungarian government to implement what they are attempting to impose on us in place of the people’s decision.” — Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
“Hungary and the Hungarian people have been convicted because we have proven that migration is not needed and that it can be stopped.” — Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjártó.
“Hungary’s decisions are made by the voters in parliamentary elections. What you are claiming is no less than saying that the Hungarian people are not sufficiently capable of being trusted to judge what is in their own interests. You think that you know the needs of the Hungarian people better than the Hungarian people themselves…. This report applies double standards, it is an abuse of power, it oversteps the limits on spheres of competence, and the method of its adoption is a treaty violation.” — Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

The European Parliament has voted to pursue unprecedented disciplinary action against Hungary over alleged breaches of the European Union’s “fundamental values.” The EU has accused the Hungarian government of attacks against the media, minorities and the rule of law.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has denied the charges, and said they are a retaliation for his government’s refusal to take in migrants from the Muslim world.

The censure represents another salvo in a showdown between pro- and anti-EU forces over populism and nationalism ahead of European Parliament elections in May 2019.

Germany: Stifling Dissent to Mass Migration by Vijeta Uniyal

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12997/germany-migration-dissent

Hans-Georg Maassen, the head of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, BfV, has dismissed claims that right-wing gangs chased non-Germans during the late August demonstrations in Chemnitz after the fatal stabbing of a German by a group of migrants. That news flew in the face of Chancellor Merkel’s repeated use of the charge of a “hunt on foreigners” in describing the incidents.
According to the domestic affairs spokesperson for Merkel’s Christian Democratic party, Maassen “would answer parliamentarians’ questions about his comments at special meetings next week. In these “hearings,” politicians are expected to bring more pressure to bear on the intelligence chief, in an apparent attempt to make him recant his statements.
Maassen is not the only one in the crosshairs of the mainstream politicians. Rattled by the recent wave of protests against country’s open-door immigration policy, establishment parties across the political spectrum are calling for the populist anti-immigration Alternative for Germany party (AfD) to be placed under police surveillance.
In early September, authorities in the states of Lower Saxony and Bremen placed their regional chapters of Young Alternative, the AfD’s youth wing, under surveillance citing “suspected ties to extremists.”

In Communist East Germany, truth-telling involved risks. The penalty for it was often loss of one’s professional career and social status, if not more. Today, challenging the state-approved narrative in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Germany can sometimes have similar consequences.

Only Trump Could End Palestine A bad time for bad ideas. Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271267/only-trump-could-end-palestine-daniel-greenfield

The Soviet Union had a perverse genius for convincing the United States to not only adopt its most destructive ideas, but to also become their chief sponsor under the delusion that it would somehow stop the destruction that its old Communist enemy had unleashed around the world.

It’s fitting that President Trump struck at two terrible red birds with one stone by dumping the UNRWA. Both the UN and Palestinian nationalism were the brainchildren of Soviet Communists that the leftist American foreign policy establishment adopted under the supposed guise of fighting Soviet influence, and was then in turn quickly picked up by a clueless Republican foreign policy establishment.

Republicans embraced Arab nationalism since President Eisenhower sided with Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Hitler admiring military dictator and his nationalization of the Suez Canal, over the UK, France and Israel. In what he would later describe as his greatest mistake, Eisenhower threatened his former British allies with economic warfare to keep Egypt’s Arab Socialist regime from going over to the Communist side.

It didn’t work.

But every Republican administration until now had embraced Arab nationalism and its ugly malformed terrorist stepchild, Palestinian nationalism.

Even the Reagan administration.

All the Soviet Union needed to do was adopt a bunch of Islamic terrorists and the United States would show up like a jealous rival to shower them with love, flowers and chocolates. After the Soviet Union collapsed, its old Arab Socialist client states, the Islamic oil kingdoms that first corrupted our foreign policy, and domestic Muslim Brotherhood lobbies continued successfully playing this game of Br’er Rabbit and the Briar Patch with the American Br’er Fox. With no more Soviet Union to compete against, the rationale for supporting terrorists was to convince them to turn moderate or to stop them from allying with more “extreme” terrorists. The only way to stop the terrorists was to adopt them.

A Suggestion for Nikki Haley Time for a U.N. speech exposing Islamist propaganda. Hugh Fitzgerald

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271301/suggestion-nikki-haley-hugh-fitzgerald

It was recently revealed that the photograph posted online by an Arab propagandist, Abdullah Alsaafin, of a two-year-old girl identified as Bayan Abu Khamash, supposedly killed by Israeli bombs, had in fact been taken from Instagram, where the girl was identified as an American two-year-old, Elle Lively McBroom.

“War is deceit,” said Muhammad, and the uncovering of deceit is a legitimate defense in such a war. Now that we know the source of that photo, there are several things that might be done. Instagram or Twitter or wherever Abdullah Alsaafin has an account might be publicly appealed to, to remove his account in light of the fact that he has been caught malevolently misusing, for the purposes of propaganda, a photograph on Instagram. Instagram cannot police every misuse of its contents, but when such a blatant and dangerous example is brought to its attention, it has a responsibility to act. It should not only remove Alsaafin’s account (if he has an Instagram account; otherwise the places where he posted the false photo should remove his account), but explain that it is doing so because of his malevolent theft, with malice aforethought, of a two-year-old’s photograph.

This is one of many examples where the Arabs have used fauxtography. Recently, I was informed, Arab propagandists had posted pictures in the aftermath of the earthquake in Mexico, identifying them as scenes in Gaza. Photographs of destruction in Syria have been similarly applied. During the 2006 war in Lebanon, Hezbollah — and willing Western journalists — engaged in fauxtography of every kind. Burning tires in the smoky distance were presented as burned out buildings, an untouched Qur’an was carefully placed in the middle of rubble, and then deliberately set on fire, long after the building it was said to have been in had been reduced to rubble.

Obama’s slimy little Deep State environmental cabal is at it again By Monica Showalter

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/09/obamas_slimy_little_deep_state_environmental_cabal_is_at_it_again.html

Under President Obama, the Environmental Protection Agency grew to gargantuan proportions, issuing 4,000 regulations, adding more than 33,000 pages to the Federal Register, and dumping $50 billion in compliance costs on business, making itself one of the biggest and most powerful agencies in the U.S. government – quite a feat for an organization without a Cabinet seat.

With all that power, it was also famous for its incompetence and corruption, in that it had a problem obeying rules other people obeyed and always got away with it. Gold King Mine on the very yellow Animas River, anyone? That also applies to the behavior of its Obamaton leaders, who communicated with secret email accounts (remember Richard Windsor?) and got rewarded with fabulous Silicon Valley social media jobs in the revolving-door aftermath. They were amply augmented in their activities by the Obama State Department and the Obama National Security Council, which conducted business pretty much the same way.

Now it turns out this same corrupt bunch is at it again, in a new Competitive Enterprise Institute report called “Government for Rent,” put on by the respected Christopher C. Horner.

According to the Washington Examiner’s Paul Bedard:

A shadow government made up of former Obama climate change aides and funded by wealthy environmental advocates is supplementing liberal governors in an “off-the-books” operation to help them win approval of sweeping global warming changes and defy President Trump, according to a new investigative report.

In it’s [sic] “Government for Rent” report, the Competitive Enterprise Institute published dozens of emails detailing the scheme and the efforts by governments to have the activists draw up official state climate change agenda paid for by private donations.

U.S. Doctors Are Performing Double Mastectomies On Healthy 13-Year-Old Girls Thirty-three of these girls were under 18 at the time of surgeries a taxpayer-funded researcher is studying to validate transgenderism. Two were only 13 years old, and five were only 14.By Jane Robbins !!!!!

http://thefederalist.com/2018/09/12/u-s-doctors-performing-double-mastectomies-healthy-13-year-old-girls/

Some physicians in the United States are performing double mastectomies on healthy 13-year-old girls. The justification is gender dysphoria (“transgenderism”)—the girls now identify as boys and therefore want to look like boys.

Sometimes this dysphoria doesn’t appear until adolescence, and often little or no psychological evaluation is done to determine the underlying cause of the teenager’s desire to mutilate her body. But these doctors are willing to give her what she thinks she wants. And your federal tax money is paying for research to validate this gruesome treatment (see here and here).

Reasonable people would be mystified, if not repelled, by the statements and actions of a leading researcher into transgender treatment. In a study funded by a $5.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), researchers including Dr. Johanna Olson of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles are supposedly evaluating use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones on dysphoric children.

As I’ve written with a coauthor, however, the study is fundamentally skewed toward the conclusions transgender activists desire: it contains no control group of subjects who will be spared these drugs, and will expire after five years, long before many negative effects may surface.

These design flaws aren’t surprising. Olson dismisses the possibility that gender dysphoria could be caused by psychological disturbance, claiming the only “mental health issue” related to gender dysphoria “comes from the way that the outside world responds” to the confused youth. She states, as though from a medical basis, that gender-dysphoric youth will go through the “wrong puberty” unless she and her cohorts can medicate them early enough in their lives to “put them through the right puberty.”

Europe Features World Macron vs Salvini: the ideological battle for Europe’s future Personal antipathy between the two men is turning into a contest for European hearts and minds Christopher Caldwell

https://spectator.us/2018/09/macron-salvini-battle-europes-future/

The first sign that Matteo Salvini was destined to do battle with Emmanuel Macron came in June, a few days after he was named Italy’s interior minister. Salvini, whose party, the League, wants to cut immigration drastically, announced that a German-registered rescue ship carrying 629 aspiring migrants from Africa would not be allowed to dock in Sicily.

Macron reacted with disgust. ‘The policy of the Italian government,’ a spokesman for his political movement announced, ‘is nauseating.’ Salvini responded that if the French wanted to show their open–heartedness, they might make good on their unfulfilled pledge to feed and shelter some of the 100,000 African migrants Italy had until recently been receiving each year.

This week, what had seemed like a personal antipathy between the two men revealed itself as an all-out battle for European hearts and minds. When Libyan rebels attacked government positions in Tripoli, threatening the agreements Italy has made with the Libyan coast guard to limit departures of migrants from the shores of North Africa, Salvini mused aloud to reporters. ‘There’s someone behind this,’ he said. ‘Someone who started a war [in 2011] that should never have been started, someone who calls for elections without sounding out his allies and the people on the ground, someone who tries to force the issue by exporting democracy, which never works.’ He urged journalists eager to know what he meant by that to ‘ask Paris’.

Days earlier, Salvini had invited the Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán to Milan to issue a manifesto. It was Orbán who exhorted Europe to harden its borders during the great overland migration from war-torn Syria and points east in 2015. Standing under the awning of a pizzeria in Milan, Orbán singled out Salvini as ‘my hero and my comrade in destiny’. And he singled out Macron as his nemesis. ‘There are two camps in Europe,’ Orbán said, ‘and one is headed by Macron. He is at the head of the political forces supporting immigration. On the other hand, we want to stop illegal immigration.’

Memo to the Washington Post: In Europe, Criticism of Multiculturalism Is Mainstream By Douglas Murray

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/washington-post-europe-multiculturalism-criticism/

Thank you, Rich for alerting me to the latest activities at the Washington Post. If it hadn’t had been for NR’s editor, I wouldn’t have noticed that the Washington Post tried to take me out as collateral in the truck they’re trying to drive at Ron DeSantis. I wouldn’t have noticed, not only because like most people I don’t read the Washington Post, but because the paper didn’t even have the guts to name me as they tried to run me over on their way towards the GOP’s candidate for Florida governor.

One of DeSantis’s crimes is apparently that he once spoke at a conference in Florida which also featured: “a critic of multiculturalism who has written that ‘Europe is committing suicide’ by welcoming large numbers of refugees and immigrants.”

The link in the article makes clear that they are talking about me. And what amazing detective work on the part of the Post. How did they discover my views? When I published my book The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam, I hoped that it would slip by unnoticed. I had planned that nobody would read it or discover what I thought of the migration crisis of 2015. To my chagrin, the work became an instant bestseller in the U.K. and across Europe and was sold by the tonne in the U.S. as well. It has been praised by politicians across the political spectrum, and by the end of this year will have been translated into more than 20 different languages.

So I’m glad the Post’s sleuths are on to my secretive and clandestine work. Although it’s clear from their descriptor that the paper’s correspondents haven’t read the book themselves. Just another demonstration of a problem that papers like the Washington Post now have — which is that their readers too often appear to know more than their writers.

In any case — it might be worth making a response to the Post’s idea of investigative journalism. There are many odd presumptions in Beth Reinhard and Emma Brown’s article. One is that the authors think that speaking at a conference that has also hosted James Damore or Ben Shapiro is somehow embarrassing or way-out-there. Another is that the school of journalism known as “I’ve danced with a man who’s danced with a girl who’s danced with the Prince of Wales” is a devastating journalistic tactic, rather than one signifier of an ultra-partisan hit-job in which the facts have been found to fit the politics of the authors.

Wall Street Journal Runs Editorial from Erdogan—World’s Biggest Jailer of Journalists By Patrick Poole

https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/wall-street-journal-runs-editorial-from-worlds-biggest-jailer-of-journalists/

One-third of all journalists jailed worldwide sit in the prisons of Turkey’s Islamist autocrat, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

So it’s startling that the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) has opened up its opinion page to him today.

Remarkably, this comes after Turkey imprisoned WSJ reporter Dion Nissenbaum for two and a half days in December 2016, refusing to allow him to contact his colleagues or his family and later deporting him.

Then in October 2017, the Turkish regime convicted WSJ reporter Ayla Albayrak in absentia on charges of publishing “terrorist propaganda.”

And just today the Erdogan regime arrested another Western journalist:
Austrian journalist arrested in Turkey
Max Zirngast, an Austrian journalist, was detained by “anti-terror” authorities in Ankara according to one of the magazines he worked for. The report said he’d likely been detained for “political publications.”

Today’s Erdogan op-ed follows another New York Times op-ed by the Turkish dictator just a month ago — published on the same day the NYT editorial board questioned whether Turkey was still an American ally.

The bizarre love affair of the American corporate media continues as 169 journalists sit in Turkish prisons. CONTINUE AT SITE

How Anti-Trump Leakers Moved From Offense to Defense By Lee Smith

https://pjmedia.com/trending/how-anti-trump-leakers-moved-from-offense-to-defense/

A trail of evidence appearing in major news outlets suggests a campaign to undermine President Trump from within the government through illegal leaks of classified information, and then thwart congressional investigators probing the disclosures.

On Monday the Justice Department released a handful of texts and other documents that included two former officials known for their anti-Trump bias – Peter Strzok and Lisa Page of the FBI – discussing the DOJ’s “media leak strategy.” Strzok now says, through his lawyer, that that strategy was aimed at preventing leaks. Nevertheless, days later he and Page approvingly mention forthcoming news articles critical of Trump associates.

“The leaks that have been coming out of the FBI and DOJ since 2016 are unconscionable,” said retired FBI supervisory special agent James Gagliano. “There’s a difference between whistleblowing and leaking for self-serving or partisan purposes.”

Past and present U.S. officials say the template for the leak campaign can be traced back to the Obama administration’s efforts to sell the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, which made the press reliant on background conversations and favorable leaks from government officials. Obama adviser Ben Rhodes told the New York Times in 2016 that “we created an echo chamber” that “helped retail the administration’s narrative.”

“That same configuration,” said Michael Doran, a senior official in the George W. Bush White House, “the press, political operatives, newly minted experts, social media validators—was repurposed to target Trump, his campaign, transition team, then presidency.” The echo chamber’s primary instrument in attacking the current White House, said Doran, “is the Russia collusion narrative.”

RCI has found that the anti-Trump leaks fall into two broad categories, or phases. Initially the leaking was an offensive operation aimed at disrupting Trump’s agenda, especially through leaks alleging connections between his campaign and the Russians. Its early successes included leaks of highly classified material that led to the firing of National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and the recusal of Attorney General Jeff Sessions from overseeing that probe.

The second phase – which began roughly a year into the Trump administration – has been more defensive, pushing back against congressional oversight committees that had uncovered irregularities in the FBI’s investigation of Trump. This phase has been marked by the willingness of press outlets to run stories backing off earlier reported leaks that proved to be deeply misleading – including the roots of the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign and the relationship between Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr and the opposition research firm that produced a central document of that probe, the largely discredited “Steele dossier.”

This second phase has also included articles and opinion pieces – some written by journalists who have published classified information – dismissing suspicions of an orchestrated campaign against Trump as, to use the phrase invoked in a recent New Yorker article, a “conspiracy theory.” CONTINUE AT SITE