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April 2019

Winner in Israel Turns Out To be New Voting Law By Michel Gurfinkiel

https://www.nysun.com/foreign/winner-in-israel-turns-out-to-be-new-voting-law/90646/

Who was the real winner in the recent Israeli elections? The answer: the 2014 electoral law. It requires a list to garner at least 3.25 % of the vote to get seats at the Knesseth.

In 2015, the first time it was in force, it helped both Prime Minister Netanyahu’s conservative Likud party and Yitzhak Herzog’s liberal Zionist Union to emerge as the country’s main political forces, with 30 and 24 seats respectively out of 120 — against eight smaller parties, Right and Left, who got from 5 to 13 seats each.

This time, it was even more effective, providing 36 seats to Likud and 35 seats to the Blue-White Coalition, the indirect heir to ZU, and leaving less than one half of Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, to nine lesser lists. In other words, the 2014 law is turning proportional representation into something closer to a bipartisan system. Quite an achievement.

Pundits like to argue about the comparative theoretical merits of the majority system, a feature most famously of America, and proportional representation. More often than not, however, countries just pick up an electoral system for practical reasons.

Thousands of Iranians carry anti-U.S. placards at nationwide protests following Friday prayers

https://www.israelhayom.com/2019/04/14/iranians-march-to-protest-us-blacklisting-revolutionary-guards/

Thousands of Iranians carrying signs reading “I’m a Guard too” and “Down with USA” marched on Friday to protest against the U.S. designation of the elite Revolutionary Guards as a foreign terrorist organization.

State television showed crowds shouting: “What’s America thinking? Iran is full of Guards” after leaving Friday prayers at Tehran University on their way to a rally in a nearby square. Similar state-sponsored protests were held across Iran, it said.

Iranian officials have condemned U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision on Monday to blacklist the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps , a step is likely to raise tensions in the Middle East.

Tehran retaliated by naming the regional United States Central Command (CENTCOM) as a terrorist organization.

Gordon Ramsay accused of cultural appropriation over ‘Asian’ restaurant By Patrick Sawer, Helena Horton

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/04/13/gordon-ramsay-accused-cultural-appropriation-asian-restaurant/

He has described his latest venture as inspired by the “culture, flavours and the incredible cooking” of Asia.

But Gordon Ramsay has now found himself caught up in a row over cultural appropriation after his new restaurant was accused of tokenism and lazy stereotyping.

The award-winning chef is opening Lucky Cat, which he calls “an Asian eating house” inspired by 1930s Tokyo, describing it as part of his “long time vision”.

During one of the venue’s preview nights last week diners were treated to dishes such as mini wagyu pastrami burger with ‘Asian’ chilli jam, English asparagus with a smoked ponzu emulsion and smoked duck breast with plum and Japanese nashi pear.

Ramsay said on the night: “I’ve toured and worked in much of Asia over the years and the culture, the flavours, and the incredible cooking never fail to inspire me. We’ve got a great team behind this project and we’re ready to bring something really special to London this summer.”

Shamima Begum was cruel enforcer in Isil’s morality police, say Syrian witnesses Josie Ensor Robert Mendick,

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/04/13/shamima-begum-cruel-enforcer-isils-morality-police-say-syrian/

Shamima Begum, the Bethnal Green schoolgirl, served in the Islamic State’s “morality police” and also tried to recruit other young women to join the jihadist group, well-placed sources have told The Telegraph.

She was allowed to carry a Kalashnikov rifle and earned a reputation as a strict “enforcer” of Isil’s laws, such as dress codes for women, sources claimed.

The claims are at odds with Miss Begum’s own account of her four years with the group, which she joined at the age of just 15.

Miss Begum, now aged 19, has insisted she was never involved in Isil’s brutality but spent her time in Syria as a devoted housewife to a jihadist fighter.

Miss Begum, whose discovery in a refugee camp in northern Syria in February sparked a public outcry, said she concentrated on bringing up the couple’s children. They subsequently died of malnutrition.

Her husband, Dutch fighter Yago Riedijk, offered a similar story, saying Miss Begum “sat in the house” and that she would pose no danger to the British public if allowed back to the UK.

Terrifying video on antisemitic conference at the University of North Carolina By Thomas Lifson VIDEO

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/04/terrifying_video_on_antisemitic_confer

Ami Horowitz, the investigatory filmmaker who often exposes campus madness, has produced a video that ought to terrify anyone familiar with the history of Weimar Germany.  Then, as now, universities were among the leaders in whipping up Jew-hatred and actually persecuting Jews.  One of the neglected aspects of the origins of the Holocaust is that the purge of Jews from Germany’s famous universities opened up new career possibilities for those faculty and students who remained once their institutions were Judenrein.We are not (yet) at the point of expelling Jews from faculties and student bodies, but we are at the point of violent attacks on Jews being justified by faculty members at prestigious universities, as a jaw-dropping interview in Horowitz’s latest video (embedded below) shows.  We are also at the point where multiple academic departments at such a university — a publicly owned and funded institution of (purported) higher learning — are comfortable sponsoring an academic conference with open Jew-hatred, and government funds (nearly a quarter million dollars!) are allocated to sponsor it.

ISIS warning: Killers planning horrifying attacks – leaked documents reveal Europe plotsISIS is still planning horrifying attacks in Europe despite the terror cell’s diminishing size, leaked documents reveal.By Alahna Kindred

https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1114060/latest-terror-attack-news-Europe-plots-leaked

Details of plots to carry out assaults across the continent funded and controlled by ISIS leaders were found on a hard drive dropped by a terrorist in Syria earlier this year. ISIS was defeated in its final stronghold last month, but as the West was quick to claim victory the documents give insight into sinister plans including to recreate the Paris 2015 attacks. Documents outline how the terror group still runs a sophisticated international network, moving fighters across borders and funding their operations from computer hacking to assassinations.

One letter obtained by The Sunday Times, signed by six ISIS leaders and addressed to the group’s “caliph” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi,breaks down there international strategy into operations and borders.

The operations abroad will be directed by Abu Khabab al-Muhajir, who already controls one cell in Russia and two in Germany.

In order to fund the operations, the letter said: “Killing infidel venture capitalists, hacking banks through bank accounts, bank robberies or robberies of places that are pre-studied.

Pursue Those Indictments! By Roger Kimball

https://amgreatness.com/2019/04/13/pursue-those-indictments/

Last month, Chris Buskirk wrote a column for the Spectator USA describing Representative Devin Nunes as “a hero of the Republic.” It was well-deserved praise. Nunes, a Republican Congressman from a rural district in California was, until January, chairman of the House Permanent Special Committee on Intelligence (he is now the ranking member). Nunes has worked tirelessly for more than two years to expose what our masters in deep-state Washington would bury from the glare of public scrutiny: the evidence that the entire Trump-Russian collusion narrative was a partisan effort, first, to undermine the Trump presidential campaign and, when that failed, to cover up the effort while still working assiduously to destroy the Trump presidency.

As Buskirk points out, without Nunes’s terrier-like efforts—conducted, it has to be pointed out, against the background of scurrilous and unremitting calumnies from the Democrats and their bought-and-paid-for megaphones in the media—the public would likely be totally in the dark about what really happened over the course of 2016 as the Obama Administration and the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign endeavored to “dirty up” Trump and his colleagues, calmly at first, and then with growing hysteria as Trump, against all the odds, emerged as a serious challenger and eventual victor in the election that all the smartest people knew, just knew, that Hillary had sewn up.

Obama’s Border Patrol Chief Mark Morgan tells it like it is about the illegal alien crisis By Peter Barry Chowka

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/04/obamas_border_patrol_chief_mark_morgan_tells_it_like_it_is_about_the_illegal_alien_crisis.html

Last January, Mark Morgan, the last head of the U.S. Border Patrol agency under the Obama Administration, started weighing in on the illegal alien invasion crisis at the Southern border.

On January 8, Law & Crime was one of the first news outlets to break the story about the former Border Patrol director. Morgan, it said,

…went public on Tuesday with a message that may surprise the White House: he supports Mr. Trump and his efforts to get funding for a border wall.

“I’m here today breaking my silence to tell the American people that the president is correct in what he’s doing,” Morgan said in an interview with the Law & Crime Network. “The wall works.”
SEE VIDEO

European Churches: Vandalized, Defecated On, and Torched “Every Day” by Raymond Ibrahim

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14044/europe-churches-vandalized

In Germany, four separate churches were vandalized and/or torched in March alone. “In this country,” PI-News, a German news site, explained, “there is a creeping war against everything that symbolizes Christianity: attacks on mountain-summit crosses, on sacred statues by the wayside, on churches… and recently also on cemeteries.”

In virtually every instance of church attacks, authorities and media obfuscate the identity of the vandals. In those rare instances when the Muslim (or “migrant”) identity of the destroyers is leaked, the desecraters are then presented as suffering from mental health issues.

“Hardly anyone writes and speaks about the increasing attacks on Christian symbols. There is an eloquent silence in both France and Germany about the scandal of the desecrations and the origin of the perpetrators…. Not a word, not even the slightest hint that could in anyway lead to the suspicion of migrants… It is not the perpetrators who are in danger of being ostracized, but those who dare to associate the desecration of Christian symbols with immigrant imports. They are accused of hatred, hate speech and racism.” — PI News, March 24, 2019

Countless churches throughout Western Europe are being vandalized, defecated on, and torched.

In France, two churches are desecrated every day on average. According to PI-News, a German news site, 1,063 attacks on Christian churches or symbols (crucifixes, icons, statues) were registered in France in 2018. This represents a 17% increase compared to the previous year (2017), when 878 attacks were registered — meaning that such attacks are only going from bad to worse.

Iran: The Ventriloquist Dummy’s New Lexicon by Amir Taheri

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14066/iran-ventriloquist-dummy

Russia has imposed the Caspian Convention it dictated, but vetoes Iran’s membership in the Euro-Asian “economic family” and the Shanghai Group. Russia’s interest is keeping Iran out of the international gas market, thus holding Moscow’s Damocles Sword above the EU’s head.

As for Turkey, its chief interest in the Islamic Republic is to secure support for killing Kurds, something that runs counter to Iran’s own national interests.

As long as the Islamic Republic believes that it can do whatever it likes without risking any punishment it would make little difference through which dummy the ventriloquist utters his text.

Though it is too early to assess the impact of President Donald Trump’s decision to harden US policy towards the Islamic Republic of Iran, one thing is already clear. Trump’s rhetoric and the reactivation of sanctions suspended by President Barack Obama, plus new measures against the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) are making it harder for the leadership in Tehran to pursue its forked-tongue diplomacy designed to hoodwink bleeding heart liberals in the West while fanning the fires of hatred in the global anti-West constituency.