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April 2019

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Anti-Semitism at NYU Why did the university award a hateful group? By Susan Shapiro

By on April 22nd, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/anti-semitism-at-nyu-11555873457

‘I went to NYU so long ago, it was in the Bronx,” my conservative Midwestern father once joked. He wasn’t thrilled to send his left-wing daughter to New York University to study creative writing. My husband, a Tisch professor, and my prelaw niece Dara also love our school. Unfortunately, the recent anti-Semitism sweeping the campus is testing our affection.

Jewish students were assaulted at an Israeli Independence Day celebration last year in Washington Square Park, where two anti-Israel student agitators were arrested after desecrating Israeli flags. The NYU Jewish Center received threats; swastikas were found in a residence hall. The student government passed an anti-Israel BDS—boycott, divestment and sanctions—resolution. NYU activists confronted a pregnant Chelsea Clinton and insanely blamed her for the massacre at a New Zealand mosque because she criticized Rep. Ilhan Omar’s anti-Semitic slurs.

Most shocking, last week the university gave a President’s Service Award to Students for Justice in Palestine for its “positive impact on the community.” SJP is known for pushing BDS, demonizing Israel and leading a boycott of Zionist student clubs.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

There’s a Brownout in the Bay Area.

By on April 22nd, 2019

https://www.openthebooks.com/

San Francisco is a city in trouble.

Today, San Francisco hosts an estimated homeless population of 7,500 people. Affluent sections of the city have become dangerous with open-air drug use, tens of thousands of discarded needles, and, sadly, human feces.

Since 2011, there have been at least 118,352 reported instances of human fecal matter on city streets.

This week, we published our OpenTheBooks.com investigation at Forbes exposing the human waste challenge in San Francisco.
It’s so unbelievable, you have to see it to believe it. Check out our interactive map to view every case report since 2011.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Islamic Terrorism Remains The World’s Greatest Threat To Peace The Sri Lankan massacre is just another harrowing reminder.

By on April 22nd, 2019

https://thefederalist.com/2019/04/22/islamic-terrorism-remains-the-worlds-greatest-threat-to-peace/

After the horrific mass murder of 50 Muslim worshippers in Christchurch, New Zealand, there was widespread coverage and a torrent of mainstream news networks contemplating the threat of white supremacy. These conversations, completely reasonable and necessary in the face of violent attacks from a racist gunman, soon began deteriorating into politically motivated and specious claims contending that “white supremacy” had become the predominate terror threat in the world.

Well, the coordinated bomb blasts aimed at Christian worshippers on Easter Sunday, which killed at least 290 people and injured hundreds more, demonstrates the kind of meticulous planning, funding, resources, and support that is still exclusively the domain of radical Islamic terrorism. It’s not merely that the act was planned to maximize the death toll, but that it is a continuation of long-standing efforts by Islamists to destroy the Christian communities left in Asia.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Prison, anyone? By Joan Swirsky

By on April 22nd, 2019

https://canadafreepress.com/article/prison-anyone

Just a few months ago, in an article entitled “Still the Smartest Guy in the Room,” I wrote the following about President Trump:

Well, whaddaya know? In the midterm elections of November 6, 2018, the American people rewarded the president—for only the third time in almost a hundred years—with a net gain of three and possibly four Senate seats, lost half the House seats that his predecessor lost, and left the radical leftwing Democrats not rejoicing at their meager gains, but still chomping at the bit to bring down the president who has effectively destroyed everything they believed in, worked for, and thought they achieved over the past 75 years..Yes, President Trump posed a mortal threat to the Left’s very raison d’etre—a globalist one-world order controlled by them!

And so way back in 2015, when he announced his intention to run for the presidency, the “connected” guys of the D.C. swamp—to use the vocabulary of the mob—decided to pool their formidable resources to “clip” the billionaire business mogul, if not physically (although I wouldn’t put that past them), then by proving that their manufactured fiction of candidate Trump’s collusion with Russia to win the presidency was, in fact, true and therefore impeachable.

In that article, I listed all the fanatical Detectives Javert—the top dogs at our top-secret intelligence agencies (and many of their wives who also played central roles)—and elaborated on their impressive credentials, privileged educations, vast experience, and, oh, their appointments to high office by the former occupant of the Oval Office, Barack Obama.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Taqiyya for Easter by Mark Steyn

By on April 22nd, 2019

https://www.steynonline.com/9317/taqiyya-for-easter

Let’s say a fire breaks out at Notre Dame cathedral in Paris at the start of Holy Week, and just after two of the city’s other most prominent houses of worship – St Sulpice and the Basilica of St Denis – have been attacked and vandalized.

Well, I think we can all confidently say as the first flames are beginning to lick the ceiling that it’s undoubtedly an accident. Cigarette butt. Or maybe computer glitch. Probably just an overheated smart phone. We don’t need to get in there and sift through the debris. We can just announce it.

On the other hand, when there are coordinated attacks on Easter services at several churches in Sri Lanka, it becomes a little more challenging to pass off multiple suicide-bombings killing nearly three hundred people as an electrical malfunction.
So, in contrast to the confident declarations of a week ago, on Sunday morning the media opted for a subtler narrative. Lead sentence from The Economist:IT HAS BEEN nearly ten years since the guns fell silent in Sri Lanka’s civil war. But bloodshed returned with a vengeance…So it’s something to do with the Tamil Tigers? Their guns fell silent, but now they’ve returned with a vengeance, eh?Well, er, no, er, not, ah, precisely… But it’s useful for “context”, lots and lots of context. And, if you pile up enough context, you can bury the actual story. My old chums at The Age in Melbourne produced an especially fine example:Colombo: More than 200 people were killed and hundreds more wounded in eight bomb blasts that rocked churches, luxury hotels and other sites in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday – the deadliest violence the South Asian island country has seen since a bloody civil war ended a decade ago.Ah, there’s that bloody civil war flaring up all over again, right?

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MOVIES AND TELEVISION, MY SAY: Comments turned off

MY SAY: REFLECTIONS ON THE MOVIE “CAPERNAUM”

By on April 22nd, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/04/4_21_2019_16_40.html

Capernaum: a film review By Ruth S. KingWhen I heard that the movie Capernaum was short-listed for a foreign film Oscar, I braced myself. Capernaum was a fishing village established during the time of the Hasmoneans, located on the northern shore of the Sea of Galilee.  The trailer for the film showed squalid scenes of Arabs squeezed into makeshift homes on streets with running sewers and diapered children hungry and weeping.

Another tale I told myself, of the “Palestinian Arab refugee” camps maintained by UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency) to be used and recycled as Potemkin proof of Arab dislocation and Israel’s tyranny.

In Arabic, “capernaum” means chaotic and disorderly. The locus of the movie is actually Beirut, where unregistered Syrian refugees live in unspeakable conditions. Amenities such as potable water, electricity, proper housing, and medical care are virtually nonexistent. Children have no birth records or schooling. Their lives consist of begging or stealing for crumbs. Girls as young as eleven are sold to degenerate grooms. Menial jobs amount to slavery. The conditions in jail are inhuman. Infants in diapers wander the mean streets often abandoned by their parents and multiple siblings.Zain, the lead character, about twelve and desperate and illiterate, runs away from home after his sister is sold to a sexual predator for a few chickens. An Eritrean refugee takes him in and feeds him, but he is obliged to care for her baby.  When she is jailed and fails to return, Zain’s efforts to find her and take care of the baby become impossible and he relinquishes the child’s care to a vendor who traffics in humans.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Russian ‘Collusion’s’ Greatest Hits By Victor Davis Hanson

By on April 22nd, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/04/21/russian-collusions-greatest-hits/

From late 2015 until April 2019, the media, the Left, and the Obama administrative state hierarchy warned us nonstop that candidate, president-elect, and inaugurated President Trump “colluded” with Russia to defeat Hillary Clinton, to assemble a suspect cabinet, and to rule in treasonous fashion in the interests of Vladimir Putin. The former head of the CIA and the director of national intelligence were birthed as permanent analysts at MSNBC and CNN to sermonize—with wink-and-nod assurances that their past billets and security clearances substantiated their authority—that the treasonous Trump would likely be impeached, indicted, or quit.

A mostly progressive team of lawyers, with an unlimited budget, no restrictions on time, and with enormous legal powers found all of that to be a lie.

Unable to find Trump likely guilty of either collusion or obstruction of investigating the non-crime of collusion, they instead salted their report with innuendo and rumor of what the enraged Trump was supposedly thinking about, raging about, and talking about among his closest confidants, including the insurrectionary statement of his press secretary who allegedly sinned by exaggerating the extent of FBI rank and file unhappiness over the firing of James Comey.

All that was a long, slow distraction over real culpability on the part of a number of our supposed best and brightest. And here are some of their most absurd moments from the Orwellian hunt for collusion.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

The Party of Bias and Bigotry By Rabbi Yaakov Menken

By on April 22nd, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/04/21/the-party-of-bias-and-bigotry/

Let’s review: one individual, Representative Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), consistently minimizes terrorism while condemning efforts to combat it. Prior to coming to Congress, she wrote to a judge to request leniency for a man convicted on terrorism-related charges. She laughed in an interview when discussing how a professor’s reaction to mentions of al-Qaeda or Hezbollah differed from when America or England were mentioned.

And during a speech on behalf of a group created at the behest of the Muslim Brotherhood, she expressed an offhand dismissal of the worst act of terrorism in U.S. history.

A second individual, President Donald Trump, tweeted a video of her comment alongside images of the horrific act of terrorism to which she referred, pointing out how callous it was to brush off that traumatic event as “some people did something.”

Without question, one of these two individuals made comments “designed to incite hatred” that are putting “life at risk.” But according to leading Democrats, that person would be the president and not Omar. One could hardly look for a better example of the inversion of morality, and of hater and hated.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Earth Day: Opposing Progress Trumps Protecting the Planet By Andrew I. Fillat and Henry I. Miller

By on April 22nd, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/04/21/earth-day-opposing-progress-trumps-protecting-the-planet/

April 21 is Earth Day, a celebration originally conceived by then-U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson (D-Wis.) and first held in 1970 as a “symbol of environmental responsibility and stewardship.” In the spirit of the time, it was a touchy-feely, consciousness-raising, New Age experience. Most activities were organized at the grassroots level.In recent years, however, Earth Day has become an occasion for professional environmental activists and alarmists to warn of apocalypse, dish anti-technology dirt, proselytize, and raise money more to sustain their movement than to sustain the planet. Provability inevitably takes a back seat to alleged plausibility.

The Earth Day Network, which organizes Earth Day events and advocacy, regularly distorts or ignores science and exaggerates fears in order to advance its anti-technology, big government agenda. With a 2019 theme of “Protect Our Species,” this year’s event is no exception. Predictably, “our species” refers not to us humans, homo sapiens, but only to the other species on the planet, which we are destroying.

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BOOKS, EDUCATION Comments turned off

More Academic Malfeasance by Daniel Pipes

By on April 22nd, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14106/more-academic-malfeasance

So, how does anyone, much less a professor, promote views that are so clearly stated and so profoundly wrong?

John Maszka probably figured that he knew what my views were well enough not to have to bother with the tedious exercise of verifying what they actually are.

In this, he depressingly typifies much of Middle East studies: too dim to have common sense, too lazy to bother with research, too ideological to fix factual mistakes, and too smug to care about the harm caused by them.

Did you know that that the War on Terror actually “is a war for natural resources – and that terrorism has little to do with it”?

So argues John Maszka in his book, Washington’s Dark Secret: The Real Truth About Terrorism and Islamic Extremism (Potomac, 2018), as summarized in the publisher’s blurb. If you were curious how this “Terrorism Scholar” (his capitals) and professor of international relations at the Higher Colleges of Technology in Abu Dhabi, would pull off so implausible a thesis, you might want to dip into the book.

A sentence, however, on p. 54, might give you pause: “Islamophobes such as Daniel Pipes insist that there is no such thing as a moderate Muslim.”

Okay, you might ignore the predictable “Islamophobe” silliness; but where did that statement come? Wherever did I “insist that there is no such thing as a moderate Muslim”?

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