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Ruth King

Another Ignored Genocide of Christians Plagues Burkina Faso by Raymond Ibrahim

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15288/genocide-christians-burkina-faso

While a total of 12 Islamic terror attacks in Burkina Faso were registered in 2016, nearly 160 were reported in just the first five months of 2019.

The situation has reached the point where… the mainstream media habitually downplay the religious element whenever Muslims attack Christians, by referring to it as “sectarian strife….

[T]he militants told everyone to lie down and proceeded to look for Christians by asking for first names or looking for anyone wearing Christian insignia (like crosses). The deadly search yielded four men…. [W]hen they saw crosses, the assailants singled them out. All four were taken aside and executed.” – June 27, 2019.

“There is no Christian anymore in this town [Arbinda],” said a local contact; “… they [terrorists] were looking for Christians. Families who hide Christians are [also] killed. Arbinda had now lost in total no less than 100 people within six months.”

According to a local, “The assailants asked the Christians to convert to Islam, but the pastor and the others refused.” So “they called them, one after the other, behind the church building where they shot them dead.”

One can only hope that the response of the media and international community will be stronger than their usual one: ignoring the massacres. This slaughter has been already been characterized as a “genocide of Christians.” When, then, will the media and the so-called human rights groups finally confront — or at the very least condemn or even report on — these religiously fueled massacres plaguing West Africa?

On Sunday, December 1, 2019, Islamic terrorists raided a Protestant Christian church in Burkina Faso during the service and massacred 14 worshippers. The pastor and several children were among those killed.

This is but the latest of many lethal attacks on the Christian minority of the small nation located in West Africa, a region better known for the persecution of Christians in Nigeria.

Despots of the Square-Kilometer Empires by Amir Taheri

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15287/despots-square-kilometer-empires

The “Supreme Guide” is supposed to be excellent in everything. He has written on Islamic cuisine, the methodology of successful marriage, the destruction of Israel, the reform of human sciences, a new Islamic civilization to replace the old one that has decayed, and, as an afterthought, radical re-ordering of the global order.

Today, Syrian regime head Bashar Assad is confined to his square-kilometer close to Damascus with no chance of ever roaming in other parts of the war-torn country. General Qassem Soleimani, the Iranian master of PR, claims he prevented Assad from fleeing because Khamenei ordered him to stay put which, in practice, means the Syrian became a prisoner like Khamenei.

In autobiographical notes, Khamenei waxes lyrical about the joys of visiting Shiite “holy” shrines in Iraq. Today, he dares not set foot in an Iraq shaken by uprisings against his ideology. Worse still, fearful of visiting even Mash’had, Iran’s own “holy” city, he has to be content with a hussainiyah he built near a “villa” confiscated by the revolution.

In a recent speech in Tehran, Ayatollah Golpayegani, Chief of Staff of “Supreme Guide” Ali Khamenei, claimed that his boss had reached a position from which he not only led the Muslim world but also dictated to infidel powers, now in retreat.

NYU Student Thanks Trump for Standing Up to Students for Justice in Palestine Anti-Semitism at NYU Sun Dec 15, 2019 Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2019/12/nyu-student-thanks-trump-standing-students-justice-daniel-greenfield/

The media lied about President Trump’s executive order against anti-Semitism. It lied about it because it wanted to gaslight American Jews into opposing a measure meant to fight campus anti-Semitism. And here, from NYU, is the reality of what that hatred looks like.

When I first started at NYU, I was excited to go to a school that championed diversity and inclusion — until that diversity and inclusion applied to everyone except my community. After years of overt protests, boycotts, and direct aggression toward Jewish students from NYU’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), the university honored the organization with the President’s Service Award for “outstanding contribution to NYU life.”

What did SJP do to “earn” this prize? They organized a 53-group boycott against Realize Israel, a non-political student organization, depicting assault rifles on flyers calling for a revolt. Further, at the 2018 Rave in the Park in which NYU students celebrated Israel Independence Day, one SJP member burned an Israeli flag and another physically assaulted a Jewish student; both students were arrested.

Throughout the year, I spoke with eight administrators from multiple NYU departments — the Office of Student Affairs; Center for Student Life; Office of Student Conduct and Community Standards; and even the Office of Public Safety — about rising hostility against the Jewish community on campus. My concerns were brushed off, and after the arrests, I was asked not to draw attention to the issue.

The presidential award solidified the university’s stance: violent acts against students on the basis of their views are not only tolerated, but celebrated, and the concerns of Jewish students are not to be taken seriously.

Illegal Immigrants in NY to Qualify for Driver’s License From Monday After Legal Challenge Fails By Katabella Roberts

https://www.theepochtimes.com/illegal-immigrants-in-ny-to-qualify-for-drivers-license-from-monday-after-legal-challenge-fails_3174599.html

Illegal immigrants in New York will be eligible to apply for a driver’s license next week after a federal judge on Friday dismissed a legal case seeking to block the new law.

Republican county clerk Frank Merola had sought to obtain a preliminary injunction to block the controversial ‘Green Light Law,’ which allows those in New York to apply for a driver’s licence, regardless of their immigration status.

However, in a 17-page decision, District Judge Gary Sharpe ruled that Merola didn’t have legal capacity to sue the state over the law or the personal right to litigate in federal court.

The judge also knocked down Merola’s assertion that the new legislation would oblige him to offer voter registration to undocumented immigrants.

This is the second lawsuit in the last month against the Green Light law to be dismissed. In November, District Judge Elizabeth Wolford similarly dismissed a suit brought forth by Erie County Clerk Michael (Mickey) Kearns to block implementation of the law.

Following Judge Sharpe’s ruling against Merola this week, New York Attorney General Letitia James, a member of the Democratic Party, hailed the judge’s decision in a statement, noting that it was the second time a judge has dismissed challenges.

Dinosaurs, Snow Drifts and Mrs Simpson James Allan

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/travel-qed/2019/12/dinosaurs-snow-drifts-and-mrs-simpson/

“Greetings from snowbound Utah, where our trans-America trek has been stalled by a blizzard. Like the bleak and parched Dinosaur Monument Park, it’s another reminder that climate change was at work long before SUVs and modern life so upset a certain teenage Swedish truant.”

As my time in Coronado, San Diego, came to an end, my wife and I looked out at our next-door neighbour, the magnificent Hotel del Coronado, and decided we really needed to take the upmarket tour of the place.  This hotel is the second-biggest all-wood structure in the United States.  It was built in 1888 by two entrepreneurs from back east who bought up the land on the isthmus of Coronado (which has such a long and slender neck that most people just think of it as an island).  They sold enough to start building the grand hotel they had always envisaged in the Queen Anne style, with money seemingly no object as it was being built.  Today the hotel is in the midst of a $200 million-plus facelift, about half of which has been completed.    Near on a dozen US presidents have stayed there.  You have to see this place, and if you’ve ever watched Some Like It Hot, you already have. While the movie pretends the last half takes place in Florida, the reality is that those scenes were shot at the Coronado.

The Coronado also played host to all sorts of celebrity types.  Edward VIII, pre-ascent and abdication, was a guest.  The hotel had a huge banquet in his honour.  Our tour guide reported that early in the night the Prince of Wales sneaked away to gamble in Tijuana. It rings true.  And Mrs Simpson has quite a connection with Coronado as well, having lived there for a number of years and whose extended stay is commemorated by The Windsor Cottage, named for the abdicator and his divorcee wife. Her first husband (Edward was number three) was a US admiral in charge of the US Navy’s nearby air base.  This is where naval aviation was born; it’s where Charles Lindbergh learned his craft (meaning flying, not idiotic political views) and from where he started out in the Spirit of St Louis to make his way east before becoming the first man to fly the Atlantic from New York to Paris.

Boris Triumphant The British election was a thunderous rejection of the Labour Left. Oliver Wiseman

https://www.city-journal.org/boris-johnson-victory

All elections matter, but some matter more than others. Yesterday’s British general election will be remembered as one of the most consequential in decades. The immediate effects are beyond doubt. Boris Johnson’s 80-seat victory—the biggest Conservative win since Margaret Thatcher—means that Brexit will happen next month. Britain will leave the European Union by the end of January. The emphatic defeat for Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn—the worst defeat for the party since the 1930s—means that, for the foreseeable future, socialism in Britain remains something to be debated in the abstract, rather than tested on the country.

Finishing Brexit and finishing off Corbyn are huge achievements. But they are only part of a bigger shift. Last night, British politics didn’t just escape a three-and-a-half-year doom loop of squabbling over the 2016 referendum; it changed in fundamental ways. As the results trickled in, it soon became clear that the realignment many had forecast ahead of polling day was really happening, and on a remarkable scale. Voters in Brexit-supporting seats in the North and Midlands that have always returned a Labour MP to Parliament abandoned the party in droves. While the Conservatives demolished Labour’s red wall, it was a different story in London and the South East, where things trended in the other direction, even if the Conservatives held onto all but a few of the seats they were defending in and around the capital.

The upshot is that Britain’s two major parties now answer to very different sets of voters than before. The Conservative base has become more working-class, older, and whiter. The Labour Party’s constituency is getting wealthier, younger, more metropolitan, and more ethnically diverse.

Present at the Demolition By Matthew Continetti

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/12/post-wwii-order-ending-and-nothing-has-replaced-it/

The post-WWII order is ending — and nothing has replaced it.

Economists at the World Bank and International Monetary Fund must feel pretty lucky these days. They work for just about the only institutions set up in the aftermath of World War II that aren’t in the middle of an identity crisis. From Turtle Bay to Brussels, from Washington to Vienna, the decay of the economic and security infrastructure of the postwar world has accelerated in recent weeks. The bad news: As the legacy of the 20th century recedes into the past, the only 21st-century alternatives are offered from an authoritarian surveillance state.

The pressure is both external and internal. Revisionist powers such as China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea undermine the foundations of global governance and hijack institutions to the detriment of the liberal international order. The institutions themselves lack the self-confidence necessary to further the cause of human freedom. Meanwhile, the most powerful nation in the world has turned inward. Its foreign policy is haphazard and improvisational, contradictory and equivocal. The confusion and zigzagging contribute to the erosion of legitimacy. It delays the emergence of new forms of international organization.

The breakdown was visible at last week’s NATO summit in London. Remarkably, the source of the immediate ruckus wasn’t President Trump. It was French president Emmanuel Macron, who doubled down on his criticism of the Atlantic alliance that he’d expressed in a recent interview with The Economist. Trump disagreed with Macron’s description of NATO as “brain dead.” He and other allies didn’t back Macron’s call for rapprochement with Russia and China and renewed focus on terrorism.

The Business of Climate Change By Rupert Darwall

https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2019/12/12/the_business_of_climate_change.html

MADRID

Saving the planet takes money, and lots of it. Money is both the theme and the subtext of the latest round of UN climate talks being held here—a vast river of cash flows through the UN climate process. Formally, the meeting is about nailing down one of the more obscure provisions of the Paris Agreement: Article 6, which provides for market-based instruments so that countries can trade their way out of their decarbonization commitments. Billions of cross-border dollars and transaction fees hang on the outcome.

With the negotiations concerning mind-paralyzing definitions of interest only to the most intrepid climate geeks, business and finance leaders could wind up taking center stage. When they first started coming to climate conferences, it was to observe and advise. Now it’s to show-and-tell their green virtue. “Momentum is there,” declared Paul Polman, the former Uniliver CEO. “Climate change is the biggest business opportunity of all time.” We’re close to several policy tipping points, he suggested.

The EU is about to approve a massive Green New Deal. Michael Bloomberg’s Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TFCD) encourages companies to make voluntary climate-related risk disclosures. Draft EU regulations, meantime, could pave the way for mandatory climate disclosures that would force investment managers to justify their investments against climate and environmental benchmarks. Businesses are transitioning to “net zero,” Polman claims—meaning zero carbon emissions. They’re so far advanced that at this point, it’s only governments holding them back.

Peeling away the hype reveals a very different picture. Companies promising to cut their carbon emissions rely on offsetting—that is, paying for their consumption of hydrocarbon energy by supporting projects that reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, such as renewable energy. If companies were genuine in their commitment to tackle climate change, though, they would develop zero-carbon baselines for their own activities.

GRETA THUNBERG, PUPPET OF PROGRESSIVES, MALICE IN BLUNDERLAND

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/12/malice_in_blunderland.html#.XfUlW9CVq2M.twitter

Malice in Blunderland Doris O’Brien,

As if the stresses of the holiday season weren’t enough, harried Americans find themselves tumbling deeper and deeper down a rabbit hole of political insanity.

Originally orchestrated by Mad Hatter Adam Schiff, the plot of the impeachment hearings has been every bit as preposterous as that of the Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, written over a century and a half ago.  And the current cast of characters is eerily reminiscent of those in that childhood classic — if not even more bizarre.

You may recall that the original tale was about a young girl who nods off to sleep and dreams that she runs after an agitated white rabbit and unexpectedly falls into a warren of  strange misadventures from which she finally awakens — just in the nick of time to avoid the evil Red Queen’s edict, “Off with her head!”

Thus far, however, Americans have unfortunately not awakened from the nightmare of the contemporary “Malice in Blunderland,” the congressional impeachment hearings whose shifting Schiff-controlled narrative has been advanced by Trump-hating  Democrats and likeminded loathers brought into the proceedings to validate their biased claims. With its bungled series of changing charges, the presidential impeachment scenario can aptly be described as “curioser and curioser.”

If any “fun” is to be found in all of this nonsense, it might come from comparing the current wild-eyed crop of impeachment pushers to the hodgepodge of  fantastical characters Alice encounters in Wonderland.  The scampering white rabbit, for example, could well be white pants-suited Nancy Pelosi, nervously flitting here and there, eager to retain her  personal power by acquiescing to the demands  to impeach Trump, and then acknowledging — as she scurries off  to join her colleagues — “I’m late, I’m late, for a very important date.”

But the current impeachment hearings have been anything but a tea party. Mad Hatter Schiff and Dormouse Nadler – who snoozed at his own hearings! — have  played their  parallel roles looking  much like Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dumber.  Meanwhile, at the prospect of finally impeaching her nemesis in the White House, perennial Congressional rabble-rouser Maxine Waters has been grinning like the Cheshire Cat .

https://www.theblaze.com/op-ed/greta-thunberg-isnt-a-hero-shes-a-victim-of-the-leftist-progressive-cult

Greta Thunberg isn’t a hero. She’s a victim of the leftist progressive cult.
TheBlaze.com

For the 16-year-old climate catastrophe prophetess turned Time Person of the Year has “How dare you’d” her way into our cultural folly, because her life has been entirely forsaken to a cause clearly not of her own choosing. From the perspective of the progressive cult, she is no less a worthy human sacrifice now than she would have been had she been aborted. Either way, all of her individuality has been subsumed by the cause.

The degree to which the poor girl is afflicted with Asperger’s, which adversely impacts socialization and communication skills, is clearly how she was able to be groomed into such a useful zealot’s frenzy of one-note rage at such a young age. Even though progressives will tell you they are about individuality and diversity — a scam I have exposed on my show many times before — what they really want is the sort of rigid, doctrinaire conformity that allows them to maximize their zeal for power and control over us all.

Greta was the perfect vessel for what other people, young and old, often try in the name of various progressive shibboleths, but can’t quite pull off because the lure of autonomy in their lives is just too strong. But the girl who just admitted she hardly spent any time talking to people before this year of pagan jubilee was programmed by her parents to live in such fear of a climate Armageddon that one neurosis was simply traded for another. Yes, that’s right. Her parents manipulated her curse of perpetual discomfort and weaponized it to suit the ends of the inglorious group think.

Trapped by the Ghosts of Corrupt Administrations Past The Left is lying not to beat Republicans so much as beat the rap. Thaddeus G. McCotter

https://amgreatness.com/2019/12/13/trapped-by-the-ghosts-of-corrupt-administrations-past/

It’s little wonder sane people have taken the Left’s messaging strategy regarding impeachment and the Justice Department inspector general’s new report as mere political inanity and mendacity. Government officials, past and present, who fear potential indictment for abuse of power for personal and partisan gain, their legal “experts” at Lawfare, their collusion media cohorts, and social media’s rabid pack of regressive mouth-breathers who do little more than parrot them are not advancing a typical political argument. They are proffering a preemptive legal defense.

For the Left, preparing briefs for a prospective court of law rather than making good faith arguments in the court of public opinion is a necessary gambit, due to U.S. Attorney John Durham’s probe into the Russia-gate lie. Think of it this way:  These Obama administration officials, both in and out of government, are out on karaoke night croaking out their mashup of Warren Zevon’s classic, “send Lawfare, guns, and money!”

Specifically, the Left is pursuing a legal strategy common in criminal trials: In order to distract from and/or prejudice the trier of fact against the evidence of the accused’s guilt, the defense endeavors to put the government on trial. (In the case of the House Democrats’ sham impeachment, it is doing this quite literally.)

It’s understandable the Left’s ulterior motive might be missed as one merely aimed at gaining votes and, though they do hope that will be a collateral benefit, that’s not all that’s going on here. Still, they are using their shopworn bag of despicable “politricks”: baseless personal attacks; veiled threats to intimidate; and, of course, accusing others of what the Left is doing.

This is routine by now, so it’s easy to miss what’s actually going on.