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Ruth King

Time for Iran to Face a Reckoning The mullahs can only be stopped by means of “the mailed fist.” Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273761/time-iran-face-reckoning-bruce-thornton

While the media obsess over chimeras like the president’s obstruction of justice for nonexistent crimes, and AG Barr’s impeachment for obeying the law, a collision between the U.S. and Iran is brewing in the Middle East. The question now is whether Iran will finally face the reckoning it has invited and deserved for 42 years, or the latest crisis will peter out into U.S. saber-rattling and empty threats.

Donald Trump has made a good start at ending our nearly half-century appeasement of a regime that has declared war on the U.S. and backed it up by murdering Americans and working to create nuclear weapons that would make even more difficult, or even prohibitive, the price of punishing them for their aggression.

Since Jimmy Carter’s timid, feckless response to the 1979 American embassy hostage crisis, we have signaled to the mullahs that we will not exact a cost for their aggression. And this failure has been a bipartisan effort. When in 1983 Iranian proxies murdered 241 of our military personnel in Beirut, the Reagan administration pulled out even as the French and the Israelis strafed and bombed “Little Tehran,” the terrorist camps set up in the Beqaa Valley by Tehran, which nurtured the attackers. Since then Iran has been implicated in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and periodically taken hostage American citizens and sailors. In Iraq and Afghanistan, Iran’s Quds Force, the regime’s shock troops of global terror, have facilitated and participated in the murder of our soldiers. And it has continued to train and financially support terrorist gangs like Hezbollah and Hamas.

And a Little Child Shall Lead Them Why the Left puts children at the forefront of its agendas. Mark Tapson

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273767/and-little-child-shall-lead-them-mark-tapson

In this recent video clip from a news channel’s interview with 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg, it is clear that the young girl has no special insight to offer, only canned platitudes (“If everyone does something, huge changes can happen”). And yet the older male interviewer fawns over his teenage subject as if she is a credible, informed expert and a wise Cassandra whose dire warning we ignore at our peril. He does so not in spite of her youth, but precisely because of it. Why? Because the leftist media, and the left generally, love propping up gullible, politically indoctrinated children as authoritative mouthpieces to promote their agendas.

Swedish schoolgirl Thunberg attracted worldwide media attention at age 15 for her activism against weather, and is now the deadly serious face of the left’s climate change hysteria. Recently nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, Thunberg is following in the carbon footprints of environmental activist Xiuhtezcatl Roske-Martinez who, at the age of 15, entreated the United Nations General Assembly in 2015 to take action against purportedly human-caused climate change.

After the Parkland school shooting in Florida on Valentine’s Day, 2018, student activists David Hogg and Emma Gonzalez (pictured above), 17 and 18 respectively at the time, were ubiquitous in the media coverage about the atrocity – not because their thoughts on the incident were any more insightful than those of any of their fellow students, but because of their forceful calls for stricter gun control and their eagerness to demonize the hated National Rifle Association.

Right from wrong: Bringing Iran to its knees By Ruthie Blum

https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Right-from-wrong-Bringing-Iran-to-its-knees-589934

On January 12, 2016, a year before US President Donald Trump entered the Oval Office, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) seized American patrol boats that had entered Iranian territorial waters in the Persian Gulf. Although the US sailors explained that they had drifted into the area by mistake, their IRGC captors spent the next 15 hours terrorizing and humiliating them at gunpoint.

Footage shot by the IRGC showed the 10 sailors – nine men and one woman – on their knees with their hands behind their heads, while their documents, electronic devices and weapons were being confiscated. Under interrogation by the Iranian thugs, nine of the sailors reportedly spilled sensitive data about their ships and gave their abductors their cellphone and computer passwords. For this “violation of the naval code of conduct” they would subsequently be investigated, and two of them would be relieved of their command.

The response on part of the powers-that-be in Washington was to spend nearly an entire day trying to persuade Tehran that the incident had occurred due to a mechanical or navigational error, and therefore the sailors should be let free. To this end, then-US Secretary of State John Kerry phoned his counterpart, Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, during the day and throughout the night to plead for the Americans’ release.

By morning, Zarif was exhausted in general, and weary of listening to Kerry’s voice in particular. Since the act of bringing the “Great Satan” literally and figuratively to its knees had been milked enough in the meantime, and filmed for future propaganda purposes, Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator was able, finally, to liberate the crew and catch some sorely needed sleep.

Peaceful-Coexistence in the Middle East? Ambassador (Ret.) Yoram Ettinger

https://bit.ly/2LYX0p4

“The Middle East and North Africa have a well-deserved reputation for being a region plagued by war and conflict. Every decade since the end of WW2 has seen at least one interstate conflict; it has also witnessed 25 types of intrastate war, including insurgencies, civil wars and protracted terrorism. In the same timeframe, 2.3 million citizens have died as a result of political violence – 40% of the global total of battle-related deaths, although the region accounts for 5% of the world’s population…. 25 of these [intrastate] conflicts have claimed 1.5 million victims – 64% of the region’s total war deaths…. ” (Florence Gaub, Deputy Director, European Union Institute for Security Studies, October, 2017).

Middle East inter and intra-Arab/Muslim conflicts – some of them 1,400 year old – have been largely intractable, defying Western conventional wisdom, which has been dominated by the well-meaning pursuit of peaceful-coexistence, conflict-resolution, democracy and improved standard of living.

According to Dr. Daniel Pipes and Prof. Gunnar Heinsohn, some 11 million Muslims have been killed in wars from 1948-2007, only 35,000 of them in Arab-Israel wars – 0.3%!

According to Dr. Daniel Pipes and Prof. Gunnar Heinsohn, some 11 million Muslims have been killed in wars from 1948-2007, only 35,000 of them in Arab-Israel wars – 0.3%!Middle East inter and intra-Arab/Muslim conflicts – which preceded the 1948 establishment of Israel – have exposed the oversimplification of conventional Western wisdom, which has approached the Arab-Israeli conflict as if it were “the Middle East conflict.”

French Socialism Has Failed By Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2019/06/03/french-socialism-has-failed/

‘Free’ government services in France are unsustainable and anything but progressive

One of Charles de Gaulle’s most notorious moments of public wit came when he was asked at a press conference whether “Europe” wasn’t the solution to France’s problems. After a long defense of his policies, he exclaimed: “Of course, people can jump up and down on their chairs like mountain goats and shout ‘Europe! Europe! Europe!’ but it means nothing and leads nowhere.” It seems that when it comes to health-care reform in the U.S., progressives often think it’s enough to jump up and down like mountain goats and shout “France! France! France!” But it’s not. I am proudly French, and I have seen the problems of socialism in my nation firsthand.

Let’s get the obvious out of the way first: Yes, the French health-care system is, at the moment, almost as amazing as they say. Taking my frighteningly sick daughter to Necker, the main children’s hospital in Paris, made me proud to be a French taxpayer. Not only was the building gleaming and everything in it high-tech, but the staff was first-class, efficient, and, above all, kind, a world away from bureaucratic cliché. When, on my way out, after my daughter had recovered, I asked whether I had to pay for anything, the staff looked at me as if I’d just flown in from Mars.

Nonetheless, the French system offers virtually no lessons applicable to the United States.

Progressives either dislike private insurance or want to ban it outright; the French system relies on private insurance. Health-care wonks left and right agree that the biggest problem of the U.S. system is that it is employer-based. French health care? Also employer-based.

The Bill de Blasio Appeal He’s the very model of modern progressivism.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-bill-de-blasio-appeal-11558048763

Politics these days is a form of entertainment, and for the comedy portion of the Democratic presidential nomination fight we now have New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. He has no chance of winning, but we’ll break our longtime policy and consider an endorsement if he resigns as mayor while he’s running.

Our friends at the New York Post greeted his candidacy with a front page of people laughing at the news. But the one benefit is that he is a walking expression of today’s progressivism: Assertions of great moral virtue in calls to advance equality and justice, followed by abject failure as these good intentions fail miserably in the execution.Mr. de Blasio entered office indicting New York as “a tale of two cities,” one for the wealthy and privileged and the other for everyone else.

But his policy failures have hurt the least affluent and connected the most.

The New and Unimproved SAT The college test’s ‘adversity score’ may foment more cynicism.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-new-and-unimproved-sat-11558048986

News of affluent parents scamming to get their kids into top universities has again stoked complaints that college admissions are rigged. To level the socioeconomic field, the College Board now plans to assign students an “adversity score” on their SAT admissions tests. This demographic handicap may instead fuel more public cynicism and harm middle-income kids.

The College Board’s new adversity score will include 15 variables such as a student’s neighborhood crime rate, housing values and poverty. These variables will feed into an algorithm with weights assigned to each variable. Out will pop a score that students won’t be able to see or challenge before it goes to colleges.

Some schools have been seeking ways to quantify student socioeconomic challenges, and the adversity score would be superior to the blatant use of race. It could also help them compare similarly situated students. High-performing low- and middle-income students could likewise benefit from being compared to peers with similar means.

Yet the new score will make college admissions even less transparent. Notably, the variables that go into the score will be based on census and proprietary College Board data. So the scores won’t take into account individual circumstances and character, which is supposed to be the purpose of “holistic” admission assessments.

The Rot Is Irreversible: A perverse alliance. Abe Greenwald

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/author/abe-greenwald/

Disease is reversible—rot isn’t. Representatives Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib brought the disease of anti-Semitism into the upper echelons of the Democratic Party when they were elected in November. The party could have fought the disease. It chose instead to nurture it. And that’s when the irreversible rot set in.

The rot explains why Democrats, from Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi on down, are vigorously defending Tlaib’s recent lies about Arabs welcoming Jews after the Holocaust. It doesn’t matter what Tlaib or Omar say, how blunt their Jew-hatred is, or how often it’s aired. A defense pact is already in place that covers all calumnies against the Jews. Both the Democratic leadership and the liberal media establishment will back these bigots against any and all charges of anti-Semitism in return for smooth relations with the social-justice left. It’s a monstrous deal made by people too weak to defend their party and speak the truth.

During a Yahoo podcast over the weekend, Tlaib said that she gets a “calming feeling” when she thinks about the Holocaust because “it was my ancestors, Palestinians, who lost their land and some lost their lives, their livelihood, their human dignity . . . in the name of trying to create a safe haven for Jews, post-Holocaust, post-tragedy. . . And, I love the fact that it was my ancestors that provided that, right?”

Wrong. At the time, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, was a supporter and ally of Hitler. When the two met, al-Husseini told Hitler that they shared the same enemies: “the English, the Jews, and the Communists.” The two went on to scheme about how best to set upon and destroy the Jews of the Middle East. What’s more, the Arabs regularly massacred Jews in Mandatory Palestine.

Seventy-five Years Later, Hungary Still Hasn’t Come to Terms with its Role in the Holocaust written by Anna Porter

https://quillette.com/2019/05/15/seventy-five-years

On the 75th anniversary of the extermination of most of Hungary’s Jews—including the Auschwitz deportations, which began in May, 1944—we should also take note of the Hungarian government’s apparent determination to distort the country’s historical record. In some circles, this effort includes even the rehabilitation of Miklós Horthy, the longtime Hungarian Regent who governed Hungary during the Holocaust.

A former admiral and adjutant to the Habsburg Emperor-King, Horthy entered Budapest in dramatic style with his army on November 16, 1919, astride a white horse. His army defeated the ragtag Bolshevik forces that had imposed 133 days of “Red Terror” upon the country, but also inflicted its own “White Terror,” in some ways more brutal than its communist predecessor. Early during Horthy’s rule, Hungary enacted some of Europe’s first 20th-century anti-Jewish laws. Jews were capped at 6% of university admissions, and subsequent measures limited Jewish participation in elite professions to the same benchmark.

MAY CONFIRMS PLAN FOR DEPARTURE

Theresa May has confirmed she will announce a date for her departure next month – regardless of whether she has delivered Brexit or not.

The Prime Minister has agreed to meet with the executive of the 1922 committee, the powerful backbench committee of Tory MPs, at the beginning of June, when they will “agree a timetable for the election of a new leader”.

In a joint statement issued this afternoon, the committee and Mrs May announced that they will meet again in the week beginning 3 June, following the second reading of the Withdrawal Agreement Bill in the House of Commons.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/05/16/brexit-latest-news-theresa-may-set-showdown-meeting-senior-tories/

It comes after Mrs May was told last night that she would face a vote of no confidence unless she agreed to set out a clear timetable for her departure.