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Ruth King

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Why Go West? By Victor Davis Hanson

By on April 30th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/immigration-western-civilization-leftist-complaints/

T he harshest critics of the West in general and the United States in particular are the best arguments for it. Take the latest iconic critic, 29-year-old Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. She has a predictable list of complaints against America, past and present.

Yet fortunately for her, her paternal grandparents and mother had experienced firsthand the antitheses of mainland America. And thus they were obsessed with what was right, not wrong, with the continental United States — and with getting there as quickly as possible. If they had once been critics of America, such animus was seemingly not great enough to prevent them moving to a place with a different language, ethnic majority, and traditions from those of their home, itself a territory of the U.S.

They apparently assumed that a free-market economy and transparent government gave them economic opportunities unknown in Puerto Rico, an otherwise naturally rich landscape. They wisely stayed in North America, apparently because they felt as supposed minorities that they would have far more cultural, social, political, and economic opportunities than they would as part of the majority in Puerto Rico. The fact that her father was a second-generation immigrant and architect, that AOC herself grew up in affluent Westchester County, that she received scholarships to attend pricey Boston University, and that she was elected to Congress bore out her parents’ correct assumptions of a meritocracy, not a caste state.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

DePaul Students Demand Professor’s Censure, Call Him ‘Xenophobe’ For Supporting Israel In The Federalist By Joy Pullmann

By on April 30th, 2019

https://thefederalist.com/2019/04/30/depaul-students-demand-professors-censure-as-racist-for-supporting-israel-in-the-federalist/

Campus administrators are trying to calm down students after a week of outrage over DePaul University professor Jason Hill writing in The Federalist to support Israel’s right to create defensible borders and repel Islamist attempts at genocide.

“Jason Hill, you can’t hide, we know you want genocide!” shouted students throwing papers over bannisters during a protest last week. The protesting students demanded that the university formally censure Hill, require him to take “racial sensitivity training,” and him to publicly apologize for writing that Israel has a “moral right” to annex the West Bank because it is territory it won during a war initiated by enemies who believe Israel and Israelis should be wiped from the earth.

Several student groups have denounced Hill’s praise for Jewish and Western civilization’s achievements as “racist, anti-Palestinian, xenophobic, sexist and Islamophobic,” characterizing his criticisms of Sharia law as “uncivilized,” “barbaric,” and “primitive.” More than 3,000 have signed an online petition denouncing him.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Why Is Ilhan Omar’s Collusion With Islamists Acceptable? Omar’s penchant for provoking millions of Americans with odious words has masked the related elements of her associations, ideology, and background. Ben Weingarten

By on April 30th, 2019

https://thefederalist.com/2019/04/30/ilhan-omars-collusion-islamists-acceptable/

Freshman Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) has distinguished herself with often offensive, outrageous, and unpatriotic rhetoric. One week she invokes classic anti-Jewish tropes. The next she trivializes the September 11 jihadist attacks. Another it is unearthed that she espouses morally relativistic if not overtly anti-American views about U.S. soldiers, the very ones who fought to defend civilians in her native Somalia to boot.

Omar’s penchant for provoking millions of Americans with odious words has masked the related, equally if not more troubling, elements of her associations, ideology, and background.

Consider Omar’s Meeting with Turkey’s President

Consider, for example, the revelation, largely unnoticed outside of conservative media, that as a Minnesota Assemblywoman Omar had a closed-press meeting in fall 2017 with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. According to a curiously now-deleted article from the local Somalian-language periodical in her district, the Tusmo Times, she and the Islamist authoritarian president met during his U.N. General Assembly visit to New York.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

8 Times Barack Obama Abused His Power To Appease His Base By Matt Margoli

By on April 30th, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/trending/8-times-barack-obama-abused-his-power-to-appease-his-base/

Joe Biden, now all in for 2020, has his sights set on Donald Trump. With daily attacks, he’s lobbing any accusation he can against Trump in the hopes that such attacks will get traction. His latest attack is to claim that President Trump has abused his powers. “There’s only one thing that stands in our way. It’s our broken political system that’s deliberately being undermined by our president to continue to abuse the power of the office,” Biden claimed, calling Trump “the only president who has decided not to represent the whole country. He has his base. We need a president who works for all Americans.”

Has Creepy Uncle forgotten that thanks to Trump, African-American unemployment is at an all-time low? So is Hispanic unemployment. Last I checked, African Americans and Hispanic vote overwhelmingly Democrat. Women also vote more Democrat, but are thriving in the Trump economy. Looks to me as though Trump has been working for all Americans—even those not in his base.

But what really got me about Biden’s comments was the part about Trump allegedly abusing power. President Trump has spent much of the past two years trying to undo Obama’s abuses of power—which Obama did, not in the best interests of the whole country, but for the benefit of his base. Has Biden forgotten Obama’s presidency or is he just a bad liar? Many of these abuses should have resulted in Obama’s impeachment. Unfortunately, Republicans in Congress didn’t have the guts to impeach him, but they tried everything could to reign in on his pseudo-dictatorship. Two pieces of legislation were drafted in order to stop his abuses and force him to follow the law. Obama threatened to veto both bills rather than risk any limits on his ever-expanding legislative authority.

Below are 8 examples of Obama doing exactly what Joe Biden just accused Donald Trump of doing.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The Peculiar Progressive-Islamist Alliance By Philip Carl Salzman

By on April 30th, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/the-peculiar-progressive-islamist-alliance/

After Congresswomen Ilham Omar’s and Rashida Tlaib’s incendiary anti-Semitic rants directed at Jewish Americans and American ally Israel, the Democrat House “progressive caucus,” led by Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, rallied around to protect and support them. The progressive media chimed in, supporting the Islamist congresswomen. Even after Rep. Omar dismissed the 9/11 attacks as “someone did something,” Democrat progressives defended her, accusing the president of religious bigotry when he objected.

Not to be outdone, the ever more progressive and pro-Islamist New York Times published a political cartoon that even they admit is anti-Semitic, as well as an article claiming that Jesus was a Palestinian, which was applauded by Ilhan Omar! The anti-Semitic congresswomen and media were right in tune with the powerful “Women’s March” leaders, who allied with notorious anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan, head of the Nation of Islam, calling him “The greatest of all times.”

Progressive leftists, who wish to bring socialism to America, and Islamists, who wish to bring Sharia law to America, are strange bedfellows indeed. Despite opposite political philosophies, they have found common cause in anti-Semitism.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

In defense of a booming economy. This is no ‘sugar high.’

By on April 30th, 2019

https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/editorials/ct-edit-economy-trump-gdp-growth-unemployment-20190428-story.html

The U.S. economy is growing at such a fast clip and the unemployment rate is so low that … there must be something terribly wrong. Does that make sense? No, but the healthy state of the country seems to be too much for some economists, talking heads and others in the chattering class. They struggle to find something nice to say about 3.2 percent growth accompanied by 3.8 percent unemployment.

We’re puzzling over the negativism because we’re certain everyone will miss the good times when they inevitably fade. The debate we’d like to see is how to extend this era of prosperity — and delay the next recession — as long as possible. Instead, there’s skepticism in the air, which is potentially damaging because part of what drives economic growth is confidence. If business owners and consumers turn skittish, they’ll invest and spend less. Fear of recession could hasten one.

Here’s what we’re talking about: The Bloomberg consensus estimate for first-quarter annualized GDP growth was just 2.3 percent, meaning the experts had undershot the actual result by nearly a full percentage point. That happens, given that forecasting is an inexact science. But when Friday’s numbers were released, a scramble ensued to downplay the results to justify previous pessimism. That 3.2 percent growth figure? It was illusory, due to a host of one-time factors, such as companies boosting inventories as a precaution against escalating trade friction with China. This fast growth can’t last, said the experts. “The first-quarter number is overstating the strength of the economy,” Ben Herzon of Macroeconomic Advisers told The Washington Post.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

The Chinese Tortoise and the American Hare By David P. Goldman

By on April 30th, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/spengler/the-chinese-tortoise-and-the-american-hare/

Historian Andrew Roberts reports that Winston Churchill said just after Pearl Harbor that “in the event of war, the Japanese would ‘fold up like the Italians,’ because they were ‘the wops of the Far East.’” The West chronically underestimates Asians, as the Russians found out at Port Arthur, the Americans at Pearl Harbor and the Yalu River, the British at Singapore, and so forth.

A case in point is the present tariff war. The U.S. assumed that tariffs on Chinese imports would force China to make fundamental concessions to American trade demands. On January 6, President Donald Trump said, “China’s not doing very well now. It puts us in a very strong position. We are doing very well.” Since then China’s CSI 300 stock index has gained 37% during 2019 to date, double the gain in U.S. stock markets. China’s economic growth has accelerated while America’s has slowed. The tariff war may have hurt the U.S. economy more than China’s. With an internal market of 1.4 billion people, China can replace lost foreign business by increasing internal demand. Ten years ago exports made up 36% of China’s gross domestic product versus only 18% today. World trade is shrinking, but the impact on China is manageable.

I support President Trump. I applaud him for calling attention to China’s challenge to America’s strategic position. But I have warned from the outset that the tools he has employed won’t get the results he wants.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Poor Friendless Erdoğan by Burak Bekdil

By on April 30th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14118/erdogan-friendless

In reality, with the exception of Qatar’s emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, and Venezuela’s troubled man, Nicolás Maduro, Erdoğan is increasingly friendless.

China’s ambassador to Ankara, Deng Li, diplomatically showed Turkey the most frightening stick. Deng told Reuters: “If you choose a non-constructive path, it will negatively affect mutual trust and understanding and will be reflected in commercial and economic relations.”

It was a shock to the Turkish president to wake up the other day and learn that the genocide suspect whom he embraced as “brother”, President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan, had been ousted by a coup d’état.

“World leaders hail Erdoğan on local vote win,” the news headline ran, referring to the outcome of Turkey’s local elections on March 31. They laboriously ignored that President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Islamist AKP party lost in all of Turkey’s three biggest cities — and for the first time in 25 years in Ankara and Istanbul. They were nevertheless able to find one element to hail regarding Turkey’s strongman. But, “world leaders?”

Here is the full list: Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, tripartite Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina Chairman Milorad Dodik, former Bosniak member of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina Bakir Izetbegovic, Guinean President Alpha Conde, and Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Finland Cozies Up to Iran by Kenneth Sikorski

By on April 30th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14162/finland-iran

Just a little more than ten years ago, Finland’s flagship telecommunications company, Nokia, was found to have sold to Tehran surveillance technology, which was used a year later to suppress dissident demonstrators’ use of social media.

“[T]here are two documented instances where [the Finnish company] Cargotec-tied cranes have been used for public executions.” — United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) press release.

How Finland behaves today is eerily reminiscent of its behavior with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. During that time, Finnish politicians, academics and journalists practiced self-censorship. They knew whom not to talk about, let alone criticize. Today it is criticism of Islam that is aggressively prosecuted under the guise of combating “hate-speech” or “disparaging of religious groups”. It is the same M.O., just a different place and time.

There is a special saying in Finland describing a person’s naïvety: it is called being “blue-eyed”. Unfortunately, there is not a saying that describes the same trait for an entire political class.

Successive Finnish governments could be accurately described as extremely “blue-eyed,” especially during the last decade or so in their relations with Iran.

Part of the problem seems to lie with Finnish politicians, who seem truly to believe that having a dialogue — any dialogue — regardless of who is on the opposite side of the table, is better than having no dialogue at all. So you can easily end up with the equivalent of a businessman trying to reach an agreement with Al Capone, while each holds completely different assumptions about the underlying terms of an agreement, including whether agreements are even meant to be kept.

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MEDIA Comments turned off

What if the New York Times Cartoon had depicted a Muslim, a Lesbian, an African American or a Mexican as a Dog? by Alan M. Dershowitz

By on April 30th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14165/what-if-the-new-york-times-cartoon-had-depicted

Only three quarters of a century after Der Stürmer incentivized the mass murder of Jews by dehumanizing them we see a revival of such bigoted caricatures.

I do not believe in free speech for me, but not for thee. But I do believe in condemning those who hide behind the First Amendment to express anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, homophobic, sexist or racist views.

For years now, the New York Times op-ed pages have been one-sidedly anti-Israel. Its reporting has often been provably false, and all the errors tend to favor Israel’s enemies.

Most recently, the New York Times published an op-ed declaring, on Easter Sunday, that the crucified Jesus was probably a Palestinian. How absurd. How preposterous. How predictable.

Imagine if the New York Times cartoon that depicted Israel’s Prime Minister as a dog had, instead, depicted the leader of another ethnic or gender group in a similar manner? If you think that is hard to imagine that you are absolutely right. It would be inconceivable for a Times editor to have allowed the portrayal of a Muslim leader as a dog; or the leader of any other ethnic or gender group in so dehumanizing a manner.

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