Displaying the most recent of 90443 posts written by

Ruth King

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israel in the Cross Hairs of the International Criminal Court How Israel can counter the Palestinians’ lawfare strategy at the ICC. Joseph Klein

By on March 6th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273065/israel-cross-hairs-international-criminal-court-joseph-klein

The Palestinians have weaponized the International Criminal Court (ICC). Leveraging the decision of the United Nations General Assembly to bestow Palestine with the title “Non-Member Observer State,” the Palestinian leaders decided to join the ICC, which accepted its application with open arms. Then, on May 15, 2018, the Palestinians exercised their “right as a State Party to the Rome Statute to refer the Situation of Palestine for immediate investigation” of alleged Israeli crimes to the ICC prosecutor, who had previously opened an informal “preliminary examination” on her own initiative.

The Palestinians’ referral checked many of the boxes defining the crimes subject to ICC jurisdiction, particularly the alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes. On May 24, 2018, the ICC’s Presidency assigned the “Situation in Palestine” to the ICC’s Pre-Trial Chamber, which took steps to begin informing alleged “victims” as to the ICC’s role and activities, so they can “properly exercise their rights.”

The ICC’s chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda’s office issued its “Report on Preliminary Examination Activities” for 2018 dated December 5, 2018, which included a section on the Palestinian situation. It appears that a decision is near on whether to open a formal investigation into Israeli actions in the West Bank and Gaza mentioned in the report, including demolition of Palestinian property, eviction of Palestinians from the West Bank and East Jerusalem, plans to evacuate residents of the Bedouin village Khan al-Ahmar, settlements construction, the 2014 Gaza war, and more recent violence in and around the Gaza Strip border with Israel stemming from Palestinian mass protests. Experts believe that the prosecutor will open such an investigation with the Pre-Trial Chamber’s blessing in the near future, especially in light of her recent expressions of concern over continuing casualties in the proximity of the Gaza border with Israel.

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Women’s March leader blasts ‘white feminist’ Nancy Pelosi for Ilhan Omar condemnation By Eric Ting

By on March 6th, 2019

https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Ilhan-Omar-Linda-Sarsour-anti-semitism-Pelosi-13665817.php

Women’s March leader Linda Sarsour ripped into House Speaker Nancy Pelosi after House Democrats drafted a resolution condemning anti-Semitism in response to Rep. Ilhan Omar accusing pro-Israel lawmakers of pushing for “allegiance to a foreign country.”

Sarsour, who served as co-chair of the Women’s March in 2017 and 2019, accused Pelosi of “doing the dirty work of powerful white men” by condemning Omar.

“Nancy is a typical white feminist upholding the patriarchy doing the dirty work of powerful white men,” she wrote in a Facebook post. “God forbid the men are upset – no worries, Nancy to the rescue to stroke their egos.”

Sarsour, who has faced anti-Semitism accusations herself, said the resolution of condemnation gives Republicans an “easier path” in 2020.”Democrats are playing in to the hands of the right,” she wrote. “Dividing our base and reinforcing their narrative and giving them an easier path towards 2020… You want a resolution? Condemn all forms of bigotry. All forms of bigotry are unacceptable. We won’t let them pin us up against each other. We stand with Representative Ilhan Omar. Our top priority is the safety of our sister and her family.”

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Democrats’ Resolution Condemning Anti-Semitism Is A Transparent Joke Liberals do their best to deflect and dilute Ilhan Omar’s bigotry By David Harsanyi

By on March 6th, 2019

http://thefederalist.com/2019/03/05/the-democrats-resolution-condemning-anti-semitism-is-a-transparent-joke/

Democrats’ draft measure condemning anti-Semitism, which the House will vote on this Wednesday, is a useless and transparent attempt to distract from a serious problem. The melodramatic resolution mentions Alfred Dreyfuss, Leo Frank, Henry Ford, and “anti-Muslim bigotry”—because, hey, even when Jews are being smeared it’s about Islamophobia—but not once does it condemn Rep. Ilhan Omar or the strain of Jew-hatred she is helping normalize on the left. The resolution, teeming with useless platitudes, is one that even Omar could probably support.

Omar argues that American “democracy is built on debate” and that she “should not be expected to have allegiance/pledge support to a foreign country in order to serve my country in Congress or serve on committee.” No decent person disagrees with this comment in theory. Also, no sane person believes this contention, perpetually repeated by anti-Israel progressives, is true of Omar.

No one asked her, or anyone else, to pledge allegiance to a foreign nation. It’s her belief that supporting the Jewish state, a long-time ideological and geopolitical ally of the United States, is an act of dual loyalty — either by Jews themselves, or by those they’ve hypnotized to do “evil” for them. She is the one who accuses Jewish Americans, a group that has played a robust role in the nation’s civic life for a long time, of doing the bidding of a foreign nation to the detriment of their own.

Continue reading →
WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Sincerely, Emmanuel Macron offers Europe an earnest recitation of his worst ideas.

By on March 6th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/sincerely-emmanuel-11551831254

As political campaign tactics go, we’ve seen better than the open letter that French President Emmanuel Macron sent this week laying out a pan-Europe agenda ahead of May’s European Parliament elections. He manages to combine bad ideas with off-putting self-promotion.

Mr. Macron is trying to rally voters around a centrist, “pro-European” message amid fears that euroskeptic parties could win a third or more of the seats in the next parliament. Violent protests against a fuel-tax hike at home have thwarted Mr. Macron’s effort to build a pan-European political movement, so he’s making do with the letter published in newspapers across the Continent in 22 languages. His platform is “freedom, protection and progress.”

Some ideas are merely impractical. European voters increasingly demand more effective border enforcement, especially after 2015’s migration crisis. Mr. Macron’s call for more stringent border controls around the passport-free European Schengen zone may resonate. But his demand for more burden-sharing in processing asylum claimants will flop. Voters in Poland don’t want to be obliged to house migrants that countries such as Germany or Italy have welcomed or proven powerless to stop.

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Nadler’s ‘Obstruction’ Quest The examples he cites as crimes are legal presidential actions.

By on March 6th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/nadlers-obstruction-quest-11551833245

Well, we’re off on the march to impeachment, as we predicted last year even as Democrats said it wasn’t on their minds. With Chairman Jerry Nadler’s subpoena swarm from House Judiciary this week, and his assertions that President Trump obstructed justice, the articles of impeachment are apparently awaiting only the collection of the readily available details to fill in the blanks.

“Do you think the President obstructed justice?” asked ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on Sunday.

“Yes, I do,” replied Mr. Nadler. “It’s very clear that the President obstructed justice. It’s very clear—1,100 times he referred to the Mueller investigation as a witch hunt, he tried to—he fired—he tried to protect [Michael] Flynn from being investigated by the FBI. He fired [FBI director Jim] Comey in order to stop the Russian thing, as he told NBC News.”

Credit Mr. Nadler for candor that Democrats didn’t display when they campaigned last year. Then they talked only about holding the President “accountable.” Now they claim they already have enough to impeach Mr. Trump, though as Mr. Nadler admitted Sunday, “you have to persuade enough of the opposition party voters, Trump voters . . . that you’re not just trying to steal the last—to reverse the results of the last election.”

Continue reading →
HISTORY Comments turned off

DID YOU KNOW THIS?

By on March 5th, 2019

Thomas Sowell @ThomasSowell”More whites were brought as slaves to North Africa than blacks brought as slaves to the United States or to the 13 colonies from which it was formed. White slaves were still being bought and sold in the Ottoman Empire, decades after blacks were freed in the United States.”  1:03 PM – Feb 27, 2019

Continue reading →
EDUCATION, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Forget About Decolonizing the Curriculum. We Need to Restore the West’s Telos Before it’s Too Late written by Doug Stokes

By on March 5th, 2019

https://quillette.com/2019/03/03/forget-about

The campaign by left-wing student protestors and some faculty to force Western universities to “decolonize the curriculum” has been surprisingly successful. A movement that started at the University of Cape Town in 2015, with the demand that the city’s university remove its statue of Cecil Rhodes—“Rhodes Must Fall”—quickly made its way to the U.K., with student activists calling for his statue at Oriel College, Oxford to be taken down. At its heart, the movement seeks to challenge what it characterizes as the dominance of the Western canon in the humanities and social sciences, as well as the under-representation of women and minorities in academia. It also, like many movements inspired by critical theory, maintains that a person’s beliefs and worldview are largely determined by their skin color, sexual orientation and gender.

In a bizarre turn of events, this movement now enjoys the endorsement of the British Royal Family. In February 2019, on a visit to a London University, the Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle, lent her weight to the movement, having had her eyes opened by a presentation about the relatively small number of Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) staff within the U.K. higher education sector. According to the Times, the Duchess visited City University in London in her capacity as the patron of the Association of Commonwealth Universities (ACU) and responded to the presentation by announcing that Britain’s universities need to “open up that conversation so we are talking about it as opposed to continuing with that daily rote . . . sometimes that approach can be really antiquated and needs an update.” When presented with evidence about the lack of black and female professors in British universities she reportedly exclaimed, “Oh my God!” One of the organizers, Meera Sabaratnam, said it was “wonderful to see the Duchess standing up for female equality” as many “of the issues around racial equality are similar and it is great to see her embrace this. Change is long overdue.” The Duchess’s call for British universities to “decolonize the curriculum” may well become the policy of the British Labour Party, and potentially the U.K.’s next government. Angela Rayner, Labour’s Shadow Education Secretary, recently made a similar observation to the Duchess: “Like much of our establishment, our universities are too male, pale and stale and do not represent the communities that they serve or modern Britain,” she told the University and College Union conference earlier this month. If Labour comes to power, she said she would use the powers of the newly-established Office for Students to address this shortcoming. For Rayner, U.K. universities must “do much more, and under Labour they will be held to account.”

Continue reading →
WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

China is Gearing up for a Long Fight by Nick Taber

By on March 5th, 2019

https://quillette.com/2019/03/04/china-is-gearing-

On February 18, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced that a “sophisticated state-actor” had launched a cyber attack on Australia’s major political parties and parliamentary computer system. The Australian government has not yet identified which state-actor is responsible but suspicions almost instantly fell on China. The Chinese military maintains a dedicated unit (the People’s Liberation Army Unit 61398) for cyber attacks. While several other nations maintain the capabilities for this kind of attack, they do not have China’s record of interference in Australian politics. The Chinese Communist Party puts significant resources into neutralizing opposition to its interests within Australian politics and society. Its increasingly flagrant acts of interference prompted the nation to pass sweeping foreign interference laws in 2018.

If China is responsible for the cyber-attack on Australian parliament, it fits a very clear pattern of increasing antagonism by China against the West. This points towards a worrying and unstable future for Western middle-powers with high economic exposure to China. Moreover, China’s increasingly threatening posture suggests that it no longer believes that it can radically reshape the international order without waging a long-term strategic conflict with the West. Until recently, China was careful to maintain the West’s support for the nation’s rise by refraining from activities that would trigger too much anxiety. Not only is China now engaging in these activities with little pretense of restraint (including militarizing the South China Sea) but it has gone one giant leap further by directly threatening the autonomy and stability of Western societies with extensive interference operations.

Continue reading →
POLITICS Comments turned off

Tulsi Gabbard vs. the War Party By Brandon J. Weichert

By on March 5th, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/03/04/tulsi

Representative Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) is the latest victim of the corporate media’s smear machine. Although a liberal Democrat, Gabbard is a retired U.S. Army major who served in a medical unit during the Iraq War. Despite a number of untenable domestic policy positions, her foreign policy instincts reflect a far more conservative predilection than many in her party’s elite appreciate. Gabbard’s skepticism about humanitarian military intervention and regime change have made her a pariah among the elite of both parties. Gabbard in January announced her plans to run for president in 2020. Even though she is an ideological leftist, the fact that she opposes perpetual warfare in places like Syria makes her prospects of winning her party’s nomination very low. What’s more, Gabbard’s track record on foreign policy decision-making since entering Congress in 2012 is far better than that of the permanent bipartisan fusion party. That alone makes her a threat to the democratic globalist elite.

Gabbard served in Iraq in 2005, a year after the American position there became mired in a brutal ethno-religious insurgency, and a year before the David Petraeus-led “surge” put a band-aid on the deep, festering wound that was U.S. war policy at the time. She has seen up-close what the hubris of America’s political elite costs the nation.

After all, the Iraq War was not just about removing (non-existent) weapons of mass destruction from a rogue state. Nor was the conflict only about ridding the world of Saddam Hussein, a tyrant who truly was among the world’s most brutal dictators. No, the war was a social engineering experiment applied by “competent” technocrats in the sterile halls of power and the stuffy Ivory Towers of think tanks in Washington, D.C.

Continue reading →
BOOKS Comments turned off

Anonymous Strikes — Again and Again By Victor Davis Hanson

By on March 5th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/03/anonymous-editorial-resistance-trump-administration/

Editor’s Note: This essay is adapted from Victor Davis Hanson’s new book, The Case for Trump.
The premise of efforts to undermine Trump is that the establishment has such power, prestige, and authority to overturn the verdict of the 2016 election.

On September 5, 2018, the New York Times published an anonymous editorial by a supposed “senior official” in the Trump administration. In astounding fashion, the unnamed writer claimed that he/she was part of a legion of administration appointees and government officials who were actively working to undermine the Trump presidency by overriding his orders, keeping information from an unknowing Trump, or acting independently of his directives. Or as Anonymous unapologetically put it:

Trump is facing a test to his presidency unlike any faced by a modern American leader.

It’s not just that the special counsel looms large. Or that the country is bitterly divided over Mr. Trump’s leadership. Or even that his party might well lose the House to an opposition hellbent on his downfall.

The dilemma — which he does not fully grasp — is that many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.

I would know. I am one of them.

The Times author then continues by confessing to a sort of slow-motion coup to undermine the Trump presidency:

It may be cold comfort in this chaotic era, but Americans should know that there are adults in the room. We fully recognize what is happening. And we are trying to do what’s right even when Donald Trump won’t.

The result is a two-track presidency.

Continue reading →