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January 2019

Yes, Anti-Zionism Is The Same As Anti-Semitism ‘Anti-Zionism’ is the predominant justification for violence, murder, and hatred against Jews in Europe and the Middle East. It’s now infiltrating American politics. By David Harsanyi

http://thefederalist.com/2019/01/08/yes-anti-zionism-is-anti-semitism/

In a recent New York Times op-ed titled “Anti-Zionism isn’t the same as Anti-Semitism,” columnist Michelle Goldberg defended Ilhan Omar, a newly elected House representative who has claimed that Jews have hypnotized the world for their evil works. A person can oppose “Jewish ethno-nationalism without being a bigot,” Goldberg explained. “Indeed,” she went on, “it’s increasingly absurd to treat the Israeli state as a stand-in for Jews writ large, given the way the current Israeli government has aligned itself with far-right European movements that have anti-Semitic roots.”

It’s true, of course, that anti-Zionism isn’t “the same” as common anti-Semitism. Anti-Zionism is the most significant and consequential form of anti-Semitism that exists in the world today. Anti-Zionism has done more to undermine Jewish safety than all the ugly tweets, dog whistles, and white nationalist marches combined. It is the predominant justification for violence, murder, and hatred against Jews in Europe and the Middle East. And it’s now infiltrating American politics.

What was once festering on the progressive fringes has found its way into elected offices and the heart of the liberal activist movement. As Democrats increasingly turn on Israel, Jewish liberals, many of whom have already purposely muddled Jewish values with progressive ones, are attempting to untether Israel from its central role in Jewish culture and faith for political expediency.

Now, of course, merely being critical of the Israeli government isn’t anti-Semitic. No serious person has ever argued otherwise. I’ve never heard any Israeli official or AIPAC spokesman ever claim that Israel is a “stand-in for Jews writ large,” nor have I ever heard an Israeli prime minister profess to speak for all Jews. (We have the ADL for that.) Israel has featured both left-wing and right-wing governments, and like governments in any liberal democracy, its leaders can be corrupt, misguided, or incompetent. Israelis criticize their governments every day.

The Baseless, Trite Arguments against Walls By Douglas Murray

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-baseless-trite-arguments-against-walls/

Of all of the flatulent memes that have been running low on gas since the late 1960s, the most aggravating — against stiff competition — are probably all variations on “Build bridges not walls.” The bridge I must cross most often in an average year is Westminster Bridge. Since a jihadist plowed a car along the pavements of one side of the Westminster Bridge (killing and wounding dozens of locals and tourists) a couple of years ago, it has been covered in walls. Specifically, it has been covered in metal crash barriers erected to stop replays of that incident. So as I find myself reminded on a weekly basis at least, when it comes to bridges and walls, the world is not necessarily an either/or choice. Who could have guessed?

Well, a lot of the president’s opponents by the sound of it. There are satisfactory arguments on both sides about the utility of building a wall along the southern border of the U.S. My personal view is that since the president was partly elected on the promise of building this wall, he should probably get a chance to build it and give at least some voters what they asked for.

But it is not the practical but the moral objections to the president’s initiative that are so unutterably tired. For instance, one objection just made by Nancy Pelosi is that building a wall is “an immorality” and “not who we are as a nation.” Walls are also, according to Pelosi an “old way of thinking.”

In fact, in Europe — among many other places — walls are not an old way of thinking at all. In fact, they are a much newer way of thinking than anything Nancy Pelosi is offering. Since the European migrant crisis was at its height in 2015, countries across central and eastern Europe have begun erecting walls. I have gone to see a number of them, and very smart, modern fence-like things they are, with movement-detectors, drones to fly overhead, and more. When the Hungarian government erected their first wall (having had hundreds of thousands of people pour across their previously un-walled borders in a few months), they received some criticism from their neighbors.

Ginsburg Missing from SCOTUS Bench for Second Day in a Row By Mairead McArdle

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/ruth-bader-ginsburg-missing-from-scotus-bench-for-second-straight-day/

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg missed a second day in a row on the Supreme Court bench Tuesday after missing oral arguments for the first time in her over 25 years on the court Monday.

Justice Ginsburg, 85, will participate in the court’s decisions from home but is “unable to be present,” said Chief Justice John Roberts as the court convened for its second day in 2019. She is recovering from surgery on December 21 that removed two cancerous spots in her left lung, discovered during tests after a November fall that broke three of her ribs. Physicians said the surgery had been a success, as she appeared to be cancer-free.

Ginsburg’s health troubles have worried liberals already smarting at the composition of the Court, where conservatives gained a majority after President Trump appointed Judge Brett Kavanaugh to replace retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy. If she is forced to step down, her replacement will be Trump’s third appointment to the court. However, she has weathered colon cancer and pancreatic cancer in the past and said last summer that she aims to serve “at least five more years” on the court.

This term the court will consider Trump’s plan to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and his ban on transgender individuals serving in the military, among other hot-button issues.

Can Higher Education Be Saved? By Victor Davis Hanson

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/higher-education-decline-propaganda-intolerance/

Universities are expensive engines of propaganda and intolerance, and many non-academics are offering scholarly material free online.

America is schizophrenic about its major universities and, to a lesser extent, its undergraduate colleges.

On the one hand, higher education’s professional schools in medicine and business, as well as graduate and undergraduate programs in math, science, and engineering, are the world’s best. America dominates the lists of the top universities compiled in global surveys conducted from the United Kingdom to Japan.

On the other hand, the liberal arts and social sciences have long ago mostly lost their reputations. Go online to Amazon or to the local Barnes and Noble bookstore, and the books on literature, art, and history are often not the products of university professors and presses.

Few believe any more that current liberal-arts programs have prepared graduates to write persuasively and elegantly, to read critically and to think inductively while drawing on a wide body of literary, linguistic, historical, artistic, and philosophical knowledge. In fairness, that is no longer the aim of higher education. When students at tony colleges present petitions objecting to free speech or the right of guests to give lectures, they are usually full of grammatical errors and often incoherent.

Colleges, with some major exceptions (Hillsdale most preeminently), simply do not ensure the teaching of such skills any more. Of course, there remain wonderful classes, courageous deans who buck trends, and hardworking faculty who teach splendidly and have received modest compensation and little credit for their yeoman work. But they are a minority and a shrinking one at that.

By and large, the bachelor’s degree, even in a liberal-arts major, no longer certifies that a graduate will be able to read, reason, compute, or draw on a body of knowledge far more effectively than those without an undergraduate degree. The decline of the university has been an ongoing tragedy since the 1960s, but the erosion has accelerated because of ideological bias and its twin, incompetence. Here are five major recent and additional catalysts.

MELTDOWN: Ocasio-Cortez Explodes After Fact-Check, Doesn’t Want To Be Held To Same Standards As Trump By Ryan Saavedra

https://www.dailywire.com/news/41889/meltdown-ocasio-cortez-explodes-after-fact-check-ryan-saavedra

Socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) exploded on Monday after multiple left-wing publications fact-checked her and criticized her defense of the numerous falsehoods she has told.

The former bartender claimed on CBS News’ “60 Minutes” on Sunday that people were too focused on being “factually” accurate, and not focused enough on being morally right, which drew widespread criticism.

That criticism carried over into news reports today from left-leaning publications, including The Washington Post and CNN, which published reports titled, “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s very bad defense of her falsehoods” and “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s very slippery slope on facts,” respectively.

Even leftist Whoopi Goldberg slammed Ocasio-Cortez, advising her to “sit still for a minute and learn the job .. .before you start pooping on people and what they’ve done, you got to do something … ”

Ocasio-Cortez then suggested that it was not fair that she was, in her own mind, being held to the same standards as President Donald Trump.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

✔ @AOCFacts are facts, America. We should care about getting things right. Yet standards of who gets fact-checked, how often + why are unclear.This is where false equivalency+bias creeps in, allowing climate deniers to be put on par w/scientists, for example.
Ocasio-Cortez then whined that she was getting fact-checked by one website the same amount of times as Press Secretary Sarah Sanders.

Nancy Pelosi Says ‘A Wall Is An Immorality.’ James Woods Asks The Perfect Question.

https://www.dailywire.com/news/41874/nancy-pelosi-says-wall-immorality-james-woods-asks-amanda-prestigiacomo
Pelosi is not alone regarding such double standards, of course. A house owned by the Obamas is barricaded by a ten-foot tall wall, too.
Reacting to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s anti-Trump and anti-wall speech last week, successful actor and outspoken conservative James Woods asked the Democrat one simple question: Why do you have a wall around your property, then?

Like many politicians, Pelosi apparently lives by a set of politically-expedient double standards. Though she has repeatedly slammed President Donald Trump for his goal of funding a wall at the Southern border, calling it an “immorality,” she’s perfectly fine with securing her own property.

“The fact is, a wall is an immorality. It’s not who we are as a nation,” Pelosi told a crowd of reporters Thursday. “We are not doing a wall. Does anybody have any doubt? We are not doing a wall,” she added.

Woods replied to the tweet, asking, “Well, then, why do you have one?”

According to a report from right-wing outlet The American Mirror in 2018 (see photos, here), and begrudgingly backed by left-wing fact-checking site Snopes, Pelosi has a barrier around a multi-million dollar property she and her husband own in Napa Valley.

According to The Washington Post, the estate was worth around $5 million in 2011, and brought in “at least $5,000 worth of grape sales from the vineyard, according to financial disclosure forms for 2010.” (Nancy and Paul Pelosi, by the way, are estimated to be worth somewhere between $58.7 and $72.1 million.)

Opposition to A Border Wall Is Opposition to Public Safety Open borders cost innocent lives. Michael Cutler

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272473/opposition-border-wall-opposition-public-safety-michael-cutler

The battle between the Congressional Democrats and the Trump administration continues over the construction of a border wall along the U.S./Mexican border.

Many political battles are fought over hypothetical arguments. This debate, however, is well-grounded in cold, hard, irrefutable facts and in the deaths of far too many innocent people, who have fallen victim to aliens who entered the United States illegally, often repeatedly.

Let me be clear, in my judgement, the Democrats have left the administration with no choice but to take the action of shutting down a part of the government. As a former INS agent I can certainly empathize with the federal employees. All too frequently the employees of the government suffer from the bad decisions of our political leaders. However, America faces many threats and challenges that are the direct result of multiple failures of the immigration system and our nation must finally address these failures beginning with securing our borders.

The most critical issues that the federal government must address are national security and public safety.

On January 3, 2019 I participated in an interview of Fox & Friends First to discuss the senseless murder of 33 year old police officer Ronil Singh, from Newman, California, by a citizen of Mexico who was allegedly an illegal alien: 32 year old Gustavo Perez-Arriaga.

The Washington Post’s December 29, 2018 article, Suspect, 7 others, arrested in fatal shooting of California police officer, noted that this arrest that has sparked a debate about California’s sanctuary policies began with this excerpt:

The arrest Friday of a man in the shooting death of a California police officer has renewed criticism of sanctuary laws, with a local sheriff suggesting that the state’s efforts to protect undocumented immigrants could have contributed to the killing.

Gustavo Perez Arriaga, a 32-year-old undocumented immigrant, was charged with homicide in connection with the shooting death of 33-year-old Newman police officer Ronil Singh, according to law enforcement.

Stanislaus County Sheriff Adam Christianson assailed sanctuary laws that limit state and local governments’ cooperation with federal immigration agents, but he did not detail how those rules applied to Perez’s case or how they would have prevented Singh’s death.

Sharifa Alkhateeb Talks About Using Public Schools to Convert America to Islam When Muslims aren’t shy about stating the nature of the threat. Frontpagemag.com

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272486/sharifa-alkhateeb-talks-about-using-public-schools-frontpagemagcom VIDEO

https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4732679/sharifa-alkhateeb-talks-public-schools-convert-america-islam&fbclid=IwAR123wunxJyyl99nwvi41n76-fkmXBXeaU1MLnCqNGnL8Fm7eUVrVfyllJg

Carlson’s Invisible Political Hand Riles Conservative Critics By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2019/01/07/carlsons-invisible-political

In spite of policy differences on social issues—from gay rights to gun control to abortion—the steadying core of modern-day conservatism always has been the defense of the individual over the state. During the Reagan era, the movement witnessed in real time how the disassembling of statist economic policies could resuscitate a fossilized free-market system to the benefit of nearly all Americans.

Before Reagan’s election, libertarian economist Milton Friedman warned that our economic freedom is threatened constantly by the capriciousness and self-interest of politicians and their special interest benefactors—and that was not okay: “Both the fragmentation of power and the conflicting government policies are rooted in the political realities of a democratic system that operates by enacting detailed and specific legislation,” Friedman wrote in his 1980 book, Free to Choose. He continued:

Such a system tends to give undue political power to small groups that have highly concentrated interests, to give greater weight to obvious, direct, and immediate effects of government action than to possibly more important but concealed, indirect, and delayed effects, to set in motion a process that sacrifices the general interest to serve special interests, rather than the other way around. There is, as it were, an invisible hand in politics that operates in precisely the opposite direction to Adam Smith’s invisible hand. Individuals who intend only to promote the general interest are led by the invisible political hand to promote a special interest that they had no intention to promote.

Once upon a time, that wasn’t a radical way of thinking on the Right. It was mainstream—it recognized that a behemoth of bigwigs could, and would, easily crush the little guy. The invisible political hand is not the baker and the butcher and the brewer, but rather the banker and the bureaucrat and the Bloombergs. And as we’ve seen in just one highly publicized case, when the baker defies the bureaucrat—to say nothing of the Bloombergs!—who suffers most?

But now that those same sentiments have been expressed, not just by President Trump but by Fox News host Tucker Carlson, they are considered heresy by the anti-Trump Right.

The Anatomy of Trumpophobia Why NeverTrumpers should reflect on what makes Trump attractive to voters. Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272448/anatomy-trumpophobia-bruce-thornton

In an op-ed for The Washington Post, Mitt Romney launched a gratuitous attack on Donald Trump. Like his earlier criticisms, there’s not much of substance in this latest complaint, just recycled bromides typical of NeverTrumpRepublicans’ (NTR) obsession with style, optics, and “character.” As such, however, Romney’s screed is useful for analyzing the disgruntled elitism that explains not just Trumpophobia, but also the reasons for establishment Republicans’ alienation of millions of voters whose natural political home should be the Republican Party.

Romney begins with the by now stale assessment that Trump, despite his numerous achievements, “has not risen to the mantle of the office,” implying some recognized standard of “acting presidential” that Trump has failed to meet. But throughout our history, the definitions of such standards depend on what cohort of America’s electorate you talk to. Andrew Jackson certainly wasn’t “presidential” according to his predecessor John Quincy Adams. He skedaddled from DC to avoid Jackson’s inaugural festivities, when the White House was thrown open to ordinary citizens, including Jackson’s frontier and backwoods constituencies––“KING MOB,” according to Chief Justice Joseph Story–– who made “disgraceful scenes in the parlors,” as one journalist reported.

Second, these appeals to more recent ideas of presidential decorum imply that compared to previous presidents, Trump’s behavior is singularly reprehensible. But is Trump’s vulgar and braggadocios rhetoric more disqualifying than JFK’s or Bill Clinton’s sordid sexual escapades in the White House? Or LBJ’s barnyard epithets, racial slurs, duets with his dog Yuki, or penchant for rubbing himself against women? What’s “presidential” about Barack Obama fêting foul-mouthed, misogynist rappers at the White House? Or taking an interview with an internet carnival act who sat in a bath tub full of milk and Fruit Loops? Or using a sexual vulgarity to describe the Tea Party? Where were the NTRs and their lofty standards back then?

All such standards contain a good deal of subjectivity and hypocrisy, and they shift according to circumstance. They also reflect social class as well as regional variations. So too with Romney’s next specious claim, which occurs in the paragraph that summarizes the NTR’s indictment of the president’s character:

To a great degree, a presidency shapes the public character of the nation. A president should unite us and inspire us to follow “our better angels.” A president should demonstrate the essential qualities of honesty and integrity and elevate the national discourse with comity and mutual respect. As a nation, we have been blessed with presidents who have called on the greatness of the American spirit. With the nation so divided, resentful and angry, presidential leadership in qualities of character is indispensable. And it is in this province where the incumbent’s shortfall has been most glaring.