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Ruth King

Does ‘Make X Great Again’ Ever Happen in History? By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2018/12/02/does-make-x-great-again

The short answer: Sometimes.

Here’s one example. By 527 A.D., the Eastern Roman Empire at Constantinople seemed fated to collapse like the West had a near century prior. The Persian Sassanids were gobbling up Byzantine lands in the east. Almost all of old Rome west of Greece had already been lost.

A growing and unsustainable administrative state exercised near control of Constantinople. Christianity was splintering into irrelevant factionalism. The law was a selective mess.

Justinian was certainly an unlikely emperor: an outsider of peasant stock from the northern frontier, an Eastern Latin rather than Greek speaker (and likely the last native Latin-speaking emperor), who would marry an infamous but shrewd courtesan, Theodora.

Yet in some 38 years of sometimes brutal rule, Justinian through the leadership of his brilliant generals, Belisarius and Narses, stabilized the eastern borders. He reclaimed for eastern Rome North Africa, Sicily, much of Italy, and some of Spain, often through small, well-organized armies and prudent alliances. He reformed the bureaucracy, systematized Roman law (Codex Justinianus), and built the magnificent Christian cathedral of Hagia Sophia—the largest church in the world for a thousand years.

Justinian might have done even far more had not a devastating three-year epidemic of bubonic plague spiked and wiped out a quarter of the empire’s population. The millions of losses created a permanent manpower shortage that left the Byzantines vulnerable to relentless Gothic enemies in Western Europe—and ultimately, a century and a half later, the conquests of new Islamic armies in the Middle East and North Africa.

The outsider Justinian’s agendas were those of many past reformers and restorers: apply the law equally and rationally, control government finances, restore the value of the currency, unite and inspire the population with iconic buildings and new infrastructure, reform and enhance religious practice, and offer predictable and steady rule.

Pro-Israel Students Stare Down Hamas-backed SJP at UCLA “From the moment the SJP conference began, they were not given a moment’s quiet.” Matthew Vadum

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272113/pro-israel-students-stare-down-hamas-backed-sjp-matthew-vadum

More than 200 pro-Israel activists picketed what Haaretz described as the “largest ever pro-Palestinian student conference held at UCLA,” letting members of the Hamas-backed anti-Semitic hate group Students for Justice in Palestine know that their radicalism and violence against Jews and Israel supporters will no longer go unchallenged on campus.

Groups supporting Israel gave the campus Left a taste of its own medicine. Turn-about is, after all, fair play.

Students Supporting Israel (SSI), Reservists on Duty (RoD), and other pro-Israel groups came together in Los Angeles to protest a recent weekend conference. Literature documenting the role of Students for Justice in Palestine as a front for the terrorist organization Hamas was provided by the David Horowitz Freedom Center (DHFC). The DHFC literature documented the fact that the Hamas-funded, anti-Israel BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement on campus is a terrorist operation, created by Hamas, funded by Hamas and advancing Hamas’ chief political operation: the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions movement.

Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) claimed 500 people registered for the conference, which was titled, “Radical Hope: Resistance in the Face of Adversity.” When it announced the conference, the group bragged about disrupting pro-Israel events, stating, “Other instances of our perseverance include disruptions of pro-war, Zionist, and racist guest speakers.” The anti-Semitic SJP’s agenda is demonizing Israel spreading genocidal lies about its creation, and justifying Hamas terrorist attacks on civilian populations.

Amit Deri of Reservists on Duty said his group demonstrated using flags and signs provided by DHFC outside the conference from the Friday it began through Sunday, Nov. 18. RoD is an Israeli nonprofit created by Israeli reserve soldiers who wished to combat the BDS movement and anti-Semitism.

“From the moment the SJP conference began, they were not given a moment’s quiet,” Deri said.

“This is the first time that so many pro-Israeli organizations are collaborating and are able to raise an effective demonstration at the annual conference of SJP at UCLA,” he said. “SJP were afraid to get their heads out of the hall where the demonstration took place.”

“If we will be strong enough on every campus, SJP will not dare to be violent against Jewish students!”

The EU Reich versus Britain By James Lewis

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/12/the_eureich_versus_britain.html

Europe has a neurotic compulsion to repeat the past. This is bad news, because nobody wants to repeat five (count ’em!) East-West wars exploding out of Europe over the last two centuries.

But – the E.U. now has a better idea.

It wants European nations to surrender to the German-French axis without a shot being fired. “Countries must give up their sovereignty and join the one-world government,” German chancellor Angela Merkel remarked generously the other day. The E.U. Times, of all places, remarked that “[n]o, this isn’t something Adolf Hitler said many years ago.”

Everybody in that part of the world knows who runs the E.U.: the Germans, fronted by the French. So when the charming Frau Merkel said that, most of her listeners filled in the rest of the story. But the Brits were not laughing.

Just to keep the historical record straight:

Napoleon beat the German-speaking provinces around 1800, arousing a century of vendetta wars.
Otto von Bismarck used Prussian robo-militarism to invade Paris in 1871.
WWI started as an enormous German-French meat-grinder, finally ended by the United States entering the war.
In the 1920s and ’30s, Hitler arose in revenge for WWI, leading to thirteen years of industrialized massacres of innocent human beings and ending with catastrophic Axis aggression in World War II, including the Japanese Rape of Nanking and all the rest.
But…Europe’s world wars did not end in 1946. They just moved to the Soviet Empire, which included East Germany. Korea and Vietnam were proxies for the U.S.-Soviet struggle.

And now we have Reich Number Six, called the “European Union.” But the only “union” in the E.U. is the unelected ruling caste, which rules with an iron hand, while the left-out voters are getting sick and tired of the scam.

This may be why Emmanuel Macron, the German vassal in Paris, just called for an E.U. army – to use agains

Time to Stop Equating each Immigration Situation with the Holocaust By Rabbi Aryeh Spero

https://thefederalist.com/2018/11/30/no-preventing-job-seekers-illegal-entry-not-comparable-holocaust/

During the past two years when liberal groups disagreed with President Trump on a particular immigration situation, they tried justifying their position by comparing the plight of the refugee or immigrant to that of victims of the Holocaust. Just yesterday, Representative-elect from the Bronx, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez equated the plight of the Caravan people to that of the Jews in the 1940s trying to escape the Holocaust and attempting to sail to America. It was similarly brought up two years ago when tens of thousands of Muslims leaving Syria toward the United States were met by a President who wanted to place a ceiling on how many could enter and who rightfully demanded they be vetted comprehensively, as opposed to what had previously been rather perfunctory and easy questioning.

And, of course, a few months ago when children were placed in clean and pleasant housing away from their parents during their parents’ appearances before immigration judges, we heard the refrain about Concentration Camp guards separating parents from children. However, none of the Jewish children forcibly seized from their mother and father at Auschwitz saw their parents again. They were murdered in the gas chambers. Well, at least that’s what I heard in the early 1950s back in Cleveland from the mouths of mothers who survived the War. In contrast, the immigrant children from Mexico last year were quickly reunited with their parents, and during their away-time found nurses and doctors, playmates and games, gym, wholesome food and clean bedding, and probably more personal medical care than ever before. Comparisons to the Holocaust are fundamentally wrong and a dishonor to the six million Jews who were rounded up from their homes and put on trains to be tortured and murdered.

Even for those on the Left who have made it their mission to destroy President Trump, it seems vile to do it on the backs of the Six Million. The question needs to be asked: Who has brainwashed and poisoned the minds of so many against their fellow Americans, the President, Republicans, as well as employees of ICE? How is it that so many Americans on the Left believe their own countrymen would act like guards at Concentration Camps? How can so many (including Jews on the radical Left) knowingly lie and demean the Holocaust-martyred just to score political points against President Trump? Well, political leftism, like communism, often takes hold of its adherents in a fervor that invariably ignores reality, propriety, and even decency.

Why Iran Funds Palestinian Terrorists by Bassam Tawil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13361/iran-funding-palestinian-terrorists

The message that Iran is sending to Palestinian families is: “If you want money and a good life, send your children to die on the border with Israel.” This is a message that is likely to reverberate far and wide among Arabs, well beyond the Palestinians.

The declared goal of the Iranian-sponsored World Forum for Proximity of Islamic Schools of Thought is to forge unity between Muslims. For the Iranians and their proxies, Islamic unity is a prerequisite to advancing the ultimate goal of removing the “cancerous tumor” (Israel) from the face of the earth. Iran has been doing its utmost to achieve this goal.

Were it not for Iranian support, the Lebanese Shiite terrorist organization, Hezbollah, would not be aiming tens of thousands of rockets and missiles at Israel. Were it not for Iranian military and financial backing, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other terrorist groups would not have been able to fire more than 500 projectiles at Israel in 24 hours, as they did last month.

To set the record straight: Iran cares nothing for the Palestinians; Iran seeks to obliterate Israel, and if it could, obliterate the US, as its expansion into South America suggests.

It seems that some mullahs in Iran cannot wait for Khamenei’s prediction of Israel’s destruction in 2040. The Iranian money promised to the families is meant to encourage other all Arabs and Muslims to send their children to launch rocket attacks on Israel and throw stones and firebombs at Israeli soldiers.

In keeping with its long-standing policy of funding anyone who seeks to destroy Israel or kill Jews, Iran has decided to pay stipends to the families of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip who were killed during attacks on Israel. The decision refers to the Palestinians who were killed while attacking Israeli soldiers during the weekly Hamas-sponsored riots along the Gaza-Israel border; they began in March 2018 under the banner of the “March of Return.”

France’s President Macron Effortlessly Destroys the Brexit Deal But it could be saved if May were less stubborn by Malcolm Lowe

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13369/france-macron-brexit

We are most grateful to French President Emmanuel Macron for revealing that the problem of the “backstop” is far larger than anyone had realized. It was seen as merely a problem of good faith of the EU Commission toward the UK. Now we see that it is also a problem of good faith of all the 27 remaining members of the EU. The problem is 28 times larger than anyone had noticed.

The flaw in Article 20 of the “backstop” is that it permits the customs union dictated by the Protocol to continue forever unless both parties agreed to end it. What is needed is the reverse: a date on which the application of the Protocol ends unless both parties agree to continue it. Indeed, the length of the transition period starting on March 29, 2019 is defined in the reverse manner in the Withdrawal Agreement. So why did the UK’s negotiators fail to demand something of the kind for Article 20?

Although UK Prime Minister Theresa May’s Conservative critics do have the power to create a majority against her deal by voting with the opposition, there is a much greater majority in the Commons for preventing a no-deal exit. That is, there are other Conservatives who will themselves join the opposition in feverishly averting no-deal, and with good reason. Apart from May’s Conservative critics, no-deal is unthinkable.

On November 25, 2018, a summit meeting of the 27 remaining countries of the European Union approved the Brexit deal agreed with the UK’s Theresa May. At the end of the summit, President Macron gave a press conference in which he announced how he would abuse the deal to blackmail the UK, thereby making approval of the deal in the UK Parliament unthinkable. This deal must be the shortest-lived treaty in history.

From the moment that Theresa May first presented the proposed Brexit deal to her cabinet on November 14 and to the House of Commons the next day, opposition to it has steadily risen among the MPs of her own Conservative Party. Also the Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland (DUP), the coalition partner that gives her a small majority in the Commons, is unanimously opposed. May has earned respect for the resolution with which she promotes the deal amid a cacophony of opposed voices that offer no coherent alternative, but also amazement at the stubbornness with which she rejects any change to the deal, thereby ensuring its failure.

Spain reels as far-Right Vox party storms into Andalucian parliament

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/12/02/spain-reels-far-right-vox-party-storms-andalucian-parliament/

The ultra-conservative and anti-immigration Vox has stormed into the Andalucian assembly in Sunday’s regional election, marking the first time a far-Right party has achieved parliamentary representation on any level in Spain’s recent history as a democracy.

The party that favours the end of autonomy in Catalonia and the expulsion of all immigrants who entered Spain illegally won 12 out of 109 seats in Andalucia’s parliament with 11 per cent of the vote.

“Vox was the party that led the political debate,” said the party’s secretary general, Javier Ortega.

“We put on the table the need to control our borders and end illegal immigration, end abusive levels of taxation and the need to put an end to ideological laws relating to gender.”

Despite running out narrow winner in the region it has ruled continuously for 36 years, the PSOE Socialist party of Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez suffered a hugely disappointing result in Andalucia. The party’s all-time low of 28 per cent and 33 seats mean it will not be able to govern with a majority, even with the support of the Left-wing coalition Adelante Andalucia, which includes Podemos.

Spain’s main conservative opposition force, the Popular Party (PP), also lost ground, sliding six percentage points to just under 21 per cent, while the liberal Ciudadanos was the night’s only winner among the established parties, doubling its share to 18 per cent.

Ahead of European and possibly a general election in 2019, Spain’s political scene appears more fractured than ever after the dramatic emergence of Vox on the extreme right of the spectrum.

Despite having seen its number of seats in the Andalucian parliament shorn from 33 to 26, the PP appeared to welcome the arrival of Vox on the political scene.

For the PP’s candidate for the presidency of the region, Juan Manuel Moreno, it was a “historic day” on which “Andalucia had chosen change”, saying he wants to lead a right-of-centre coalition including Vox and Ciudadanos.

Vandals, or Militants? Observers of the Paris unrest should hope that it’s more of the former and less of the latter. Guy Sorman

https://www.city-journal.org/paris-riots

On July 14, 1789, in Paris, the price of bread had reached its highest point in a century. Parisians held the king responsible, which was in part justified. The royal administration’s meddlesome regulation had made grain commerce among the provinces difficult, leading to local famines. The result: a riot in the capital, and the taking of the Bastille—a mostly empty prison but a hated symbol of the absolute monarchy.

What then followed was a revolution—the French Revolution—taken over by an elite fired by the mad ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: this generation of twentysomething men would invent the first modern dictatorship and shed much French blood before taking on Europe, all in the name of the Republic and according to a Virtue that it claimed to embody. Robespierre, one of the most wild-eyed of the revolutionaries, designated himself the Republic’s messiah, charged with the “purification” of the old world. This history is well known, but it is generally reconstituted in a positive light, baptized with the ideology of “the common good” or “the general will.”

One can’t help but recall this French taste for rebellion, idealized as progressive and ultimately positive, as rioters are currently setting fire to the Champs-Élysées. Might this symbol of consumer society be the equivalent, for contemporary protesters, of the Bastille two centuries ago?

The origin of the present protest is not the price of bread but an increase in gasoline taxes. Yet, with gasoline now occupying a central place in our way of life as bread once did, there is at least some link between the two eruptions. And Louis XVI was guilty by inattention, just as Emmanuel Macron the First, France’s president, seems strangely indifferent to public sentiment. To enact policies that raise gasoline prices—already the highest in Europe—on the eve of the year-end holidays and without offering a justification, was a major political error.

Macron’s mistake was made worse by the justification given after the uprising: the government explained to skeptical citizens that the new tax was actually an ecological measure, and therefore justified, since the goal was not to add to the state’s coffers but to help fight climate change. Obviously no one believes this excuse, including the government that issued it, or so we must hope.

ASSISTED SUICIDE OF EUROPE :EDWARD CLINE

https://edwardcline.blogspot.com/2018/12/assisted-suicide-of-europe.html

I devoted too little space in my last column, “The Blob and Fake News,”, to the master plan of the UN for world governance, “The “Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration,” which Canada will sign on to. Or, rather, the boy Wonder, JustinTrudeau, will sign on to it.

Trudeau, premier of Canada, opined that national borders are an anachronism and obsolete, and should be abolished. In “The Blob,” I wrote:

According to Gatestone, in 2015, he said,

“There is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada. There are shared values –openness, respect, compassion, willingness to work hard, to be there for each other, to search for equality and justice. Those qualities are what make us the first postnational state.”

Two years later, Salim Mansur at Gatestone reported,

The Canadian government’s recent announcement that it will be providing more than CDN $600 million (USD $455 million) over the next five years to bail out the country’s financially strapped media outlets — as part of the fall fiscal update about the federal budget ahead of the 2019 federal election — is not as innocent as it may seem.

In response to the announcement, the heads of Canada’s media organizations promptly popped open the proverbial champagne and raised their glasses to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Unifor, a national union that represents Canadian journalists, was even more jubilant. It felt vindicated that its slogan of “Resistance” — which it touts as Conservative Party opposition leader Andrew Scheer’s “worst nightmare” — had so swiftly resulted in opening the government’s wallet, and handing out taxpayers’ money, to an industry that should actually be fighting to remain steadfastly independent of any form of government backing.

In effect, Canadian “journalists,” and journalists everywhere, will become the paid shills of the government and its policies of not saying critical things about Islam or Muslims. Furthermore, rolls of duct tape will be readied to silence any such criticism or to quash it before it even thought of:

The Global Compact requires the media outlets of member-states to adhere to the objectives and refrain from any critical discussions of these objectives that would be deemed as not “ethical” and against UN norms or standards consistent with the ideology of globalism.

Iran Tests Ballistic Missile in Violation of UN Resolution By Rick Moran

https://pjmedia.com/trending/iran-tests-ballistic-missile-in-violation-of-un-resolution/

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that Iran had test-fired a medium range ballistic missile capable of carrying several warheads.

The test violated a Security Council resolution that calls on Iran not to pursue “any activity related to ballistic missiles designed to be capable of delivering nuclear weapons, including launches using such ballistic missile technology.”

The missile has the ability to hit parts of Europe and any location in the Middle East, the secretary said.

NBC News:

“We condemn these activities,” Pompeo said, “and call upon Iran to cease immediately all activities relating to ballistic missiles designed to be capable of delivering nuclear weapons.”

On Sunday, a senior Iranian official said the country’s missile program was not in breach of U.N. resolutions.

“Iran’s missile program is defensive in nature… There is no Security Council resolution prohibiting the missile program and missile tests by Iran,” state news agency IRNA quoted Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahram Qasemi as saying.

Qasemi did not confirm or deny that Iran had carried out a new missile test.

Iran has repeatedly said its missile program is purely defensive and denied its missiles are capable of being tipped with nuclear warheads.

The resolution makes no distinction between an “offensive” weapon and a “defensive” weapon. The idea that a nuclear-tipped missile would be “defensive” in nature is absurd, but there are Iranian apologists in the U.S. who back Tehran up.

The language of the U.N. Security Council Resolution “calls on” rather than “forbids” Iran from testing its missiles, according to Trita Parsi, the president of the National Iranian American Council. The very U.N. resolution that Pompeo cited is also the very nuclear deal the Trump administration withdrew from earlier this year, Parsi added.

“We had a functioning deal and you may not have agreed with all the contents of it but it actually contained this conflict,” he said. “Trump came in, ripped it up and now we are seeing more missile tests, we’re seeing escalation and we are seeing a drift towards war.”

Actually, that was one of the biggest deficiencies in the nuclear deal — that it didn’t cover Iran’s ballistic missile program. Parsi, a pro-regime hustler in Washington, is trying to distract from Iran’s violation by shifting the blame to Trump. It doesn’t pass the smell test. CONTINUE AT SITE