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October 2019

VICIOUS ANTI-SEMITISM IN BELGIUM

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2019/10/yes-virginia-there-is-famous-belgian.html

Yes, Virginia, There is a Famous Belgian …
… Or, rather, an infamous one.

His name’s Christoph D’Haese.  He’s Burgomeester (mayor) of the Belgian city of Aalst in old East Flanders, and a member of the Nieuw-Vlaamse Alliantie, which, being translated, means New Flemish Alliance.

Once upon a time, in another city in what is now Belgium, live cats were thrown from a belfry tower to their deaths on a carnival day held during Lent.  That vile barbarism, a product of the Middle Ages, apparently persisted until 1817.

In Aalst during Lent there is also a carnival day.  

No, they don’t sacrifice cats. 

But they do sacrifice all pretensions to human decency by (would you believe this, post-Shoah!?) including hideous depictions of Jews in the carnival parade, depictions that would do credit to Julius Streicher and the rest of the Nazi fiends were those monsters still alive. 

Here’s how a senior American academic, Eliot A, Cohen, calling it out for the antisemitism that it is, described the obnoxious spectacle from last year:

“On Sunday, a float rolled down the streets of Aalst, a Belgian town, for carnival. It featured two grotesque caricatures of Hasidic Jews, hooked noses, hands reaching out for money, and a rat sitting on money bags. That’s 2019. A second float … —in Marburg, Germany, in 1936—featured celebrants dressed as Orthodox Jews. The only real difference is that the former was more elaborately and professionally executed, and if anything more grotesque.”
 To quote The Independent newspaper at the time:

 ‘A carnival parade which featured Jewish caricatures standing amid piles of money has been compared to Nazi antisemitic propaganda and provoked fierce criticism in Belgium. One float in the city of Aalst’s annual feast on Sunday was decorated with two huge figures of men with large sideburns, crooked noses and wearing shtreimels, a fur hat worn by some Orthodox Jews. One had a rat on his shoulder.

Whistleblower Eric Ciaramella: Is this the best they’ve got? By Monica Showalter

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/10/whistleblower_eric_ciaramella_is_this_the_best_theyve_got.html

Well, Happy Halloween.

The whistleblower is now pretty well outed by investigative journalist Paul Sperry, and it’s underwhelming.  He’s been identified as one Eric Ciaramella, 33, prep school grad, Yalie, Obama backwash, political operative, and fanatic Trump-hater.  Hardly the Mister Probity concerned about national security that’s been painted.

Sperry did the digging but pointed out that that the man’s identity had been an open secret in the Beltway, with mainstream media doing their darnedest to keep his name from being attached to his rather spectacular charges.

Federal documents reveal that the 33-year-old Ciaramella, a registered Democrat held over from the Obama White House, previously worked with former Vice President Joe Biden and former CIA Director John Brennan, a vocal critic of Trump who helped initiate the Russia “collusion” investigation of the Trump campaign during the 2016 election.

Ciaramella’s name should be out there because it’s relevant whether all the hearsay in his legally couched charge was actually made in good faith or was just another leftist smear job under cover of government mechanisms, same as the Steele dossier.

Based on Sperry’s digging, it certainly looks like the latter. 

From Sperry’s reporting, we learn that this creep wasn’t trying to make anything better within government, which is what whistleblower protections are for.  He was just another leftist trying to overturn the 2016 election, and it dated from way back, starting with his propensity to leak.

In May 2017, Ciaramella went “outside his chain of command,” according to a former NSC co-worker, to send an email alerting another agency that Trump happened to hold a meeting with Russian diplomats in the Oval Office the day after firing Comey, who led the Trump-Russia investigation. The email also noted that Russian President Vladimir Putin had phoned the president a week earlier.

Contents of the email appear to have ended up in the media, which reported Trump boasted to the Russian officials about firing Comey, whom he allegedly called “crazy, a real nut job.”

Palestine Misunderstood written by Petra Marquardt-Bigman

https://quillette.com/2019/10/31/palestine-

From my home on the southern outskirts of Tel Aviv, I hear the Muslim call to prayer every day as it issues from a mosque half a mile away in neighboring Jaffa. Jewish Israelis see Arabic on their money, on street signs, on buses, and on the labels adorning foodstuffs that provide consumers with nutritional information. They hear Arabic in the stores, shopping malls, and cafes they routinely frequent. And if they visit a clinic or hospital, Jewish Israelis will hear Arabic spoken by their fellow patients, and by the doctors and nurses who tend to them. Israel may be the world’s only Jewish state, but Arabs account for roughly 21 percent of its population, so the sounds and sights of the Arabic language are simply part of daily life in this corner of the Levant.

So I was surprised to learn, from an article written by Michael Humeniuk for Quillette, that “when Jewish Israelis hear spoken Arabic, which they perceive as screams, they don’t know if a bomb is about to go off or one guy is simply complimenting another guy’s shoes.” Humeniuk is from Toronto, and his article is a well written and (presumably) well intentioned attempt to look beyond the “solemn stereotypes” he and other Westerners have absorbed of Palestinians “as freedom fighter or terrorist—geopolitical character actors within the grand narrative of what is vaguely described as ‘the Middle East conflict.’” Others, like him, who have travelled to Middle East because they are “touched and troubled by the plight of the Palestinians,” are so preoccupied by the politics of the conflict that they forget to notice “the Palestinian people themselves—how they cook and eat, how they tease and flirt, how they celebrate and mourn.” It is to this unenlightened view that Humeniuk wishes to offer a corrective.

Unfortunately, as Humeniuk relates his experiences in Palestine’s de facto capital, it becomes increasingly evident that he knows little about the region, its people, or its complexities. And so his lesson (audaciously entitled “Ramallah for Beginners”) soon lapses into tiresome clichés that contrast a heavily fortified and paranoid Israeli state with a portrait of peaceable donkey-riding Palestinians quietly tending their picturesque olive groves or enjoying the city’s party life (“cheaper and more welcoming,” we are told, than that offered by Tel Aviv). This perspective not only misunderstands the fraught history and political present of the region, but it unhelpfully caricatures Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs on both sides of the Green Line that separated Israel and the Jordanian-annexed West Bank before the Six Day War of 1967.

The Rules Of The Democrat-Backed Impeachment Inquiry Are Stacked Against Trump By Tristan Justice

https://thefederalist.com/2019/10/31/the-rules-of-the-democrat-backed-impeachment-inquiry-are-stacked-against-trump/

House Democrats rubber-stamped an ad hoc anti-Trump investigation Thursday aimed at overturning the results of the 2016 election after the spectacular failure of the grand Russian collusion hoax collapsing earlier this year.

The text of the resolution lays the framework for the official impeachment proceedings going forward led by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., who has been operating an illegitimate process since Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., announced the beginning an investigation in September.

Despite Democrat claims that the resolution would mean an open and transparent process, House members are still holding hearings in secret even after its passage.

The Democrat passed rules for impeachment also bar Republican lawmakers from calling witnesses or subpoenaing evidence without prior approval from Democrats. Members of the minority party were granted these rights in both the Nixon and the Clinton impeachment proceedings.

Schiff, whose credibility was shattered by his peddling of the Russian conspiracy theory for the last three years, has run an unfair process from the start. Behind closed doors, Schiff interviewed witnesses and selectively leaked parts of their testimonies to frame the president while Trump’s legal counsel has been barred from participating, denying the president rights to due process.

On Wednesday, House Minority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., exposed Schiff for directing witnesses testifying not to answer questions asked be Republican members.

“He’s directing witnesses not to answer questions that he doesn’t want the witness to answer if they’re asked by Republicans,” Scalise told reporters on Capitol Hill. “He’s not cut off one Democrat. He’s not interrupted one Democrat and told a witness not to answer Democrat members’ questions but today he started telling witnesses not to answer questions by certain Republicans.”

Poll: Nearly Half of British Jews Say They Would ‘Seriously Consider’ Fleeing the Country If Corbyn Is Elected PM By Zachary Evans

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/poll-nearly-half-of-british-jews-say-they-would-seriously-consider-fleeing-the-country-if-corbyn-is-elected-pm/

Forty-seven percent of British Jews would “seriously consider” emigrating if Labour party head Jeremy Corbyn is elected prime minister, according to a poll by Survation commissioned by the Jewish Leadership Council (JLC), a British-Jewish advocacy group.

The poll, which was shared with the Jewish News, also found that 87 percent of respondents believed Corbyn to be anti-Semitic.

Corbyn has a long history of association with Islamists and other anti-Semitic figures. In 2009, he invited Hamas members to speak in Parliament, while on Holocaust Memorial Day in 2010 he hosted an event at Parliament during which a Jewish Holocaust survivor compared the Israeli government to Nazis. He also reportedly laid a wreath at the grave of a Black September terrorist who participated in the murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich.

Corbyn has also failed to tackle anti-Semitism within the Labour party, according to an expose published in April of this year. The party received 863 complaints of anti-Semitism as of March but took action in only 101 of those cases. Members who have said such things as “Heil Hitler,” “F**k the Jews,” and “Jews are the problem,” have remained in the party despite complaints against them.

Two Jewish politicians have so far quit the Labour party, one of whom, Louise Ellman, wrote that anti-Semitism has “become mainstream in the Labour Party. Jewish members have been bullied, abused and driven out. Anti-Semites have felt comfortable and vile conspiracy theories have been propagated…The Labour Party is no longer a safe place for Jews.”

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Bonfire of the Democratic Party’s Once-Rising Stars By Jim Geraghty

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/bonfire-of-the-democratic-partys-once-rising-stars/

Let the 2020 cycle be a warning to political correspondents who write glowing profile pieces on the next great Democratic party hope. For some of us, the best part of this cycle so far is watching the slow-motion implosion of so many wildly over-hyped “rising stars” of the Democratic party — relentlessly trying and failing to gain traction against a trio of well-worn septuagenarians. This primary is turning into a giant bonfire of once-promising political talents who could make national reporters swoon.

As far back as 2017, Vogue and other national glossies gushed over the presidential potential of Kirsten Gillibrand.

Beto O’Rourke was the favorite subject of glowing profiles in national publications throughout 2018.

Julian Castro spent much of the past decade being touted as “the Latino Obama.”

Cory Booker was the subject of documentaries and a social media star . . . and like the rest, he’s an afterthought.

And as our John McCormick notes, Kamala Harris’s campaign may be reaching the stage of an M.Night Shamalayan character — long since dead, but still walking around in denial of this difficult truth. Harris stands out from the others because in early summer, she appeared to have reached the top tier, or at least be knocking on the door. But difficulties in defending her record as a prosecutor have her well behind everywhere, even in her home state.

Some of the blame for these crash-and-burn campaigns goes beyond the candidates. It’s tougher to stand out among twenty-something candidates than among a half-dozen. Booker spent much of his career emulating the early Barack Obama and trying to cultivate a post-partisan problem-solver image, and with the election of Donald Trump, Democrats aren’t as interested in that — consider him a species that could not adapt to political climate change.

Examining the House Impeachment Inquiry Resolution By Andrew C. McCarthy

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/10/house-impeachment-inquiry-resolution-observations/

Some observations

On Tuesday, House Democrats published the resolution that, once passed, will approve and govern the impeachment inquiry on the question whether President Trump should be impeached. The vote is likely to take place on Thursday.

Some observations about the eight-page resolution.

1) The resolution is flawed, for reasons we’ll get to (the flaws could be major or minor, depending on how the resolution is implemented). By any measure, though, it is a significant improvement over the status quo ante. Once it’s passed, the House as an institution will have endorsed the impeachment inquiry. As we have pointed out, the Constitution commits the impeachment power to the House, not to the Speaker or the majority party in the House. The House acts as institution only by voting. It will finally have done so once this resolution is approved. The president and Republicans will no longer have a valid argument that the inquiry is constitutionally infirm. That has been the White House’s main justification for refusing to cooperate. (This refusal is overstated since a number of executive officials have submitted to closed-door interviews and otherwise participated. This has largely been done, though, despite the discouragement of the White House, which has otherwise declined to cooperate.)

2) Not surprisingly, Democrats are posturing that the passage of the resolution means the president must produce any information directed by the House. This is an overstatement. What the resolution means is that the White House’s position of blanket, indiscriminate non-cooperation will no longer be justifiable. Nevertheless, the president maintains all the legal privileges he enjoyed — including executive privilege and attorney-client privilege — regardless of whether there was a resolution.

3) It is not clear how extensive executive privilege is. In United States v. Nixon, the Supreme Court recognized that the president’s communications with key advisers in carrying out his official duties were presumptively privileged; but it further held that the privilege was not absolute and would have to give way to the needs of a criminal investigation — particularly if the evidence at issue was critical and there was no alternative source for obtaining it. A House impeachment inquiry is not a criminal investigation. It is, however, a core constitutional function, and I believe the courts would find that its needs for information are at least as compelling as those of a criminal investigation.

Georgia State Lawmaker Proposes Making Gender Transition Surgery For Minors A Felony By Matt Margolis

https://pjmedia.com/trending/georgia-state-lawmaker-proposes-making-gender-transition-surgery-for-minors-a-felony/

Republican State Representative Ginny Ehrhart from Georgia wants to make it a felony for doctors to perform gender transition procedures on minors, including mastectomy, vasectomy, castration and other forms of genital mutilation, and ban the prescription of puberty-blocking drugs and cross-sex hormone therapy.

State Rep. Ginny Ehrhart, R-Powder Springs, said the legislation aims to protect children from having irreversible procedures done when they are young. Current law requires a parent to consent to surgery or for a minor to be prescribed medication.

While the bill is still being drafted, Ehrhart said Georgia medical providers who perform surgeries or administer or prescribe medications that assist minors with gender transition could be charged with a felony. The legislation would not affect doctors working with adults who seek to undergo gender transition.

“We’re talking about children that can’t get a tattoo or smoke a cigar or a cigarette in the state of Georgia but can be castrated and get sterilized,” she said.

While this seems like common sense to most people, Jeff Graham, the executive director of Georgia Equality, an LGBT rights group in the state, blasted the proposed legislation. “This legislation would criminalize decisions that are made carefully within families in consultation with medical professionals and mental health professionals. Supporting children in recognizing their gender identity is not only humane, it saves lives and strengthens families.”

SYDNEY WILLIAMS: WHAT HAS BECOME OF US?

swtotd.blogspot.com

“Have we lost our minds?” Andrew Cuomo (1957-)Governor, New York

While Governor Cuomo’s exclamation was in response to the increasing number of assaults by the mentally deranged in New York City, it is one that has applicability across our political landscape, not just for the unhinged way Leftist politicians treat truants and criminals in our cities, but in most all ways political. Have we all gone bonkers? I wince at President Trump’s coarseness and grimace as he Tweets as fast as a Shetland Pony sheds its winter coat. Then I listen to anti-Trumpers and their lemming-like hatred that betrays an emotional response rather than a reasoned reaction. Seen as a threat to the comfortably established elite, the majority of Democrats wanted to impeach Mr. Trump on November 9, 2016. And I wonder: What ever happened to e Pluribus Unum?

Phrases and words: Identity politics; victimization; equality; wokeness. Identity politics is segregation by a different and more politically correct name. Real victims are ignored, while perpetrators are mollycoddled as deserving of special care for having been “victims” of society governed by old, white men. Equality has morphed into homogenization, deflating the individual to an inflated collective. The cream in our public schools can no longer find its way to the top. Wokeness is a Tesla-like vehicle for social justice warriors.

Politicians, abetted by a media that has foregone any semblance of investigative independence, to become a propaganda arm of the Party they prefer. They have given new meanings to those phrases and words mentioned above. The consequence has been a shock to the Judeo-Christian culture in which most of us were raised, when Albert Einstein once wrote, and we all believed, that “only morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to life.”

Here we are now, three years after the fact, yet a refusal to accept the outcome of the 2016 election persists. Civil discourse is a thing of the past. We have intelligence agencies that colluded against a Presidential candidate. Public schools, especially those in inner cities who keep a watchful (and jaundiced) eye on equality, teach to the lowest common denominator, which means that those who have been identified as “gifted and talented” cannot be separated, so taught differently and thus given a chance to disengage from the claws of mediocrity that entrap them. In many of these same cities, the homeless – some mentally sick, others addicted to drugs and/or alcohol and a few simply down on their luck – ply our parks and streets. Instead of offering the dignity of a job and asking proper behavior in return for food and shelter, we provide them free needles and let them soil streets, sidewalks and parks. In our desire to explain away criminal acts and civil misbehavior as a consequence of victimization, we ignore the plight of real victims. Men and women are tried in the press, without benefit of due process. The “broken windows” policy of policing, first described in 1982 by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling and based on the theory that if man lives in a neighborhood where property and people are respected crime rates will decline. It worked in New York City in the ‘90s and early 2000s but has been abandoned because of accusations that minorities were unfairly targeted. To paraphrase Dr. Seuss: “How did we get so stupid so soon?”

Domestic energy producers, the Middle East and Israel Ambassador (Ret.) Yoram Ettinger and Fred Zeidman

https://bit.ly/2N228qY

The growing sophistication of domestic oil and natural gas production has enhanced the US national security. It has transformed the leader of the free world from a major importer of crude oil to the world’s top producer of both crude oil (surpassing Saudi Arabia) and natural gas (ahead of Russia), and expected to be the globe’s largest exporter in five years.        

The dramatic reduction of US dependency on the importation of oil takes place at a time when the supply of oil from the Persian Gulf is increasingly precarious.  It is threatened by Iran’s Ayatollahs, as well as by additional rogue elements in the inherently violent, intolerant, fragmented, unpredictable, shifty, non-democratic and unstable Middle East. An area which is strategically located between Europe, the Mediterranean, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean.   

The Middle East – and especially Iran’s Ayatollahs – has become a most proliferating epicenter of global Islamic terrorism, drug trafficking and the development of ballistic and nuclear capabilities, producing ripple effects throughout the globe. For instance, the expanding presence of the Ayatollahs and Hezbollah terrorists in the South American platforms of anti-US Islamic terrorism and drug trafficking: the trilateral border of Argentina-Brazil-Paraguay and the trilateral border of Chile-Peru-Bolivia. The aim of the Ayatollahs is to employ these platforms – and their intensified presence in Venezuela and Mexico – as a venue to surge toward the US.        

Iran’s Ayatollahs are not driven by the eagerness to improve trade balance, employment, standard of living and education. They are driven by the conviction that they are divinely ordained to dominate the Persian Gulf, the Middle East, Asia, Africa and the entire globe. They indoctrinate their youth that the world is divided into the abode of Islam and the abode of the infidel, which will eventually submit itself or be vanquished through Jihad (holy war).