Displaying the most recent of 90443 posts written by

Ruth King

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Palestinians No One Talks About by Bassam Tawil

By on November 27th, 2018

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13355/palestinian-victims

The 3,903 Palestinians killed in Syria in the past seven years are of no interest to the Western correspondents and their editors.

The Western media’s obsession with Israel has created the impression that the only Palestinians living on this planet are those who are residing in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. This impression does injustice to the Palestinians who are facing horrendous conditions, torture, and death in the Arab countries, especially Syria.

Who cares about the suffering of these Palestinians? No one. Every week, scores of foreign journalists travel to the Israel-Gaza border to report on clashes between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian rioters. Have any of these journalists thought of travelling to Syria or Lebanon to report about the atrocities that are being committed against the Palestinians there? Of course not. Why should they do so when the story lacks an anti-Israel angle?

The number of Palestinians killed in Syria will soon reach 4,000. Perhaps then, with that gruesome milestone reached, will Western correspondents in the Middle East wake up to the enormity of the crimes that are really being perpetrated against Palestinians?

Here’s some “good” news: In October, only five Palestinians living in Syria were pronounced dead. The London-based Action Group for Palestinians of Syria reports that in October 2017, 12 Palestinians were killed due to war-related incidents in that country. “The list of victims who died in October 2018 includes four Palestinians who were pronounced dead in Teloul Al-Safa, in Al-Sweida desert, south of Syria, and one Palestinian in Damascus,” the group said.

According to the human rights watchdog that monitors the situation of Palestinians in Syria, the number of Palestinians killed in Syria since the beginning of the civil war there in 2011 now stands at 3,903. Another 1,712 Palestinians in that country have been arrested by the Syrian authorities, and 316 are listed as missing.

The latest victim was identified as Ahmed Abdullah Balbisi who, according to the human rights group, died of torture in a Syrian prison eight years after his incarceration. The group said that Balbisi was arrested then for participating in peaceful demonstrations organized by the Syrian opposition. Balbisi is the latest victim added to the 3,903 Palestinians killed in Syria during the past seven years. His death was reported by the group on November 22.

A day earlier, the human rights group reported that two other Palestinians, Mohammed Khalil al-Kurdi and Wael Abu Hamdeh, died due to lack of proper medical treatment. On November 19, reports surfaced that a third, Mohammed Ahmed Farhat, was killed during an exchange of gunfire between the Syrian army and the Islamic State (ISIS) terrorist group.

Continue reading →
ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

The Latest Manipulative National Climate Assessment Report Outlandish predictions aim to steer public policy changes. Joseph Klein

By on November 27th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272052/latest-manipulative-national-climate-assessment-joseph-klein

Last Friday, the Trump administration released the latest volume of the congressionally mandated National Climate Assessment, which was prepared by scientists from 13 government agencies with contributions from outside scientists. The development of this report was well underway during the Obama administration. Nevertheless, the Trump White House did not change the report’s content. When President Trump was asked on Monday whether he had read the report, he replied, “I’ve seen it, I’ve read some of it, and it’s fine.” He remains skeptical, however, regarding the report’s dire predictions of the extent to which climate change will have a supposedly devastating impact on the U.S. economy by the end of this century. “I don’t believe it,” he said, also noting that China and other countries were largely responsible for the problem, not the United States. The president has every reason to be skeptical of the report’s doomsday forecasts for the U.S. economy.

“Climate change is transforming where and how we live and presents growing challenges to human health and quality of life, the economy, and the natural systems that support us,” the report’s authors wrote. At the same time, the authors admitted the difficulties in making predictions as to the “cascading impacts” climate change may have on “the natural, built, and social systems we rely on individually and through their connections to one another.” The authors also acknowledged that “it is hard to quantify and predict all the ways in which climate-related stressors might lead to severe or widespread consequences for natural, built, and social systems.” Nevertheless, after admitting the difficulty of making such predictions, the report’s authors did just that in very specific terms. No wonder President Trump has his doubts.

Indeed, the authors of the just released National Climate Assessment report projected what they believe is likely to happen in the United States by the middle and the end of this century if drastic measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are not taken in time. The authors purported to quantify the devastating effects in the United States on health, the environment, agriculture, trade, infrastructure, and the economy if there is continued growth in greenhouse gas emissions at the current rate. The authors predicted between 3,900 and 9300 more deaths per year by the end of the century. They broke down their end-of-century forecast by type of climate change-related harm to the economy. There will be $141 billion from heat-related deaths, $118 billion from sea level rise and $32 billion from infrastructure damage, they predicted. Under one of their scenarios, “almost two billion labor hours are projected to be lost annually by 2090 from the impacts of temperature extremes, costing an estimated $160 billion in lost wages.” All told, according to the latest National Climate Consensus report’s authors, “annual losses in some economic sectors are projected to reach hundreds of billions of dollars by the end of the century—more than the current gross domestic product (GDP) of many U.S. states.”

Continue reading →
ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Trump’s critics are wrong. By Rabbi Aryeh Spero

By on November 27th, 2018

https://spectator.org/american-nationalism-is-a-good-thing/

Over the last month, President Trump has been assailed by shrieking critics within the U.S. and overseas by French President Macron regarding Mr. Trump’s enthusiastic endorsement of the concept of American Nationalism. Many NeverTrumpers and neocons are charging that nationalism in America equals white supremacy, a forerunner to Nazism. Nothing is further from the truth. Their hysterical assertion is extremely misguided or a deliberate attempt to once again besmirch Mr. Trump, in the same way as when they blamed him for anti-Semitism and the massacre at a Pittsburgh synagogue despite the fact that the shooter was anti-Trump and the President has been the most pro-Israel and genuinely Jewish-friendly president we have ever witnessed.

Loving America is a good thing inasmuch as America is a good country. As with any institution, including marriage and family, nothing is perfect; but America was founded on highly moral and workable principles and has consistently provided more fair pay, opportunity, and decency than any country in the history of the world. America is the first choice for those around the world seeking a haven or place to find work and dignity, and deserves to be loved. It is a badge of honor to identify with America as a nation.

Loving this nation and its people is highly proper and commendable inasmuch as the American people themselves are a good people. For over a half century I have traveled across America and, precisely because of my yarmulke, I have been greeted with enthusiasm and warmth by strangers due to their sense of spiritual and civic kinship with a member of the Jewish faith, whose biblical Testament had so much to do with the founding of this country and whose ancestral nation of Israel is so deeply ingrained within their outlook. Contrary to what liberal Northeasterners often accuse, I have been treated with utmost respect and sincere friendship by those in the Deep South. News Flash to NeverTrumpers and neocons: America is not Nazi Germany. Being a super-patriot or putting America first, is what we should do.

Continue reading →
ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Latest Global Warming Lies from US Global Change Research Program By Norman Rogers

By on November 27th, 2018

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/11/latest_global_warming_lies_from_us_global_change_research_program.html

The U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) has released its latest doomsday climate report. This organization, part of the federal government, has been in business for a long time, releasing nonsense reports concerning the supposed global warming threat. I attended meetings of the federal advisory committee associated with the program in 2011 and wrote an article about that particular circus. Federal advisory committees are supposed to be committees of experts with a diversity of viewpoints. The committee in 2011 consisted of supposed experts with only one point of view, that we are threatened by doomsday global warming.

The USGCRP suffers from a lack of imagination. Its reports imitate the style and approach of the United Nations International Panel On Climate Change (IPCC). The USGCRP uses the IPCC as a trusted source. The problem is that the IPCC is not to be trusted. One idea broached at the 2011 meeting is present in the 2018 report. In 2011 the activists wrestled with the problem that nobody was paying much attention to their reports. They decided that there should be customized reports for different parts of the U.S. The idea was that people would be more concerned if there were specific doomsday predictions for their neighborhood. The country was divided into regions as shown in the map below. Doomsday forecasts for the regions are taken from climate models, sometimes supplemented by a procedure known as downscaling.

Continue reading →
ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Shattering the Obama Myth: A Wolf in Presidential Clothing by Linda Goudsmit

By on November 27th, 2018

http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/21815/shattering-the-obama-myth-a-wolf-in-presidential
http://goudsmit.pundicity.com
http://lindagoudsmit.com

The Fabian Society, a British think tank founded in London in 1884, is named after the Roman general Quintus Fabius Maximus whose battle strategy was one of harassment and attrition rather than violent military battles against the Carthaginian army under general Hannibal.

Fabius had much in common with the great Chinese warrior and strategist Sun Tzu who wrote the extraordinary military treatise The Art of War in the 5th century BC. According to Sun Tzu, “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting. . . the greatest victory is that which requires no battle.”

Sun Tzu’s foundational premise was, “All warfare is based on deception.” His advice, “Engage people in what they expect; it is what they are able to discern and confirms their projections. It settles them into predictable patterns of response, occupying their minds while you wait for the extraordinary moment – that which they cannot anticipate.”
In 2008 Jerry Bower wrote a brilliant article appearing in Forbes titled, “Barack Obama, Fabian Socialist.”

Raised by a Fabian socialist, Bower defines the ideology, “Fabians believed in gradual nationalization of the economy through manipulation of the democratic process. Breaking away from the violent revolutionary socialists of their day, they thought that the only real way to effect ‘fundamental change’ and ‘social justice’ was through a mass movement of the working classes presided over by intellectual and cultural elites.”

Fabian socialism is Obama’s world. Bower continues, “He’s [Obama] telling the truth when he says that he doesn’t agree with Bill Ayers’ violent bombing tactics, but it’s a tactical disagreement. Why use dynamite when mass media and community organizing work so much better? Who needs Molotov cocktails when you’ve got Saul Alinsky?”

Barack Obama was sincere when he promised to fundamentally transform America. What most Americans did not understand in 2008 was that Obama was promising to bring evolutionary socialism rather than revolutionary socialism to America – the soft sell – revolution without bullets. Obama disguised the radical creed of Fabian socialism in the soft sell of a gifted con man. This is how it works.

Continue reading →
IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Storming the Southern Border Violent migrants will turn Americans against generous asylum policy.

By on November 27th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/storming-the-southern-border-1543277802

Migrants on Sunday stormed the U.S. border near San Diego, and from the media coverage you’d think the culprits were the Border Patrol agents who used tear gas to disperse the mob and defend themselves. But the officers were right to repel the crowds, and the tragedy is that such lawlessness will undermine support for legal asylum in the U.S.

Hundreds of migrants overwhelmed Mexican law enforcement and rushed north, and some stormed the car lanes at San Ysidro, the Western Hemisphere’s biggest land-border crossing. Others surged through gaps in the nearby border fence.

The United States can’t tolerate migrants who rush the border or assault officers with rocks. Members of the same caravan defied officers last month to push through the Honduras-Guatemala border and later the Guatemala-Mexico border. U.S. Customs and Border Protection spent weeks preparing for a similar rush, and to its credit no one sustained serious injury on Sunday.

President Trump responded with typical overkill, threatening on Twitter Monday to “close the Border permanently if need be.” That may have been an attempt to get Mexico’s attention, but closing the border would hurt the U.S. too. More than 100,000 people cross north legally each day at San Ysidro, and Customs and Border Protection estimates that 33 such travelers create one American job.

By Monday morning Mexican authorities had already deported around 100 migrants over Sunday’s fracas and said they’ll do the same to others involved. Mexican immigration officials added that, far from helping Central American migrants, such acts “undermine the legal migration framework and could result in a serious incident at the border line.”

That’s also a message for U.S. immigration activists who too often sound as if migration anywhere is a natural right. Sunday’s real victims are Central Americans who have respected U.S. law even as they flee genuine persecution, and who are waiting in Tijuana to seek asylum legally at the U.S. port of entry.

Violence and lawlessness erode public support for a generous asylum policy. Germany is the cautionary tale. Even Hillary Clinton recently acknowledged that Chancellor Angela Merkel erred by admitting a million Middle Eastern migrants in 2015. The result has been a political backlash that has abetted the far right and turned many Europeans against non-passport transfers within Europe.

Mr. Trump is also being vilified for seeking to keep asylum seekers inside Mexico as they wait to have their requests reviewed by U.S. agents. But 69 of the migrants who rushed the border Sunday made it to U.S. soil. They were detained and will be prosecuted, but the Immigration and Nationality Act allows them to apply for asylum now, despite their lawlessness.

Continue reading →
FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Trump’s Saudi Gamble By:Srdja Trifkovic

By on November 26th, 2018

https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/trumps-saudi-gamble

“America First! The world is a very dangerous place!” President Donald J. Trump’s opening of his statement on “Standing with Saudi Arabia” (November 20) was eccentric; the ensuing 600-odd words—indubitably his own—appeared to give Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (“MbS”) an unqualified and outrageous carte blanche, seven weeks after Jamal Khashoggi’s murder. There may be more than meets the eye, however.

A disclaimer first. With my decades long, sometimes passionate, amply documented record of loathing all things Saudi, I do not rejoice at what looks like the President telling a nasty man in charge of a nasty country that he is free to go on acting like a murderous thug that he is. What I sense, however, is that Trump-the-Transactionalist senses an opportunity to grab and hold MbS by his short and curlies, while telling an incredulous world that the Prince is still a good boy intent on reforms like women driving, Saudi Vision 2030, and all that.

The opening of Trump’s statement was replete with visceral Iranophobia:

“The country of Iran . . . is responsible for a bloody proxy war against Saudi Arabia in Yemen, trying to destabilize Iraq’s fragile attempt at democracy, supporting the terror group Hezbollah in Lebanon, propping up dictator Bashar Assad in Syria (who has killed millions of his own citizens), and much more . . . The Iranians have killed many Americans and other innocent people throughout the Middle East. Iran states openly, and with great force, ‘Death to America!’ and ‘Death to Israel!’ Iran is considered the world’s leading sponsor of terror.”

Continue reading →
BOOKS Comments turned off

Robert Conquest and the Human Spirit under Communism-Robert Service

By on November 26th, 2018

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2018/11/robert-conquest-human-spirit-c
COMMUNISM AND THE COLD WAR-ON ROBERT CONQUEST- THE BEST HISTORIAN ON THE SUBJECT RSK

Robert Conquest (left) was an extraordinary man in the seamless way he combined his literary with his historical endeavours. He was also a notable public figure in British, European and Western life. I first heard a poem by Robert Conquest when I was thirteen years old and an English master at my school read out the “Excerpt of a Report to the Galactic Council”. So I knew him as a poet many years before I had any idea about the astonishing contribution he made to the analysis of Soviet totalitarianism.

The book that made a worldwide impact for him was The Great Terror, published in 1968. We all now use the term “the Great Terror”. Robert Conquest invented it. It was used only privately in Russia before communism started to collapse. Now it is used generally. Millions of people were killed in 1937 and 1938. Millions of people were also killed, starved or otherwise abused both before and after, but especially in that two-year period of the Great Terror. The euphemism that was applied to it was the period of the cult of the individual. Robert Conquest tore down the veil of preposterous euphemism and called things by their names. His poetry, for all its wonderful refinement, is similar in its determination to use plain words when plain words will do. The basic Conquest interpretation of totalitarianism is one with which I overwhelmingly agree.

That fine book, The Great Terror, was welcomed by people who accepted a fundamental set of ideas. This was that the USSR had invented a one-party, one-ideology terror-based state that poured people into its Gulag labour camps; that it systematically built up propaganda in favour of militant atheism; that it practised legal nihilism—these ideas were fundamental to Robert Conquest’s oeuvre. The remarkable achievement of the book was that it was welcomed by people along the political spectrum from Trotskyists through the middle of Western political life to the further reaches of the political Right.

Robert Conquest was an open-ended writer. You could read him and find out what you wanted for yourself. But when reading him, you could not overlook his essential message that there was something utterly rotten about how the Soviet model had originated and developed in Russia and how it was spread, not just to one or two countries, but to a third of the world in the six decades after the October revolution.

As a public figure, Robert Conquest insisted that something had to be done about removing the communist blight. The result was that whereas he was welcomed for having written The Great Terror, he was shunned and disliked by many who rejected his appeal for action against communism worldwide. He urged that it simply wasn’t right for Western policy to ignore the fate of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and the countries to the west of those Baltic States. He declared that a much firmer Western policy was morally and practically desirable. And he pursued this objective throughout his literary and political life, a life which made him a controversial figure.

He is no longer controversial, for the basic reason that most of his ideas now form part of the conventional wisdom. They weren’t greeted in this way at the time when he was first expressing them. He had to stand up for them against a blizzard of criticism.

Continue reading →
BOOKS Comments turned off

Eternally ours by Nigel Spivey

By on November 26th, 2018

https://www.newcriterion.com/issues/2018/11/eternally-ours
On the world’s favorite ruin, occasioned by the publication of The Rome We Have Lost, by John Pemble.

Her inhabitants are allowed to grumble. And so they do: about traffic, trash, politicians, potholes—and tourists. But tourists to Rome have reasons to feel cheerful. For one thing, the very impact of tourism is, in relative terms, not too bad. Unlike Venice or Florence, Rome has been absorbing large numbers of visitors, rich and poor, for over a millennium. And since most secular pilgrims nowadays content themselves with just a few sights—the Colosseum, the Trevi Fountain, the Sistine Chapel—many of the city’s absorbing attractions, such as the Palazzo Massimo museum, remain pleasantly unthronged. Further causes for happiness are readily listed according to individual preference. Some find the prevailing palette of civic decor, with its basis of yellow ocher, incomparably soothing to the eye. Others will applaud the proliferation of vendors specializing in artisanal ice cream, or the fact that even in the centro storico one can get a genuine cappuccino at a bar for little more than a euro. Capitals elsewhere vaunt more vertiginous architectural drama. But Wordsworth begs to be corrected. In terms of an urban panorama, surely earth has not anything to show so fair as Rome’s skyline viewed from the terrace of the Capitoline Museums.

And yet there is no place like Rome for inducing melancholia. Psychologically, to those who immerse themselves in it, the city is depressing. Sigmund Freud—who immersed himself repeatedly—noted that effect without diagnosing the cause. It may have perplexed him, since he also recognized the contentment of exploring ancient ruins—a return (of course) to the bourn of a maternal embrace. Rome is always feminine, thus the eternal mother. Yet eternity unsettles us. If only the city would crumble. If only it would obey the laws of vegetable growth and decay, or else have the decency to fossilize like Troy and Nineveh. If only Rome were to match those other great cities of Classical antiquity, Athens and Alexandria, and fashion of its past glory a definable museum. Then we might take some comfort from observing the limits of longevity. But Rome resists those expectations. Mere mortals may strut along the Corso now. Soon enough they must stagger, then collapse. The street has seen it all before, and will see it all again. So this city, unlike any other, tells us that our lives are carved in water.

Continue reading →
ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Please, you lefties, more and louder protests Tim Blair

By on November 26th, 2018

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2018/11/please-screaming-leftoids-louder-protests/
FROM AUSTRALIA—-UPFRONT FROM DOWN UNDER

As a connoisseur of the genre, I’ve established a strict protocol for ranking the quality of left-wing protests. This protocol has evolved through decades of observing leftists marching, shouting, attacking opponents, weeping, waving banners and cheering speeches from people you’d ordinarily find on a housing rental warning list.

Not all leftist protests, you see, are pitched at the same qualitative or creative level. They may all initially appear, before an inexperienced onlooker, to be of equal pointlessness and stupidity. But to an expert, every individual protest fits into a clearly defined and differentiated hierarchy of pointlessness and stupidity.

The next time you witness or read about a left-wing protest, please do not immediately dismiss it as a nonsensical indulgence committed by work-shy whiners whose collective contribution to cultural or civilisational advancement is less than that of a solitary day-old dust mite.

Instead, first consider where that protest qualifies under the rigorous and scientifically-sound Blair Protest Ranking System.

And then dismiss it. Let us begin.

Placed on the very lowest rung are protests that never happen. These are typically proposed during Australian and US federal election campaigns in which a conservative candidate may be victorious, and involve threats to move overseas if the conservative is elected.

Canada and New Zealand are the standard options, but there are others. During the 2016 US election, celebrities Chelsea Handler, Bryan Cranston, Chloe Sevigny, Barry Diller, Lena Dunham, Jon Stewart, Neve Campbell, Samuel L. Jackson, Amy Schumer, Miley Cyrus, Omari Hardwick, Keegan-Michael Key, Eddie Griffin, Ali Wentworth and Cher all vowed to flee if Donald Trump won. Their destinations included Spain, Canada, “another planet” (Jon Stewart), Africa, Italy, Mexico, Sydney and Jupiter (Cher). But then Trump easily defeated Hillary Clinton and not one celeb phoned a removalist. What’s the difference between a Trump-hating millionaire leftist and Donald Trump? The President keeps his promises.

Continue reading →