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Ruth King

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Sweden Spinning out of Control by Judith Bergman

By on September 26th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14819/sweden-crime

From the beginning of 2019 to the end of July, there were 120 bombings in Sweden, according to police statistics.

In Uppsala alone, a picturesque Swedish university town, where 80% of girls do not feel safe in the city center, four rapes or attempted rapes took place in early August within four days.

“Stop the rapes – you are letting the women down…. That women do not have the same opportunity to move freely in the streets and squares without having to worry about being exposed to crime, is a serious restriction on women’s freedom and self-determination”. — Josefin Malmqvist, member of parliament for the Moderate Party; Aftonbladet, August 24, 2019.

“Löfven, you have lost control of Sweden,” the leader of the largest opposition party, the center-right Moderate Party, Ulf Kristersson, recently wrote in an article in the daily newspaper Aftonbladet, in which he criticized Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Löfven for failing to solve some of Sweden’s biggest problems. According to Kristersson:

“Two areas that we [the Moderate Party] highly prioritize are law and order and integration. Because Sweden’s biggest problems are there now.

“Last year, 306 shootings occurred and 45 people were shot dead. According to the police, the number of people killed has doubled since 2014. During the same period, the number of people who have been subjected to sexual abuse has tripled according to BRÅ [the Swedish Crime Prevention Council]…

“Concrete reforms are necessary. We have proposed them – the Social Democrats say no…

At the same time, we have an integration crisis: More than half of all the unemployed are born outside of Sweden. In our exclusion areas, [utanförskapsområden] there are schools where not even half of the students pass all subjects… Many children born in Sweden hardly speak Swedish, and there is extensive repression [in the name of] honor culture. Here too we have called for reforms, but the Social Democrats say no.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Denying Jerusalem’s Jewish History Despite Archaeological Evidence by Lawrence A. Franklin

By on September 26th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14909/jerusalem-jewish-history

As has been true with previous archaeological discoveries in Israel, however, this one is unlikely to put a dent in the long-term international campaign to delegitimize the Jewish state by rewriting and distorting its history, even by renaming the Jewish sites Rachel’s Tomb near Bethlehem to “Bilal ibn Rabah mosque” (it was never a mosque) and Hebron’s Tomb of the Patriarchs the Ibrahimi Mosque.

“Rewriting the history of the Land of Israel in order to deny Israel’s right to exist is central to Palestinian Authority (PA) policy. Long before it started the PA terror campaign (the ‘Intifada,’ 2000-2005), the PA was fighting a history war – erasing Jewish history and replacing it with a fabricated Palestinian history.” — Palestinian Media Watch.

Where Palestinian propaganda is concerned, however, none of the above [documentation or archeological evidence] appears to matter.

The City of David Foundation recently delivered a major blow to the Arab effort to erase Judaism’s 3,000-year ties to Jerusalem. On September 9, the foundation’s leading archaeologist, Eli Shukron, announced the discovery of a 2,600-year-old royal seal, found near the Western Wall in the Old City of Jerusalem, which bears the name (in Hebrew) of Adenyahu, a son of King David mentioned in the biblical Book of Kings.

As has been true with previous archaeological discoveries in Israel, however, this one is unlikely to put a dent in the long-term international campaign to delegitimize the Jewish state by rewriting and distorting its history, even by renaming the Jewish sites Rachel’s Tomb near Bethlehem to “Bilal ibn Rabah mosque” (it was never a mosque) and Hebron’s Tomb of the Patriarchs the Ibrahimi Mosque.

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Impeach Joe Biden…He did what Trump did not do

By on September 26th, 2019

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/09/26/impeach-joe-biden/

Until the transcript of President Donald Trump’s call with Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelensky emerged on Wednesday, Democrats were in a mad fury with accusations that Trump had bribed a foreign government to investigate the business dealings of former Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter.

The claim, based on a whistleblower’s second-hand account, which none of them had seen, alleged that Trump withheld aid to Ukraine on the condition that it open an investigation on Biden.

Circumstantially at least, there seemed to be some crumbs to back this up. Aside from the mysterious whistleblower claim, the administration had held up an aid package shortly before the call. And then, statements made by Trump and his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, seemed to confirm some elements of the story.

When the transcript of the call came out, however, the story fell apart. There was no discussion of aid. Trump did not cajole or pressure Zelensky.

Of course, since the impeachment train had already left the station, Democrats couldn’t suddenly shrug their shoulders and say “never mind.” So the mere fact that Trump brought up the topic of the Biden investigation is now grounds for impeachment.

But if that’s all there is to it, why isn’t Biden under the impeachment cloud?

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‘Ukraine-Gate’ Is About the Russian Hack That Wasn’t Julie Kelly

By on September 26th, 2019

amgreatness.com/2019/09/25/ukraine-gate-is-about-the-russian-hack-that-wasnt/

“CrowdStrike’s Ties to Democrats While lawmakers and pundits on the Left and NeverTrump Right breezed past Trump’s mention of CrowdStrike—either out of subterfuge or ignorance—it is significant. CrowdStrike is a cybersecurity firm with strong ties to the Democratic Party. After the DNC server was hacked in early 2016, Perkins Coie, a politically connected law firm, hired CrowdStrike on behalf of the DNC to find out who was behind the intrusion. (Perkins Coie is the same law firm that hired Fusion GPS on behalf of the DNC and Hillary Clinton campaign to dig up Russia-related dirt on Team Trump before the election.)”

One of the animating chapters in the Trump-Russian collusion saga was the claim that Russia infiltrated the Democratic National Committee’s email server in the spring of 2016. That hack, according to collusion truthers, and the subsequent release of damaging emails exchanged between top Democratic Party officials was central to Vladimir Putin’s scheme to sway the presidential election in favor of Donald Trump.

But the evidence to support this widely accepted claim is sketchy at best and appears to be under appropriate scrutiny by prosecutors now examining the origins of the FBI’s pre-election investigation into the Trump campaign for “colluding” with Russia.

According to the transcript of a July call between Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s newly elected president, Trump raised the issue of “CrowdStrike” and suggested Ukraine might be in possession of the “server,” a reference to the DNC server.

“I would like you to do us a favor,” Trump said. “I would like you to find out what happened with the whole situation with Ukraine, with CrowdStrike. The server, they say Ukraine has it. There are a lot of things that went on, the whole situation.”

To say the least.

CrowdStrike’s Ties to Democrats

While lawmakers and pundits on the Left and NeverTrump Right breezed past Trump’s mention of CrowdStrike—either out of subterfuge or ignorance—it is significant.

CrowdStrike is a cybersecurity firm with strong ties to the Democratic Party. After the DNC server was hacked in early 2016, Perkins Coie, a politically connected law firm, hired CrowdStrike on behalf of the DNC to find out who was behind the intrusion. (Perkins Coie is the same law firm that hired Fusion GPS on behalf of the DNC and Hillary Clinton campaign to dig up Russia-related dirt on Team Trump before the election.)

That isn’t the extent of CrowdStrike’s dubious political ties. Its co-founder, Moscow-born Dmitri Alperovitch, is associated with the Clinton Foundation; in 2015, CrowdStrike received $100 million in funding from Google whose chairman, Eric Schmidt, was a generous supporter of Hillary Clinton. CrowdStrike’s president is Shawn Henry, who headed up the FBI’s cybercrimes division during the Obama Administration when Robert Mueller was director.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Dems Bet It All on a Telephone Call Transcript The president breaks no law – but facts elude leftists in full Trump Derangement Meltdown. Matthew Vadum

By on September 26th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/09/democrats-bet-it-all-trumps-telephone-call-matthew-vadum/

A day after Democrats vowed to open a formal impeachment inquiry, President Trump dropped a bombshell Sept. 25 by releasing the transcript of a conversation he had with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that Trump’s enemies insist is the smoking gun that should drive him from office.

That the impeachment push is an attempt to placate the Democrats’ increasingly affective Antifa-loving base and probably also a tactic to direct attention away from the at least questionable dealings in Ukraine of Democrat presidential frontrunner Joe Biden and his cokehead grifter son, Hunter, have barely been mentioned in the media. The media is promoting the theory – based on an anonymous “whistleblower” complaint – that Trump tried to enlist a foreign government to help him in the 2020 election, even though Department of Justice lawyers have already issued an opinion that Trump’s conversation did not constitute a violation of U.S. campaign laws.

After months of hand-wringing, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi pulled the trigger to begin the process of impeaching Donald Trump, even before she read the transcript, dogmatically declaring that Trump “asked a foreign government to help him in his political campaign at the expense of our national security.”

The unsubstantiated claim is that Trump threatened to withhold a military aid package from Ukraine to pressure that country to investigate the Bidens.

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

The Epochal Challenge of Mass Immigration Wolfgang Kasper

By on September 26th, 2019

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2019/09/the-epochal-challenge-of-mass-immigration/

Wolfgang Kasper is an emeritus Professor of Economics. This is an edited version of an address to a meeting of the Mont Pèlerin Society in Fort Worth, Texas, in May. Professor Kasper thanks Regine Kasper, Jeff Bennett (Canberra), Václav Klaus (Prague), Stefan Markowski (Warsaw and Canberra), Tom Sowell (Stanford) and many attendants at the Fort Worth gathering for their comments, but of course retains all responsibility for judgments and errors. 

Allow me to begin on a personal note. When I was a child, my family was “ethnically cleansed” and, soon after that, we became refugees because my father had to flee for his liberty from the Soviet effort to “harvest” German engineers for the post-war reconstruction of the Russian Fatherland. Later, we became migrants. As an adult, I have been a guest worker in half a dozen countries. And over the past forty-six years I have lived in Australia, the country with the biggest share of foreign-born residents, bar Israel.

I therefore claim to know a thing or two about migration.

Migration and integration

The most important thing I know is that one cannot and must not discuss the act of migration without considering the subsequent process of integration. To me, integration means that the newcomers must make every effort to learn the host community’s rules of conduct in the public domain, and obey them. What meals they cook at home, to what gods they pray—that is left to their own private choice. Integration, though personally gratifying and potentially rewarding, is a huge challenge. It touches on deeply held feelings of personal identity and demands the adaptation of normally persistent cultural norms[1].

Insisting on the newcomers adopting the habits and modes of public behaviour of the host community is not racist. Racism is abhorrent, because it amounts to discrimination according to what we have been given by nature, characteristics which we cannot change. By contrast, habits and modes of behaviour come from nurture; they are cultural features, which are learnt and can be relearnt.

In this article I shall use the shorthand “the West” to describe the countries of Western Europe, North America and Australasia, which are the three pillars of Western civilisation. By and large, they are democratic and have capitalist market economies. I shall speak summarily of “the South” when I refer to Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and Latin America, namely the regions that are the main sources of the new mass migration.

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

The Death of American Citizenship By Victor Davis Hanson

By on September 26th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/the-death-of-american-citizenship/

Open borders and sanctuary cities are blurring the distinction between illegal immigrants and Americans, and activist judges are eroding the Bill of Rights.

The American Founders institutionalized the best of a long Western tradition of representative government, with the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights. These contracts outlined the rare privileges and responsibilities of new American citizens.

Yet the concept of citizenship is being assaulted on the premodern side by the legal blending of mere residency with citizenship.

Estimates on the number of undocumented American residents range from 11 million to more than 20 million. The undocumented are becoming legally indistinguishable from citizens and enjoy exemption from federal immigration law in some 500 sanctuary jurisdictions. An illegal resident of California will pay substantially less tuition at a California public university than will a U.S. citizen of another state.

Multiculturalism has reduced the idea of e pluribus unum to a regressive tribalism. Americans often seem to owe their first allegiance to those who look like they do. Citizens cannot even agree over once-hallowed and shared national holidays such as Christmas, Thanksgiving, and the Fourth of July.

It is eerie how such current American retribalization resembles the collapse of Rome, as Goths, Huns, and Vandals all squabbled among themselves over what was left of 1,200 years of Roman citizenship — eager to destroy what they could neither create nor emulate.

Citizenship has always been protected by the middle classes — on the idea that they are more independent and self-reliant than the poor but can stand up to the influence and power of the elite.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Netanyahu Holds On Three lessons from Israel’s stalemated politics.

By on September 26th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/netanyahu-holds-on-11569454352

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been counted out of politics many times in his long career, including after last week’s election saw his center-right coalition fail to win the necessary 61-seat parliamentary majority. On Wednesday he was granted a mandate to form a government, though what happens next is anyone’s guess.

Mr. Netanyahu’s main rival, Benny Gantz of the centrist Blue and White party, also failed narrowly to win a majority. If Mr. Netanyahu can’t twist enough arms to form a government, Mr. Gantz may get a chance—or Israelis may need to head to the ballot box for an unprecedented third time.

There are wider lessons to be drawn from the political tumult. The first is that Israelis have moved right on security. Last week’s election was triggered because Mr. Netanyahu’s longtime partner Avigdor Lieberman, a secular-nationalist hawk, split with Mr. Netanyahu over religious issues. Mr. Lieberman felt comfortable sinking a center-right government in part because he knew that the opposition would not deviate much from Mr. Netanyahu’s positions on borders and security.

While the Blue and White party strikes a more inclusive tone when it comes to Israeli Arabs and Palestinians, many of its leaders are drawn from the upper ranks of the Israel Defense Forces, including General Gantz. In power he may be more aggressive about defending Israel’s interests in the region. American liberals hoping that a Prime Minister Gantz would repudiate President Trump’s Iran policies and make a priority of restarting the peace process will be disappointed.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Ukraine Transcript Fizzle The phone call evidence isn’t enough to annul a presidential election.

By on September 26th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-ukraine-transcript-fizzle-11569455303

The White House on Wednesday released the transcript of President Trump’s July call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and the news is that Mr. Trump was telling the truth about it. The conversation was largely routine diplomacy, and even the reference to Joe Biden was less than promoted by the press. Good luck persuading Americans that this is an impeachable offense.

The five-page transcript shows that Mr. Trump called to congratulate Mr. Zelensky on his party’s victory in Parliament. After niceties, Mr. Trump waxes on as he often does that the U.S. “spend[s] a lot of effort and a lot of time” on Ukraine, while complaining that European countries don’t do their share. At no point does Mr. Trump threaten a withdrawal of U.S. aid to Ukraine.

Mr. Trump does ask for a “favor”—that Ukraine look at 2016 election meddling. “I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike,” he says, referring to the company that investigated the 2016 hack of the Democratic National Committee.

He also disparages former Special Counsel Robert Mueller—no surprise there—and notes that “they say a lot of it started with Ukraine.” Mr. Trump is clearly still sore about the attempt by the Hillary Clinton campaign to dig up foreign dirt on him, but there is nothing wrong with asking a foreign head of state to investigate meddling in U.S. elections.

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MY SAY: Comments turned off

MY SAY: IT’S RASHOMON ON IMPEACHMENT

By on September 25th, 2019

In the film’s ingenious examination on the nature of truth, “Rashomon” is an outstanding example of faulty  justice. In Kurosawa’s masterpiece four people recount totally differing accounts of a crime.So it is with the latest brouhaha about the transcript of President Trump’s conversation with Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky.The Democrats all screech “impeach! impeach now!.” But some conservative pundits display a variety of opinions.David French and Jonah Goldberg at the National Review  see malfeasance and evidence of a quid pro quo and unconvincing Trump spin, but remain sanguine about Biden corruption and Ukraine’s role in the Mueller narrative.The Justice Department issued the following: “Relying on established procedures set forth in the Justice Manual, the Department’s Criminal Division reviewed the official record of the call and determined, based on the facts and applicable law, that there was no campaign finance violation and that no further action was warranted,” read a Wednesday statement from Justice spokesperson Kerri Kupec. “All relevant components of the Department agreed with this legal conclusion, and the Department has concluded the matter,” she added.And Kimberley Strassel of The Wall Street Journal writes after reading the same transcript as  French and Goldberg:Kimberley StrasselVerified account @KimStrassel1) Having read DOJ’s Trump-Ukraine release, here’s the real story: This is another internal attempt to take out a president, on the basis of another non-smoking-gun.Thomas Lifson of American Thinker writes  : “The text in italics seems to indicate that President Zelensky already had investigation plans, and wanted US cooperation. This is the opposite of Trump demanding or coercing cooperation with a threat to withhold military aid or supply any positive or negative incentive.  ”None the less Lifson thinks the Dems will still demand impeachment and it could be injurious to the President.So which is it?It’s Rashomon. I mostly agree with Thomas Lifson, but the biggest loser will ultimately be Joseph Biden…..rsk

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