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August 2019

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Al-Qaeda, ISIS, Afghanistan and an Opportunity for the West by Lawrence A. Franklin

By on August 21st, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14739/al-qaeda-isis

In the short term, al-Qaeda evidently wants to pressure the United States to withdraw from direct involvement in the Middle East. ISIS, on the other hand, wants to cleanse the region’s Arab regimes of secular dictatorships, corrupt ruling elites and insufficiently devout Muslim intelligentsia.

There is, however, a serious complication. The Taliban-al-Qaeda coalition is now being challenged by increasingly strong ISIS forces in several Afghan provinces. The United Nations recently estimated that ISIS still have roughly $300 million at their disposal. Moreover, some “disaffected” or hardline Taliban fighters opposed to ongoing negotiations with the U.S. are defecting to ISIS.

The West should take no pleasure in the global competition between al-Qaeda and ISIS. It is a competition that incentivizes each terrorist network to upgrade its recruitment appeal for the next generation of jihadists.

In its effort to sustain a pro-Western regime in Afghanistan, the United States might instead take advantage of an opportunity already in place. In an area of such unrest, and where it is still unclear what the word of those making promises is worth, it might be wise to keep a modest footprint rather than withdraw all troops. To abandon the area totally, as President Obama abandoned Syria and Iraq, and then find it overrun with terrorist groups, would be, as one saw, a catastrophic mistake…. Although admittedly less than ideal, it still be might be far less costly in life and treasure, as with the Middle East, to safeguard the area and gather intelligence, rather than to leave and then have to go back. It is an opportunity that would be foolhardy to give up.

While the world’s two most prominent and competing jihadist networks, al-Qaeda and the Islamic State (ISIS), share the ultimate objective of establishing a global Islamic caliphate and ushering in the apocalyptic age of the Mahdi. Their intermediate goal seems to be replacing the liberal nation-state system with a worldwide Muslim Ummah. Their immediate aims are different.

In the short term, Al-Qaeda evidently wants to pressure the United States to withdraw from direct involvement in the Middle East. ISIS, on the other hand, wants to cleanse the region’s Arab regimes of secular dictatorships, corrupt ruling elites and insufficiently devout Muslim intelligentsia.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Trump Is Fighting the Battles No One Was Willing to Fight Rabbi Aryeh Spero

By on August 21st, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/08/20/trump-is-fighting-the-battles-no-one-was-willing-to-fight/

President Trump is broadening the effect of the presidency by taking on issues no previous leader was willing to address. First, he alerted us to a media no longer impartial but zealously preoccupied in manufacturing fake news on behalf of a radical-left wing agenda.

He then exposed us to the dangerous reality of a vast government bureaucracy, akin to a shadow government, operating on behalf of its own interests and concerns and not those of the American people. The deep state, operating confidently and without checks and balances, ignores representatives elected by the people while pursuing a globalist and self-serving agenda.

Now Trump is challenging the unofficial rule that people dare not criticize those whom the liberal community considers icons, personalities who may never be questioned or probed due to their liberal credentials. 

Well, it’s about time! 

It started when the president tweeted about the deplorable conditions in some of our major urban areas. He began pin-pointing what we have all seen, namely, how Democrats have run these cities for decades, contributing to their degradation and decay, and causing severe harm to their inhabitants. The liberal “icons” that have controlled these municipalities for decades have allowed urban centers, through their enforced and sanctimonious liberalism, to devolve from once-great cities to districts akin to war zones and rubble. It’s not about the race of the leaders, but their left-liberal policies, as may be seen in parts of New York City under Bill de Blasio and in Chicago until recently under Rahm Emanuel.  

Once-untouchable liberal icons, such as U.S. Representative Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), are a major part of the problem. Trump points this out. Grandstanding about conditions along the U.S. southern border, Cummings has stood idly by as his own West Baltimore district has fallen apart. His only purpose seems to be to demand more money for the district’s power brokers. 

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Media Lies About Trump’s Comments About Jews Who Vote Dem Daniel Greenfield

By on August 21st, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/274692/media-lies-about%C2%A0trumps-comments-about-jews-who-daniel-greenfield

THE PRESIDENT’S EXACT WORDS: “I can’t even believe that we’re having this conversation. Five years ago, the concept of even talking about this, even 3 years ago, of cutting off aid to Israel because of 2 people that hate Israel and hate Jewish people. I can’t believe we’re even having this conversation. Where has the Democratic Party gone? Where have they gone where they’re defending these 2 people over the state of Israel? I think that any Jewish people that vote for a Democrat, I think it shows either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty.”

Two House Dems decided to go on a trip organized by Miftah, an anti-Semitic hate group.

Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib’s since-canceled trip to Israel was sponsored by Miftah, an exceptionally anti-Semitic group that praises Palestinian terrorists and claims Jews used the blood of Christians in the Jewish Passover. The organization also publishes Neo-Nazis and calls for the destruction of Israel.

And the mainstream media not only covered for Miftah and defended Omar and Tlaib, but raised a ruckus that the Jewish State had the temerity to deny the bigots entry.

Then Rep. Omar and Rep. Tlaib retweeted a cartoon by a bigot who had submitted a cartoon to Iran’s Holocaust cartoon contest.

Again, the media shrugged and looked away from their anti-Semitism, while celebrating them as heroes and victims.

But now, finally the media discovered “anti-Semitism”.

Trump Accuses Jewish Democrats of ‘Great Disloyalty’ – New York Times

Trump: Jewish people who vote Democratic show ‘great disloyalty’ – NBC

etc, you know the rest.

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The Mullahs’ Provocations Iran heightens the stakes. Joseph Puder

By on August 21st, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274647/mullahs-provocations-joseph-puder

The U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo wrote in his Twitter account last week that the UN embargo on Iran will expire soon, and he asked the Iranian regime to end its “destabilizing behavior.” He added that the “clock is ticking,” and urged the international community to recognize that it means the Islamic Republic will be able to resume its nuclear weaponization and that its Quds Force (part of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps or IRGC) commander Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani will be able to travel freely again and foment trouble and instability worldwide. Pompeo called upon the western powers to continue their support for sanctions on the Iranian regime.

Pompeo charged Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, with inciting violence against Israel on the eve of the ninth of Av, a tragic day for Jews, which commemorates the destruction of the Temples in Jerusalem. The Ayatollah Khamenei exhorted Muslim pilgrims to Mecca to take an active part in defeating America’s “deceit,” a reference to the U.S. Middle East Peace Plan, also known as the ‘Deal of the Century.’ 

Pompeo tweeted in response that: “It’s sick that on the eve of Tisha (ninth) B-av, a solemn day for the Jewish people, Khamenei calls for violence against the Jewish state.” Pompeo took issue with Khamenei’s hypocritical positioning of Iran as the champion of the Palestinians. He wrote that Khamenei’s “faux concern” for the Palestinian people runs so deep, that under his reign of terror he provided less than $20,000 in aid since 2008, while the U.S. provided $6.3 billion in support to the Palestinians since 1994.” In another tweet, Pompeo wrote that, “Khamenei doesn’t see “progress” as prosperity for the Palestinian people, but for Palestinian terrorists switching from rocks to rockets to kill more Jews.”

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When ‘White’ Became an Ideology – and Not a Human Reality How “anti-racists” exploit “whiteness” to feather their own political nest. Bruce Thornton

By on August 21st, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274679/when-white-became-ideology-and-not-human-reality-bruce-thornton

Recently, terminal Trumpophobe Max Boot went after chronic Trumpophobe National Review for not being extreme enough in their denunciation of “white grievance politics” and “whining” whites, who “can justify everything from a public temper tantrum to a shooting spree,” and expose their belief “that white supremacy is the natural order of things.” Boot counsels “clueless white people” to “get a grip” and tone down the “sense of outrage that white people feel when they fear losing their privileged position to people of color.”

John Nolte on Brietbart humorously dissects Boot’s racialist drivel and the NeverTrump civil war, and John Hirschauer ably defends NRO’s real point. What I find interesting 50 years after the Civil Rights legislation is the continuing use of empty terms like “white.” Such racial categories are left-overs from early 20th century “scientific racism,” which dressed up irrational and self-serving bigotry in the technical terminology and quantitative procedures of real science. Today, they are the instruments of the progressive project of dismantling the Constitutional order at the expense of freedom.

Back in the heyday of “scientific racism,” the category “white” was an incoherent amalgam of superficial physical characteristics like skull shape and skin-color, with subjectively defined inherited “traits”––including vague qualities like “gumption” or “stick-to-it-ive-ness”––  that in fact reflected cultural differences, different social mores, affluence, and geographic diversity. Soon “white” denoted the Anglo-Norman, Nordic, and Germanic peoples, often compressed into WASPs, who comprised America’s socio-economic, political, and educational elite. That same demographic provided the intellectual and political advocates of “scientific racism” and the eugenics movement, which sought to limit immigrants from southern Italy, eastern Europe, and the Middle East, who by the Darwinian laws of nature were incapable of functioning in a politically free, economically advanced society.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Short-Circuiting the Natural Love of Learning in Young People By David Solway

By on August 21st, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/08/shortcircuiting_the_natural_love_of_learning_in_young_people.html

There can be little doubt that the majority of today’s students are largely incapable of literate performance. They are also collectively devoid of humility before the majesty of the Great Tradition and the lessons of experience that would allow them to grapple with a strenuous and comprehensive curriculum of study.

They have been deprived of genuine instruction in the academic disciplines, indoctrinated in the political shibboleths of the time, and coddled into a state of self-assured autonomy of judgment. This is common knowledge.

Grasping the rudiments of grammar and style, learning how to write coherently (by which I mean both the cursive of penmanship and the cursive of thought), and reading with comprehension in history, literature, philosophy and politics have become dead letters, quite literally. The state of juvenility and ineptitude in which they loiter bodes ill for the culture.

The default procedure among administrators and teachers is to ignore the obvious, to install largely useless computer instruction in the acquisition of writing skills and language proficiency, insist that “fairness” justifies weakening admission standards at the expense of quality, and that ‘social justice” rather than scholarly achievement and disciplinary merit is the aim of education.  

While these institutional debits and failures remain in place, the crux of the issue lies elsewhere. Nothing can supplant early reading — that is, actual reading and being read to — in the home. This is an advantage that cannot be overestimated. Education, as the adage has it, begins in the home with loving and responsible parents. According to Aristotle in the Politics, a child’s character and potentialities are formed by the age of seven, and there is considerble truth to that. Failing such parental supervision, students enter the education system at a deficit. Reclamation is always difficult though differentially possible, assuming native and untapped inclination in the student, a curriculum stressing the basics and expanding outward, an administration concerned with education rather than entrenchment, and teachers who are themselves well-educated and professionally accountable — a Sisyphean proposition.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

BABY KILLERS: JOAN SWIRSKY

By on August 21st, 2019

https://canadafreepress.com/article/baby-killers

“Thou shalt not kill.” Exodus 20:13

”…I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live:”Deuteronomy 30:19

Remember good ole boy Johnny Edwards—actually North Carolina Democrat Senator John Edwards (1998-2012), VP candidate in 2004, and presidential candidate in 2008? Edwards is hard to forget because he burst upon the national stage as the golden-tongued lawyer who was famous for defending the rights of the unborn.

According to writer Douglas Johnson in National Review, “in 1985, John Edwards stood before a jury and channeled the words of an unborn baby girl. In his closing argument to the jury, Edwards conveyed what the unborn child, Jennifer Campbell, purportedly had been feeling hour-by-hour as her distress grew.

“She speaks to you through me,” Edwards told the jury. “And I have to tell you right now—I didn’t plan to talk about this—right now I feel her. I feel her presence. She’s inside me, and she’s talking to you.”

Edwards won that lawsuit and went on to file at least 20 similar lawsuits in the years following, achieving verdicts and settlements of more than $60 million for his clients.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Solar Energy: Good For Virtue Signaling And Not Much Else

By on August 20th, 2019

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/08/20/the-truth-about-solar-power-good-for-virtue-signaling-and-not-much-else/

There’s a great future in solar, the fossil-fuel haters have been telling us for some time. They might be right. One day. But they’ve been saying that for quite a while, and the future continues to be out there … somewhere.

Not so long ago, the French even thought paving their highways with solar panels was a good idea. But “Three Years Later,” says a Popular Mechanics headline from late last week, “the French Solar Road Is a Total Flop.”

How can this be? Solar, we’ve long been told, will save us all.

“It’s too noisy, falling apart, and doesn’t even collect enough solar energy,” says PM.

France’s Sun Road, known locally as the Wattway — what, nobody thought of Voltabahn or Wattastrada? — was an “experiment that seemed ingenious in its simplicity: fill a road with photovoltaic panels and let them passively soak up the rays as cars drive harmlessly above.”

However, its “most optimistic supporters have deemed” it a “failure,” says PM. It couldn’t handle the weight of heavy trucks, the surface made so much racket that the speed limit had to be lowered to 43 mph, and it’s failed to deliver the power that had been promised.

Flaws include poor location (“Normandy is not historically known as a sunny area,” says Popular Mechanics, to which we add, no area is sunny at night); storms (the climate alarmists will blame global warming for their existence); and questionable design (solar panels work when best directed toward the sun, not arranged flat on the ground as a road bed).

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

St Greta of Thunberg

By on August 20th, 2019

https://quadrant

As Greta Thunberg makes her way across the Atlantic in a high-tech racing yacht built of petro-chemical derivatives and guided by banks of power-hungry onboard computers, the sort of people who maintain the UN’s climate powwows are more than opportunities for Third World kleptocrats’ brothers-in-law and professional scaremongers to live large on other people’s money are strewing her foamy progress with the rose petals of adoration.

James Delingpole sees the voyage in a rather different light, not to mention Saint Greta of Thunberg’s appearance on the cover of GQ magazine:

…What kind of man would be remotely interested in buying a mag whose main feature entailed a finger-wagging lecture (one we’ve all heard a gazillion times before) about how, like, totally endangered the planet is and how totally it’s all our fault and how we’ve got to abandon all the things we hold dear — meat; air travel; fast cars; designer threads — in order to stop all the baby polar bears melting?

A lecture, furthermore, from a child who hasn’t finished her schooling, whose frontal lobes haven’t formed, who has no sense of humour, whose every utterance is the second-hand opinion of alarmist grown-ups whose doomsday claims she is completely unequipped to assess?

No kind of man that I know of, that’s for sure. Unless you count tofu-eating, milquetoast, pantywaist, beta, snowflake, self-flagellating, Mom’s-basement-dwelling, environmental science graduates as men….

And that is Delingpole just getting started.

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Why Conservatives Don’t Trust Facebook My independent team of investigators looked into the complaints, and the company has taken action. By Jon Kyl

By on August 20th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-conservatives-dont-trust-facebook-11566309603

From the Ivy League to Hollywood and the mainstream media, Americans with traditional morals or conservative politics have often felt excluded from the country’s elite, culture-creating institutions. Facebook offered an alternative: a place to express views and share news that you couldn’t find in the New York Times.

Over time, however, many conservatives lost trust in Facebook, believing it discriminated against them. The increasing scale and complexity of Facebook’s content-moderation practices made matters worse. In 2016 Facebook employees were accused of suppressing conservative articles in the news feed’s now-discontinued “trending” section. In April 2018 Congress grilled Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg about anticonservative bias, from blocked content to suspended accounts.

In response to mounting criticism, Facebook asked me to conduct a survey to hear from conservatives directly. Following substantial public interest in the project and in light of policy changes Facebook has recently made, we have decided to share our findings at this time.

Facebook placed no restrictions on how I could conduct the work. My team at the law firm Covington & Burling LLP began conducting interviews in May 2018. We cast a wide net to include as many aspects of conservatism as possible—from organizations focused on Christian values or protecting free expression to those focused on tax policy and small government. We identified individuals, groups and lawmakers who either use, study or could potentially regulate Facebook, and interviewed 133 of them. To encourage them to speak freely, we told interviewees we wouldn’t publish their identities. We presented our preliminary findings to Facebook in early August 2018 and have been discussing them with the company ever since.

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