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September 2018

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Anti-Christian “Pogroms” in Nigeria Not that you’d know this from the Roman Catholic leadership. Jack Kerwick

By on September 4th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271216/anti-christian-pogroms-nigeria-jack-kerwick

Unquestionably, the abuse and corruption of children by sexually predatory Catholic priests and its concealment by church leaders long precedes the rise of Pope Francis. Nevertheless, as has been noted by Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, former Vatican ambassador to the United States, this rot reaches to the highest echelons of the Church leadership.

Thus, Vigano concludes, the Pope must resign.

This lifelong Roman Catholic agrees wholeheartedly.

The idea that the Pope was ignorant of what has occurred stretches credibility to the snapping point. But even if he was ignorant, his resignation would be a powerful symbolic expression of the Church’s resolve to repent of the evil that it has permitted for decades.

In all candor, though, there are still other reasons for why Francis should resign:

Simply put, by way of exploiting his office and influence toward the end of promoting, not traditional Church teaching, but a leftist political agenda that prominently features “climate change” and “[illegal] migrant’s rights,” Francis has injected confusion and division into the church.

The infusion of leftist ideology into the church became glaring this past weekend when the newly appointed Archbishop of Chicago, Cardinal Blasé Cupich, a defender of Pope Francis, remarked that Francis is not going to be distracted from his “bigger agenda” by going down the “rabbit hole” of the child sex scandal that’s rocked the church.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

The Democratic Socialists of America Have an Anti-Semitism Problem Can the DSA ‘Corbynize’ the Democrats into an anti-Semitic movement?

By on September 4th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271218/democratic-socialists-america-have-anti-semitism-daniel-greenfield

“Like most American Jews, I was raised with the delusion that Israel was a safe haven for me,” Julia Salazar wrote on Mondoweiss, an anti-Semitic hate site, while denouncing the Jewish State.

Salazar’s rant had appeared on a racist site whose creator had complained that his publication had been banned from DailyKos because of “my repeated insistence on talking about the large Jewish presence in the American establishment and the importance of Jewish money in the political process” and one of whose editors had declared, “I do not consider myself an anti-Semite, but I can understand why some are.”

In reality, Salazar had been baptized as a Catholic, her uncle was a Jesuit priest, and her brother made it clear that no one in the family was Jewish. The Jewish part of her past was as fake as the rest.

And it was this biography that the Democratic Socialists of America candidate was running on. The DSA had been hoping to turn Salazar into the next Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, with the support of radical lefties like Cortez, Cynthia Nixon and Zephyr Teachout by playing up her imaginary biography.

But Salazar, a socialist candidate running for the State Senate in New York, had lied about that, and nearly everything else. Caught on video, claiming, “I immigrated to this country when I was little,” she had actually been born in Miami to an Italian-American mother and a Columbian immigrant father. Despite growing up in a mansion, she claimed to have a working class background. Her mother and her brother between them tore up most of her fake biography of a hardscrabble, immigrant life.

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HOMELAND SECURITY, IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Massive MS-13 Bust in California Establishment media ignores the story – and California Democrats seek to avoid “labels” for violent criminal illegals. Lloyd Billingsley

By on September 4th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271230/massive-ms-13-bust-california-lloyd-billingsley

“Murder, violent assaults and drug trafficking among charges against alleged MS-13 members,” read the Fresno Bee headline last week. The story got little attention at the national level, despite the gravity and scope of the crimes. According to Fresno County Sheriff Margaret Mims, the investigation began with 14 homicides in the town of Mendota and in Fresno County between 2015 and 2017.

“The homicides are extremely violent in nature,” Mims said in the press conference. “Most as a result of hacking injuries” and knife attacks. Police confiscated seven guns, 57 knives, 10 machetes, and 270 rounds of ammunition. The investigation eventually covered at least 30 homicides in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Houston and New York City.

“The investigation uncovered a wide range of criminal activity, including murder, violent assaults and drug trafficking by MS-13 cells operating in and around Mendota and Los Angeles,” U.S. Attorney McGregor W. Scott told reporters.

“MS-13 members were using the remote area of our county as an extension of their larger operation in Los Angeles,” Fresno County District Attorney Lisa Smittcamp said, “and created a home base to continue to operate their unlawful activities while ingraining themselves in our community.” A full 25 members of the MS-13 gang, ages 18 to 31, face charges for murder, violent assaults and drug trafficking, but it wasn’t just a local or California issue.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Republican NeverTrump Tic Trump Derangement Syndrome branches out into new pathologies. Bruce Thornton

By on September 4th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271228/republican-nevertrump-tic-bruce-thornton

Having suffered from Trump Derangement Syndrome for two years, those disaffected Republican NeverTrumpers have developed a verbal tic. Whatever the topic, they can’t resist taking a few shots at Trump that are usually irrelevant to whatever point they are making. They are seemingly unaware that in doing so they function as Fifth Columnists for the progressives, at the same time they repeatedly demonstrate the entitled arrogance of the entrenched elite that Trump successfully ran against, and that they continue to deny exists.

Here’s an example from NRO’s Jonah Goldberg in a column contrasting John McCain and Donald Trump. And not surprisingly, considering Goldberg’s persistent animus against Trump, the comparison is invidious. You know what’s coming when Goldberg gratuitously contrasts McCain’s captivity in Hanoi with Trump’s five draft deferments. Of course, a splendid service record and medals for bravery are admirable, but not necessarily guarantees of political wisdom. They are achievements deserving of honor, but they don’t exempt a mediocre politician from criticism. Goldberg’s contrast is merely a species of ad hominem attack.

Goldberg uses this fallacy as a lead-in to another simplistic contrast: between “the forces of democracy and the forces of nationalism,” a struggle the nationalists, as he defines them, are winning. Again, this is an either-or fallacy rooted in choosing one dimension of some nationalisms, such as Russia’s, and then proclaiming via another begged question that Donald Trump embodies it. Goldberg finishes with an even more egregious begged question: “Trump defines national interest in almost autocratic terms,” hinting at the preposterous smear that Trump is some sort of inchoate Adolph Hitler.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

School Daze Are Here Again — Help! By Michael Walsh

By on September 4th, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/trending/school-daze-are-here-again-help/

Boo-hoo:

Florida State University is launching a mandatory program to teach incoming students about “resilience” and “coping skills,” but will allow students to opt out if they have “experienced significant trauma.”

The new Student Resilience Project (SRP) is designed to help “strengthen student emotional and academic coping skills,” according to the “Frequently Asked Questions” on the program website. The “evidence-informed universal public-health style prevention program,” the website explains, is “intended to destigmatize mental health issues and encourage help-seeking” among students dealing with trauma or stress.

What kids with “mental health issues” are doing in college in the first place is left unexplained. Unless you accept the Left’s notion that everybody is insane….

While it is unclear how the program in funded, the SRP will reportedly cost over $300,000, including a $50,000 budget for “advertising costs,” according to Inside Higher Education. The program was developed by the Institute for Family Violence Studies (IFVS) at the FSU College of Social Work and features “highly engaging animation, videos, and numerous TED-talk style educational audio sessions from faculty and mental health providers.”

“Florida State University recognizes that some incoming students have experienced significant family or community stress,” Karen Oehme, director of IFVS, stated in a university press release. “Unmanaged stress responses can interfere with student success in college and cause long-term negative consequences.”

One is tempted to say, “oh, grow up,” or “study Shakespeare instead” — but that would be mean –CONTINUE AT SITE

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MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

Operation Finale – A Review By Marilyn Penn

By on September 4th, 2018

http://politicalmavens.com/index.php/2018/09/03/operation-finale-a-review/

Yet another movie about the capture of Adolf Eichman, architect of the Nazis’ Final Solution of the Jewish Question. This one, directed by Chris Weitz, features two Hollywood stars – Ben Kingsley as Eichman and Oscar Isaac as Peter Malkin, the Mosad agent most responsible for his capture and, according to this movie, for the murderer’s final cooperation in Israel’s kidnap of an Argentine citizen. Living openly as Ricardo Klement, Eichman had a wife (the unrecognizable and little-used Greta Scacchi) and two children, one a handsome young man and one a toddler A young woman, briefly involved with the former, introduces him to her blind father who quickly figures out his father’s real identity and contacts Mosad with the information that Eichman is alive and well in Argentina.

A plan is hatched and Malkin is one of the leaders of the team designated to “catch and extract” him and bring him back to Israel alive for trial. There are the requisite number of false starts and obstacles and some questionable and unanswered events, primarily – the 10 day delay of the El Al plane supposed to transport the team back to Israel. We are never told why the plane was so seriously “delayed” – equivalent to the driver of the getaway car in a bank heist not showing up at the last minute. We also don’t understand why no one on this clever team is capable of forging Eichman’s signature on a release form necessary for him to be transported back to Israel. Instead of answers to these pivotal questions, we are given a far too lengthy interval of Oscar Isaac attempting to bond with Eichman in order to get the essential signature; scenes which include Eichman on the toilet (TMI), Isaac promising to let the mass murderer see his wife before he dies (disturbing) and a particularly jarring exchange between Isaac and his on-screen girlfriend who accuses him of making this “all about his pain” – an anachronistic concept that surely would not have entered the mind of an Israeli doctor working for Mosad in 1960, a brief 15 years after the holocaust decimated the Jews of Europe.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Senate’s Unremembered Ex-POW -Joseph Duggan

By on September 3rd, 2018

https://spectator.org/the-senates-unremembered-ex-pow/
Such a contrast to the excess of the last several days.

is path to distinguished service in the United States Senate led through the Naval Academy, aerial combat over hostile territory, and long years of confinement, beatings, and torture in the Hanoi Hilton.

He was a man worth remembering.

No, his name was not John McCain.

Six years before McCain’s election to the Senate, Alabama voters sent retired Rear Admiral Jeremiah Denton to Washington’s upper chamber.

Both the parallels and the divergences in Denton and McCain’s lives tell something about the last few decades of our political history.

Twelve years older than McCain, Denton was born in Mobile in 1924, the same year as George Herbert Walker Bush. After studies at the Jesuits’ Spring Hill College, Denton transferred to Annapolis where in 1946 he graduated in a class that included a young man from Americus, Georgia, named Jimmy Carter. Denton excelled academically, earning a master’s in international relations from George Washington University and winning the Naval War College’s award for best thesis. Diligent in his study of philosophy and history, he was respected as a strategic thinker.

Denton, at 41, was one of the oldest active American pilots in Vietnam when his A6A Intruder, leading a squadron of 27 other aircraft, was shot down over North Vietnam in 1965. (His friend and contemporary, George H.W. Bush, meanwhile was one of the youngest American pilots in the Second World War.)

McCain, the son and grandson of four-star admirals, was erratic as a student at Annapolis. He graduated number 894 out of 899 members of his class. When he was shot down in 1967 he was 31 years old.

Denton suffered imprisonment for nearly eight years, McCain for nearly six. Both men gained national and international attention for defiant courage during their ordeals. As son of the admiral commanding the U.S. Pacific fleet, McCain spurned Communist Vietnamese efforts to manipulate him for propaganda purposes. Denton, as one of the top-ranking officers, outwitted the enemy when they featured him in a televised propaganda news conference. Unbeknownst to his captors, he blinked his eyes with the Morse Code letters T-O-R-T-U-R-E as he answered questions.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

EDWARD CLINE: THE “SIN” OF WHITENESS

By on September 3rd, 2018

https://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/

Let’s start at the beginning about “whiteness” and “white privilege.” Wikipedia seems to be one of the rare venues that discusses the concept with any (relative) intelligibility. As can be seen in the Wikipedia text, the idea of “whiteness” is rooted in Marxist ideology (shall we call it theology?) or “critical race theory,” whiteness is becoming a substitute for “class.” Race theory was imported from Germany via the Frankfurt School and quickly infested our school system from K1 to academia.

White privilege (or white skin privilege) is the societal privilege that benefits people whom society identifies as white in some countries, beyond what is commonly experienced by non-white people under the same social, political, or economic circumstances. Academic perspectives such as critical race theory and whiteness studies use the concept to analyze how racism and racialized societies affect the lives of white or white-skinned people….

In sociology and political philosophy, the term critical theory describes the neo-Marxist philosophy of the Frankfurt School, which was developed in Germany in the 1930s. This use of the term requires proper noun capitalization, whereas “a critical theory” or “a critical social theory” may have similar elements of thought, but not stress its intellectual lineage specifically to the Frankfurt School. Frankfurt School theorists drew on the critical methods of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. Critical theory maintains that ideology is the principal obstacle to human liberation. Critical theory was established as a school of thought primarily by the Frankfurt School theoreticians Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, and Erich Fromm. Modern critical theory has additionally been influenced by György Lukács and Antonio Gramsci, as well as the second generation Frankfurt School scholars, notably Jürgen Habermas. In Habermas’s work, critical theory transcended its theoretical roots in German idealism and progressed closer to American pragmatism. Concern for social “base and superstructure” is one of the remaining Marxist philosophical concepts in much of contemporary critical theory.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

LOSING THE NEGEV-DAVID ISAAC

By on September 3rd, 2018

https://freebeacon.com/issues/losing-the-negev/

“The Bedouin need to understand that we live in a country of law,” said Yoav Galant, minister of construction and housing, on Wednesday, sending a warning shot across the bow of local leaders in an otherwise festive occasion to celebrate the opening of the first-ever Bedouin country club in the city of Rahat in the Negev. “Whoever resides legally can enjoy this country club, public and cultural institutions, and everything else we at the office of construction and housing build,” he said.

The problem is that illegal Bedouin encampments stretch for miles across the Negev. There are 64,000 illegal structures with 2,000 new ones added each year. In 2012, Israel established a special police division to deal with the problem. Their demolitions can’t keep up with construction.

“It really is a question of sovereignty,” said Naomi Kahn, director of the international division of Regavim, an Israeli organization focusing on land issues. “Israel may be powerful but it’s hesitant to use that power.” She cites as an example Route 6, one of the country’s main arteries, which ends abruptly in the Negev because Bedouin have camped out on its planned route. As a result, there’s a large military complex in the south without a major road or train to service it, she says.

Regavim estimates that only a fraction of the Negev’s Bedouin, or 55,000 people, actually live in these illegal settlement clusters, equivalent to one-sixth of one percent of Israel’s population.

Yet, they take up over 520,000 dunams, or some 130,000 acres. “These facts are almost impossible to grasp, especially when compared to the total area of land available for civilian use in Israel, some 11 million dunams,” a Regavim report notes.

Senior statesmen have drawn attention to the problem for decades. Committees have been established, plans formed, reports issued. Yet successive Israeli governments have failed to act, making the problem two-fold—not only are the Bedouin uninterested in obeying Israel’s land laws, but the state appears impotent in enforcing them.

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MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

The banality of lies: In ‘Operation Finale,’ Eichmann’s falsehoods are validated Opening this weekend, the film, focused on the kidnapping of Holocaust ‘architect,’ humanizes its notorious antagonist and allows his deceptions to go unchallenged By Matt Lebovic

By on September 3rd, 2018

https://www.timesofisrael.com/banality-of-truth-in-operation-finale-eichmann-propagated-lies-are-validated/

The new film “Operation Finale” about Adolf Eichmann’s dramatic 1961 capture is technically masterful. It is a shame that audiences aren’t told what is technically the historical truth as well.

Like German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt’s portrayal of Eichmann — who was commonly known as the “architect” of the Holocaust — “Operation Finale” downplays Eichmann’s role in the massive genocide of the Jewish people. Additionally, the film validates his fallacious statements about “ignoring orders” and his supposed attempts to rescue Jews from the death camps.By inspiring empathy for Eichmann and allowing him to minimize his wartime –and pre-war — activities, the producers of “Operation Finale” placed their film at home with Arendt’s seminal work, “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil,” written after his trial.

In her 1963 opus, Arendt blamed European Jews for their own slaughter. She also declared that Eichmann was not motivated by anti-Semitism, and that both he and his evil were “banal,” or unoriginal.

For viewers unfamiliar with Eichmann’s role in the Holocaust, the film’s primary “explanation” takes place during the opening credits, as train schedules, maps, and lists of killing facilities appear in a dramatically scored montage. Throughout the film, Eichmann is referred to as “the man who ran the trains,” and someone who “transported millions to their deaths.” These labels, however, do not express the scope of Eichmann’s 13-year career in the SS.

“I never gave an order to kill a Jew,” said Eichmann in real-life, as well as in the film. His only crime was “aiding and abetting,” said the SS leader. Like Arendt’s book, “Operation Finale” makes Eichmann out to be a neurotic, uninspired master of train schedules.

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