Displaying posts published in

December 2018

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Indivisible Jerusalem belongs to Israel by Peter Smith *****

By on December 11th, 2018

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/12/indivisible-jerusalem-belongs-to-israel/

Jewish Jerusalem is a shining symbol of our Judeo-Christian civilisation’s origin. Out of it has flowed individual freedom, a culture of tolerance and decency, science, technology, capitalism and prosperity. Nothing matches it — except in the inverse, the refusal to recognise the city as Israel’s rightful capital.

O come, O come, Emmanuel
And ransom captive Israel

These are the first two lines of a well-known hymn which opened the service at my local Anglican church on Sunday last. It is apparently taken from a 9th-century Latin hymn. I assume it is no accident that Muslim invaders were occupying Jerusalem at the time. But it doesn’t matter whether that linkage is historically true, it is incidental to my theme which is that Israel and the people of Israel — to wit the Jews, distinctly not Palestinian Arabs — figure prominently in Christianity and in Western civilisation.

Jesus, the Apostles, Saint Paul were part of a Jewish population long occupying the land to the west of the Jordan River, including Jerusalem. They were not interlopers. The interlopers came later via conquest. Imams did not go barefoot into the unknown carrying copies of the Koran to proselytize by sweet reason.

But step back. Conquest was the name of the game for much of the history of mankind. It is useless to attach blame based on recent norms. That leaves us to make a judgment call. Who should ‘we’ recognise as being the rightful owners of the city of Jerusalem. Leave aside the broader question of the rightful geographical boundaries of Israel; though it has strong historical claims to all of Judaea and Samaria (the West Bank), which it currently occupies.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Airbnb unfairly sides with Palestinians in West Bank BY Lawrence J. Haas

By on December 11th, 2018

https://www.sacbee.com/news/news-services/article222709440.html

“We are most certainly not the experts when it comes to the historical disputes in this region,” Airbnb stated in announcing that it would no longer list rentals by Israeli citizens in the West Bank. Arbnb’s modesty is commendable, but its ignorance is insidious.

Its policy for the West Bank subjects Israel to a singular global standard and reflects an all-too-common narrative about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. By empowering one-sided Israel-haters, it also makes peace less likely, not more.

The West Bank is obviously disputed territory, but Airbnb sees the dispute only through Palestinian eyes.

After all, it isn’t leaving the West Bank. If you want a place to rent there, you can use Airbnb to find one that’s owned by a Christian or a Muslim. You just can’t find any of the 200 or so owned by an Israeli Jew.

Airbnb concluded that “Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank” are “at the core of the dispute between Israelis and Palestinians.”

So, Airbnb believes, what’s not “at the core of the dispute” is the rejection of Israel’s right to exist that’s broadly shared among Palestinians and their leaders; or the incitement to violence against Jews on Palestinian TV and social media; or textbooks that teach Palestinian school children that a future Palestine should encompass all of what’s now Israel; or Palestinian claims that Jews have no historical ties to key religious sites in Jerusalem.

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MEDIA, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Guardian, Tommy Robinson, and Me Britain’s top rag uncovers a nonexisent “global network”. Bruce Bawer

By on December 11th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272200/guardian-tommy-robinson-and-me-bruce-bawer

Damn it, the Guardian is on to us. On Friday, Britain’s most important, or rather self-important, newspaper ran a piece headlined “Revealed: the hidden global network behind Tommy Robinson.”

Move over, Pentagon Papers.

Clearly, this is Pulitzer Prize-level journalism – although, unfortunately, Brits are ineligible for that particular distinction. Obviously, the Guardian reporters in question – Josh Halliday, Lois Beckett, and Caelainn Barr – have stumbled upon that obscure and highly sophisticated research tool known as Google. And through Google, they’ve uncovered the sensational, previously unnoticed fact that two “US thinktanks…have published a succession of articles in support of Robinson,” while a third U.S. think tank has – gasp! – helped pay for Tommy’s legal fees.

These three think tanks, the Guardian scribes assert, “have been repeatedly accused of stoking anti-Islam sentiment in the west and spreading false information about Muslim refugees in Europe.” (Among the institutions that have been in the forefront of making these baseless accusations, unsurprisingly, is the Guardian itself.) The Guardian writers further contend that Tommy’s support from these “prominent and well-financed groups undermines Robinson’s self-styled image of a far-right populist underdog whose anti-Islam agenda is being silenced by the British establishment.”

Hold on a second and take a look at that last sentence. Has Tommy really sought to style an image for himself as a “far-right” activist? Who on earth would do that? Or has he constantly denied, quite correctly, that there’s anything “far-right” about him? This is journalism at its shabbiest. As for his being “silenced by the British establishment” – no, he hasn’t exactly been silenced. This Guardian article itself is a perfect illustration of the fact that he has, rather, been smeared, maligned, defamed, vilified, calumniated, misquoted, misinterpreted, and misrepresented by that establishment. Consistently.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Brexit Retreat Opens Door For BoJo Boris Johnson, our diarist reckons, has earned the chance to try to bring home a Brexit deal. by Stephen MacLean

By on December 11th, 2018

https://www.nysun.com/foreign/brexit-retreat-opens-door-for-bojo/90492/

Prime Minister Theresa May’s retreat on Brexit is best seen as an opening for her former foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, who is the last contender for prime minister to have seen the European Union question clearly from the start. What Mrs. May is doing, after all, is what Mr. Johnson proposed, once it became so clear to so many that she had been snookered in Brussels.

What Mrs. May did in the Commons this afternoon was to announce that she was postponing Tuesday’s vote on the Government’s Withdrawal Agreement bill with the European Union. “While there is broad support for many of the key aspects of the deal,” Mrs. May confessed, “there remains widespread and deep concern.”

The Prime Minister made it clear she comprehends that had she proceeded, “the deal would be rejected by a significant margin.” In the context, it is a breath-taking admission by a leader who’d seemed almost willfully blind on the point. Now, she said, the Government “will therefore defer the vote scheduled for tomorrow and not proceed to divide the House at this time.”

It is easy to see why Mrs. May is vote-shy. Just last week, after all, the government lost three votes. Two were in relation to the legal advice the government had received on the agreement. Parliament had asked for the advice in November but, when only a summary was provided, the Commons demanded the full report.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Report: Women’s March Leaders Spread Anti-Semitic Trope During Inaugural Meeting By Jack Crowe

By on December 11th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/report-womens-march-leaders-spread-anti-semitic-trope-during-inaugural-meeting/

Women’s March leaders Tamikah Mallory and Carmen Perez endorsed an infamous anti-Semitic trope during the group’s first meeting in November 2016, according to a wide-ranging report published by Tablet on Tuesday

Mallory and Perez “asserted that Jewish people bore a special collective responsibility as exploiters of black and brown people — and even, according to a close secondhand source, claimed that Jews were proven to have been leaders of the American slave trade,” the report says.

Mallory and Perez, who were invited to join the Women’s March soon after Trump’s election because the movement’s white founders felt they needed greater diversity among their leadership, deny discussing Jewish people in any capacity during the meeting in question.

As the report notes, the thoroughly debunked notion that Jewish people organized and profited from American chattel slavery was popularized by the Nation of Islam’s book, The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, which casts Jews as a historic oppressor of black people.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Britain’s Brexit Self-Abasement By Rich Lowry

By on December 11th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/12/theresa-may-brexit-plan-haphazard-provisional/

May’s Brexit is becoming increasingly haphazard and provisional.

Shakespeare famously wrote of the “sceptered isle” of Britain acting as a moat “against the envy of less happier lands.”

Lately, the less happier lands are winning in a rout.

Britain is suffering a political meltdown as it struggles to make good on a historic vote in 2016 to leave the European Union. The decision for a so-called Brexit was a stirring statement of independence and self-government by a people who have defined themselves down the centuries by their stiff-necked resistance to anyone — whether overweening monarchs or continental tyrants — who would threaten either.

That was before London ran up against the bureaucracy of the would-be European super state based in Brussels, and before it was led, if that’s the right word, by Tory Prime Minister Theresa May.

Presiding over a divided party, facing a pro-Remain British establishment and negotiating with a hostile EU, May never had an easy task. She has nonetheless not only failed to rise to the occasion but been crushed by it.

May has just pulled her Brexit deal from a parliamentary vote that she was going to lose in an embarrassing drubbing that might have loosed her increasingly precarious grip on power.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Fighting Democrats’ Dirty Politics By Karin McQuillan

By on December 11th, 2018

https://amgreatness.com/2018/12/10/fighting

The midterms are in the rearview mirror and the chattering classes are back to debating fake collusion with Russia and a looming indictment of the president. Before the midterms, Republican voters were told this election was consequential. After the midterms, we’re told it is just one more split-government election, move along.

I’m not moving along so easily, and neither is my circle of patriotic MAGA friends.

Losing the House of Representatives was a crippling blow on immigration, the cornerstone of the Democrats’ drive to permanent domination. Any hopes of Democrats accepting Trump’s 2016 victory as normal politics is dead, and now they have Congress from which to harry and hobble the president.

Democrats have dehumanized Trump and all his supporters as white supremacists, in order to justify violence against our republican foundations. Since inauguration day they have undermined respect for the presidential election, the Supreme Court, the electoral college, freedom of speech and religion and the right to bear arms. Democrats claim these hallowed institutions are bringing on fascism.

Danger lights should be going off in every decent person’s mind. We are not in a terrain of politics as usual, but in a new and terrifying world of the hard Left.

Democrats justify their crossing every line of normal political behavior in America by manufacturing a Russian crisis out of thin air. The only “crisis” is that Republicans won an election, fair and square.

The Three Rules of Democrat Dirty Politics 101

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HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Terrorism Charges: Coming Soon for New Mexico Jihadists? Feds say a superseding indictment is on the way. Matthew Vadum

By on December 11th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272207/terrorism-charges-coming-soon-new-mexico-jihadists-matthew-vadum

The five accused Muslim terrorists arrested at a jihadist training facility in New Mexico this summer will soon be charged with “terrorism and or kidnapping” in addition to the current firearms charges already pending, according to federal prosecutors.

This is the case in which five adults, including Siraj Ibn Wahhaj, were arrested after authorities found 11 hungry, filthy children living in squalid conditions in a terrorist training compound in Amalia, Taos County, a remote part of New Mexico on Aug. 3. The children were reportedly being trained to commit school shootings.

The remains of a three-year-old disabled boy, since identified as Wahhaj’s son, Abdul-Ghani Wahhaj, were discovered on the property which was filled with weapons. Authorities also found a manual explaining how to carry out terrorist attacks and fight hand-to-hand.

According to investigators, Abdul-Ghani died during a ruqyah, which is an Islamic rite of exorcism, in early 2018, after the boy’s father, Siraj Ibn Wahhaj and Leveille refused to give him epilepsy medication, which they claimed caused him to become “possessed.” He reportedly cried and foamed at the mouth during the ritual which was performed for hours each day until he died.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The Dangers of Asymmetry By Victor Davis Hanson

By on December 11th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/12/americans-frustrated-with-international-disequilibrium-trade-immigration/

International disequilibrium in trade, religious freedoms, immigration — plenty of Americans are fed up.

It is strange how suddenly a skeptical Wall Street, CEOs, and even university and think-tank policy analysts are now jumping on the once-taboo Trump bandwagon on China: that if something is not done to stop China’s planned trajectory to global hegemony, based on its repudiation of the entire post-war trade and commercial order, then it will soon be too late. In a wider sense, at some point on a variety of fronts, Americans got fed up with perceived lopsidedness, and their ensuing exasperation started to change status-quo thinking and policy — whether China’s flagrant cheating, the recent illustration, via the “caravan,” of rampant hypocrisies about illegal immigration, or weariness with the asymmetries with the Islamic world.

China

China in its planned trajectory to world global supremacy makes two assumptions about the United States:

that China can weld government-run market capitalism to autocratic government to improve on supposedly chaotic Western democratic and republican government and indulgent human rights;
that the Western world will continue to excuse Chinese violations of global commercial and trade norms, on their misplaced theories either that the more successful the Chinese become, the more they will evolve to a democratic and transparent society and join the Western liberal community and follow its post-war international norms, or that there is nothing the West can do about a fated Chinese supremacy.

As to Chinese trust that their brand of government-managed capitalism is superior, in the short term, it is true that authoritarian governments, mostly in wartime, occasionally can achieve temporary spectacular results through partnering with capitalists.

But in the longer run, managed capitalism proves far less flexible and ultimately less productive than free markets that are moderately regulated by elected governments rather than heavily controlled by authoritarians or socialists.

In addition, the Chinese misjudge Western patience, especially as its surpluses grow, its violations of copyright and patents become more flagrant, and espionage and technological appropriation are seen as a Chinese birthright.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Voters Rebel in Europe’s Big Three Western political systems are under strain despite good economic times. By Walter Russell Mead

By on December 11th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/voters-rebel-in-europes-big-three-1544486166

The past week has seen the leaders of the three most important European states fighting for their political lives. In London, Prime Minister Theresa May struggles to hold power as opinion in Parliament moves against her Brexit agreement. In Paris, a firestorm of public rage has humbled President Emmanuel Macron and forced him into an undignified retreat before street protests he previously vowed to ignore. Even Berlin experienced its share of political drama as Chancellor Angela Merkel officially stepped down under pressure as leader of the Christian Democratic Union. Her preferred successor was able to eke out only a narrow win over anti-Merkel challengers.

The turbulence in these countries, pillars of European and indeed world order, isn’t just about particular leaders. Their entire political systems have come under strain. In the U.K., even before the Brexit referendum, the rise of the Scottish National Party and Jeremy Corbyn’s victory over the moderate wing of the Labour Party had already transformed the political system. In France, Mr. Macron came to power as the existing party system imploded. In Germany, the antiestablishment Left and Alternative for Germany parties have been steadily gaining strength as centrist parties falter in the polls.

It’s one thing for political systems to face populist revolts when times are bad. President-elect Jair Bolsonaro’s victory in Brazil came on the heels of a deep recession and a massive corruption scandal. Voters turned against a political establishment that was corrupt and economically inept. Italy’s populists came to power in a country where, a decade after the financial crisis, gross domestic product has not yet returned to 2008 levels. Persistent crime and poverty helped elevate a left-wing populist to the presidency in Mexico.

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