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November 2018

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Augusto Zimmermann: Why Did We Do This to Australia?

By on November 9th, 2018

http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/11/australia/

Sir Harry Gibbs’ advice was succinct: ‘…a state is entitled to prevent the immigration of persons whose culture is such that they are unlikely readily to integrate…’ That counsel was ignored and, once again, Allah’s will has been inflicted on a society whose misguided generosity opened the gates.

At least one person has been killed and another two injured after a Muslim terrorist went on a stabbing frenzy in Bourke Street, Melbourne, on Friday afternoon. The past four successful terrorist attacks on Australia’s soil have all been carried out by Muslim terrorists, some of whom had successfully applied for refugee status before the Australian authorities. For instance, Islamic State’s most influential recruiter in Australia, Muhammad Ali Baryalei, is a Muslim refugee that the government allowed to stay in the country.

Australia has a population of approximately 24 million and around 500,000 of its people are Muslims. The number of Muslims has risen dramatically over the last thirty years. Over 300,000 of them use Arabic at home. Needless to say, most Muslims are not terrorists but, unfortunately, all terrorists consider themselves to be faithful Muslims. While security measures are not specifically directed against the broader Muslim community, terrorists are, of course, drawn exclusively from this specific religious group.

The problem is that we simply do not know who to trust amongst a religious group that largely despises our democracy, culture and laws, and that do not even accept the principle of religious tolerance and separation of powers.

Although jihadists are not drawn exclusively from the first-generation Muslim immigrants, a large Muslim immigration to Australia invariably provides a larger recruiting ground for terrorists and other Islamist militants. Both the influx of asylum seekers from dysfunctional majority-Muslim countries and the constant influx of Muslim immigrants to Australia naturally exacerbate the threat of Islamic terrorism on our soil.

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Melbourne terror attack: Knifeman Hassain Khalif Shire Ali, 30, had ‘inspiration’ links to Isis, police say Somali-born attacker’s brother was arrested on terror charges last year

By on November 9th, 2018

A man who stabbed one person to death in a terrorist attack in Melbourne was known to police and was the brother of a man arrested on terror charges last year, Australian authorities say.

Somali-born Hassain Khalif Shire Ali, 30, set fire to a pickup truck laden with gas cylinders in a busy shopping area of the city on Friday, stabbing three people, one fatally, before he was shot dead by police.

Police said that “there are links” between Ali and Isis in the form of inspiration, rather than direct contact with the terror group. Counter-terrorism investigators were searching two properties in suburban Melbourne on Saturday morning as part of their investigation.

Victoria Police commissioner Graham Ashton said the man’s brother was arrested last year on charges of planning an attack in Melbourne and currently being held in prison awaiting trial.

“He is certainly someone who is known to both us and the federal authorities in relation to counter-terrorism and terrorism-related matters,” he told Channel 7’s Sunrise program.

“He is the brother of an offender or a suspect that we arrested late last year in relation to the preparation of a terrorist event.”
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Plane crashes into residential street in Melbourne leaving one dead

Police were first called to reports of a car on fire but when they arrived, were attacked by the man, who was armed with a knife.

Videos taken by bystanders show a lengthy confrontation between the police and the attacker, as bewildered shoppers pass by.

The man lunges repeatedly at the two officers with his knife, while they attempt to incapacitate him with pepper spray and a taser.

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Britain Struggles With Rise in Knife Attacks Government, social workers target problem London mayor says will take a generation to solve By Will Horner

By on November 9th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/britain-struggles-with-rise-in-knife-attacks-1541759400

LONDON—Daniel Frederick, a 34-year-old father of three, was returning to his home on a London public-housing estate shortly after New Year’s when a group of teenagers stabbed him in the back seven times, yards from his flat near a children’s playground.

Mr. Frederick, a security guard, was targeted in a case of mistaken identity, police believe, but the assault was part of a crime trend that London’s mayor said this week would take a generation to solve: a surge in knife attacks in a country with relatively low levels of violent crime.

Mayor Sadiq Khan was speaking on Monday after a spate of four unrelated knife homicides in London in five days—the youngest victims were 15 and 17—put renewed focus on the national trend. A fifth knife killing followed that night.

With strict British laws making guns hard to obtain, knives have become the weapon of choice for members of London gangs, who youth workers say fight over territory and are prepared to kill over trivial slights. As stabbings become more frequent, more young people feel compelled to carry knives for their own protection, fueling a cycle of violence.

Mr. Frederick’s sister, Louise Samuel, was at the hospital with her brother when he died in January. The five assailants, all 16 to 18 years old, were sentenced last month to a total of 64 years in prison.

Ms. Samuel, a former youth worker, said she can understand the peer pressure that drove them. She has already forgiven the boys, she said, and would like to meet them, “Just to know why they are so angry.” CONTINUE AT SITE

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A Broward County Senate Steal? Florida’s Democratic stronghold makes a mess of vote-counting.

By on November 9th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-broward-county-senate-steal-1541809807

Democrats have a hard time accepting electoral defeat. They’ve spent two years claiming with little evidence that Vladimir Putin elected Donald Trump. And now comes a vote-counting debacle in southern Florida that is at best gross incompetence, though don’t rule out an attempt to steal GOP wins for Senate and Governor.

Florida Gov. Rick Scott is about 15,000 votes ahead of Democratic incumbent Bill Nelson for a seat in the Senate. That puts the race in range of an automatic recount under state law. But at 11:30 p.m. on election night, Mr. Scott led by 57,000 votes. The same trend is happening in the gubernatorial race that went for Republican Ron DeSantis over progressive Andrew Gillum, though neither race appeared to be heading for a recount on election night.

The spread has narrowed in the past couple days by what can only be described as a suspect process in notorious Broward County. Three days after Election Day the county wasn’t finished reporting results from early voting, which ended on Sunday.

Florida Senator Marco Rubio was among the first to note the irregularities. Broward won’t disclose how many ballots are left, and “isn’t reporting hourly or regularly, but rather releasing thousands of additional votes, often in the overnight hours, that are chipping away at GOP leads,” as Senator Rubio put it.

On Thursday a teacher in Broward found a container labeled “Provisional Ballot Box” in a storage area of an elementary school that had been a polling station. The Sun-Sentinel reported Friday that a Broward County election official said there were no ballots in the box, which would be more reassuring if country officials were more transparent.

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Burying the Other Russia Story Adam Schiff will shut down the probe that found FBI abuses.

By on November 9th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/burying-the-other-russia-story-1541810056

Arguably the most important power at stake in Tuesday’s election was Congressional oversight, and the most important change may be Adam Schiff at the House Intelligence Committee. The Democrat says his top priority is re-opening the Trump-Russia collusion probe, but more important may be his intention to stop investigating how the FBI and Justice Department abused their power in 2016. So let’s walk through what we’ve learned to date.

Credit for knowing anything at all goes to Intel Chairman Devin Nunes and more recently a joint investigation by Reps. Bob Goodlatte (Judiciary) and Trey Gowdy (Oversight). Over 18 months of reviewing tens of thousands of documents and interviewing every relevant witness, no Senate or House Committee has unearthed evidence that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to win the presidential election. If Special Counsel Robert Mueller has found more, he hasn’t made it public.

But House investigators have uncovered details of a Democratic scheme to prod the FBI to investigate the Trump campaign. We now know that the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee hired Fusion GPS, which hired an intelligence-gun-for-hire, Christopher Steele, to write a “dossier” on Donald Trump’s supposed links to Russia.

Mr. Steele fed that document to the FBI, even as he secretly alerted the media to the FBI probe that Team Clinton had helped to initiate. Fusion, the oppo-research firm, was also supplying its dossier info to senior Justice Department official Bruce Ohr, whose wife, Nellie, worked for Fusion.

House investigators have also documented the FBI’s lack of judgment in using the dossier to obtain a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant against former Trump aide Carter Page. The four FISA warrants against Mr. Page show that the FBI relied almost exclusively on the unproven Clinton-financed accusations, as well as a news story that was also ginned up by Mr. Steele.

The FBI told the FISA court that Mr. Steele was “credible,” despite Mr. Steele having admitted to Mr. Ohr that he passionately opposed a Trump Presidency. The FBI also failed to tell the FISA court about the Clinton campaign’s tie to the dossier.

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SELECTIVE TYRANNY: MARILYN PENN

By on November 9th, 2018

http://politicalmavens.com/index.php/topic/politics/

Americans are living through a period of constant disgruntlement – political, social and historical. No matter what your ethnicity, there’s a statue or a painting of someone in your city or at your school that has to come down, perhaps because of slave-owning, or ancient harm to indigenous people, or womanizing or having too much money. Some people object to the plaque of David Koch on the side of the new fountain he installed in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art – never mind that he paid for everything, helping to keep that site the most visited by tourists to our city. Some want Columbus toppled from his perch atop the circle named for him – five centuries is apparently insufficient to forgive his misdeeds to the Indians And nobody wants the name Trump on their building for a million reasons that you surely know by now.

So how interesting it is that the Whitney Museum, in its current exhibition of Andy Warhol, has placed his oversized portrait of Mao in a position of maximum prominence (see NYT 11/9/18). Since we are so sensitive to tyrants past and present, here’s an excerpt from “Mao’s Great Famine” by Frank Dikotter:

“….Mao emerges as one of the greatest mass murderers in history, responsible for the deaths of at least 45 million people between 1958-1962. It is not merely the extent of the catastrophe that dwarfs earlier estimates, but also the manner in which many people died: between two and three million victims were tortured to death or summarily killed, often for the slightest infraction. When a boy stole a handful of grain in a Hunan village, local boss Xiong Dechang forced his father to bury him alive. The father died of grief a few days later. The case of Wang Ziyou was reported to the central leadership: one of his ears was chopped off, his legs were tied with iron wire, a ten kilogram stone was dropped on his back and then he was branded with a sizzling tool – punishment for digging up a potato.”

I don’t suppose the above appears as a wall text next to Warhol’s oeuvre. Where is the insistence that this mass murderer should not be given pride of place in an art museum where few people will have the slightest knowledge of his extreme cruelty. If Columbus is too dastardly to be held up for admiration, what can we say about Mao? Put differently, the problem is that Mao is not sufficiently recognized as the face of evil, but is trivialized as a benign subject of a pop-artist who also painted soup cans. The only thing worse than having him hang at the Whitney is that this man who was responsible for the death by starvation of tens of millions of people once had this Warhol portrait of him hanging in the MOMA restaurant. What twisted curator thought this was wink-worthy?

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The Worst Person is in Charge of Broward County’s Count Daniel Greenfield

By on November 9th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/271901/worst-person-charge-broward-countys-count-daniel-greenfield

It’s stunning that we’re monitoring the elections of some states because of events that happened generations ago. Meanwhile Broward County is allowed to pull shenanigans like these.

Time after time.

The election supervisor in Florida’s second-most populous county broke the law by destroying ballots cast in last year’s congressional primary involving Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, according to election-law experts across the political spectrum. The congresswoman’s opponent has sued to get access to the ballots.

The case — one of three ongoing independent lawsuits plaguing Broward County Elections Supervisor Brenda Snipes’ troubled office — stems from a June lawsuit filed in circuit court by Democrat Tim Canova. He had wanted to inspect the optical-scan ballots cast in his Aug. 30 primary race against Wasserman Schultz because he had concerns about the integrity of the elections office.

Under longstanding federal law, ballots cast in a congressional race aren’t supposed to be destroyed until 22 months after the election. And under state law, a public record sought in a court case is not supposed to be destroyed without a judge’s order.

Snipes’ office, however, destroyed the paper ballots in question in September — in the middle of Canova’s lawsuit — but says it’s lawful because the office made high-quality electronic copies. Canova’s legal team found out after the fact last month.

Here’s how things work in Snipes world.

Supervisor of Elections Brenda Snipes is a prime example of double dipping in the public trough.

Snipes is earning $4,336 monthly in state pension benefits from her time in the Broward school system. She also gets over $12,000-a-month from her job as supervisor, according to state records.

That’s roughly $200,000 annually…increasing every year.

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Speaking Truth to Power By Marilyn Penn

By on November 9th, 2018

http://politicalmavens.com/index.php/topic/politics/

You won’t know this if your information comes mainly from the NYT and the WSJ, but Alyssa Milano (founder of MeToo) has withdrawn from the Women’s March to protest its organizers’ support of Louis Farrakhan. Leader of Nation of Islam, Farrakhan chanted “Death to the U.S” and “Death to Jews” while in Iran last week, while on the domestic front, he denied being an anti-semite and called himself an “anti-termite” instead. Linda Sarsour, a self-described brown Palestinian and Tamika Mallory, an African-American have endorsed the statement that “no Zionist can be a feminist” and Mallory refers to Farrakhan as “goat” – greatest of all time.

Alyssa Milano is not Jewish but has said, “Any time that there is bigotry or anti-semitism in that respect, it needs to be called out and addressed. I’m disappointed in the leadership of the Women’s March that they haven’t done it adequately.” How should American Jews feel about their own failed leadership in not uttering a word of protest or refusing to participate themselves. We’re used to seeing Jews at the forefront of anti-discrimination for almost every group in the world, yet rabbis were urging their congregants to join the first March Against Trump at which Sarsour made her unequivocal decree that Zionists were unfit to participate. Where was the Jewish Queen of Feminism – Gloria Steinem, or our very political Barbra Streisand, not to mention all other Jewish politicians who are so on top of trigger words like “nationalist.” Where was Chuck Schumer who calibrates every word Trump utters but has been silent about that Death to Jews from the man who stood on the same platform as Bill Clinton in the recent past.

On behalf of all Jewish people who understand the danger that comes from the anti-semitism of the left, I thank Alyssa Milano for her unsolicited moral reproach to the organizers of the Women’s March (who also support BDS )and all its followers who should have thought twice about whose path they were following the first time but have no excuse of ignorance this time around.

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The Left Won’t Celebrate These History-Making Republican Women, So We Will There were a lot of female ‘firsts’ Tuesday night, but they won’t get the credit they have earned because these winning candidates don’t embrace leftist ideology.By Nicole Russell

By on November 9th, 2018

http://thefederalist.com/2018/11/09/left-wont-celebrate-history-making-republican-women-will/

At the conclusion of Tuesday night’s election, several incredible women made history in their states, winning their races and booting male predecessors from office. So far, they haven’t gotten much media coverage, and likely won’t in the future, simply because they’re Republicans.

If the goal of the feminist movement was to shatter glass ceilings, certainly these women have kicked out a few panels. They should get the credit they deserve regardless of ideology, but they won’t because feminism was never about equality, it was about advancing liberal ideas. No wonder most American women don’t consider themselves feminists.
Meet These Highly Successful Ladies

Several Republican women won big Tuesday night. They won their races, and made history. Here are a few of them.

Young Kim became the first Korean-American woman elected to Congress. She now represents the 65th Assembly District, which includes parts of northern Orange County. She’s an entrepreneur, a minority, and a Republican. Despite fitting identity boxes that the left claims to celebrate, not only is the media failing to celebrate her win, they hardly covered her race at all. Regardless, she is a rising star to watch and her life story is inspiring.

Marsha Blackburn will become Tennessee’s first female senator ever. Blackburn is a mother and businesswoman who formerly represented Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District. Not only did she win her race, making history in the process, but she did so following Taylor Swift’s blockbuster demand that Tennesseans vote for Blackburn’s male opponent, because women’s rights. Blackburn won her Senate race by at least ten points.

The state of Iowa, which politicos typically like to consider a predictor of success for either party, elected their first female governor. Republican Kim Reynolds became Iowa’s first female governor Tuesday, besting her male opponent in a win local Democrats called “confusing.” (Try not to laugh.)

South Dakota also elected their first female governor. Kristi Noem booted her male opponent from office as well.

As of this writing, the Arizona Senate race has still not been called, but results appear to lean in Martha McSally’s favor. If she wins, she will be the first female senator Arizona has elected. She is also the country’s first female fighter pilot, and a Republican who inspires girls who want to join the military.

These are not just politicians but women who are making history across the country, busting through barriers and shattering glass ceilings, which feminists say they celebrate. Yet these women aren’t being celebrated by feminists, proving yet again that their claim of promoting women is a lie. They don’t support women, they embrace progressive ideas.

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Democrats: ‘If We Lost, the Voters Must Be Racist’ By The Editors

By on November 9th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/11/democrats-if-we-lost-the-voters-must-be-racist/

Storyline A: “We didn’t lose!” Storyline B: “If we did lose, it’s because you’re a racist!”

The Democratic party’s transformation into an undergraduate intersectionality seminar at Oberlin is proceeding at a remarkable pace. The party’s current strategy is to scream “Racist!” at people voting for Mia Love and Tim Scott while insisting that Jared Kushner’s father-in-law and Benjamin Netanyahu’s best political friend is a scheming anti-Semite.

At issue is the defeat of Andrew Gillum in the Florida governor’s race and of Stacey Abrams in the Georgia governor’s race. Democrats are busily trying to undo those defeats as of this writing (Florida Democrats have a real knack for suddenly discovering caches of ballots from sympathetic voters at the opportune moment) while simultaneously arguing that the reason these two candidates failed is that they are black, and that Donald Trump’s America is just one tweet away from repealing the 13th Amendment.

Senator Bernie Sanders — who abandoned his native Brooklyn for Vermont, the whitest state in the union — insists that white voters are “uncomfortable” voting for a black candidate. Maybe some are. But Barack Obama won more than 100 more electoral votes running against Mitt Romney than Hillary Clinton won running against a man who’d never run for office before. The signals are at least mixed.

There may be a less nefarious explanation: Florida hasn’t elected a Democratic governor since 1994. Alex Sink, the state’s chief financial officer, is at the moment the only Democrat to have been elected to a statewide office in Florida in this century. Georgia hasn’t elected a Democrat as its governor in this century, either. (Georgia went the entire 20th century without electing a Republican governor, and Georgia’s Democratic governors haven’t exactly been covered in glory: The state could have done without the services of Lester Maddox.) Democrats of all hues have had a hard time of it in those states in recent years, for good reason — the policies they support would be catastrophic for Georgia and Florida, two of the most prosperous states in the country. Florida is booming, and Georgia has been named the best state in the nation for doing business for five years in a row. Floridians and Georgians have good reason to be broadly happy with the direction of their governments.

And what were the Democrats offering?

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