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Ruth King

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Multiculturalism and the Transformation of Britain in 2018: Part II by Soeren Kern

By on January 8th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13513/britain-multiculturalism-transformation-ii

Not a single Christian was among the 1,112 Syrian refugees resettled in Britain in the first three months of 2018. The Home Office agreed to resettle only Muslims and rejected the four Christians recommended by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees — The Sunday Times.

Islamist groups are “weaponizing” Islamophobia and “cynically” using human rights to promote their ideology. Islamist groups accuse their critics of being anti-Muslim, in an attempt to shut down “legitimate debate” about Islamic extremism. The “use and abuse” of the language of human rights is “perhaps the most concerning” tactic employed by fundamentalist groups — Sara Khan, the UK government’s new counter-extremism tsar.

Women and girls who are coerced into marriage by their families will be allowed to give evidence in secret so they can object to their foreign spouses’ visas without fear of repercussions, according to legal changes announced by UK Home Secretary Sajid Javid.

JULY 2018

July 1. Mubarek Ali, a 35-year-old former ringleader of a Telford child sex abuse gang, was sent back to prison after breaching the terms of his parole. In 2012, Ali was sentenced to 22 years in prison for child prostitution offenses, but was automatically released in 2017 after serving only five years. Telford MP Lucy Allan said there are “many questions to be answered” about why Ali was released, and also about how the justice system treats so-called grooming cases:

“Now he is back in jail, justice demands that he must serve the remainder of his sentence in custody; anything less would show a casual disregard for the nature of his crimes and for the victims whose lives he changed forever.”

July 2. Abdul Rauf, a 51-year-old imam from Rochdale, was imprisoned for one year and five months after admitting to assaulting more than 20 children at a mosque. Inspector Phil Key, of Greater Manchester Police, said:

“Abdul Rauf is a nasty, bully of a man who beat the children in his classes until it became normalized. The children were left cowering and holding onto their ears, their arms and their legs after he repeatedly used violence as a punishment. The parents of the children had no idea that they were leaving their children in the care of a man who would leave them writhing in pain and covered in marks and bruises.”

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SHARIA AND SOCIALISM: EDWARD CLINE GUEST COLUMN

By on January 8th, 2019

https://edwardcline.blogspot.com/2019/01/sharia-and-socialism.html

The new Congress (the 116th): a socialist and a Muslim, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), and Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota). And there’s another Muslim , Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan), whose foul, mother-rucking mouth has made her notorious. The trio represents the Marxist-Islamic wing of the Dems, loud anti-Semites and quiet ones. RINOs (Republicans in name only) have no rebuttal to the “radicals” but can be expected to remain mute and in the name of civility in political discourse move deferentially aside and let the Dems have their way with the country exercising their well-known “hands-off” policy of being conscientiously irrelevant.We would be remiss if we did not also mention the Boycott, Divest, Sanction (BDS) movement, against Israel, supported by Omar , Ocasio-Cortez, and by foul-mouthed Tlaib, who advocates that Israel be erased from the map and replaced by the Gaza walkers (a pun to The Walking Dead), and all of its inhabitants marched to the sea to drown.

But, first, according to the apocalyptic trio, Donald Trump must first be impeached. The trio represents the Democratic Party now in control of the House. And here is Mr. Jones’s column.
Military History Book Reviews , a guest column by Grant Jones

The Democratic controlled House of Representatives looks like the cantina scene from Star Wars. It is a hive of villainy, scum, evil and treason. The Democrats’ avowed purpose is to destroy what’s left of the USA. Their method is demonstrated by what they are fighting for most vociferously. For example, to continue uncontrolled “immigration” by refusing to fund the Wall while providing “sanctuary” for murdering invaders. America’s death-spiral is encapsulated in this picture:

Appropriately, on the left is Puerto-Rican Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Her economy and soul destroying “Green New Deal” is already being touted by an equally evil media. The headbag on the right is Somali invader IIhan Omar. The picture is an excellent illustration of the Left-Islamic alliance to destroy America. Occasional-Cortex’s non-American constituents voted for her because she promises to fundamentally transform America into Venezuela as quickly as inhumanly possible. They are also excellent representatives of the anti-American fifth-column the left, and Republican turncoats, have imported for this very purpose. If the American people won’t vote for their own immolation, the left will replace them with those who will.

While a nation may survive external enemies, and may even survive imported enemies, it cannot long survive traitors within the wall. Sadly, “traitors” is the best word to describe the voters of Minnesota’s fifth congressional district who support Omar. This district, and the last election, demonstrates that the domestic left is America’s greatest enemy. They seek the nation’s death. That their own death may soon follow is not any of their concern. They are just driven to murder the object of their all consuming hate: American (and Western) traditions and freedom.

Hyperbole? No. Ayn Rand made the nihilistic motives of such haters clear in her seminal essay “The Age of Envy” in 1971.

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UNKOSHER BAN-BELGIUM

By on January 8th, 2019

https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Unkosher-ban-576528
There seems to be a contradiction between the guarantee of human rights and fundamental freedoms in Europe and the new bans on kosher slaughter.

Last week, a new law went into effect in Flanders, the northern region of Belgium, banning shechita, kosher slaughter. A similar law will go into effect in southern region of Wallonia in September, covering the entire country.

The law states that animals must be stunned before slaughter. Jewish law stipulates that meat can only be kosher if the animal was healthy before being slaughtered, and stunning constitutes an injury rendering the meat no longer kosher. The law also in effect bans on slaughter according to Islamic law, as well as the Hindu and Sikh methods of meat production.
Antwerp, in Flanders, is home to Europe’s largest Orthodox Jewish community, which will now have to import its meat from countries that have not yet banned shechita. Neighboring France, home to Europe’s largest – but dwindling – Jewish population, will likely experience a boom in its kosher businesses.

The impact of the Belgian kosher ban will go far beyond its local Jewish communities. Swedish journalist Annika Hernroth-Rothstein took to social media last week to lament that she can no longer have meat shipped in from her usual source: “I’m looking for a new kosher butcher/supermarket that delivers to Sweden,” she tweeted, calling herself “a Jew in Europe who LITERALLY just wants to live a Jewish life, but Europe seems to have other plans.”

Many other Jews around Europe will be similarly impacted.

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Brazil’s Bolsonaro Is 2018’s Biggest Winner Also: Italy’s Salvini, Turkey’s Erdogan, Syria’s Assad, and Ethiopia’s Abiy Ahmed. By Walter Russell Mead

By on January 8th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/brazils-bolsonaro-is-2018s-biggest-winner-11546909119

Twenty eighteen was a disquieting year. Although capitalism continued to raise living standards almost everywhere, the geopolitical outlook dimmed. An antimarket backlash gained strength in many countries, and relations between the U.S. and China continued on a downward trajectory even as global defense spending hit a record high.

Some leaders thrived in this environment—either despite the geopolitical headwinds or because of them. Here are the five men who, for better in some cases and worse in others, were the biggest winners in world politics in 2018.

• Abiy Ahmed. The new prime minister of Ethiopia took office in April and almost immediately launched a stunning series of political and economic reforms. In his first 100 days, the new prime minister released thousands of political prisoners, ended a state of emergency, began liberalizing the economy, and moved to implement a controversial peace agreement with Eritrea. Ethiopian institutions remain weak, and the country faces a tangle of ethnic and security issues that guarantee trouble ahead, but in 2018 Mr. Abiy gave hope to a country that desperately wants to put decades of civil conflict and authoritarian rule behind it.

• Bashar Assad. The Syrian strongman’s forces achieved a series of decisive victories in the bloodiest civil war in Middle East history. A host of morally vainglorious Western leaders demanded for years that Mr. Assad step down; with Russian and Iranian backing, he has had the last laugh. The country he rules is a ruin, but he occupies a palace in Damascus rather than a prison cell in The Hague.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Gender, Likability and Opportunity Are reporters too busy telling tales about female politicians to notice female non-politicians? By James Freeman

By on January 7th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/gender-likability-and-opportunity-1154688864

Did you notice Friday’s news that the American jobs boom is proving especially beneficial to U.S. females? For some reason media folk seem focused only on two particular job seekers who tend to look for work in Washington, D.C.

Nationwide, conditions are highly encouraging. “Women have been driving this year’s improvements in labor force participation,” notes the Journal’s Lev Borodovsky. “Participation among women aged 25-34 years hit a multi-year high.”

Whether young or old, U.S. women are not just entering the labor market; they are gaining jobs. In the last 12 months, the number of employed U.S. women age 20 years and older has increased by more than 1.6 million, according to the Department of Labor’s household survey.

Labor’s separate establishment survey of employers shows more good news for female job seekers, with women rising as a percentage of the U.S. workforce. At the margin, as America approached the end of year two of the Trump era, it appears the U.S. economy was becoming more hospitable to women relative to men. This doesn’t easily fit into the popular media narrative about our times, so it may soon be lost in a flood of politicized analysis.

Money isn’t everything and not every new job represents a happy story. Some new hires are working by necessity more than by choice. But the overall picture is one of expanding opportunity and the robust job market for women surely exerts a positive impact on many more lives than most politicians will.

Though the latest economic news is particularly good for the gals, the guys also have a lot to celebrate given what can only be considered a blowout month of job creation and rising wages. Outside of government, both sexes seem to be waging a war on the post-2008 new normal.

But of course it’s what happens inside government that fascinates most of the press corps. Therefore many reporters have lately been most concerned about the opportunities available to two particular members of the U.S. labor force who, respectively, attended Yale’s law school and taught at Harvard’s.

Despite their expensive skills, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) are, in a popular media telling, not well liked because of sexism. Annie Linskey and David Weigel recently wrote in the Washington Post:

Just hours after Elizabeth Warren announced her plans to run for president, a question began surfacing about a possible weakness. It wasn’t derived from opposition research into some facet of her life. It had nothing to do with her policy ideas.

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The Gamble of Israel’s ‘New Right’ BY: David Isaac

By on January 7th, 2019

https://freebeacon.com/blog/the-gamble-of-israels-new-right/

“Boom!” read the headline of a supplement in Israeli weekly Makor Rishon, after two leading politicians, Education Minister Naftali Bennett and Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked, announced on December 29 that they were jumping ship from the Jewish Home Party to create the New Right Party. The question Israeli pundits are trying to answer now is whether that boom—or “blast” as most of the press characterizes it—is an explosion or an implosion. Will it strengthen the national camp or will it bring it to its knees?

The ruling Likud Party wasted little time in slamming the New Right as a threat to the entire right. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, “It will break the right into slivers of slivers. Parties won’t make it past the electoral threshold.” Netanyahu referred to the 3.25 percent of the vote a party must win in order to enter the Knesset. Passing that threshold gives a party four seats. Failing to pass means the loss of all the votes that had gone to that party.

Netanyahu counts on those slivers to build his government. In Israel’s parliamentary system, a government must have a majority of at least 61 votes in the 120-seat Knesset. How does Likud fare in the polls? Much better than the others, but still with only 30 seats.

Netanyahu has repeatedly raised the specter of 1992, when a plethora of right-wing parties caused two of them to fail to make it into the Knesset, wasting their votes. The result was a Labor government led by Yitzhak Rabin, which brought about the Oslo Accords, long viewed as a disaster by the right. (It’s a view now held by most of Israel’s electorate, judging from the fact that no party outside of the extreme Meretz wants to be identified with it.)

Likud fears are more than mere scare-mongering. Polls place two to three right-wing parties perilously close to the abyss, and some analysts estimate that even the loss of one right-wing party is enough to hand the reins of government to a center-left coalition.

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HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

New ISIS Threat Tells Jihadists to Bomb Electrical Infrastructure By Bridget Johnson

By on January 7th, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/new-isis-threat-tells-jihadists-to-bomb-electrical-infrastructure/

A new online threat from ISIS supporters encourages jihadists to target critical infrastructure, with the suggestion of bombing power stations.

The image shows a faceless figure in a black hoodie with the Islamic State flag holding a bomb with a lit fuse with transmission towers and lines in the background. Along the power lines is the phrase “Just Terror” — the ISIS slogan for lone jihadist operations — and blood-spattered ground.

The poster directs jihadists to “make a surprise for the Crusaders.”

The infrastructure threat is uncommon in ISIS propaganda, which has focused more on knife, vehicle or gun attacks in crowded areas such as festivals or music venues. Suggested targets have ranged from well-fortified locations, such as the U.S. Capitol or UN Security Council, to soft targets with little symbolic significance.

At the end of last month, another ISIS-allied media group encouraged jihadists to “kill the infidels in ways which no one else ever used” including “electricity” among methods such as snakes, poison gas, poisoned arrows, and wild animals.

A December report from the National Infrastructure Advisory Council, a panel established by President Bush after the 9/11 attacks composed of industry executives along with state and local government officials, warned that “increasing threats — whether severe natural disasters, cyber-physical attacks, electromagnetic events, or some combination — present new challenges for protecting the national power grid and recovering quickly from a catastrophic power outage.”

The report also noted that America’s foes could take advantage of chaos after a natural disaster to attack energy systems. Attacks on critical infrastructure could also be a combination of cyber attack and physical attack, further complicating the response and expanding the damage.

“The United States should respond to this problem in two overarching ways: 1) design a national approach to prepare for, respond to, and recover from catastrophic power outages that provides the federal guidance, resources, and incentives needed to take action across all levels of government and industry and down to communities and individuals; and 2) improve our understanding of how cascading failures across critical infrastructure will affect restoration and survival,” the panel said, requesting the National Security Council join with lead agencies to prepare a report on steps being taken to address the threat. CONTINUE AT SITE

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

President Trump Calls for America to Recruit ‘the Smartest People in the World’ By David P. Goldman

By on January 7th, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/spengler/president-trump-calls-for-america-to-recruit-the-smartest-people-in-the-world/

Not a word appeared in the mainstream media about President Trump’s call for more legal immigrants to build America’s talent pool. The liberal media is so anxious to portray the president as a jingoist xenophobe that it ignored a key policy statement on immigration. Trump declared in his Jan. 4 press conference on the government shutdown that the U.S. should convince the hundreds of thousands of foreign students who attend our universities to stay here and contribute to the U.S. economy. He’s been listening to U.S. tech companies, who need the talent. And he’s exactly right:

At the same time, [people] can apply to come into our country legally, like so many people have done. And we need people, Major. We have to have people. Because we have all these companies coming in. We need great people. But we want them to come in on a merit basis, and they have to come in on a merit basis. They can’t come in the way they’ve been coming in for years.

I get calls from the great tech companies, and they’re saying we don’t allow people at the top of their class, at the best schools in the country, we don’t allow them to stay in our country. So they end up going back to China and Japan and so many other countries all over the world, and we don’t keep them. They get educated at our finest schools, and then we don’t allow them, through a various set of circumstances, to have any guarantees of staying. So we lose out on great minds. We can’t do that.

We have companies that, if we don’t change that — and we’re working on that, and we discussed that with the Democrats, and I think they agree. We’re working on that. But we don’t want to lose our great companies because we have a ridiculous policy that we won’t accept smart people. So, call it politically correct or not, but we have to let these great, brilliant companies have the smartest people in the world.

Only 7% of U.S. undergraduates major in engineering, compared to a third in China. Russia, with roughly a third of our population, graduates as many engineers. We need more opportunities in STEM for Americans. We should subsidize engineers, mathematicians, and scientists and starve the resentment-studies programs that pollute American universities. To train more engineers and scientists, though, we would have to recruit more teachers from overseas, as Edward Dougherty, distinguished professor of engineering at Texas A&M University, explained in a recent essay in Asia Times. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Marco Rubio Blasts Rashida Tlaib’s Dual Loyalty Suggestion: ‘Typical Anti-Semitic Line’ By Debra Heine

By on January 7th, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/trending/marco-rubio-blasts-rashida-tlaibs-dual-loyality-suggestion-typical-anti-semitic-line/
Freshman Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) is certainly making an impression in her first few days in the House of Representatives. Last week, she distinguished herself by vowing to “impeach the motherf***er,” referring to President Donald Trump at a MoveOn.org event in Washington, D.C. hours after being sworn into office. She also created a stir last week when one of her friends replaced Israel with a Post-It note that says “Palestine” on a map in Tlaib’s congressional office.

Tlaib stepped in it again over the weekend when she suggested in a tweet that several U.S. senators have dual loyalties to both the United States and Israel.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and the American Jewish Committee on Monday pushed back at Tlaib, decrying her statement as “outrageous” and “anti-Semitic.”

Rubio, along with Senator James Risch (R-Idaho), last week reintroduced pro-Israel legislation that did not get passed in the last Congress. The Strengthening America’s Security in the Middle East Act of 2019 combines several Middle East-related items into a single bill, including Syria withdrawal and financial aid to Israel.

One section of the bill, called Combating BDS Act of 2019, would protect states that penalize Israel boycotters. According to Rubio, Democrat leaders are trying to avoid a vote on his bill because it would expose how many Democrat BDS supporters are now in the Senate.

The bill empowers “state and local governments in the United States to counter the anti-Israel boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement’s discriminatory economic warfare against the Jewish state,” a press release on Senator Rubio’s website says.

“They forgot what country they represent,” Tlaib, a Palestinian American, wrote on Twitter Sunday. “This is the U.S. where boycotting is a right & part of our historical fight for freedom & equality.” CONTINUE AT SITE

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FOREIGN POLICY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Trade Talks with China Begin amid Naval Spat By Mairead McArdle

By on January 7th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/china-trade-talks-begin-amid-naval-spat/

China urged the U.S. on Monday to provide a good atmosphere for trade talks, even as it made “stern complaints” about an American warship sighted in what it claims are Chinese waters.

The U.S.S. McCampbell, a guided-missile destroyer, ventured near the disputed Paracel Islands in the South China Sea on a “freedom of navigation” mission, intended to “challenge excessive maritime claims,” the Pacific Fleet said.

The spat comes just as representatives from China and the U.S. meet for trade negotiations Monday and Tuesday, addressing U.S. allegations that China steals technology information.

“The two sides both have responsibility to create necessary and good atmosphere to this end,” Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang said. “As for whether this move has any impact to the ongoing China-U.S. trade consultations . . . to properly resolve existing issues of all kinds between China and the U.S. is good for the two countries and the world.”

Last year, President Trump imposed duties as large as 25 percent on $250 billion worth of Chinese goods, leading China to respond by levying duties on $110 billion in U.S. goods. On December 1, the two economies agreed tentatively not to raise tariffs further.

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