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December 2018

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Why the Press Pays Less Attention to the Murder of Journalists Not Named Khashoggi by Peter Baum

By on December 6th, 2018

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13375/journalists-murder

Ironically, the same members of the media who have been obsessed with Khashoggi and the Saudi-US alliance have devoted little space to the reality that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government has been imprisoning, torturing and killing journalists for years.

The ongoing story of Khashoggi’s murder at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, more than being a function of concern for the Saudi journalist, was less important to Western journalists than attacking the Trump administration.

While the October 2 murder of the Saudi journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, continues to be discussed across the world, the November 23 assassination of a Syrian journalist, Raed Fares, and his devoted friend and cameraman, Hammoud al-Jneid, gunned down in Fares’s home village of Kafrandel, Syria.

This neglect is noteworthy: Fares was among the most prominent critics of Syrian President Bashar Assad’s brutal regime. According to CBS News:

In 2013, Fares posted a satirical YouTube video depicting cave men repeatedly killed by the men representing the Syrian government as men wearing American and European Union flags idly sit by. “This is how the international community reacted to the genocide committed by Assad against the Syrian people,” Fares wrote.

Fares was also a key voice in the “Arab Spring,” and he daily challenged Assad as well as terrorist organizations operating in Syria, such as the Iranian proxy, Hezbollah. According to The New Yorker:

Three years before his assassination, to the day, Fares posted a photo on Facebook of a protest banner lampooning the fact that other countries were fighting proxy wars in Syria: “BLACK FRIDAY SPECIAL OFFER, WHOEVER WHEREVER YOU ARE, BRING YOUR ENEMY AND COME FIGHT IN SYRIA FOR FREE (FREE LAND & SKY) LIMITED TIME OFFER.”

“In the absence of peaceful, democratic political voices,” Fares noted in an op-ed for The Washington Post, “terrorists have been able to convince Syria’s vulnerable youth that violence and destruction can somehow pave the way to stability.” One can view his talk to the Oslo Freedom Forum here. In an interview with NPR, Fares said:

“… Jabhat al-Nusra tried to bomb my car. And I was in it, but I survived. And December, 2014, Jabhat al-Nusra, they kidnapped me from their checkpoint, and three days in their jail. They hanged me to the ceiling for six hours. But an activist in Istanbul, he came and talked to them and convinced them to release me. And earlier this year, they attacked my Radio Fresh station and attacked the Women’s Center, which belongs to us.”

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PRAISE FOR THE MAGNIFICENT REBECCA WEST (1892-1983) BY PETER BAEHR

By on December 6th, 2018

https://quillette.com/2018/12/03/the-unsafe-feminist-rebecca-
The Unsafe Feminist: Rebecca West and the ‘Bitter Rapture’ of Truth

In an era when indulgent university administrators and professors treat students like spoiled children, one longs for intellectuals who address their audience as adults. The British novelist, biographer, literary critic, travel writer and political commentator Rebecca West (1892-1983) is the tonic we need. Like other great authors of the 20th century—including George Orwell and Doris Lessing—West never received a university education. That may help explain her intellectual non-conformism and free-wheeling spirit.

West brushed against orthodoxy like barbed wire against chiffon. She was a suffragist who rejected pacifism in the First World War (and the Second); a leftist who fought communism; an internationalist who spoke up for small nations; an individualist who valued authority and tradition. West never crouched in one position. She was unflinchingly realistic. Human conflict, she said, is inescapable. It is as much a feature of art as it is of states. Eros, too, creates antagonism, for sex is dangerous. Yet human co-operation is ubiquitous. Women and men need each other, and can and do love each other. A feminism that treats women as if they were vulnerable children, and that blames a man for a woman’s own irresponsibility, was seen by West as absurd. Needless to say, her attitude to life is as far from the nursery-school feminism of today’s university—smothering, alarmist, bureaucratic—as it is possible to be.

Freedom carries obligations, West believed—the first of which is to grow up. “I believe in liberty,” she declared in a 1952 credo, particularly the liberty of a person to “be able to say and do what he wishes and what is within his power.” Because every individual is unique, each person “must know some things which are known to nobody else.” The transmission of such knowledge, which “could not be learned from any other source,” requires a space in which people are able to speak their minds.

The contrast between a state of innocence and a mature comprehension of life’s intractable demands (the “hard task of being adult,” as she put it in her 1931 book Ending in Earnest) is central to Rebecca West’s philosophy. We do not expect children to be active in politics; we protect children from politics. Nor do we consider adults who behave like children to be competent human agents. Maturity is the sine qua non of liberty because a pluralist society, unlike an authoritarian one, requires actors of independent mind who can draw a distinction between their civic responsibilities and private sentiments, who are sufficiently restrained to care for the world even as they pursue their own pleasures, and who are willing to take on onerous public burdens. Like great art, the liberal pursuit of freedom demands intelligence and discernment—a readiness “to test the veracity” of fantasies that all of us harbor to some degree and to evaluate “their importance in the light of the intellect.”

Maturity is evidenced, in short, where individuals embrace the “bitter rapture which attends the discovery of any truth,” and where they would rather be disconsolate in “communion with reality” than comforted by orthodoxy. West’s thesis is reminiscent of German social scientist Max Weber’s belief that a politics of responsibility requires “realistic passion.” What marks a mature person (ein reifer Mensch), Weber wrote in Politics as a Vocation (1919), is an attitude of principled realism enabling one to bear the perversity of the world without succumbing to cynicism.

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Talking Millennials Out of Socialism Can a generation marked by privilege and arrogance be reasoned with? Bruce Thornton

By on December 6th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272124/talking-millennials-out-socialism-bruce-thornton

Writing last week about the new affection for socialism on the part of Millellenials, electoral maven Karl Rove warned us not to ignore or dismiss this enthusiasm. Socialism’s long record of failure “doesn’t mean new forms of socialism can’t gain a following.” Rove’s solution is for Republicans to “do the hard work of updating old arguments,” and “hone their arguments” against socialist policies in preparation for the 2020 presidential race.

Welcome to 2500 years of dubious thinking about the power of rational persuasion and coherent argument to talk people out of bad ideas. It didn’t save Socrates from the hemlock, and it’s unlikely to change the minds of the worst-educated, most self-centered, and most pampered cohort in American history.

This stubborn belief in the power of rational thought and knowledge to improve human life lies at the heart of modern political ideologies like Marxism and progressivism. Both assume that the knowledge useful for politically organizing a state or society is “scientific,” comprising principles and techniques that are beyond ideology and universally true. Hence the need for enlightened technocratic elites to control social institutions and use power in order to rationally arrange human existence more justly and efficiently.

The flaw in this thinking was first identified by contemporaries of Plato, whose Republic imagined a utopia of elite Guardians educated to exercise totalitarian control over society. And the earliest critics of Plato’s flawed assumptions about human nature were likewise Greek writers such as Thucydides and Sophocles. Both argued that a human nature universally subject to irrational passions, free will, and a tragic world would always to some degree triumph over the rational mind.

Yet despite the subsequent millennia in which history has demonstrated that the road to utopia is lined with mountains of corpses, the dream of creating heaven on earth by applying rational techniques of control and improvement over human beings has not lost its allure. In modern times, the decline of faith and the belief in a transcendent reality has made us even more vulnerable to political religions, those delusional visions of human power and will alone able to eliminate the tragic limits of earthly life, such as inequality, suffering, injustice, and violence.

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Justin Trudeau’s Canada Embraces a World Without Borders By Salim Mansur

By on December 6th, 2018

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/12/justin_trudeaus_canada_embraces_a_world_without_borders.html

The Liberal government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is set to sign the UN Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration at an intergovernmental meeting in Marrakech, Morocco, on December 10, 2018.

Few Canadians are aware of what this UN Global Compact represents; even fewer have been consulted, and without any mandate except for a parliamentary majority, Justin Trudeau is committed in signing Canada into an agreement with far-reaching consequences — not only for Canadians. Canada agreeing to abide by the agreement will also have consequences for Americans, as among migrants entering Canada might well be those intending to sneak into the United States across the world’s longest open border.

The UN Global Compact spells out, in 34 pages of fine print, requirements for member-states to adopt as policy accommodating unfettered mass migration from the global South to the North.

Human migration is as old as human history. But in modern times, especially in the period following the end of the Second World War, resulting in massive dislocation of the European population, settlement of migrants was arranged and conducted by national governments with support of their citizens. The Global Compact, instead, is a UN top-down arrangement to deal with the migration problem turned into the most disruptive global crisis in recent years. This time, the crisis is the result of the massive failure of UN-engineered policies of socio-economic development of post-colonial societies in Africa, Asia, and Central and South America.

What we have witnessed since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the end of the Cold War in 1992, is a spike in wars, genocide, failed states, and terrorism. These have cumulatively resulted in mass migration as an escape from the collective failure of people in those countries to build and administer an orderly society, despite trillions of aid dollars provided by countries of the North, directly or through the UN agencies.

And despite this record of the failure of UN-driven development policies, the UN remains insistent on demanding more of the same in its 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The Global Compact is a critical part of this agenda, based on the notion that “Migration contributes to positive development outcomes.”

There is little or no evidence of migration from the global South providing for positive development in the developing countries of that global South. Instead, the Global Compact turns migration into a human rights issue and confers “rights” on migrants that are the same as those of the citizens of the host countries, “rights” those governments are obliged to “respect, protect and fulfil.”

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ISIS Finds a Niche in Northern Iraq In a remote, mountainous buffer zone between Iraqi troops and Kurdish ones, the terror group digs in. By Jonathan Spyer

By on December 6th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/isis-finds-a-niche-in-northern-iraq-1544053966

Makhmur District, Iraq

The Qara Chokh mountain range in northern Iraq is remote, parched and inhospitable. That’s what makes it attractive to the core of Islamic State, which has survived the four-year U.S.-led war against its caliphate. ISIS is now regrouping near here and in similar hard-to-reach corners of Iraq and Syria. The terror group isn’t finished.

“It’s more than 15 years that there is al Qaeda here,” says Lt. Col. Surood Barzanji, an officer of the Kurdish Peshmerga’s 14th Brigade, currently tasked by the Kurdish Regional Government with maintaining security in the mountain area. “They changed their name to Daesh”—the Arabic acronym for ISIS—“and now there is another one coming. A new one.” We look across the Hussein al-Ghazi Pass toward an imposing warren of caves where, he says, ISIS fighters are living. Two miles away, the first checkpoints of the Iraqi Security Forces are visible. In the no man’s land between Kurdish and Iraqi forces, Islamic State finds its niche.

Later, in a Peshmerga briefing room on the mountain, Col. Barzanji traces the route ISIS men use to reach their haven in the caves. It begins on the western side of the Tigris River, south of Mosul around the town of Hamam Alil. This region of Iraq is known to local residents, Peshmerga and Arab fighters alike as “Kandahar”—like the famously violent province of Afghanistan—because of the strength of support there for the Sunni jihadist cause.

“They cross the Tigris and they head southeast,” says Col. Barzanji, “passing through the villages here” via the Great Zab river and finally to the sanctuary of the Qara Chokh caves. “The villages along the way were Daesh supporters. One place, Tel al-Reem, there’s nine emirs”—commanders—“from Daesh that came from there. So the fighters pass through those areas and the villagers leave food for them. They come through on foot or on motorcycles.”

Once in the caves on the steep mountain, the fighters are relatively safe. Finding water is their main challenge. Iraqi forces have poisoned the one natural well, limiting the number of men able to live there.

Efforts to flush the jihadists out continue. Coalition aircraft strafed the mountain a day before our arrival, firing 12 rockets. Four ISIS members were killed and a pickup truck destroyed in another coalition airstrike here on Nov. 14. On Oct. 31, according to the coalition media office, some 20 ISIS fighters were killed on the mountain following airstrikes and a ground assault by Iraqi special-operations forces. But the jihadists remain, moving back and forth from the caves through the friendly villages and the countryside. In early November they set off an improvised explosive device near the mountain, killing four Iraqi federal policemen.

Qara Chokh is only one district in what some observers call ISIS’ “mountain state.” A recent report from the Institute for the Study of War found ISIS maintains similar networks of support and de facto control in the Hamrin Mountains in Diyala Province, the Hawija District, eastern Salah al-Din Province, Daquq and south of Mosul city—all in Iraq’s central Sunni heartland.

The report, entitled “ISIS’ Second Resurgence,” puts the number of fighters available to Islamic State in Iraq and Syria at 30,000. It also estimates that ISIS has smuggled as much as $400 million out of Iraq and invested it across the region. The terror group’s traditional revenue generators, including kidnapping, extortion and drug smuggling, still continue within Syria and Iraq. CONTINUE AT SITE

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MARILYN PENN: WHEN SALLY MET STORMY

By on December 6th, 2018

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

Let’s start with some brief statistics about the explosion of pornography online: porn sites receive more hits than Netflix, Amazon and Twitter combined – 35% of all downloads are porn related; 90% of boys and 60% of girls have seen internet porn before the age of 18; 83% of boys and 55% of girls have seen same-sex intercourse online; child-porn is one of the fastest growing businesses; pornography is a global $97 billion industry.

Now let’s go to the NYT article of Dec 4th detailing Sally Quin acting as hostess to Stormy Daniels at Politics & Prose, a Wash DC bookstore co-owned by a former Hillary adviser. The occasion was a coming-out party for the porn star’s new book, whose title I won’t mention, because unlike Sally and the NYT, I am averse to increasing the interest in pornography and the financial benefits to its performers and producers. But Sally and the Times go by the adage “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” and Stormy was hailed by Ms. Quin as a woman who has “…turned ethics and values and morals around, upside down in this country. You – Stormy Daniels the porn star – are the one who is the ethical person.”

The Times didn’t stop there – its journalist went on to interview some in the audience: “attractive woman, I was hoping she might remove her clothes. Write that down,” by Dan Schwartz, 73, and Marjorie Perloff, 75 thought Stormy was “an articulate porn star, that’s what makes her special.” Some might claim the enormous size of her breast implants might be more responsible for that but Sally summed it up with her vote of approval: “I’ve watched Stormy’s porn and it’s really good.”

This little event attended by Washington liberals took place while the country is in spasms over male sexual harassment of females, toppling celebrities and moguls with charges dating back to the last century, agonizing over the supposed increase in rape and harassment on college campuses and castigating Victoria’s Secret for setting up beautiful women as unrealistic standard bearers for young women. It would take a psychiatrist to parse this cognitive dissonance but Sally and the people who agreed to be quoted were trounced by the reaction of the guest of honor herself whose comment was “how –cked up is that? Yo.” Indeed

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Jason Chaffetz: Why is Michael Cohen prosecuted when Hillary Clinton, Eric Holder and Lois Lerner were not?

By on December 6th, 2018

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/jason-chaffetz-why-is-michael-cohen-prosecuted-when-hillary-clinton-eric-holder-and-lois-lerner-were-not

With a Republican president in place and soon-to-be Democrat-run House, the Department of Justice (DOJ) has conveniently remembered that they have the ability to prosecute people who lie to Congress. This was a power they had inexplicably forgotten about during the 10 years that Democrats were benefiting from witnesses who lied.

No doubt there should be consequences and accountability if you testify to Congress under oath and blatantly lie or violate the law. But the DOJ seems to have different standards based on which party’s political fortunes will be impacted. It is this unequal application of justice that is dividing the country and threatens peace.

Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s former attorney, struck a plea deal with the DOJ for lying to Congress. But what about all the other egregious cases of misconduct interacting with Congress? Why weren’t those pursued or prosecuted?

Let’s look back at how a very similar case was handled just a few short years ago. After FBI Director James Comey announced there would be no charges against Secretary of State Hillary Clinton or any of her associates for a variety of potential unlawful acts, Comey testified before the House Oversight Committee. I was the Chairman of the committee at the time.

When I asked Comey specifically if he had reviewed Secretary Clinton’s testimony before the Benghazi Select Committee, he confirmed the FBI never reviewed nor considered that testimony. As Chair of Oversight, I along with JudiciaryChairman Bob Goodlatte sent a formal request to the DOJ. We never even got a response. Note the contradiction: Cohen is forced into a plea deal and Clinton’s lies to Congress were not even reviewed.

The inconsistency always seems to conveniently favor the Democrats and penalize those connected to Donald Trump.

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Sen. Hirono: Democrats Have a Hard Time “Connecting” With People Because Of “How Smart We Are” By Ian Schwartz

By on December 6th, 2018

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2018/12/06/sen_hirono_democrats_have_a_hard_time_connecting_with_people_because_of_how_smart_we_are.html

Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-HI) said Democrats have a difficult time “connecting” with voters because of “how smart we are” that “we know so much.” Hirono was interviewed by journalist Dahlia Lithwick at the ‘Bend Towards Justice’ conference in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday.

“We’re really good at shoving out all the information that touch people here (points to head) but not here (points to heart),” Hirono said of Democrats.

“I’ve been saying it at all of our Senate Democratic retreats that we need to speak to the heart not in a manipulative way, not in a way that brings forth everybody’s fears and resentments but truly to speak to the hearts so that people know that we’re actually on their side,” the Senator said.

“We have a really hard time doing that,” Hirono lamented, “and one of the reasons it was told to me at one of our retreats was that we Democrats know so much, that is true. And we have kind of have to tell everyone how smart we are and so we have a tendency to be very left brain.”

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Keeping the Mentally Ill Out of Jail An innovative Miami-Dade program shows the way. Stephen Eide

By on December 6th, 2018

https://www.city-journal.org/miami-dade-criminal-mental-health-project%E2%80%8B

Barbaric conditions in mental institutions were a common target of journalistic exposés during the asylum era of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These days, though, most accounts of gross maltreatment of the mentally ill concern jails, not hospitals. Deinstitutionalization emptied America’s asylums in the name of providing more humane treatment, but that approach has left many seriously mentally ill people on the streets, where, untreated, they can spiral into disorder and violent behavior—often putting them behind bars. This year, Alisa Roth’s book Insane: America’s Criminal Treatment of Mental Illness and a series of articles by the Virginian-Pilot on mental illness in American jails have detailed the many ways in which incarceration tends to worsen serious mental illness.

For starters, jails are full of criminals. Serious offenders often harass, harm, and degrade those locked up for more minor offenses, including the mentally ill. Jails are noisy, and the population is highly transient (the standard stay is less than a month), making for “an especially unstable and disorienting social environment,” in Roth’s words. Effective treatment depends on an accurate diagnosis, but that can be a complicated process under ordinary circumstances (there’s no brain scan or blood test for mental illness), and even worse for a newly arrived jail inmate who may never have seen a psychiatrist before. When the mentally ill have trouble following jail rules, their difficulties can come across to corrections officers as insubordination.

Their propensity to break rules and commit additional crimes behind bars helps explain why mentally ill inmates often stay in jail far longer than typical inmates. They behave erratically, so it’s hard for them to mix with the general inmate population; but putting them in solitary confinement is unlikely to improve their condition. Recovery from mental illness requires not only therapy and medication but also meaningful opportunities for recreation and employment tailored to needs and capabilities. These aren’t likely to be abundant in jail, since, among other reasons, the unpredictability of release dates frustrates the development of plans for care. Incarcerated Americans have a constitutional right to mental-health care, thanks to Supreme Court and federal court rulings, but, far too often, those guarantees don’t equate to real-world benefits.

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Victor Davis Hanson:A reminder that abstract progressive ideologies impose life-and-death consequences on millions

By on December 6th, 2018

https://www.city-journal.org/california-wild-fires

California was, until recently, clouded under a blanket of smoke for weeks. Stanford University, where I work, sent students and faculty home early for Thanksgiving. The campus is more than 200 miles southwest of the 150,000-acre Camp Fire that just incinerated the Sierra Nevada foothill town of Paradise, and yet the entire Bay Area has been buried under collateral haze for days. I am a fifth-generation native Californian and remember many horrific Sierra Nevada fires, but never anything remotely comparable to the blazes of 2018.

Here in Fresno County, in the San Joaquin Valley, positioned between the Coast Range and Sierra Nevada mountains, the stagnant air for weeks has remained as polluted as China’s. When the normal northerlies blew, we were smoked in from the Camp Fire, 250 miles to the north. When the rarer southerlies took over, some of the smoke from the 100,000-acre Woolsey fire in the canyons of Malibu arrived from 230 miles distant.

July and August were nearly as incendiary as November. The huge, 450,000-acre Mendocino County conflagrations, the horrific Shasta-area Carr fire (nearly a half-million acres), and the nearby Ferguson fire in the Madera foothills all combined to make the air nearly unbreathable for two months throughout the Central Valley. Yet Californians in the irrigated center of the state were the lucky ones, breathing smoke rather than seeing fires overwhelm their homes and communities.

What is going on in California? Governor Jerry Brown, most of the Democratic-majority state legislature, the academy, and the administrative state have rushed to blame man-made global warming for the undeniable dry spell from May to mid-November that turned mountain canyons into tinderboxes. Usually autumn rains keep hillsides wet enough to prevent sudden combustions when the late autumn winds kick up. Not this year. Yet, if California has been arid and rainless these past months, two years ago we experienced near-record snow and rain that started in early fall and continued into late spring. Last year, we saw near-normal levels of precipitation.

If our life-giving reservoirs of the state’s vast California Water Project and federal Central Valley Project are currently not full, it is mostly because millions of acre-feet of stored water were released to flow into the San Francisco Bay estuaries and the delta — contradicting most of the original mandates of the water projects of providing flood control, power generation, lake recreation, and irrigation for California residents. Our ancestors rightly had assumed that two-thirds of the state’s people would continue to live where one-third of the state’s precipitation fell, requiring vast water transfers aimed exclusively for municipal and irrigation needs, admittedly at the expense of nineteenth-century whitewater rivers, flood plains, and riparian landscapes. Protecting the delta smelt population in San Francisco Bay, or restoring ancient salmon runs in the San Joaquin River, were not the concerns of these farseeing water engineers, who never imagined that their envisioned third-generation water projects would either be cancelled outright or would fail to keep pace with California’s burgeoning growth.

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