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April 2019

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Persistence and Political Correctness at Amherst By Richard Bernstein,

By on April 23rd, 2019

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2019/04/22/persistence_and_political_correctness_at_amherst.html

Sometimes in the culture wars, the identity-politics camp leans so far to a politically correct extreme that liberals and conservatives alike reject it. Or so it would seem. A recent episode at Amherst College is worth examining less as a defeat for political correctness than a tactical retreat illustrating that the cult of identity politics on campus shows little sign of weakening.
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What happened is this: Last month Amherst’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion sent all 1,850 or so students at the elite western Massachusetts school an attractively produced 36-page brochure called the Amherst Common Language Guide, with definitions of “key diversity and inclusion terms.” Its clear emphasis: “Marginalized groups” were being oppressed by what the document called the “cisheteropatriarchy” — a system of domination by straight white men – through racism, sexism, oppression, hegemony, and exploitation.

Within hours of the guide’s release, a member of the Amherst College Republicans leaked the brochure to the conservative Daily Wire website, which pronounced it “something out of ‘1984.’ ” A crescendo of ridicule from conservative websites and blogs followed.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

7 Glaring Omissions In The Mueller Report That Kill Its Credibility While there is much within the Mueller report that suggests skepticism was well-founded, what is perhaps most probative is what the report omitted. Ben Weingarten

By on April 23rd, 2019

https://thefederalist.com/2019/04/23/7-glaring-omissions-mueller-report-kill-credibility/

Robert Mueller’s special counsel was presented to the American public as unimpeachable. From its beginning, a distinct minority in politics and media, including several Federalist writers, were skeptical, citing the special counsel’s past prosecutorial abuses, the past alleged misconduct of its pivotal investigators, and the team’s peculiar partisan makeup.

Once in action, its seemingly limitless powers, heavy-handed usage of such powers, and more questionable if not dubious indictments, far removed from “collusion,” seemed to confirm our worst fears. While there is much within the Mueller report that further suggests this skepticism was well-founded, what is perhaps most probative is what the report omitted.

The following are seven of the most glaring omissions from the collusion section of the redacted Mueller report—since collusion, not obstruction, was the theory from which the investigation stemmed.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Democrats’ Relentless, Fruitless Hunt for the Great Orange Whale By Charles Lipson

By on April 23rd, 2019

https://amazingsaleonline.com/bibcntfas/?sxid=4zxvbykj4b41&c=0.0146875&siteid=3955&campaignid=35239&placementid=68179&channel=News&subchannel=Conservative+News&creative=

Democrats are trying to spin the Mueller Report as welcome news. Good luck with that. Legally, they’ve got no case left. Politically, they are making a serious mistake.

They do have some material to work with, especially the report’s second volume, which portrays a vulgar, deceitful president. The details are new, but the portrait itself is not. What’s new are some cases where the president came close to obstructing justice, according to the special counsel’s investigators. Even so, they did not say he crossed the line.

The most important news, of course, is the report’s basic findings. It clearly demonstrates Russia tried to influence the 2016 election and favored Trump, but it kills the assertion that Trump or his campaign cooperated with them. For two years, Democrats and the mainstream media said the opposite about Trump — repeatedly, loudly, insistently. To continue that attack now is ludicrous. That doesn’t mean they will retract, apologize, or return their Pulitzer Prizes. They prefer to change the subject.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Bob Woodward: FBI, CIA Reliance on ‘Garbage’ Steele Dossier ‘Needs to Be Investigated’ By Jack Crowe

By on April 23rd, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/bob-woodward-fbi-cia-reliance-on-garbage-steele-dossier-needs-to-be-investigated/

Veteran reporter Bob Woodward said Monday that the intelligence community’s reliance on the infamous Steele dossier “needs to be investigated” in the wake of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s failure to corroborate many of the document’s key claims.

Woodward told Fox News’s Chris Wallace that he was disturbed to learn that the CIA cited information included in the Clinton-funded dossier in a rough draft of their January 2017 intelligence-community assessment detailing Russian election-interference efforts.

“What I found out recently, which was really quite surprising, the dossier, which really has got a lot of garbage in it and Mueller found that to be the case, early in building the intelligence-community assessment on Russian interference, in an early draft, they actually put the dossier on page two in kind of a breakout box,” Woodward said.

“I think it was the CIA pushing this. Real intelligence experts looked at this and said ‘No, this is not intelligence, this is garbage,’ and they took it out,” he continued. “But in this process, the idea that they would include something like that in one of the great stellar intelligence assessments, as Mueller also found out, is highly questionable. Needs to be investigated.”

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

A Goal for Iran’s Oil Exports: Zero American frackers can reduce the impact of higher crude prices.

By on April 23rd, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-goal-for-irans-oil-exports-zero-11555972882

President Trump wants to exert “maximum pressure” on Iran, which is why he is giving the sanctions screws another firm twist. Any country that imports Iranian oil will soon face U.S. penalties—with no exceptions. Last year seven nations and Taiwan were granted waivers through May 2, giving them time to adjust supply lines. These waivers won’t be extended, the State Department said Monday, helping to push the benchmark oil price to $74 a barrel, a nearly six-month high.

Italy, Greece and Taiwan have already ended their Iranian oil imports. That leaves five countries at risk of U.S. sanctions: China, India, Turkey, Japan and South Korea. Two are close allies, and no doubt their leaders will protest this stiff medicine. But the Trump Administration has given them enough warning, not to mention a six-month waiver. That’s plenty of time to make other arrangements.

By all accounts, Iran’s economy is in trouble. “To date, we estimate that our sanctions have denied the regime well north of $10 billion,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Monday. “The regime would have used that money to support terror groups like Hamas and Hezbollah and continue its missile development” and “it would have perpetuated the humanitarian crisis in Yemen.”

Mr. Pompeo reiterated the White House goal “to deprive the outlaw regime of the funds it has used to destabilize the Middle East for four decades, and incentivize Iran to behave like a normal country.” To that end, the U.S. intends to drive Iranian oil exports to zero.

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ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Persecution of Palestinians No One Mentions by Khaled Abu Toameh

By on April 23rd, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14098/palestinians-persecution-saudi-arabia

In Lebanon, Palestinians have long been facing discriminatory and “Apartheid laws” that deny them basic rights, including access to dozens of skilled professions, health-care and education services. According to some reports, thousands of Palestinians have been fleeing Lebanon in recent years as a result of the dire economic conditions and government regulations that deny them basic rights.

In 2015, a Saudi court sentenced Palestinian artist and poet Ashraf Fayadh to death by beheading for “apostasy.” Later, however, the court overturned the death sentence and replaced it with an eight-year prison term and 800 lashes. The “evidence” against Fayadh was based on poems included in his book Instructions Within, as well as social media posts and conversations he had in a coffee shop in Saudi Arabia.

Palestinian leaders do not seem to care about the suffering of their people at the hands of Arabs. Yet, these same leaders are quick to condemn Israel on almost every occasion and available platform. Palestinian leaders in the West Bank and Gaza Strip are so busy fighting each other (and Israel) that they seem to have forgotten about the Palestinians in Arab countries, being killed, wounded and arrested every day.

Saudi Arabia appears to have joined the list of Arab countries that mistreat Palestinians.

In Syria, thousands of Palestinians have been wounded, murdered and arrested since the beginning of the civil war in 2011. The latest statistics show that nearly 4,000 Palestinians — 3,920 to be exact — have been killed in Syria in the past nine years, while 1,750 others are being held in various Syrian government prisons. Another 323 Palestinians have gone missing during the same period.

In Lebanon, Palestinians have long been facing discriminatory and “Apartheid laws” that deny them basic rights, including access to dozens of skilled professions, health-care and education services. According to some reports, thousands of Palestinians have been fleeing Lebanon in recent years as a result of the dire economic conditions and government regulations that deny them basic rights.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Unredact All of It By Julie Kelly

By on April 23rd, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/04/22/unredact-all-of-it/

The Mueller Report confirms what some of us have suspected from the beginning: There was no collusion between Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and the Kremlin to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. The investigation that monopolized the attention of the media, Capitol Hill, the White House, and the American public for two years is over.

Collusion truthers who’ve embarrassed themselves and misled the country about the existence of imaginary crimes are trying to move seamlessly from collusion to obstruction of justice claims. Demands for impeachment based on vague allegations of obstruction now contaminate the same cable news programs, political websites, and media outlets that falsely warned Americans for more than two years that Donald Trump was Vladimir Putin’s puppet. The self-immolation of our national news media continues.

This continuing trip with hyperbole serves one purpose: To obfuscate the real scandal, which is how the world’s most powerful law enforcement and intelligence apparatus was weaponized to sabotage a rival presidential campaign and then to try to oust the duly elected president of the United States.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Federal Grant Financed Anti-Semitic Song at U. of No. Carolina Rep. George Holding demands Department of Education hold UNC-Chapel Hill accountable. Daniel Greenfield

By on April 23rd, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273539/federal-grant-financed-anti-semitic-song-u-no-daniel-greenfield

“This is my anti-Semitic song,” Tamer Nafar declared.

The setting was the UNC-Chapel Hill. And this was the moment that, “Conflict over Gaza: People, Politics, and Possibilities”, a conference of UNC and Duke University’s notoriously pro-terrorist Middle East departments went, beyond its expected implicit anti-Semitism to explicit anti-Semitism.

The Gaza conference, with a roster of speakers from anti-Israel groups, at least one of which has been accused of funneling money to Hamas institutions, was true to form. The BDS speaker disagreed only over how much to boycott Israel. The conference was full of posters glamorizing violence. And the books on sale were even more explicit in their defense of anti-Semitic Islamic terrorism against Jews.

A journalist for The Tower picked up a copy of “Hamas: A Beginner’s Guide” and read its claim that, “Intrinsically and religiously Hamas could not be anti-Jewish.”

But Nafar’s “anti-Semitic song” was the moment that put the Gaza conference on the map of hate.

UNC Chapel Hill and Duke’s Middle East Studies departments were already notoriously hives of hatred. In February, UNC’s Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies brought in Linda Sarsour, who has frequently clashed with the Jewish community and is a supporter of the anti-Semitic Nation of Islam leader, to speak. In April, Duke’s Israel Apartheid Week had featured support for the PFLP, an anti-Semitic terrorist group responsible for the murders of Jews, and calls for the destruction of Israel.

And Steven Salaita, who had declared that, Zionism was “transforming anti-Semitism from something horrible into something honorable”, had spoken at UNC Chapel Hill.

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HOMELAND SECURITY, IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Cross-Border Terrorism Jihad creeps down from our northern neighbor. Lloyd Billingsley

By on April 23rd, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273534/cross-border-terrorism-lloyd-billingsley

As the Windsor Star reported last week, “A Canadian man convicted of terrorism for nearly killing a Michigan police officer while yelling ‘God is great’ in Arabic was sentenced to life in prison on Thursday, after boldly declaring that he only regretted not having a machine-gun during the knife attack.”

The Canadian man is Amor Ftouhi, 51, a Tunisian who moved to Montreal in 2007. In 2017, Fthouhi entered the United States at Lake Champlain and drove 1,000 miles to the Bishop Airport in Flint, Michigan. There Ftouhi attacked police officer Lt. Jeff Neville, striking him the neck. As the Star reported, investigators found that “Ftouhi wanted to take Neville’s gun and start shooting people,” which the Muslim confirmed in court.

“Do I regret what I did? Never,” Ftouhi told U.S District Judge Matthew Leitman. “I regret I didn’t get that machine-gun. I regret I didn’t kill that cop.” The man who yelled Allahu akbar as he attacked also spoke out on other themes.

As his photo revealed, Ftouhi is as pale as Justin Trudeau, but he “felt discrimination in Canada because he wasn’t a white Christian.” Ftouhi pledged allegiance to his Muslim faith and said western countries and Arabic countries should be cursed if they “don’t rule according to Allah.”

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Academia and False Advertising Historical ignorance, ideological obsession — and the deception of the American public Jack Kerwick

By on April 23rd, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273527/academia-and-false-advertising-jack-kerwick

When famous and affluent Hollywood celebrities were exposed recently for bribing their children’s way into some of America’s most prestigious academic institutions, far too many observers seemed to have missed the fact that this episode is but a symptom of a cancer that has metastasized throughout the entire academic world.

To put it in its simplest terms, “the College Admissions Scandal” revealed that colleges and universities are guilty of false advertising insofar as they would have Americans believe that applicants are admitted as students on the basis of their qualifications—not the size of their parents’ bank accounts.

But these same colleges and universities have been engaged in false advertising for decades insofar as they have been deceiving the American public into thinking that they are educational institutions that, as such, provide an open market place of ideas.

They are no such thing, sadly.

A recent illustration from my home state of New Jersey is representative of both the ideological fervor and historical illiteracy that pervades the academy. Brittany Cooper, Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Africana Studies at Rutgers University, has discovered a new villain in her campaign against “racism.” This academic who once characterized Jesus as “potentially queer,” blasted black politicians with whom she had disagreements as “white supremacists in Blackface,” and launched a profanity-ridden tirade after the Supreme Court recognized religious-based exemptions to the Obamacare mandate, now declares as racist none other than…time.

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