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November 2018

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New Hope for the Truth of 2016? Hints that congressional investigators may finally pull back the lid on James Comey’s actions. By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

By on November 17th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-hope-for-the-truth

Two men will be key in the next Congress to getting to the bottom of the remaining mysteries of the 2016 election. Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, likely chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has indicated he’s not going the let the biggest sleeping dog of the 2016 race lie.

“Totally,” he told CNN when asked whether he would probe FBI actions during the campaign. “The oversight function will be very much front and center.”

On the Democratic side, Rep. Adam Schiff told the Los Angeles Times that his first goal is to restore “comity” to his own fractious House Intelligence Committee. (Presumably the Times reporter didn’t mishear the word “comedy.”) Less felicitously, Mr. Schiff added, “We’re going to be defending the independence of the Justice Department,” by which he meant protecting special counsel Robert Mueller from being fired by President Trump.

Except the Mueller investigation is expected to wrap up soon, and it appears to have found nothing particularly exciting. Meanwhile, Mr. Schiff has finally shown some interest in the truly explosive unfinished business of 2016. He told the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer that if former FBI chief James Comey’s account of his actions during the 2016 race is accurate, then his intervention likely represents the “most measurable” and “most significant way in which the Russians may have impacted the outcome of the election.”

Mr. Schiff’s acknowledgment is especially interesting because, unlike the rest of us, he would have seen a classified Justice Department report on this episode, which remains withheld from the public.

Mr. Comey, we now know, was acting on dubious, possibly planted Russian intelligence when he intervened in the Hillary Clinton email matter. He was acting from a counterintelligence motive (he was worried about a Russian effort to discredit Mrs. Clinton’s victory), not the criminal investigatory motive he pretended at the time. In adopting this spy vs. spy rationale, he surely would have consulted with his Obama administration colleagues, CIA Director John Brennan and National Intelligence Director James Clapper.

And when Mr. Comey intervened a second time, reopening the investigation days before the election, he did so to protect the credibility of the original operation. This step, even Mr. Comey now concedes, may have tipped the Electoral College to Mr. Trump. CONTINUE AT SITE

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POLITICS Comments turned off

The Gerrymander Excuse Implodes Democrats’ total vote share roughly matches their House majority.

By on November 17th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-gerrymander-excuse-implodes-1542412885

Elections have a way of blowing up partisan conceits—see what happened to the Democratic Party’s Electoral College “lock” in 2016. This year Democrats busted one of their own cherished myths by proving that Republican gerrymanders weren’t preventing them from retaking the House of Representatives. There’s a lesson here for voters and judges.

State legislatures have been drawing congressional boundaries to favor one party or another since America’s founding. During the 40 years of sustained Democratic control of the House in the late 20th century, this worked in the Democrats’ favor. As political scientist Matt Grossmann has shown, Democrats sometimes enjoyed congressional majorities nearly 10 percentage points larger than their share of the House popular vote.

Then came the Republican romp of 2010, followed by the Census and the regular 10-year redistricting to reflect population ebb and flow across the U.S. The new GOP majorities in several states drew districts that increased their representation in the House, as Democrats also did where they had a partisan advantage.

For many commentators the post-2010 redistricting created a crisis of democracy by supposedly locking Democrats out of power. Days before the 2018 election the New York Times’ David Leonhardt cited Republican gerrymandering as evidence that the U.S. could “slide toward Hungarian autocracy.”

Well, so much for that. Democrats last week made their largest gain in House seats since 1974 and appear to be closing in on a 233-seat House majority with several races still not called. This means Democrats will hold about 53.6% of seats—a 7.1% edge. And, what do you know, Democratic House candidates nationwide have 52.8% of votes—7.3% more than Republicans, according to the latest Cook Political Report tally.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

A Tale of Two New Yorks Billions for Amazon but rats, lead paint and mold for public housing.

By on November 17th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-tale-of-two-new-yorks-1542413122

New York’s Democratic kingpins Andrew Cuomo and Bill de Blasio are getting hit from right, left and center for showering Amazon with some $3 billion in subsidies. The corporate welfare is even more outrageous when juxtaposed with New York City’s dilapidated public housing that the Governor and mayor have long neglected.

This summer the Justice Department sued Nycha for sweeping its disrepair under a shabby rug. Nycha agreed to a court-appointed monitor to oversee $1.2 billion in repairs over the next five years. On Wednesday in a 52-page ruling, federal Judge William Pauley III, a Bill Clinton appointee, rejected the settlement as inadequate and perhaps unconstitutional.

According to the New York State Department of Public Health, 83% of Nycha’s inspected units contained a hazardous condition. “Somewhat reminiscent of the biblical plagues of Egypt, these conditions include toxic lead paint, asthma-inducing mold, lack of heat, frequent elevator outages, and vermin infestations,” the judge noted, adding that the authority “whitewashed these deficiencies for years.”

While Mayor de Blasio agreed to spend an additional $1.2 billion to fix Nycha’s 326 complexes that house 400,000 people, conditions are so awful that the authority estimates it needs $32 billion for repairs. “NYCHA’s current capital needs would not be met until the year 2166,” the judge wrote.

Judge Pauley added that a special monitor “would bring about an unwarranted—and as far as this Court is aware, unprecedented—judicial usurpation of responsibilities that Congress has expressly entrusted to” the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and “raises serious concerns implicating the separation of powers and the delegation of equitable judicial power.”

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HISTORY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

WILL PRESIDENT TRUMP CALL IT “WEST BANK” OR JUDEA AND SAMARIA? DAVID SINGER

By on November 16th, 2018

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/

President Trump – having rejected a barrage of criticism since describing himself as a “nationalist” – faces a further torrent of invective should he choose to say “Judea and Samaria” rather than “West Bank” in his soon to-be-released peace proposals.

Arab propaganda has used “West Bank” since 1949 to obliterate any Jewish connection to one of the two remaining pieces of land under the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine where sovereignty still remains undetermined between Jews and Arabs. Even worse, the United Nations and the US State Department have continued using this deceptive and misleading terminology since 1967.

The media and countless political commentators have sought to relegate the historical-geographical term “Judea and Samaria” to some ancient biblical anachronism that fell into disuse centuries ago – yet that term appears in the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica and the UN 1947 Partition Plan resolution.

Incontrovertible Jewish claims to this hotly-disputed territory – about the size of Delaware – were eloquently summarised in the Forward on 12 July 1991:

‘As for “Judea” and “Samaria”, they are indeed ancient names, but the notion that they had become “archaic” prior to 1967 is totally false for both English and Hebrew. Indeed, unlike their Moslem counterparts, not only Jewish, but Christian geographers too, from Roman times onward, always considered the mountainous regions north and south of Jerusalem to be discrete entities, since this is how the Old and New Testaments speak of them because of the separate Judean and Israelite kingdoms that existed there. As late as many 18th-, 19th- and early 20th-century atlases, it is possible to find accurate maps of Palestine with the major Arab towns and villages appearing beside the words “Judea” and “Samaria” in large print.

The Hebrew terms, yehuda and shomron have had a slightly more complex history – rather, shomron has had, since yehuda, “Judah” which was originally the name of the tribe that occupied the southern hill country of the Land of Israel, has been in uninterrupted use as a geographical term since the Book of Deuteronomy. We find it and it alone in the Mishnah and the Talmud; in the account of the famous 12th-century Jewish traveller Benjamin of Tudela; in Kaftor u-Ferach, a 16th-century halakhic geography of Palestine composed by the Italian Rabbi Ishtori Haparhi; in all the 19t- and 20th-century literature of Zionist settlement in Palestine; and in thousands of other Hebrew sources from every period of Jewish history as well.

The case of “shomron”, “Samaria”, is somewhat different. The oldest Hebrew name for the mountains north of Jerusalem is not shomron but efrayim, after the tribe whose territory it was. Shomron was originally a site in Efrayim that, in the reign of King Omri, became the capital of the northern Kingdom of Israel, which eventually began to bear its name. Thus, in the Hebrew Bible we find shomron, efrayim, and yisra’el used interchangeably, while in rabbinic literature they are joined by a fourth term: eretz ha-kutim, “the Land of the Cuthites” – a reference to the Samaritans, a population originally transferred from the Babylonian region of Kutu to take the place of the “ten lost” tribes of Israel deported by the Assyrians in 721 B.C.E.

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BOOKS, EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Free Speech Crisis on Campus Is Worse than People Think by Bradley Campbell

By on November 16th, 2018

https://quillette.com/2018/11/14/the-free-speech-

Last month Samuel Abrams, a politics professor at Sarah Lawrence College, published an op-ed in the New York Times titled, “Think Professors Are Liberal? Try School Administrators.” Abrams, who describes himself as conservative leaning, pointed to the titles of some recent events put on by his campus’s Office of Student Affairs: “Stay Healthy, Stay Woke,” “Understanding White Privilege,” and “Microaggressions.” He described these events as politically lopsided and noted that this kind of highly politicized socialization of college students is occurring throughout the country. A lot of campus critics have pointed to the left-wing political skew of faculty, he said, and have worried about indoctrination in the classroom. But indoctrination is much more likely at campus events outside the classroom, and the political skew of administrators in charge of student life is even greater than that of faculty. (He surveyed a representative sample of 900 “student-facing administrators” and found a ratio of 12 liberals for every conservative, compared to 6 to 1 for academic faculty.)

Remember, Abrams is a tenured professor commenting about a widely discussed issue and writing about his research in the New York Times—America’s pre-eminent newspaper, hardly some right-wing rag. And what was the reaction at Sarah Lawrence College? Campus activists, after apparently trying to break into Abrams’s office, vandalized the office door, taking away the items he had put up, including a picture of his newborn son, and putting up signs with statements such as “Quit” and “Our Right to Exist Is Not ‘Ideological’ Asshole.” The student senate held an emergency meeting to discuss the offending op-ed, and the college president, Cristle Collins Judd, suggested to Abrams that he had created a hostile work environment and asked him whether he thought it was acceptable to write op-eds without her approval. She also asked him if he was on the job market, perhaps as a suggestion that he should be.

A new moral culture

If you were a time traveler from 10 years ago—maybe even five years ago—you’d probably have trouble following some of that. What’s a microaggression? What’s woke? And how could a New York Times op-ed lead to that kind of uproar on campus? But if you’ve been around, and if you’ve been following the happenings on American college campuses, you’re familiar by now with conflicts like this and the new moral terminology guiding the campus activists. In the last few years we’ve seen professors such as Nicholas Christakis at Yale and Brett Weinstein at Evergreen State College surrounded by angry, cursing students, with Christakis and his wife, Erika Christakis, soon leaving their positions as the masters of one of Yale’s residential colleges and Weinstein and his wife, Heather Heying, leaving Evergreen entirely. We’ve heard about microaggressions, said to be small slights that over time do great harm to disadvantaged groups; trigger warnings, which some students demand before they are exposed to course material that might be disturbing; and safe spaces, where people can go to be free of ideas that challenge leftist identity politics. We’ve heard claims that speech that offends campus activists is actually violence, and we’ve seen activists use actual violence to stop it —and to defend this as self-defense—when administrators fail to do so.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Lessons of the Asia Bibi Case By Nina Shea

By on November 16th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/11/asia-bibi-blasphemy-laws-western-asylum/

Pakistan has released the purported blasphemer against Islam. Now what nation will have the courage to grant her asylum?

Asia Bibi, the Catholic mother imprisoned in Pakistan for nine years and condemned to hang for violating that country’s strict blasphemy law, has drawn broad sympathy throughout the West. Lacking credible evidence, and despite her denials, lower courts plainly yielded to Islamist pressure in making the illiterate field hand the first Pakistani woman to be given a death sentence for insulting Islam’s prophet, Mohammed. Then on October 31, Bibi finally received justice in an acquittal by Pakistan’s supreme court. But when she was released a week later, she found that mobs were baying for her blood throughout Pakistan — and, most surprisingly, that the West held out no firm offer of a safe haven.

Islamabad has given assurances that Bibi has been taken to a secret, secure location inside Pakistan, pending a permanent place of refuge. But her escape seems stalled. The West’s response so far of passive hand-wringing while Bibi faces mortal danger indicates more than poor planning; it shows a failure to fully comprehend the deeply radicalizing effects of the blasphemy taboo within the world’s second-largest Muslim nation — and the inroads it has made in the West.

Western leaders have consistently expressed concern for Bibi during her nearly decade-long ordeal. Human-rights advocates, such as the indefatigable Lord David Alton, who just last month met personally in Pakistan with the chief justice, have vigorously championed Bibi in the British parliament. Yet when the moment of truth arrived, London quickly decided it would not give her asylum owing to security concerns. The U.K. has its own radical Islamist leaders within its million-strong Pakistani community to worry about, including Anjem Choudary, paroled last month following a terror-law conviction. Lord Alton called the British decision “craven.”

In Paris, the city hall had an enlarged photo of Bibi by its front entrance when I last visited several years ago, and France has long been discussed as a place of asylum for her. But deadly Islamist attacks against Charlie Hebdo’s editors for blasphemy, and most recently against French Jews, make asylum there unthinkable. Last week Italy and Canada revealed their engagement in “sensitive” multilateral talks on Bibi’s case, but so far neither has offered an actual legal grant of asylum. Also last week, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau apologized for Canada’s turning away the MS St. Louis and its 907 desperate Jewish passengers seeking refuge from German Nazis 79 years ago. Hopefully, he will apply the St. Louis lesson to throw a lifeline to Bibi.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Haley Announces Flip from Longstanding U.S. Abstention on Golan Heights Resolution to ‘No’ By Bridget Johnson

By on November 16th, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/haley-announces-flip-from-longstanding-u-s-abstention-on-golan-heights-resolution-to-no/

For the first time, the United States plans to vote “no” today instead of abstaining on an annual United Nations resolution slamming “continued Israeli military occupation” of the Golan Heights.

In past years, the resolution has called upon Israel “to desist from changing the physical character, demographic composition, institutional structure and legal status of the occupied Syrian Golan and in particular to desist from the establishment of settlements.”

It also calls upon Israel “to desist from imposing Israeli citizenship and Israeli identity cards on the Syrian citizens in the occupied Syrian Golan, and from its repressive measures against the population of the occupied Syrian Golan.”

The U.S. Mission to the United Nations cited as the reasons for the change from abstention to “no” the “resolution’s anti-Israel bias, as well as the militarization of the Syrian Golan border, and a worsening humanitarian crisis.”

UN Ambassador Nikki Haley declared in a statement previewing the vote that “the United States will no longer abstain when the United Nations engages in its useless annual vote on the Golan Heights.”

“If this resolution ever made sense, it surely does not today. The resolution is plainly biased against Israel,” she said. “Further, the atrocities the Syrian regime continues to commit prove its lack of fitness to govern anyone. The destructive influence of the Iranian regime inside Syria presents major threats to international security. ISIS and other terrorist groups remain in Syria.”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, POLITICS Comments turned off

In Democratic circles, anti-Semitism is becoming normal I am of two minds about where our country’s new flirtation with socialism is heading Roger Kimball

By on November 16th, 2018

https://spectator.us/democratic-anti-semitism-israel/

As people scramble to explain the sudden resurgence of socialism not only on America’s college campuses but also in the corridors of political power, it is worth noting the concomitant resurgence of anti-Semitism in those redoubts. The coincidence is not, as the Marxists like to say, an accident. The truth is that unfettered socialism, though based primarily on a demand for the abolition of private property, always comes riding on a current of anti-Semitism. Picking apart the conceptual reasons for this link is a complex business that I will leave aside here. But it is worth noting how impeccable a provenance the union enjoys. Consider this observation:

What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money. . . . Emancipation from huckstering and money, consequently from practical, real Judaism, would be the self-emancipation of our time [and would] make the Jew impossible. . . . In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.

Louis Farrakhan in his ‘Jews are termites’ mode? Nope. That’s old Karl himself in his classic anti-Semitic effusion of 1843, ‘On the Jewish Question.’

It’s worth keeping Marx’s views in mind as you ponder the rise of figures like Ilhan Omar, the young and comely Somali refugee who just took Keith Ellison’s House seat in Minnesota. Like many new Democrats, Omar was nurtured by the far-left Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. ‘Israel has hypnotized the world,’ Omar said on Twitter, ‘may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel.’

Then there is the man she replaced, Keith Ellison, now the Attorney General-elect of Minnesota. ‘We can’t allow another country to treat us like we’re their ATM,’ Ellison said of Israel. ‘That country has mobilized its Diaspora in America to do its bidding in America.’

And let’s not forget the Democrat ‘It Girl’ herself, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has gone back and forth on the question of whether Israel has a right to exist at all but has been as never-varying as Dewar’s Scotch in referring to Israel’s ‘occupation’ of Palestine.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Public charter school puts benefits of teaching Hebrew to the test By Alex Traiman

By on November 16th, 2018

https://www.jns.org/public-charter-schools-puts-benefits-of-teaching-hebrew-to-the-t

The Mill Basin Hebrew Language Academy Charter School in Brooklyn, N.Y., in Israel. Credit: Alex Traiman. Credit: Alex Traiman.
The Mill Basin Hebrew Language Academy Charter School in Brooklyn, N.Y., in Israel. Credit: Alex Traiman. Credit: Alex Traiman.
An experimental approach to learning Hebrew is strengthening the identity of Jewish students who cannot afford a private-school education, while simultaneously building pro-Israel advocates from other faiths.

An experimental approach to learning Hebrew is strengthening the identity of Jewish students who cannot afford a private-school education, while simultaneously building pro-Israel advocates from other faiths.

Now in its ninth year, the Hebrew Public network of 13 charter schools utilizes a blend of startup philanthropic funding and state funds to offer high-quality bilingual education to Jewish and non-Jewish students alike. Currently, these schools run in New York, New Jersey, California, Minnesota and Washington, D.C. New schools are scheduled to open soon in Philadelphia and Texas.

The school teaches Hebrew to all its students—about half of them Jewish. Classes on other traditional public-school subjects are also taught in Hebrew. The school does not teach any subjects on Jewish faith, but does offer information on Israeli culture, history and national holidays, which often overlap with Jewish holidays.

“We are not a Jewish school. We are the only public-school network in North America that teaches Hebrew to kids of all backgrounds,” says Valerie Khaytina, chief external officer of Hebrew Public.

The network—with more than 3,000 students—was started by the Areivim Philanthropy Group and the Steinhardt Philanthropic Foundation in 2009 to provide a free alternative for parents and students searching for an education that could provide Jewish identity, but without the burdensome costs of a private Jewish day school, which can range anywhere from $10,000 to over $20,000 per year.

“The Areivim group sought to find the next big idea to actually make Jewish education affordable for all children,” explains Khaytina. “At around the same time, they got to learn about the concept of charter schools. And they said, ‘OK, that sounds great.’ Then they learned that to be a charter school, you have to be open to everybody. So, there is no religion in our schools.”

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The World Should Back Trump’s Strategy on Iran by Emily B. Landau

By on November 16th, 2018

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/middle-east-watch/world-should-back-trumps-strategy-iran-36002

The JCPOA has not engendered a more moderate stance on the part of the Islamic regime, which has become more aggressive in the pursuit of its regional aspirations across the Middle East.

The round of sanctions slapped on Iran in early November—targeting the oil and energy sectors, banks and shipping companies—are the latest step in the pressure campaign that the Trump administration has been mounting on Iran since it came into office in early 2017, and with greater impetus since it left the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), known as the Iran nuclear deal, in May 2018.

The goal of the Trump administration is primarily to leverage the pressure of these sanctions to compel the Iranian regime to negotiate a much improved nuclear deal. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has noted that reimposing the sanctions that were lifted as part of the 2015 nuclear deal is also designed to ensure that the regime has fewer resources with which to continue to support terror and its other aggressive activities throughout the region, in line with its declared hegemonic aspirations.

Cutting off resources is a rather straightforward aim that has a good chance of achieving the desired result. With regard to the expected effectiveness of sanctions as a means of bringing Iran back to the table to renegotiate the nuclear deal, the situation is more complicated. It depends on the regime’s assessment as to whether it can withstand the pressure—at least until a new president is elected in 2020; one that might adopt a more favorable approach toward Iran—or whether it concludes that it cannot do so, and is compelled to make additional nuclear concessions in order to ease the pressure.

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