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December 2018

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The New Norm: Crime, But Not Punishment : Ilana Mercer

By on December 8th, 2018

http://www.ilanamercer.com/phprunner/public_article_list_view.php?editid1=996
In the title of his magisterial book, Fyodor Dostoevsky paired “Crime and Punishment,”not crime and pardons, or crime and “Civics lessons,” amnesty and asylum.

Punishment must closely follow a crime in order to be both effective as a deterrent, as well as to serve as a public declaration of values and norms.

In explaining Texas justice and its attendant values, stand-up satirist Ron White performed the public service no politician is prepared to perform. “In Texas, we have the death penalty and we use it. If you come to Texas and kill somebody, we will kill you back.”

So, where’s such clarity when you need it?

Something has gotten into the country’s lymphatic system. The infection is becoming more apparent by the day, not least in the way matters of life-and-death are debated (or not).

Again-and-again one hears boilerplate statements that fail to properly fix on the defining issues of our time, much less fix them.

Consider the flippancy over threats against persons and property, from within the country and from without it.

The home of Fox News personality Tucker Carlson is surrounded by a small, if menacing, mob, and his family threatened. Before dinging the man’s front door, the assailants chant out their criminal intentions:

“Tucker Carlson, we will fight. We know where you sleep at night. We know where you sleep.”

To which other talkers, even the wonderful Tucker, respond by vaporizing about rights to speech and protest vs. some or other watered-down peace and security to which private property owners are entitled.

Nobody alludes to the rights of private property or to the fulcrum that is law-and-order.

No demands for arrests are issued or voiced, publicly. No expectation for retribution is set-up. Follow-up is nonexistent in media. Police do not publicize any arrests. If they make them, none are reported by media.

No teachable moments occur.

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IMMIGRATION, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Let’s Mobilize an Army of Stone Throwers on the Border By Ilana Mercer

By on December 8th, 2018

In the United States, even our Customs and Border Protection apologizes for doing its job. Allegedly, CBP “protects the public from dangerous people and materials attempting to cross the border …”

On one of the media networks that wants all people, dangerous or not, to cross the southern border into the United States if they so desire, a CBP officer was bending over backwards to appear like a “global force for good.” (That, believe it or not, was the U.S. Navy’s motto, between 2009 and 2015!)

Tear-gassing rabble-rousing migrants, who were charging his officers and breaching the U.S.-Mexico border, was in the service of protecting … the migrants, especially The Children. Perhaps that’s in the oath of office a CBP officer takes?

Law enforcement officers entrusted with the safety of the American people struggle to articulate pride in executing their mandate. Attached to the expected self-loathing repartee is, invariably, a declaration of loyalties to The World. (Of a piece with this confused loyalty is the typical argument made by the typical TV talker: Illegal immigration must be stopped, so as to … save migrants from the journey’s depredations.)

It’s instructive to contrast the apologies around defending the U.S. border and the American people with the absence of apologies on Israel’s borders.

In May of this year, The Economist reported, “Tens of thousands of Palestinians massed near Gaza’s border fence, threatening to ‘return’ to the lands their forefathers lost when Israel was created in 1948.” They wanted in.

Israeli soldiers responded not with tear gas, but with bullets. They killed over 60 protesters who threatened to breach the border. The number has since risen to 120.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The suicidal folly of tolerating the intolerant :Geert Wilders

By on December 8th, 2018

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/12/the-suicidal-folly-of-tolerating-the-intolerant/
https://www.geertwilders.nl/in-de-media-mainmenu-74/nieuws-mainmenu-114/94-english/2135-speech-geert-wilders-restoration-weekend-palm-beach-usa-november-17-2018

‘Islam is dressed up as a religion but is in reality a totalitarian ideology. It wants to dominate and is unwilling to integrate and assimilate. There is not a single country where Islam is dominant that is truly free … We will never apologize for being free men, we will never bow for the combined forces of Mecca and the Left.’

If we want to stop the terror, the violence, the attacks on our women, if we want to protect our freedom and the freedom of generations to come, we have to get rid of the dangerous concept of cultural relativism – the false idea that all cultures are equal. People are equal but cultures are not.

Cultural relativism is weakening the West day by day. Government leaders, lawyers, judges, churches, trade unions, media, academia, charities – the majority of them are still blinded by political correctness and are condoning Islam.

As a result a little bit of the free West dies each day. But the truth is that our culture and identity – based on Christianity, Judaism and humanism – is not equal to but far better than the Islamic culture of submission, intolerance and violence.

Our civilization, based on the legacy of Jerusalem, Athens and Rome, is the best civilization on earth. It gave us democracy, freedom, equality before the law, the separation of church and state, and the notion of sovereign states to protect it all. The remedy to all the misery and terror is clear: we have to reassert what we are. Only then will we be able to ensure a future for our children. In Europe today, the problems we face are existential. Not economics but Islamisation, terrorism and mass-immigration are our main problems.

Existential indeed, because it determines who we are, what we are and if we will exist as free people in the future. We have to support each other. That’s why we all should always support the Jewish State of Israel. Israel is one of us, the only democracy in the Middle East, a beacon of freedom in an unfree region. Israel is forced to defend itself against the dark forces of Sunni and Shia Islam. It is our duty to always support Israel. Israel is a vital outpost of Western civilization, the canary in the coalmine. If Islam conquers Israel, we will be next. The Israeli-Arab conflict is proof that Huntington was wrong: there is no clash of civilizations, but a clash between our civilisation and barbarism.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Does The Netherlands Have a Problem? by Judith Bergman

By on December 8th, 2018

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13362/netherlands-problem

“The number of Dutch victims of grooming gangs has risen sharply in recent years”. It is estimated that rape-groomers force around 1400 under-age girls into sex-slavery every year. — Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad.

“Despite stagnating growth, the size of the Dutch jihadist movement is cause for concern.” — Terrorist Threat Assessment for the Netherlands (DTN), published by the National Coordinator for Security and Counterterrorism.

It is estimated that 140 mosques in the Netherlands are affiliated with the Religious Affairs Directorate of the Republic of Turkey (Diyanet). One sermon, given in the city of Hoorn, was about jihad and martyrdom: “The one who dies in the way of Allah, never call him dead, but call him alive”.

“Right-wing extremists are growing more confident. They continue to focus on protesting against the perceived Islamisation of the Netherlands, the arrival of asylum seekers and the perceived loss of Dutch identity…” [emphasis added] wrote Dutch authorities in a September threat assessment.

Islamization in the Netherlands, however, is not merely a “perception” of “right-wing extremists” but an increasingly established trend. The threat assessment by the country’s National Coordinator for Security and Counterterrorism, for example, shows that Islamic terrorism has been growing for several years. “Despite stagnating growth, the size of the Dutch jihadist movement is cause for concern,” it wrote.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Academic Stabbed to Death for ‘Insulting Mohammed’ During Lecture By Jack Crowe

By on December 8th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/academic-stabbed-to-death-for-insulting-mohammed-during-lecture/

An Irish lecturer was stabbed to death by a student outside the Paris university where he taught on Wednesday for allegedly insulting the prophet Mohammed by displaying a drawing of him during class.

John Dowling, 66, was speaking with a student, identified by authorities only as Ali R., following a lecture when the 37-year old student fatally stabbed him 13 times in the throat and chest.

The suspect, who is set to be indicted for murder on Friday, told the authorities that, while he killed Dowling to defend his faith against a perceived slight, he has also long maintained a personal grudge against the lecturer, the Daily Mail reported Friday.

Government prosecutor Catherine Denis said that Ali has nurtured an ‘obsessive resentment’ against the university since it expelled him in September 2017.

“He came to France two years ago to join the management school, but did not pass his first year,” she said. “Since then he had been returning to the college, and had become unwanted to the point that he was not allowed in any more.”

Ali’s explanation for carrying out the murder, however, cited Dowling’s display of a drawing of the prophet Mohammed during class.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

The U.N. Gives Palestinian Terrorists a Free Pass By David May

By on December 8th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/12/the-u-n-gives-palestinian-terrorists-a-free-pass/

The General Assembly expresses solidarity with the Palestinians by endorsing violence against Israeli civilians.

On Thursday the United Nations had an opportunity to speak with moral clarity and denounce the terrorist group Hamas. Instead, the General Assembly (UNGA) rejected a U.S.-sponsored resolution that called for an end to violence, encouraged intra-Palestinian reconciliation, and condemned terrorism.

A disappointed Nikki Haley, U.S. ambassador to the U.N., lamented, “Over the years, the UN has voted to condemn Israel over 500 times . . . and not one single resolution condemning Hamas. That, more than anything else, is a condemnation of the United Nations itself.”

Moreover, the U.N. indicated that Jews’ praying at the Western Wall is more worthy of condemnation than Hamas’s lobbing rockets indiscriminately at Israeli civilians. The UNGA passed another resolution calling for an end to “Israel’s occupation . . . including of East Jerusalem,” the location of Judaism’s holiest shrine.

This was the seventh anti-Israel resolution in as many days. Last week, on November 29, the U.N. celebrated its annual Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People with a series of anti-Israel speakers and resolutions highly critical of the Jewish state.

Marc Lamont Hill, one of the speakers, endorsed violence against Israelis and a boycott of the Jewish state and called for a “free Palestine from the river to the sea.” That slogan is widely understood to be a euphemism for destroying Israel, and it led to his termination from CNN.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

A Home Run by Trump By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on December 8th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/12/william-barr-attorney-general-nominee-excellent-choice/

In nominating William Barr for AG, the president could not have done better

In 2007, the Justice Department was in disarray. Though it was largely exaggerated, a controversy over the firing of some United States attorneys, the intrusion of politics into Justice Department hiring decisions, and White House contacts with Main Justice forced the resignation of an overmatched attorney general, Alberto Gonzales.

The Justice Department is not just any arm of government. It is a bulwark of the rule of law on which our domestic tranquility and prosperity depend. It is a watchman against terrorists and hostile foreign powers, ensuring our domestic security. When it is reeling, the nation is reeling. In 2007, it was reeling.

Then, in a masterstroke, President Bush named Michael B. Mukasey as the new attorney general. A distinguished former Justice Department prosecutor, Judge Mukasey had been as accomplished and exemplary a jurist as the nation could produce. His nomination was exactly the shot in the arm the Justice Department needed. Order was restored, thanks to the respect he’d earned from all quarters, including both sides of the congressional aisle, for his legal acumen and scrupulousness.

In a time of similar tumult, President Trump has hit a similar home run, nominating William P. Barr to be the next attorney general. Bill Barr will restore order.

Barr brings much-needed experience and instant credibility to the task. After all, he has already been the nation’s chief federal law-enforcement officer, serving as attorney general in the last years of President George H. W. Bush’s term. He is a lawyer’s lawyer, having led the Department’s Office of Legal Counsel before being elevated by Bush 41 to deputy AG and, ultimately, the top job. He has rightly been adamant that, while an attorney general is a consequential administration official, the AG’s first allegiance is to the Constitution and the laws.

Importantly, when Barr was attorney general, the chief of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division was a fellow by the name of Robert Mueller — now the special counsel running the investigation of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, including any Trump-campaign “collusion” therein.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Virginia Teacher Fired after Refusing to Call Trans Student by Preferred Pronoun By Mairead McArdle

By on December 8th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/virginia-teacher-fired-after-refusing-to-call-trans-student-by-preferred-pronoun/

A Virginia high-school teacher was fired on Thursday after refusing to address a transgender student by the student’s preferred pronoun.

The school board of the West Point Consolidated School District unanimously approved the district superintendent’s recommendation to let French teacher Peter Vlaming go from West Point High School. He had previously been suspended with pay since October 31.

“The School Board has policies that prohibit discrimination on the basis of gender identity,” said Superintendent Laura Abel. “As detailed during the course of the public hearing, Mr. Vlaming was recommended for termination due to his insubordination and repeated refusal to comply with directives made to him by multiple WPPS administrators. As superintendent, it is my responsibility to enforce board policy, and due to Mr. Vlaming’s non-compliance I therefore recommended termination.”

“My religious faith dictates that I am to love and respect everyone, whether I agree with them or not. Because we are all made in God’s image,” Vlaming said during Thursday’s public hearing. “I am also aware of, and agree with, speech limits that are placed on public-school teachers concerning matters of religious faith. I represent the state in my role as a public-school teacher and therefore speak with a certain authority. That authority is not to be used to promote any one specific worldview, and I don’t. However, we are here today because a specific worldview is being imposed upon me.”

Other students said the student in question was born female and now identifies as male.

“I won’t use male pronouns with a female student that now identifies as a male though I did agree to use the new masculine name but avoid female pronouns,” an online petition supporting Vlaming quotes him as saying. “Administration is requiring that I use masculine pronouns in any and every context at school.”

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Diversity Mania Forges Ahead By George Leef

By on December 8th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/diversity-agenda-higher-education-hiring-california/

In today’s Martin Center article, John Rosenberg looks at the latest advances of the seemingly unstoppable diversity juggernaut. The silly idea that some people are more valuable to a university than others simply because of their ancestry has spread to hiring faculty who supposedly “improve” diversity without even being attached to any academic discipline. Some schools are even demanding that candidates for faculty positions or promotions must submit “diversity statements,” which compel everyone to genuflect to the diversity gods if they want a chance at landing a job or improving their rank.

Not surprisingly, California is leading the way here.

Rosenberg writes, “In other words, the candidates UC-Davis seeks should not only be of a desired color, but also of the right religion, i.e., proven acolytes of the Diversity Creed. ‘We want people who are committed to advancing diversity,’ said Phil Kass, vice provost for academic affairs. ‘This elevates the importance of diversity as a singular qualification in these searches. They have to have that.’”

Will these fervent believers in the Diversity Creed do anything to improve learning among the students? Apparently that hardly matters. Academic expertise is not top priority at Davis, it seems.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Brendan O’Neill: France Revolts Against the Tyranny of Environmentalism

By on December 8th, 2018

https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2018/12/in-praise-of-the-gilets-jaunes/

At last, a people’s revolt against the tyranny of environmentalism. Paris is burning. Not since 1968 has there been such heat and fury in the streetsThousands of ‘gilets jaunes’ stormed the capital at the weekend to rage against Emmanuel Macron and his treatment of them with aloof, technocratic disdain. And yet leftists in Britain and the US have been largely silent, or at least antsy, about this people’s revolt. The same people who got so excited about the staid, static Occupy movement a few years ago — which couldn’t even been arsed to march, never mind riot — seem struck dumb by the sight of tens of thousands of French people taking to the barricades against Macronism.

It isn’t hard to see why. It’s because this revolt is as much against their political orthodoxies as it is against Macron’s out-of-touch and monarchical style. Most strikingly this is a people’s rebellion against the onerous consequences of climate-change policy, against the politics of environmentalism and its tendency to punish the little people for daring to live relatively modern, fossil-fuelled lives. This is new. This is unprecedented. We are witnessing perhaps the first mass uprising against eco-elitism and we should welcome it with open arms to the broader populist revolt that has been sweeping Europe for a few years now.

The ‘gilet jaunes’ — or yellow-vests, after the hi-vis vests they wear — are in rebellion against Macron’s hikes in fuel tax. As part of his and the EU’s commitment to cutting carbon emissions, Macron is punishing the drivers of diesel vehicles in particular, raising the tax by 7.6 cents for every litre of diesel fuel. This will badly hit the pockets of those in rural France, who need to drive, and who can’t just hop on buses as deluded Macronists living in one of the fancy arrondissements of Paris have suggested they should. These people on the periphery of French society — truck drivers, provincial plumbers, builders, deliverymen, teachers, parents — have rocked up to the centre of French society in their tens of thousands three times in recent weeks, their message the same every time: ‘Enough is enough. Stop making our lives harder.’

It is a perfect snapshot of the most important divide in 21st-century Europe: that between a blinkered elite and ordinary people who’ve had as much bossing about, tax rises, paternalism and disdain as they can take. So from his presidential palace in Paris, Macron decrees that the little people of the nation must pay a kind of penance for the eco-crime of driving diesel-fuelled cars, like a modern-day Marie Antoinette deciding with a wave of the hand what is good for the plebs. It’s little wonder that the graffiti left behind following the latest uprising in Paris at the weekend compared Macron to Louis XVI and demanded that he resign.

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