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Ruth King

Who Is Responsible for the ‘Crisis’ in Islam? by Khaled Abu Toameh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16660/islam-crisis

Other Arabs said that Muslims have only themselves to blame for the “crisis” in their religion. They are referring to the use of Islam, by many Muslims, to carry out terrorist attacks and other atrocities against Muslims and non-Muslims.

The message these Arabs and Muslims are sending is: We created the crisis in our religion by allowing terrorists and extremists to use Islam as a pretext for their crimes.

The views expressed by these Arabs and Muslims are reminiscent of those by Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Sisi. In 2014, he called for a “religious revolution” in Islam and appealed to leading Muslim groups to “confront the misleading ideologies harming Islam and Muslims worldwide.”

“The fact is that the biggest conspirators against Islam are the Muslims themselves, specifically those who reproduce the discourse of closed-mindedness and hatred. In this context, there is no difference between those who create, finance or carry out terrorism and those who are silent about it or justify it.” — Mohammad Maghouti, Moroccan writer, Hespress, October 13, 2020.

“[W]e have to call on France to place the Muslim Brotherhood and Hezbollah on the list of terrorist organizations.” — Nervana Mahmoud, prominent Egyptian commentator and blogger, Al Hurrah, October 11, 2020.

“The crisis that Islam is suffering from was made by Muslims with their own hands when they allowed a handful of them to adopt violence as a language for dialogue with the other. Macron was right in everything he said. His message should be considered a wake-up call. Muslims have greatly offended Islam when they showed it to be a religion that incites violence and spreads chaos in stable societies that received them as refugees and provided them with protection. Muslims made a mistake when they used their religion as a justification for attacking others. This does not give us the right to condemn others and accuse them of being hostile to Islam. Islam is in crisis because it has been distorted, mutilated, and destroyed from within. We should have said thank you to Macron rather than curse him.” — Farouk Yousef, Egyptian writer, Middle East Online, October 13, 2020.

The Unapologetic Bias of the American Left by Victor Davis Hanson *****

https://amgreatness.com/2020/10/18/the-unapologetic-bias-of-the-american-left/

Today’s Left sees their efforts bending in a preordained historical arc that ends with ultimate progressive justice—and retributions.

Some yearn for the ancient monopolistic days of network news, the adolescent years of public radio and TV, and the still reputable New York Times—when once upon a time the Left at least tried to mask their progressivism in sober and judicious liberal façades. 

An avuncular Walter Cronkite, John Chancellor, Jim Lehrer, or Abe Rosenthal at least went through the motions of reporting news that was awkward or even embarrassing to the Left. Their agenda was 1960s-vintage Great Society liberalism, seen as the natural evolution from the New Deal and post-war internationalism. Edward R. Murrow, the ACLU of old, and Free Speech Movement at Berkeley—these were their liberal referents. Those days are gone.

Yet even during the Obama years, when studies showed the president had received the most slanted media honeymoon in news history, overt media bias was, at least, as hotly denied as it intensified. There were still a few ossified, quarter-hearted efforts now and then to mention the IRS scandal, the surveillance of Associated Press reporters, the various scandals embroiling the Veterans Administration, General Service Administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, and the Secret Service. But even that thin pretense is over now, too.

Racism, Cancel Culture, and Hypocrisy At Harvard Witnessing the ruthless dismantling of free thought.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/racism-cancel-culture-and-hypocrisy-harvard-richard-l-cravatts/

As racism continues to engulf campuses in paroxysms of aggrievement and perceived oppression by black students, Harvard University has become another in the growing list of universities where professors found themselves victims of the cancel culture. At UCLA, University of Chicago, Cornell, and Skidmore, faculty members were maligned and threatened with termination for purportedly critiquing Black Lives Matter, defending the police against attacks for perceived racist brutality, and even questioning the extent and reality of anti-black racism at their respective institutions and outside the campus walls.

At Harvard one of the current faculty targets is David Kane, Preceptor in Statistical Methods and Mathematics in the university’s Department of Government, who first made the apparently unforgivable error of inviting Charles Murray to speak to his Gov 50 class. Murray, of course, is a political scientist, libertarian, and the author of the still-controversial 1994 book, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, in which the authors demonstrate, in the most inflammatory section, genetic differences in intelligence between whites and blacks. Although Murray was going to discuss his new book, Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class in Kane’s class, it was Murray’s reputation as an alleged racist white supremacist that was on students’ minds when they learned of the upcoming speech.

To make matters worse for Kane, some of his assiduous students uncovered racist posts he had allegedly written on his website EphBlog. over the course of several years under the pseudonym “David Dudley Field ’25.”

China is Using Companies like Twitter to Interfere in the Election Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter’s businesses are tethered to the Communist regime. Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/china-using-companies-twitter-interfere-election-daniel-greenfield/

Last year, Amazon was forced to shut down its marketplace business in the People’s Republic of China. Amazon’s defeat followed that of a long line of Big Tech players who had tried to make a go of it in China and failed miserably. China’s economy is built to boost domestic businesses and foreign exports, with some needed imports, by companies linked to the Communist Party.

And no matter how politically correct Amazon may try to be, it can never join that club.

But Amazon’s business in China isn’t done. To a large degree, Amazon’s business is China. Behind the smiling logo, the massive array of businesses covering everything from running the CIA’s cloud to spending $500 million to make a Lord of the Rings streaming series, are a bunch of grim offices, apartments, and warehouses in Chinese cities that make up its real business.

Three years ago, third-party sellers topped Amazon’s own sales. They now make up 58%. Who are they? If, like most Americans, you shop at the giant dot com retail monopoly, you’ve already waded through a stream of random shop names, fake misspelled reviews, and counterfeit products while searching for just about anything. What happened? China happened.

Between 40% to 48% of top third-party sellers on Amazon are operating out of China. The massive growth in Chinese third-party sellers has been fairly recent and transformative.

Muslim Beheads Man on French Street, and Here We Go Again Once again we get the same mind-numbing denial and willful ignorance we always see after jihad attacks. Robert Spencer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/muslim-beheads-man-french-street-and-here-we-go-robert-spencer/

It happened again on Friday: a Muslim migrant from Chechnya, screaming “Allahu akbar,” beheaded a schoolteacher, Samuel Paty, on a street in a Paris suburb for the crime of showing cartoons of Muhammad to his students. The response to this gruesome jihad murder has been as predictable, and dreary, and drearily predictable, as one might expect.

In response to the murder, French President Emmanuel Macron said: “This battle is ours and it is existential. They will not pass. Obscurantism and the violence that goes with it will not win. They will not divide us. That’s what they seek and we must stand together.”

This sounds great on the first hearing. That’s the idea. But in reality, “They will not divide us” is a statement that is designed to reassure Muslims in France. Macron is saying that he will do nothing to “divide” the supposedly happily united French people. What would “divide” them? Well, something like scrutinizing the Islamic death penalty for blasphemy and challenging Muslim leaders in France to repudiate it explicitly and declare their support for the freedom of speech, and to demonstrate their sincerity by instituting programs in mosques and Islamic schools in France to teach against Sharia blasphemy laws and emphasize the importance of the freedom of speech. That would “divide us.” Macron is saying it won’t happen, as expected.

The Biden Emails Prove Impeachment Was A Sham The New York Post story shows once and for all that Trump’s impeachment was all based on a lie.By David Marcus

https://thefederalist.com/2020/10/17/the-biden-emails-prove-impeachment-was-a-sham/

Remember January? I know it feels like several lifetimes ago, the before times of life as we used to know it. But think back to the biggest story of those chilly days. It wasn’t the Chinese virus slowly spreading to our shores or the Democratic presidential primary. No, it was the impeachment of the president of the United States. This week’s bombshell New York Post story on Hunter Biden now shows what many of us suspected: The impeachment was a ridiculous sham.

The basis for the impeachment, for those whose recollections are understandably shaky, was that President Trump pressured the president of Ukraine to launch investigations into the energy company Burisma for the purely political purpose of hurting Joe Biden. Central to that allegation was the argument that Trump and the United States had no legitimate interest in seeing Burisma investigated. If the trove of emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop are accurate, and they have not been disputed, then this argument falls to pieces.

Pam Bondi, working for the Trump defense team, said this back during the national ordeal about the Democratic House managers’ constant attempts to call allegations against the Bidens “baseless”:

In their trial memorandum, the House managers describe this as baseless. Now, why did they say that? Why did they invoke Biden or Burisma over 400 times? The reason they needed to do that is because they’re here saying that the president must be impeached and removed from office for raising a concern. And that’s why we have to talk about this today. They say ‘sham.’ They say ‘baseless.’ They say this because if it’s OK for someone to say, ‘Hey, you know what? Maybe there’s something here worth raising,’ then their case crumbles.

Joe Biden, the father of ‘Borking’ By George Neumayr,

Supreme Court nomination hearings have gone from serene to savage, thanks largely to Joe Biden.

As head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he presided over the infamous Robert Bork hearings. His smearing of Bork for his original-intent judicial philosophy transformed hearings for Supreme Court nominees into bloody ideological battles. Henceforth, all conservative nominees were subjected to “Borking.”

Brutal to Bork from the start, Biden treated him not as a serious judge but as a stooge for what Biden called the “Reagan-Meese” agenda. Biden’s transparently unfair treatment of Bork was so bad even The Washington Post editorialized against Biden at the time:

While claiming that Judge Bork will have a full and fair hearing, Senator Joseph Biden this week has pledged to civil rights groups that he will lead the opposition to the confirmation. As the Queen of Hearts said to Alice, “Sentence first—Verdict Afterward.”

How can he possibly get a fair hearing from Biden, who has already cast himself as the role of prosecutor instead of a juror in the Judiciary Committee? If there is a strong, serious case to be argued against Judge Bork, why do so many Democrats seem unwilling to make it and afraid to listen to the other side?

In a forecast of what his own judiciary would look like, Biden opposed Bork not because he lacked the legal credentials to be on the court – Bork was considered one of the leading legal scholars in the country – but because Bork didn’t conform to Biden’s view of a good judge as a leftwing legislator from the bench.

Biden lectured Bork: “Will we retreat from our tradition of progress or will we move forward, continuing to expand and envelop the rights of individuals in a changing world which is bound to have an impact upon those individuals’ sense of who they are and what they can do?…In passing on this nomination to the Supreme Court, we must also pass judgment on whether or not your particular philosophy is an appropriate one at this time in history.”

Restitution, reparations and sins of the fathers Diane Bederman

https://dianebederman.com/restitution-reparations-and-sins-of-the-fathers/

Parents are not to be put to death for their children, nor children put to death for their parents; each will die for their own sin. (Deut 24: 16)

Deuteronomy refers to human justice as administered in a court of law. How can mere mortals decide the extent to which one person’s crime was induced by the influence of others? Clearly the judicial process must limit itself to the observable facts. The person who committed the crime is guilty. Those who may have shaped his character are not.

The guilt of previous generations would not be attached to them.

So how did we devolve into blaming the people of today, for the sins of their fathers, and then suggest reparations from generations far removed from the event?

A movement supporting reparations as a way to make amends for the atrocities of slavery and to reduce the persistent wealth gap is gaining momentum. One hundred and forty-two members of Congress support H.R. 40, the bill to study reparations. William Darity, professor of public policy at Duke University  and his wife, Kirsten Mullen, made the most comprehensive case for a reparations program in their latest book “From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century.” They argue a meaningful program to eliminate the existing Black-White wealth gap requires an allocation of between $10 trillion and $12 trillion, or about $800,000 to each eligible Black household.

China Threatens to Detain U.S. Citizens over Prosecutions of Researchers Linked to Chinese Military By Zachary Evans

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/china-threatens-to-detain-u-s-citizens-over-prosecutions-of-researchers-linked-to-chinese-military/

China is threatening to detain U.S. citizens in response to Justice Department prosecutions of researchers linked to the Chinese military, the Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday.

The Justice Department has indicted several Chinese researchers who worked in the U.S., accusing them of attempting to conceal their connections with the People’s Liberation Army. U.S. intelligence officials believe that a small number of Chinese researchers have been involved in gathering intelligence for the P.L.A. When the State Department ordered the closure of the Chinese consulate in Houston, the department also ordered China to remove all P.L.A.–connected researchers from the U.S., the Journal reported in August.

Chinese diplomats have been issuing warnings to their American counterparts that if the Justice Department continues its prosecutions of P.L.A.–linked researchers, U.S. citizens in China could run into legal troubles, people familiar with the matter told the Journal. China began issuing the threats after the U.S. arrests of those researchers.

The State Department issued a level-3 travel advisory in September for Americans planning to visit China. A level-3 advisory is the agency’s second-highest travel advisory, and is implemented “due to serious risks to safety and security” of travelers.

 

“The [Chinese] government arbitrarily enforces local laws, including by carrying out arbitrary and wrongful detentions and through the use of exit bans on U.S. citizens and citizens of other countries without due process of law,” the State Department’s warning states. “U.S. citizens traveling or residing in [China] or Hong Kong, may be detained without access to U.S. consular services or information about their alleged crime.”

What Trump Has Done to Change Health Care and How It’s Helped Battle COVID-19 By John C. Goodman & Marie Fishpaw

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/what-trump-has-done-to-change-the-health-care-system-and-how-that-has-helped-battle-covid-19/

Deregulation and market forces are making care more available at lower cost.

Our health-care system is experiencing rapid, powerful change, far more consequential than is generally recognized. Although these changes are welcomed by many in the health-policy community (see our assessment a year ago), even those who applaud them have been surprised at their speed and impact.

What follows is a brief overview of what the Trump administration has done to reform the health-care system — in some cases, with the compliant help of Congress. The vision behind the Trump reforms can be found in Reforming America’s Healthcare System Through Choice and Competition. This 124-page Health and Human Services document from 2018 argues that the most serious problems in health care arise because of government failure, not market failure.In pursuing its vision, the administration has aggressively pursued its options under current law. We now need Congress to make the revolution complete.

Virtual Medicine. The ability to deliver medical care remotely is growing by leaps and bounds. It promises to lower medical costs, increase quality, and reduce the time and travel cost of patient care. For example, most people in hospital emergency rooms don’t really need to be there. With a phone or a computer and an app or two, many of them could be examined and triaged in their own homes.

The benefits of telehealth have been known for a long time. Yet as we entered 2020, it was illegal (by act of Congress) for Medicare doctors to consult with their patients by phone or email, except in rare circumstances. Even non-Medicare patients were constrained. For example, it wasn’t clear if visual communication by Zoom or FaceTime satisfied the federal government’s privacy regulations. While some state governments were clearing away barriers, progress was incremental and uneven.