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Ruth King

ISRAEL, POLITICS Comments turned off

Congressional Middle East Peace Initiative: Funding NGOs Not Peace By Lori Lowenthal Marcus

By on June 10th, 2019

https://saraacarter.com/congressional-middle-east-peace-initiative-funding-ngos-not-peace/

What a name: “Partnership Fund for Peace.” What a goal: promoting peace in the Middle East. That should sum up legislation introduced in Congress last week. But what a waste, because the Fund, which will be given $250 million of U.S. taxpayer money for its first five years in existence, is nothing more than a retread of past Middle East projects, so many of which are already being funded and not one of which has moved the peace needle one inch forward.

The stated overarching goal of the bill’s sponsors is to “help create the necessary conditions on the ground to support an eventual two-state solution.”

The bill’s sponsors are Democrats Rep. Nita Lowey (NY) and Senators Tim Kaine (VA) and Chris Coons (DE) and Republicans Rep. Jeff Fortenberry (NE) and Senators Cory Gardner (CO) and Lindsey Graham (SC). They claim the Fund is intended to promote economic health for Palestinian Arab companies and entrepreneurs, to improve the quality of life and stimulate the economy of Palestinian Arabs and to “further shared community building, peaceful coexistence, dialogue and reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians by financing people-to-people peacebuilding programs.”

Using international funds to stop Palestinian Arabs from engaging in terrorism is the standard western response to the conflict. One stark difference is that PFfP funds cannot be made available either to the Israeli government or to Hamas, the Palestinian Authority or the PLO. That’s good. But the primary source through which funding will be distributed is non-governmental organizations (NGOs): that’s not so good.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Brexit for Cokeheads by Mark Steyn

By on June 10th, 2019

https://www.steynonline.com/9438/brexit-for-cokeheads

I look at the race to succeed Theresa May as Tory leader and I wonder, to modify our Sunday Poem, where are the squares of yesteryear? No Conservative seeking to maintain political viability wants to seem too disconnected from the debauchery of contemporary Britain. So it has become the habit to confess to “youthful indiscretions”, “youthful” being a term of art stretching easily into late middle age.

This time round the craze is for drug-fiend Tories. Of this week’s crop of alleged leadership contenders, Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt says he had a cannabis lassi while backpacking in India; International Development Secretary Rory Stewart admits he puffed on an opium pipe at an Iranian wedding; my old boss Boris Johnson claims to have snorted icing sugar at Oxford; former Brexit Secretary Dominic Raab discloses he’s tried cannabis but never any “Class A drugs”; and, just to put the hallucinogenic icing on the psychotropic trifle, the Environment Secretary Michael Gove reveals he only does “Class A drugs”.

Mr Gove purports to have taken cocaine as a “young journalist” twenty years ago – that’s to say, when he was in his thirties and working for The Times. He applied for a job round about that time at a publication for which I then wrote, and the chum of mine who took the interview reported back that Gove was one of the most boring men he’d ever had the misfortune to sit through lunch with. If he was snorting in the bog between the soup and fish, it evidently didn’t add any sparkle to his repartee. For American readers, the notion of Michael Gove as a cokehead is roughly analogous to discovering Mike Pence spends his weekends in a gay leather bar: It renders the very concept of transgression pointless. Given what he’s like on his face, the idea of Gove off his face is too surreal to contemplate.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Iran-linked terrorists caught stockpiling explosives in north-west London Ben Riley-Smith

By on June 10th, 2019

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/06/09/iran-linked-terrorists-caught-stockpiling-explosives-north-west/

Terrorists linked to Iran were caught stockpiling tonnes of explosive materials on the outskirts of London in a secret British bomb factory, The Telegraph can reveal.

Radicals linked to Hizbollah, the Lebanese militant group, stashed thousands of disposable ice packs containing ammonium nitrate – a common ingredient in homemade bombs.

The plot was uncovered by MI5 and the Metropolitan Police in the autumn of 2015, just months after the UK signed up to the Iran nuclear deal. Three metric tonnes of ammonium nitrate was discovered – more than was used in the Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people and damaged hundreds of buildings.

Police raided four properties in north-west London – three businesses and a home – and a man in his 40s was arrested on suspicion of plotting terrorism.

The man was eventually released without charge. Well-placed sources said the plot had been disrupted by a covert intelligence operation rather than seeking a prosecution.

The discovery was so serious that David Cameron and Theresa May, then the prime minister and home secretary, were personally briefed on what had been found.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Theresa May is about to spend £1 trillion on a pointless policy. This climate madness has to end Bjorn Lomborg

By on June 10th, 2019

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/06/10/theresa-may-spend-1-trillion-pointless-policy-climate-madness/

Chancellor Phillip Hammond was slapped down by Downing Street last week for warning that reaching net zero carbon emissions could cost the UK £1 trillion and require cuts to funding for schools, hospitals and the police force. Climate change needs a response, but Mr Hammond is right to highlight the cost – and in fact, he is likely to be underestimating the real price-tag.

Almost all signatories to the Paris Agreement on climate change are failing to live up to their promises. This is nothing new, countries have been failing to deliver ever since the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit was held back in 1992. Their grand promises always run up against the hard reality that forcing a transition from fossil fuels to alternatives remains incredibly expensive and is the reason why renewable energy has only increased by 1.1 percentage points in that time — from meeting 13.1 per cent of the worlds energy needs in 1992 to 14.2 per cent today.

The UK is, reportedly, already resorting to the use of “creative accounting” as it attempts to meet its current obligation of reducing emissions by 80 per cent by 2050. However, that hasn’t stopped the government considering an even bolder promise: net zero.

This will have no meaningful impact on temperatures because the UK is responsible for just one per cent of global emissions. If it eradicated its entire emissions forever, global temperatures in 2100 would be affected by less than 0.014°C. Yet while the benefits of reaching net zero are negligible, the cost of delivering this pledge would be massive.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israel’s Narrow Path To Peace by Angelo M. Codevilla

By on June 10th, 2019

https://www.hoover.org/research/israels-narrow-path-peace

Pitilessly, the past quarter century’s events have dismissed the hopes for peace with the Arabs that Israeli diplomats, often accompanied by U.S. counterparts, detailed to the world in 1993 as they explained the concessions they had finalized in Oslo. Previously, they had treated Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization as a terrorist organization to be marginalized if not destroyed. The list of its outrages, from bombing school buses and airports to murdering Olympic athletes, spoke for itself. In 1982, the U.S. saved the PLO from imminent destruction by an Israeli and Lebanese alliance, and sustained it in supervised exile in Tunisia. U.S. policy had always nourished hopes that, were the PLO to be given responsibility and treated as a partner, it would moderate itself. This would result in a Palestinian state living peacefully alongside Israel.

In Israel, substantial high-level opinion had come to share these hopes. And why not? The Soviet collapse, having removed the PLO’s main source of funding and hope of support, radically weakened Syria. The Israelis judged that the PLO had little choice but to take the generous option of peace and partnership offered to it. Besides, Israel had been suffering from a wave of PLO-organized violence in the West Bank, and longed for a broad path to peace. Hence, the Oslo Accords.

The accords delivered the opposite. Subsequent waves of violence, escalating demands, and outright wars, have convinced the Israeli public’s vast majority that its only path to peace is very narrow—a long-term commitment to very hard, defensible borders, coupled with encouraging Egypt and Jordan, who are almost as equally threatened as Israel by what the Palestinian people have become, to take control of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Only the Arab parties and the left wing of left-wing Meretz regret abandoning attempts at a “two state solution.”

So firmly is Israel on this path, so lacking are credible alternatives, that the highly touted “plan of the century” that Jared Kushner is to unveil in June 2019 may trouble it, but is unlikely to alter it.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Commissars at the End of History Anthony Daniels

By on June 10th, 2019

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2019/06/commissars-at-the-end-of-history/

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2019

Who won the Cold War? asked Daryl McCann in a recent issue of Quadrant. At first sight, this is an absurd question: of course America and its allies won. After all, it was the Soviet empire that folded, and for a time—a very short time, admittedly—it seemed as if large-scale geopolitical conflicts were a thing of the past. Francis Fukuyama suggested that history had come to a full stop. He had seen the future and it was universal liberal democracy; any little local resistance was futile and would quickly be overcome. To try to stop its spread would be like trying to plug a volcano in mid-eruption.

We now know different, if ever we gave credence to Fukuyama’s very dilute Hegelianism (I did not).  Interestingly, the reading of a book by John Laffin, an Australian writer on military subjects, published in 1979 in a popular, sensationalist style under the prophetic title The Dagger of Islam, might have sufficed by itself to warn us against all complacency in however sophisticated a form, and that ideology was far from dead albeit that its Marxist incarnation, or one of its Marxist incarnations, had so obviously failed even according to the most Machiavellian of criteria. 

Nevertheless, no one could seriously claim that the Soviet Union other than lost the Cold War, or that its leaders at any time in its history would have welcomed the denouement of that conflict. It was a victory for freedom over tyranny, indeed one of the most complete forms of tyranny known to human history.

And yet I suspect that few people would subscribe wholeheartedly to the proposition that, since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, liberty has progressed from triumph to triumph in the world, even—or perhaps especially—in the lands of the victors of the Cold War. The fact is that for people to feel free, more is required than a political system with certain legal or constitutional guarantees, all of which can be subverted by the kind of rationalisation to which intellectuals are often given, and the absence of overt or obvious tyranny.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Eric Swalwell mounts a strong effort to take the crown as the most pathetic entrant in the Democrats’ presidential field By Thomas Lifson

By on June 10th, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/06/eric_swalwell_mounts_a_strong_effort_to_take_the_crown_as_the_most_pathetic_entrant_in_the_democrats_presidential_field.html

The expression “clown car” is frequently used to describe the crowded field of Democrats running for the presidency. But it is appropriate not just to denote the crowding, but also the behavior of some of the members of the field.  Yesterday, it looked to me as though it would be hard to top the efforts of Kirsten Gillibrand to ingratiate herself with the patrons of a gay bar in Des Moines by chugging shots and getting jiggy.

But Eric Swalwell, the Bay Area congressman who unsuccessfully tried to ride charges of “treason” against President Trump to fame and fortune, is making a strong effort to surpass her. The weekend before last, he tried changing an unnamed but presumably his baby’s diapers on video, only to see that it was inadequate to rocket him up the rankings of presidential contenders beyond too-low-to-round-upward-to-one-percent.

So, in the last few days, he managed to beclown himself not once, but twice.

Watch as he gives such an inane answer to a serious question by S. E. Cupp on CNN on his signature issue – why, if he’s serious about gun violence, is he focused on assault weapons that only account for a tiny percentage of deaths:

“I’ll just say assault weapons are a small percentage of gn violence deaths, but when you talk to a child in a classroom today, 100% of their fear is an assault weapon coming into their classroom…”  (hat tip: The Right Scoop) 

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Why Clinton Got Impeached By Rich Lowry

By on June 10th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/06/bill-clinton-impeachment-case-stronge

The anti-Clinton case then was stronger than the anti-Trump case is now.

There’s been a cottage industry in accusing Republicans of impeachment hypocrisy.

They happily impeached Bill Clinton and now vociferously oppose the impeachment of Donald Trump, even though Clinton was accused of obstruction of justice — just as Trump is now.

Is this a legitimate point?

There are uncomfortable parallels. The Democrats most fervent about impeachment say that it is their duty to do it no matter what, politics be damned. They speculate that perhaps the polling on impeachment will improve once it’s under way. Republicans said the same thing in the 1990s, and the Clinton impeachment ended in a fizzle.

And it’s certainly true that both Clinton and Trump behaved appallingly when under investigation.

Given that the Clinton impeachment, as a practical matter, acted as a censure vote and Clinton’s misconduct didn’t involve his core presidential duties, there’s a good argument that a formal censure would have been the wiser course. In retrospect, Newt Gingrich doesn’t give himself high marks for how he handled it.

That said, the case for Clinton’s impeachment was still stronger than the case for Trump’s.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Poll: Trump More Popular in New York than Mayor DeBlasio By Rick Moran

By on June 10th, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/trending/poll-trump-more-popular-in-new-york-than-mayor-deblasio/

A new Siena College Research Institute poll uncovers the embarrassing fact that more people in the state of New York have a favorable opinion of Donald Trump than of New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio.

Did we mention that de Blasio is running for president of the United States?

Washington Examiner:

Trump is by no means popular in his home state, as the new Siena College Research Institute  poll finds that just 34% of registered voters have a favorable view of him, compared with 63% who have an unfavorable view. But when it comes to de Blasio, just 29% have a favorable view, compared with 53% who view him unfavorably.

So far, the mayor’s 2020 presidential campaign has produced more mockery than actual support, which is undetectable in polling.

It may not be detectable, but the inference is clear; de Blasio is making a fool of himself running for president.

Case in point: hizzoner failed to gain any support whatsoever from Iowans in the new Des Moines Register poll that was released yesterday. Could it be because of his dismissive attitude toward rural voters?

Mediaite:

De Blasio and Miramar, Florida Mayor  Wayne Messam  were the only two candidates in the field of 23 candidates to not be listed as either a first or second choice for president by one of the respondents.

“I’ll tell you something, Iowans have consistently surprised the pundits and come out many, many times with a choice that was not expected,” de Blasio contended.

“Ana, it’s a poll of 600 Iowans, eight months before the caucuses. This is just the beginning of a very long process,” he said.

“I wonder if being New York City mayor might hurt you in a place like Iowa,” CNN’s Ana Cabrera asked.

“It’s a fair concern,” de Blasio said. “But I’m hearing about the same issues I hear from my constituents in New York.”

“I think the Democratic Party for decades formed a coalition, a rural-urban coalition. That’s what Franklin Delano Roosevelt did, it worked for Democrats. It was about working people, farmers, factory workers, every day people.” de Blasio said.

I don’t think those 600 Iowans — or many other Democrats in the state — appreciate being dismissed so cavalierly.

Realistically, it’s very difficult to see a successful path forward to the nomination for de Blasio, especially in the early primary and caucus states. By the time the California primary rolls around on March 17, de Blasio should be relaxing in his office, thinking up ways to make the lives of New Yorkers miserable and not in the midst of a battle for the presidential nomination.

So the question arises; why? If Sanders, Biden, or Warren eventually get the nod, de Blasio has zero chance of being named as any of those candidates’ vice president. The mayor is too urban, too northern, too prickly, and too “New Yorkish” to get the nod.

So you have to wonder if de Blasio isn’t setting himself up for a run for governor or, perhaps, Senator. When you consider that de Blasio is term limited and will be out of office in 2021, the possibility of a run for higher office is not out of the question. CONTINUE AT SITE

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Is America Experiencing Europe’s Growing Anti-Semitism?By Melissa Langsam Braunstein

By on June 10th, 2019

https://thefederalist.com/2019/06/10/america-experiencing-europes-growing-anti-semitism/

It all started on the campuses, and we did nothing because they were students. We did nothing when they joined the party because it was just the left-wing fringe, and now they’ve taken over.’

Is America experiencing Europe’s growing anti-Semitism? That was the central question at the Hudson Institute last Tuesday afternoon. As Hudson Institute CEO Ken Weinstein noted in opening remarks, it’s a question we never thought we’d have to ask.

Yet, in 2019, it’s an unavoidable, even urgent question. After deadly attacks in Pittsburgh and Poway, along with openly anti-Semitic rhetoric in the U.S. Congress and anti-Semitic imagery in The New York Times, the climate has clearly changed.

The world’s oldest hatred, which began a resurgence in Europe at the turn of the century, has begun rearing its ugly heads here. Heads plural because, as the various speakers agreed, contemporary anti-Semitism is a three-headed monster: it exists on the far-left, the far-right, and among Islamists.

Europe has long had a problem with anti-Semitism. For Jews, one of the best things about emigrating to the New World was leaving behind centuries of pogroms, forced conversions, and general mistreatment. In America, Jews have always been a tiny minority. But here, we’re free to practice (or not practice) our religion, and we can be treated like everybody else. So, should we expect things to follow a European-like trajectory?

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