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October 2019

Turkey, Azerbaijan Ban Chess Champion by Sezen Şahin

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14934/turkey-ban-armenian-chess-champion

The tournament that three-time Armenian chess champion, Maria Gevorgyan, was invited to attend — and from which her invitation was subsequently withdrawn — was the 2019 Sivas Buruciye Chess Open, which was held August 19-24.

In a letter of complaint to the Lausanne, Switzerland-based International Chess Federation (FIDE), MP Mkhitar Hayrapetyan… demanded that FIDE take action…. The investigation is still ongoing.

The solution to the persecution of Armenians in Turkey and Azerbaijan lies in the victory of critical thinking and human rights over dogma and political corruption in those countries.

For there to be a chance of this happening, however, Turkey and Azerbaijan should be governed not by dictatorships that spread hate-filled propaganda, but by people who participate in a true democracy with equal human rights for all.

The banning of three-time Armenian chess champion, Maria Gevorgyan, from an international tournament in Turkey — due to pressure by the Azerbaijani delegation — highlights the discrimination and persecution that Armenians continue suffer in Turkey and Azerbaijan.

The tournament that Gevorgyan was invited to attend — and from which her invitation was subsequently withdrawn — was the 2019 Sivas Buruciye Chess Open, which was held August 19-24.

Antifa Goons Block and Harass Elderly Couple Attending Conservative Event in Canada Debra Heine

https://amgreatness.com/2019/09/30/antifa-goons-block-and-harass-elderly-couple-attending-conservative-event-in-canada/

A protest outside of a free speech event at a college in Ontario, Canada turned violent Sunday evening as far left demonstrators blocked and harassed supporters trying to enter the building.

The event at Hamilton’s Mohawk College featured People’s Party of Canada Leader Maxime Bernier and American political commentator David Rubin.

Masked agitators waved signs that read “White supremacy is terrorism” and “Refugees welcome here,” and chanted  “Nazi scum, off our streets” as attendees tried to enter the building.

According to a Rebel Media reporter on the scene, antifa members blocked the path of the attendees, shoved their middle fingers in their faces and pulled the hats off their heads.

Things turned positively surreal when a group of antifa agitators got in the faces of an elderly couple as they made their way across the street toward the entrance of building.

“Nazi scum, off our streets!” the antifa thugs screeched at the little old lady hunched over a walker. Three masked agitators moved in so close to the couple, they touched the frail woman’s walker. At that point, one of the goons screamed something and pointed an accusatory finger in the old man’s face as he tried to stand up for his wife.

Four protesters were briefly detained after assaulting conservative attendees, but they were quickly released without charges, according to Portland-based journalist Andy Ngo.

Julie Kelly: Elections Inspector General’s Ties Suggest Ukraine ‘Scandal’ is Just More Collusion Hoax

amgreatness.com/2019/09/30/inspector-generals-ties-suggest-ukraine-scandal-is-just-more-collusion-hoax/

Democrats are poised to begin the impeachment process based on this latest controversy. It’s time for Republicans to uncover as much information as possible, including whether this scandal is an extension of the collusion hoax and whether it involves some of the very same players.

Michael Atkinson, the intelligence community’s inspector general at the center of the so-called “whistleblower” report, is earning Robert Mueller-level adoration by the press.

Atkinson, we are told, is a truth-seeker with no partisan agenda or political grudge. “The intelligence community’s chief watchdog, Michael Atkinson, is known to his peers and colleagues as a highly cautious ‘straight shooter’ who tends to keep his head down,” cooed Politico reporter Natasha Bertrand on September 23.

The former prosecutor’s resume is touted as proof that the long-time public servant only is acting in the best interest of the country; his motives are not to be questioned, we are chastised. (This description follows a pattern similar to the way the media portrayed dossier author Christopher Steele and Special Counsel Robert Mueller.)

Atkinson is “a no-nonsense, serious and nonpartisan career prosecutor who showed a strong commitment to the law throughout his nearly two-decade career at the Department of Justice,” insisted a puff piece in The Hill on September 26.

DOUGLAS MURRAY’S NEW BOOK “THE MADNESS OF CROWDS-GENDER, RACE AND IDENTITY””

In his devastating new book The Madness of Crowds, Douglas Murray examines the twenty-first century’s most divisive issues: sexuality, gender, technology and race. He reveals the astonishing new culture wars playing out in our workplaces, universities, schools and homes in the names of social justice, identity politics and intersectionality.

We are living through a postmodern era in which the grand narratives of religion and political ideology have collapsed. In their place have emerged a crusading desire to right perceived wrongs and a weaponization of identity, both accelerated by the new forms of social and news media. Narrow sets of interests now dominate the agenda as society becomes more and more tribal–and, as Murray shows, the casualties are mounting.

Readers of all political persuasions cannot afford to ignore Murray’s masterfully argued and fiercely provocative book, in which he seeks to inject some sense into the discussion around this generation’s most complicated issues. He ends with an impassioned call for free speech, shared common values and sanity in an age of mass hysteria.

American, British And Israeli Elites To The People: There’s No Going Back Bob Maistros

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/09/30/american-b

America’s two parties have given up all pretense of pushing any program for the rest of the current president’s term (which still has over 30% of its length to run).

Forget about another round of growth-driving tax cuts, immigration reform, infrastructure, fixing the health care system, a common trade policy. Anything the American people might like to see.

The only objective on one side: impeachment. On the other: simple survival.

In the UK, the political system is similarly paralyzed. The government is seeking to achieve the people’s will on Brexit on reasonable terms — or even any terms at all. But rogue members of the ruling Conservative Party have voted to ensure it can’t leave the European Union without a deal, which means it has lost its negotiating leverage to achieve such a deal. Prime Minister Boris Johnson wants to appeal to the people through a new election. But party rebels have scotched that path forward as well.

In Israel, neither of two major alliances won enough seats in this month’s election to cobble together a majority, and voices across the political spectrum are calling for a so-called “unity government.” But one side won’t join a coalition that includes Benjamin Netanyahu, who faces indictment on corruption charges. The prime minister’s party won’t form a government without him. A potential kingmaker (who forced the second election in a year) says he won’t sit with the prime minister’s party, either, unless it deep-sixes its Orthodox Jewish coalition partners, which the bloc refuses to do.

In short, the world’s three most important democracies, all rendered ungovernable.

Hillary Clinton and Ukraine A letter released Monday raises questions beyond the Bidens. By James Freeman

https://www.wsj.com/articles/hillary-clinton-and-ukraine-11569881729

The Biden clan still needs to explain why a vice president’s son was enjoying a $50,000-per-month gig for which his principal qualification appears to have been his last name. But Joe Biden isn’t the only pillar of the Democratic establishment who won’t enjoy the new spotlight on American relations with Ukraine. And President Donald Trump isn’t the only one who wants a fuller accounting of that country’s role in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

In a letter released on Monday morning, Republican senators Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin ask U.S. Attorney General William Barr if he’s trying to answer the lingering questions:

We write to follow up on Senator Grassley’s July 20, 2017 letter, which highlighted brazen efforts by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton campaign to use the government of Ukraine for the express purpose of finding negative information on then candidate Trump in order to undermine his campaign. That letter also highlighted news reports that, during the 2016 presidential election, “Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump” and did so by “disseminat[ing] documents implicating a top Trump aide in corruption and suggest[ing] they were investigating the matter[.]” Ukrainian officials also reportedly “helped Clinton’s allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers.”

The senators aren’t relying on reports from conservative bloggers. The quotations come from a 2017 story in Politico, hardly a pro-Trump outfit. “Ukrainian efforts to sabotage Trump backfire,” read the headline on the article by Kenneth P. Vogel and David Stern. “Kiev officials are scrambling to make amends with the president-elect after quietly working to boost Clinton,” said the subhead of the article, which was published shortly before Mr. Trump’s inauguration.

Why Foreign Influence Is on the Rise Corrupt officials and ‘princelings’ grow more important in our globalized politics. By Walter Russell Mead

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-foreign-influence-is-on-the-rise-11569885340

“Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence,” George Washington warned in his Farewell Address, “the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government.” Those words have rarely seemed more relevant than now, when both the president and the front-runner for the nomination to challenge him are embroiled in a scandal that began with attempts by Ukrainian figures to manipulate Washington politics and policy.

The Ukrainian firestorm is only the start. America and the world are changing in ways that will make the question of foreign influence in U.S. political life more fateful, and more difficult to police, than ever.

This isn’t about Facebook ads and voting machines. It is not even about more blatant forms of foreign meddling, like the alleged Russian leaks of damaging information stolen from the Democratic National Committee. Serious as these problems are, America’s greatest risk isn’t the vulnerability of its voting machines to foreign hackers or the susceptibility of party apparatchiks to phishing scams. It is the erosion of ethical standards in the American political and business establishments that most exposes the U.S. to the kind of foreign interference against which Washington warned.

This isn’t a partisan problem. Some members of the administration, including the tweeter in chief, have behaved in ways that earlier American presidents would have condemned, but they are hardly alone. The Clinton Foundation was perceived by many of its foreign donors to be a way to influence American politics during the years in which Hillary Clinton was a likely future president. And hardly anyone believes it was Hunter Biden’s experience, sagacity and business acumen that commended him as a candidate for board membership to a beleaguered Ukrainian gas company.

ICE Targets Illegals in Sanctuary City Raids Making headway in the fight against bastions of lawlessness. Matthew Vadum

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/10/ice-targets-illegals-sanctuary-city-raids-matthew-vadum/

In a weeklong sweep U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement took close to 1,300 illegal aliens into custody, many of whom were arrested in so-called sanctuary cities that harbor illegals and shield them from federal immigration enforcement efforts.

Sanctuary jurisdictions defy U.S. law by, among other things, refusing to honor detainer requests in which ICE asks local jailers to notify the agency before an inmate wanted on immigration charges is released. A detainer request also asks the jailer to hold the individual for up to 48 hours after when the individual would otherwise be released so ICE can take him or her into custody for processing and possible deportation.

“To be clear, the concept of sanctuary cities is perhaps the most ridiculous and outrageous idea I’ve ever encountered in my almost 40 years of law enforcement,” Sheriff Wayne Ivey of Brevard County, Florida, told reporters at the White House Sept. 26.

“To think that there are those in power who took the same oath of office that we did to uphold the Constitution, who would be willing to oppose the rule of law, is completely insane and unacceptable.”

The sanctuary movement gave illegal aliens permission to rob, rape, and murder Americans by, among other things, stigmatizing immigration enforcement. Some left-wingers call sanctuary jurisdictions “civil liberties safe zones” to blur the distinction between citizens and non-citizens by implying illegal aliens somehow possess a civil right to be present in the U.S.

Fake Hate: Virginia Girl Admits She Made Up ‘Hair Cut’ Assault at School Where Karen Pence Teaches By Stephen Green

https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/fake-hate-virginia-girl-admits-she-made-up-hair-cut-assault/

It’s been a running gag at Instapundit for years now that if it weren’t for fake hate crimes, there’d be hardly any hate crimes at all. So it probably shouldn’t come as a huge surprise to learn that yet another fake hate crime allegation has been proven false.

It was all over the major papers late last week, when 12-year-old Amari Allen, a black student, claimed that three white boys held her down and forcibly cut some of her dreadlocks at their Christian school.

Wiser bloggers demurred from covering the story until more information could come to light.

Yet the NYT and other outlets breathlessly reported the sixth-grader’s accusation in a phone interview. “They put me on the ground,” she claimed. “One of them put my hands behind my back. One put his hands over my mouth. One cut my hair. They were saying that my hair was ugly, that it was nappy.” And Twitter was all lit up because of the supposed Mike Pence connection — his wife Karen teaches at the Immanuel Christian School where the assault never happened.

3 white boys allegedly cut black girl’s dreadlocks at Christian school where Karen Pence teaches https://t.co/mtQl2mz9yf

— Daily Kos (@dailykos) September 30, 2019

No, they didn’t. The girl recanted. Nevertheless, school principal Stephen Danish released a statement this morning bemoaning the “tremendous pain for the victims and the hurt on both sides of this conflict.”

Both sides? Did Allen’s feelings get hurt when she had to retract her false accusation?