Displaying posts published in

May 2019

Waving Goodbye To the Jerusalem Waiver

https://www.nysun.com/editorials/waving-goodbye-to-the-jerusalem-waiver/90677/

Secretary of State Pompeo’s report that no further waivers are necessary in respect of the Jerusalem Embassy Act is a wonderful moment in these parlous times. It is a marker not only of principle but also of stick-to-it-ive-ness. And it puts paid to an account opened, so to speak, by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan when he was at the peak of his power in the Senate.

That was in the mid-1990s. We were editing the Jewish Forward at the time, and the senator had asked if he could stop by. He was then chairman of the finance committee and we wanted to talk about — naturally — the gold standard. He, it turned out, had no more interest in the gold standard than the man in the moon. Instead, he thrust at us a copy of the State Department telephone directory.

Moynihan handed the book to us even before he sat down. “Here,” he said once a few colleagues were seated at a round table. “Let’s talk about this.” We were stumped. So he riffed through State’s phone book, stopping at Jerusalem. It wasn’t listed under Israel, he pointed out, or any other country. Alone among capital cities, it was listed under Jerusalem — as if it were a separate nation altogether.

Expecting Israelis to pay to be killed proves Abbas isn’t interested in peace By Lawrence J. Haas

https://thehill.com/opinion/international/442905-expecting-israelis-to-pay-to-be-killed-proves-abbas-isnt-interested-in-peace

Gazan terrorists launched hundreds of rockets into Israel in recent days to overwhelm its Iron Dome anti-missile system, killing four civilians and forcing untold numbers of others to take cover. And on the West Bank, the supposedly moderate Palestinian Authority planted the seeds for more killing – albeit less flamboyantly.

That Israel is more focused on Gaza of late than the West Bank is hardly surprising. One can only imagine the U.S. reaction, and reprisals, if hundreds of rockets were flying in from Canada or Mexico.

In a televised address on April 29, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas conceded that his organization faces a financial crisis but insisted that it will continue to reject all Israeli payments because the Jewish state had the audacity to deduct the cost of stipends that go to terrorists and their families.

“Our position on this issue was, and still is, clear,” the 83-year-old Abbas told the Palestinian people, looking into a camera as he sat behind a desk. “We refuse to receive the money if any amount is missing from it, especially the amount [that we pay to the families of] the martyrs, or any other amount that they owe us.”

Indeed, his position is crystal clear. Abbas announced the policy in February after Israel declared that it would withhold $140 million over the course of the year, which it said was what Abbas’ government pays to the families of “martyrs” who died while trying to kill Jews or who were now held in Israel jails for the same reason.

Democrats Face a Bleak Post-Mueller Landscape . By Victor Davis Hanson

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/05/09/progressives_face_a_bleak_post-mueller_landscape_140279.html

Democrats have grown infuriated by Attorney General William Barr’s indifference to their hysteria over the Trump-Russia collusion narrative.

Barr recently released a brief summary of special counsel Robert Mueller’s conclusions that Donald Trump did not collude with the Russians to warp the 2016 election. Barr added that Mueller had not found enough evidence to recommend that Trump be indicted for obstruction of justice for the non-crime of collusion.

Progressives, who for 22 months had insisted that Trump was a Russian asset, were stunned. But only for a few hours.

Almost immediately, they redirected their fury toward Barr’s summation of the Mueller report. Yet few rational people contested Barr’s synopses about collusion and obstruction.

Both the Mueller report and Barr’s summation can be found on the internet. Anyone can read them to see whether Barr misrepresented Mueller’s conclusions.

Again, there have been few criticisms that Barr was wrong on his interpretation that there was no collusion and not enough evidence to indict on obstruction of justice.

The Middle East Anti-Peace Movement by Khaled Abu Toameh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14189/anti-peace-jordan

[The Jordanian mayor] went on to say that he believes in the “liberation of Palestine, from the [Mediterranean] Sea to the [Jordan] River” – meaning that he supports the elimination of Israel.

The campaign against the Jordanian mayor is the direct result of anti-Israel incitement in Jordan and most of the Arab and Islamic states. While some of the leaders of these countries may appear to be relatively moderate in their views towards Israel, their people continue to reject any form of normalization with the “Zionist enemy.”

For decades, Arab and Muslim leaders have been radicalizing their people on a daily basis against Israel. They have delegitimized Israel in the eyes of their people to a point where they can no longer be seen talking to or making peace with Israelis.

One is left wondering how any Arab leader would accept any peace plan with Israel when a mayor is being widely condemned and shamed for being caught on camera in the company of Israelis.

In order to achieve peace with Israel, Arab and Muslim leaders need to start preparing their people for peace, and not inciting them against Israel.

Ibrahim al-Karaki, the mayor of the Jordanian city of Al-Karak, 87 miles to south of Amman, with a view to the Dead Sea, is under attack for hosting Israeli (Jewish) tourists during the Jewish Passover holiday. His critics have accused him of promoting normalization with the “Israeli enemy” and are demanding his resignation.

Although Jordan has a peace treaty with Israel, many Jordanians remain opposed to any form of normalization with Israelis. The same applies to Egypt, the second Arab country that has a peace treaty with Israel and where the “anti-normalization” camp remains one of the strongest in the Arab world.

CLAREMONT REVIEW OF BOOKS: HUNGARY & THE FUTURE OF EUROPE

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2019/05/crb-hungary-and-the-future-of-europe.php

No English-language newspaper reported on it at the time, nor has any cited it since, but the speech Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán made before an annual picnic for his party’s intellectual leaders in the late summer of 2015 is probably the most important by a Western statesman this century. As Orbán spoke in the village of Kötcse, by Lake Balaton, hundreds of thousands of migrants from across the Muslim world, most of them young men, were marching northwestwards out of Asia Minor, across the Balkan countries and into the heart of Europe.

Already, mobs of migrants had broken Hungarian police lines, trampled cropland, occupied town squares, shut down highways, stormed trains, and massed in front of Budapest’s Keleti train station. German chancellor Angela Merkel had invited those fleeing the Syrian civil war to seek refuge in Europe. They had been joined en route, in at least equal number, by migrants from Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. For Hungarians, this was playing with fire. They are taught in school to think of their Magyar ancestors as having ridden off the Asian steppes to put much of Europe to the torch (Attila is a popular boys’ name), and they themselves suffered centuries of subjugation under the Ottomans, who marched north on the same roads the Syrian refugees used in the internet age. But no one was supposed to bring up the past. Merkel and her defenders had raised the subject of human rights, which until then had been sufficient to stifle misgivings. In Kötcse, Orbán informed Merkel and the world that it no longer was.

Progressives Face a Bleak Post-Mueller Landscape By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2019/05/08/progressives-face-a-bleak-post-mueller-landscape/

Democrats have grown infuriated by Attorney General William Barr’s indifference to their hysteria over the Trump-Russia collusion narrative.

Barr recently released a brief summary of special counsel Robert Mueller’s conclusions that Donald Trump did not collude with the Russians to warp the 2016 election. Barr added that Mueller had not found enough evidence to recommend that Trump be indicted for obstruction of justice for the non-crime of collusion.

Progressives, who for 22 months had insisted that Trump was a Russian asset, were stunned. But only for a few hours.

Almost immediately, they redirected their fury toward Barr’s summation of the Mueller report. Yet few rational people contested Barr’s synopses about collusion and obstruction.

Both the Mueller report and Barr’s summation can be found on the internet. Anyone can read them to see whether Barr misrepresented Mueller’s conclusions.

Again, there have been few criticisms that Barr was wrong on his interpretation that there was no collusion and not enough evidence to indict on obstruction of justice.

But now Democrats are calling for Barr to resign or be impeached for not regurgitating the unproven allegations against Trump. In other words, Barr acted too much like a federal prosecutor rather than a tabloid reporter trafficking in allegations that did not amount to criminal conduct.

New York Orders Museums to Hire People By Race Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/273718/new-york-orders-museums-hire-people-race-daniel-greenfield

Another great idea from New York City’s white mayor and white city council speaker.

They’ve destroyed so much of New York City. But even in the city’s darkest days, the Met, Carnegie Hall, and other classical cultural institutions had survived. Now the cultural revolution is coming for them.

The heads of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall are among dozens of cultural institution leaders quaking in their boots as Mayor Bill de Blasio considers slashing their funds if they fail to meet his staff diversity criteria, The Post has learned.

De Blasio’s decree targets the nonprofit organizations that run the 33 museums, theaters, concert halls, botanical gardens and zoos that comprise the city’s “Cultural Institutions Group.”

But in 2017, de Blasio reversed course and warned that diversity “will be a factor in funding decisions,” claiming, “We do this because we believe in fairness.”

And nothing says fairness like giving people jobs because of their race.

The move is intended to help boost people with African, Latin, Asian, Arab and Native American heritage, “LGBTIQ populations,” people with disabilities, non-English speakers and the poor.

The next great Met conductor can be one or all of the above.

Today’s Churchill – and Today’s Chamberlain Like his Hitler-era counterpart, Jacob Rees-Mogg has no grasp of the dire threat facing his nation. Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273685/todays-churchill-%E2%80%93-and-todays-chamberlain-bruce-bawer

In the South Yorkshire town of Rotherham (pop. ca. 100,000), so-called Islamic “grooming gangs” were responsible for the repeated rape of about 1400 non-Muslim girls, mostly from the working classes, from the late 1980s on. Although local politicians, child-protection officials, police, and journalists were aware of the problem, they kept silent about it for decades, partly out of cowardice, partly out of political expediency, partly out of a misguided fear of inciting “Islamophobia,” and partly out of a classist disregard for the victims and their families. As a result, the perpetrators did not begin to be identified, arrested, and prosecuted until earlier in this decade.

There is nothing unique about Rotherham, of course: it just happens to be the place where the dam burst first. The list of British towns where similar gang activity has been uncovered is continues to grow longer, and the number of perpetrators and victims is increasing apace.

Meanwhile, on July 7, 2005, Muslim suicide bombers killed 52 people and wounded about 700 in London. On May 22, 2013, two Muslims slaughtered a British soldier, Lee Rigby, in Woolwich. On March 22, 2017, on Westminster Bridge, a Muslim behind the wheel of a car mowed down about four dozen pedestrians, four of whom were killed. On May 22, 2017, a Muslim suicide bomber took 22 lives at Manchester Arena. On June 3 of the same year, three Muslims with a van killed eight people on and near London bridge.

In addition, every so often during the past few years, some British newspaper has dared to publish a news story like the one that appeared in the Daily Mail on Saturday: according to a secret government report, more than 48 Islamic madrasas in Britain, all of them run by the Darul Uloom (“House of Knowledge”) network, are staffed by followers of the Deobandi movement, which produced the Taliban. The students, who are preparing to be imams, are thus “being taught that music and dancing comes from the devil and that women do not have the right to refuse sex to their husbands.”

U.S. Prepares to Confront Possible Iranian Attacks While the Mullahs cut back on their nuclear deal commitments. Joseph Klein

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273716/us-prepares-confront-possible-iranian-attacks-joseph-klein

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo cancelled a scheduled meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in order to go to Baghdad on a sudden unannounced visit. His purpose was to warn Iraq’s leaders about a “very specific” threat of Iranian attacks which, he said, “were imminent.” Secretary Pompeo told reporters after his meetings that he wanted assurances that Iraq is “able to adequately protect Americans in their country.” Secretary Pompeo’s warning followed the deployment of a U.S. aircraft carrier strike group to the Middle East. The Pentagon has also sent nuclear-capable B-52s to the region.

There are approximately 5,200 U.S. troops currently in Iraq, who the Iranian regime has declared are legitimate targets. The regime has threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz, which is a vital navigation route for the shipments of global oil. Israel had also reportedly passed on intelligence to the United States within the last couple of weeks of an Iranian plan to attack either U.S. or U.S.-allied interests in the Gulf.

The Trump administration decided, along with the ratcheting up of its sanctions against Iran, that a strong military presence in the region is the best deterrence. The administration is positioning the United States to be fully prepared to protect the interests of the U.S. and its allies in the region against any aggression the Iranians may decide to launch themselves or through their proxies. Secretary Pompeo’s visit to Iraq was meant to convey personally the need for Iraq to do its part in preventing the Iran-backed militias in the country from attacking U.S. forces stationed in Iraq.

Hydrocarbons beat biofuels on all counts By Viv Forbes

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/05/hydrocarbons_beat_biofuels_on_all_counts.html

“Coal and oil are thus more enviro-friendly than biofuels.  Locking the gate on coal, oil, and gas while supporting policies that waste land, food crops, and water for motor fuels is environmental desecration.”

Coal and oil are made from plants and animals that died millions of years ago, when the atmosphere contained abundant carbon dioxide plant food.  They are now concentrated forms of energy that can be extracted from small areas of land.  Burning these natural hydro-carbons returns CO2 and fresh water to the atmosphere, thus greatly assisting global plant growth.  If we are lucky, these extra gases in the atmosphere may also slightly delay the start of Earth’s next cooling cycle, but this looks unlikely.