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Ruth King

How Foreign Terrorist Funders Get U.S. Public Schools To Teach Anti-Jew Propaganda Using teacher training programs to indoctrinate U.S. children in Massachusetts shows just a sliver of the Arab theocracies’ larger influence operations within the American K-12 system. Ilya Feoktistov

http://thefederalist.com/2018/10/03/foreign-terrorist-funders-get-u-s-public-schools-teach-anti-jew-propaganda/

The ruling dynasty of Qatar, the house of Al Thani, invests its massive fossil fuel profits to promote its political and theological agenda around the world. It invests in major Western properties, Hollywood studios like Miramax, global news broadcasters like Al Jazeera, terror organizations like ISIS and Hamas, and, most curiously, in American K-12 education.

The Qataris, according to the Wall Street Journal, are spending millions to influence what American educators teach in their classrooms; and it has recently emerged that one of their investments is behind a roiling controversy in the Boston suburb of Newton.

For more than six years, parents and citizens in Newton have been complaining that their city’s high school world history curriculum is biased against Israel to the point of being anti-Semitic. Newton Superintendent of Schools David Fleishman promised the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of New England last year that he would remove and replace the bigoted curriculum with vetted scholarly materials, but public records requests revealed that biased, anti-Semitic, and false materials continued to be taught.

Since Fleishman’s broken promise, the biased teaching at Newton schools has gotten worse. In August, The Federalist broke the story of how a Newton history teacher, David Bedar, plotted with fellow teachers over email to harass, bully, and “call out” conservative students in the classroom, admitting to acting as a “liberal propagandist” in the classroom. Further public records requests show that Bedar is also quite literally a trained propagandist for Qatar. He is working on behalf of a foreign petro-theocracy to teach anti-Semitic lies to American children.
A Qatari-Funded U.S. Teacher Influence Fund

Last year, Bedar attended a five-day summer teacher training course on how to teach about “the dynamics of the Middle East,” provided by a Massachusetts-based organization called Primary Source. Primary Source claims to work “to advance global and cultural learning in schools,” and has partnerships with more than 50 schools and school districts in New England.

It is funded by four foundations. Two are Massachusetts government agencies, the Mass Cultural Council and Mass Humanities. The third, the Cummings Foundation, is one of the largest private foundations in New England. The fourth is Qatar Foundation International (QFI), an arm of the Qatari ruling family’s Qatar Foundation. Through QFI since 2009, according to the Wall Street Journal, Qatar’s Al Thanis have given more than $30 million directly to American K-12 public schools, and an untold amount to teacher training outfits like Primary Source.

Georgetown Prof: White Male GOP Senators Deserve ‘Miserable Deaths,’ Castration By Katherine Timpf

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/10/georgetown-professor-white-male-gop-senators-deserve-miserable-deaths-castration/

A professor at Georgetown University has stated that the “entitled white” Republican senators who are defending Judge Kavanaugh deserve to die “miserable deaths” and be castrated.

On Saturday, Christine Fair — an associate professor at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service — tweeted:

Look at thus chorus of entitled white men justifying a serial rapist’s arrogated entitlement.

All of them deserve miserable deaths while feminists laugh as they take their last gasps. Bonus: we castrate their corpses and feed them to swine? Yes.

The tweet appears to have since been deleted, but not before it received coverage from outlets including Fox News and The College Fix.

This is far from Fair’s first brush with controversy. As The Fix notes, Fair has previously called German police officers Nazis and harassed a Trump-supporting colleague. What’s more, Fox News reports that she had also referred to the GOP as “filthy swine” and a “f***ing death cult” in a tweetstorm the week prior.

A university spokesperson told Fox News that Fair’s comments are within the bounds of the school’s speech policy.

“Our policy does not prohibit speech based on the person presenting ideas or the content of those ideas, even when those ideas may be difficult, controversial or objectionable,” the spokesperson stated. “While faculty members may exercise freedom of speech, we expect that their classrooms and interaction with students be free of bias and geared toward thoughtful, respectful dialogue.”

Ford’s Lawyers Withhold Information Requested by Senate Pending FBI Interview By Mairead McArdle

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/christine-blasey-ford-lawyers-withhold-information-pending-fbi-interview/

Lawyers for Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who accuses Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of attempting to sexually assault her, are refusing to turn over to Congress certain pieces of evidence she has cited to the Senate until she has been interviewed by the FBI, which is investigating the allegations.

Notes from Ford’s therapy sessions that mention the assault as well as the results of a polygraph test she took will be turned over to the Senate Judiciary Committee only after the FBI interviews her, her attorneys said in a letter to Committee chairman Chuck Grassley.

“Dr. Ford is prepared to provide those documents to the FBI when she is interviewed,” the letter said. “We have not yet heard from the FBI about scheduling an interview with her.”

The California psychology professor says Kavanaugh drunkenly assaulted her at a party when they were both in high school, pinning her to a bed, covering her mouth, and trying to undress her before she managed to escape. She testified to Congress on Thursday about the alleged assault, and Kavanaugh afterwards presented the Committee with an emotional defense, categorically denying all accusations against him.

Grassley requested the documents Tuesday evening in a letter to Ford’s attorneys.

A sworn statement from an ex boyfriend of Ford’s suggested that she may have perjured herself and raised “specific concerns about the reliability of her polygraph examination results,” the Iowa Republican warned. “The Senate therefore needs this information,” he wrote.rassley said Wednesday that a cloture vote on Kavanaugh’s nomination could come as soon as Friday.

Democrats’ Complaints about the FBI Investigation Are Absurd By Andrew C. McCarthy

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/10/democrats-complain-brett-kavanaugh-fbi-investigation/

It’s unnecessary to begin with, and is not a criminal probe.

The Delay, Delay, Delay strategy to stop Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court is taking the predictable course. Once they got Republicans to agree to the one-week delay, Democrats immediately started complaining that the time limit was arbitrary — that the FBI should have whatever time is necessary “to get the job done.”

Therein lies the issue, which Democrats have obfuscated from the start. “The job” is not the FBI’s job, it is the Senate’s; and the job is not to conduct a criminal investigation, it is to develop enough information that the Senate can responsibly exercise its constitutional advice-and-consent duty.

Thus understood, “the job” is already done. The Senate has more information about this nominee than it has had about any judicial nominee in history. It has vetted him before, approving his nomination to the prestigious D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. In the ensuing dozen years, Kavanaugh has issued hundreds of opinions, many of which are influential in the Supreme Court and the lower courts. He has, moreover, interacted with colleagues and litigants who give him high grades for collegiality and temperament. He has hired and mentored an impressive and diverse stable of law clerks, who think the world of him and are coveted for distinguished positions in the legal profession, including Supreme Court clerkships.

Furthermore, this nomination is the occasion for the seventh FBI background check of Kavanaugh’s career. The number is high because he has held positions of high responsibility, including national-security duties. Consequently, he has been carefully examined and found fit for access to the nation’s most closely held defense secrets.

The Majority as Identity Group by Mark Steyn

https://www.steynonline.com/8895/the-majority-as-identity-group

The sold-out Mark Steyn Club Cruise departed Quebec City just as a wild tsunami of an election result crashed on the Plains of Abraham and washed away the National Assembly. On Monday François Legault’s brand new party, the CAQ (Coalition Avenir Québec), won 74 out of 125 seats and became the first government in half-a-century to be neither Liberal nor separatist. The CAQ is described as “center-right”, but that term doesn’t really cover it: Like many of the emerging parties in the new Europe – from Sweden to Italy, France to Hungary – M Legault concluded that the sweet spot on the spectrum lay in being both fiscally protective and socially protective. That’s to say, these new parties are not “center-right” in terms of Milton Friedman economics – they do not seriously challenge expectations of the big welfare state – but they are nationally assertive on the cultural front.

And so it was that Quebec’s new premier, in his first press conference, pledged to cut immigration by twenty per cent and to use the Notwithstanding clause to uphold the government’s ban on the niqab in the public service. Once again we see a clear difference between the English world (America, Britain, anglo-Canada) and the rest of the west (continental Europe, Quebec) when it comes to the rights of the majority versus the provocations of Islam. Here’s what I had to say on the subject in Maclean’s in 2010 :

The other day, a reader wrote to say that, while en vacances au Québec, he had espied me in a restaurant. With a couple of obvious francophones. And, from the snatches of conversation he caught, I appeared to be speaking French. “Appeared” is right, if you’ve ever heard my French. Nevertheless: “You’re a fraud, Steyn!” he thundered. The cut of his jib was that I was merely pretending to be a pro-Yank right-wing bastard while in reality living la vie en rose lounging on chaises longues snorting poutine with louche Frenchie socialists all day long.

I haven’t felt such a hypocrite since I was caught singing The Man That Got Away in a San Francisco bathhouse two days after my column opposing gay marriage. But yes, you’re right. I cannot tell a lie. I have a soft spot for Quebec. Not because of its risible separatist movement, for which the only rational explanation is that it was never anything but one almighty bluff for shakedown purposes. Yet, putting that aside, I’m not unsympathetic to the province’s broader cultural disposition. I regard neither Trudeaupian Canada nor Quietly Revolutionary Quebec as good long-term bets, or even medium-term bets. But, if I had to pick, I’d give marginally better odds to the latter. And the reasons why can be found in the coverage of Ms. Naema Ahmed and her “illegal” niqab, the head-to-toe Islamic covering that only has eyes for you.

The facts—or, at any rate, fact—of the case is well-known: a niqab-garbed immigrant from Egypt has been twice expelled from her French-language classes at the Saint-Laurent CEGEP and the Centre d’appui aux communautés immigrantes by order of the Quebec government. That much is agreed. Thereafter, the English and French press diverge significantly. The ROC reacted reflexively, deploring this assault on Canada’s cherished “values” of “multiculturalism.” In the Calgary Herald, Naomi Lakritz compared Quebec’s government to the Taliban. So did the Globe and Mail, in an editorial titled “Intolerant Intrusion.” In La Presse, Patrick Lagacé responded with a column called “The Globe, Reporting From Mars!”

The headline was in English, and on the whole M. Lagacé’s English is better than the Globe’s French. He began by noting their unbelievably stupid editorial on O Canada, in which they endeavoured to balance their charge of sexism in the English lyrics (“in all thy sons command”) by uncovering sexism in the French—”terre de nos aïeux” or “land of our forefathers.” Where, fretted the Globe for a couple hundred words, are the foremothers? This is what happens when your claims to be Canada’s national newspaper rest on the translation services of Babel Fish. As M. Lagacé pointed out, “aïeux, en français, englobe hommes et femmes.” Englobe maybe, but not in Globe.

Common Reading for Common Activism By David Randall

https://amgreatness.com/2018/10/03/common-

A few weeks ago my wife and I were walking through the Brooklyn Book Festival and we saw a booth saying something about Harry Potter. My son is a fan of the books—my wife and I like them, too—so we looked at the booth. It was for an organization that wants to use Harry Potter to inspire social justice activism. They think the point of reading Harry Potter is to learn that “Through reflection and awareness, we can draw lessons on how oppression operates and use those lessons to help develop an anti-racist, feminist, disability justice, queer and transgender liberationist, working class-based anti-capitalist movement”—that is, the Left.

My wife and I don’t want our son educated by Slytherins who fancy themselves Gryffindors, so we walked on. I’m afraid a lot of parents and kids didn’t.

College common reading programs think about reading the same way—that the point of reading is to draw you in to left-wing activism. And it isn’t just the college common reading programs—there are city reading programs and county reading programs, and earnest activists at book fairs around the county. It’s important to know that this isn’t just happening on campus.

A college common reading is usually one book, which students read over the summer so they can discuss it during orientation. Common readings are supposed to set academic expectations for incoming students—but they’re also usually run by co-curricular bureaucrats, who use them as a tool in their broader campaign to turn higher education into social justice activism.

The National Association of Scholars has been publishing an annual report on college common readings since 2010. This year we’ve added a lot more data to our report. We’ve gathered and collated information on college common reading assignments for the last 11 years, from 2007 through 2017. We now have information on 732 individual colleges and universities, 4,754 separate assignments, and 1,655 individual texts. Our analysis now draws upon the choices made by tens of thousands of bureaucrats and professors at hundreds of colleges, over the course of half a generation.

UCI Preparing to Refer Anti-Israel Disrupters to Prosecution The ripple that could become a wave on American campuses. Edwin Black

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271493/uci-preparing-refer-anti-israel-disrupters-edwin-black

Campus police at University of California, Irvine will in the near future refer anti-Israeli event disruptors of a May 3, 2018 pro-Israel event to Orange County prosecutors, according to a UCI spokesperson. Referral will occur, says the spokesperson, as soon as the campus police investigation concludes.

If so, UCI will be the second UC campus, after UCLA, to refer loud and raucous anti-Israel disruptors to prosecutors for violation of California’s statutes prohibiting disruption of public meetings, disturbing the peace, and conspiracy to do either.

After the police referral, it will be up to District Attorney Tony Rackauckas to decide whether actual prosecution should ensue. Rackauckas previously made history with the 2011 prosecution and conviction of the famous “Irvine 11,” who disrupted Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren in 2010 when he spoke at UCI. Rackauckas is considered one the state’s most seasoned, no-nonsense DAs.

The new UCI case arises from a May 3, 2018 effort by UCI’s College Republicans to host a panel with Israeli Reservists on Duty. After about 40 minutes, a parade of anti-Israel agitators filed in to stage a well-orchestrated and unruly disruption, using a bullhorn and shouting derogatory chants. The disruption was documented by at least two dozen videos. reviewed by this writer, including this long video at minute 42:00. After the disruptors were ushered out, the boisterous disorder continued to disrupt from the corridor under police protection, according to the videos.

Three statutes pertain. Title 11, Sec. 403 concerns meeting disruption. “Every person who … willfully disturbs or breaks up any assembly or meeting … is guilty of a misdemeanor.” This was the very statute Rackauckas used to successfully prosecute and convict the “Irvine 11.”

The Speech I Never Gave Sweden’s Islamic invasion catalyzed by the death of free speech. Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271473/speech-i-never-gave-bruce-bawer

A few prefatory words: I was invited to give a talk in Gothenburg, Sweden, on Saturday, September 29, as part of an “Alternative Book Fair.” The Gothenburg Book Fair was being held that weekend, and the point of the alternative event was to highlight books – mostly about Islam, I gathered – that the official fair had rejected. I was asked to talk about freedom of speech, a freedom that is in increasingly short supply in Sweden, as elsewhere in Western Europe. As if to prove the point, civic officials – at the urging of police, who were spooked by Antifa threats – banned the “Alternative Book Fair.” Here’s what I planned to say.

When I was twenty years old, there was a famous free-speech case in the state of Illinois. Nazis wanted to march in a Chicago suburb called Skokie, which had a large population of Jews, many of them Holocaust survivors. Skokie sued successfully in county court to prevent the march. The Nazis, with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union, took the case to the state appellate court and the Illinois Supreme Court. Long story short, after the case had gone to the United States Supreme Court, the Nazis were allowed to march.

As I say, I was twenty years old at the time. The Supreme Court’s decision filled me with admiration. Not because I liked Nazis, but because that ruling demonstrated that in the United States of America, even the most reprehensible expression was protected. Innocuous speech doesn’t need protection. What requires protection is controversial speech, extremist speech, speech that perhaps everyone on earth except the speaker finds offensive. Without such protections, any dissent from received opinion is in danger of being shut down. It’s a simple point but a crucial one. Without absolute freedom of speech, freedom itself – all freedom, every freedom – is threatened, period.

Eric Holder ‘Thinking About’ Running Against Trump; ‘Time for Democrats to be Tough’ By Bridget Johnson see note

https://pjmedia.com/election/eric-holder-thinking-about-running-against-trump-time-for-democrats-to-be-tough/
Will he run a “Fast and Furious” campaign?… Remember “The House Oversight Committee let loose with a scathing assessment of Eric Holder in a recent report, accusing the Barack Obama-era attorney general of outright misleading Congress on its investigation of the “Fast and Furious” gun-running scandal.” rsk

Former Attorney General Eric Holder said tonight that he’ll be making a decision next year on whether he’ll vie for the Democratic nomination in the 2020 presidential contest.

Since stepping down from the Justice Department during the Obama administration in 2015, Holder has led the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, a party-affiliated nonprofit advocating for reforms to redistricting that Holder argues rigs elections in favor of Republicans.

“I’m thinking about it. I’m going to decide next year. Right now I’m focused on Nov. 6 and making sure we have a good midterm election,” Holder told CNN, clarifying that he expected to have a decision by the “first quarter of next year.”

“It’d be interesting to see — two guys from Queens,” he added when asked if he could defeat President Trump. “I know how to talk to that guy. I know Donny Trump. I know that guy.”

Host Chris Cuomo asked Holder if Dems should meet Trump at his level of attacks, or go high when he goes low.

Tolerance: Not really a thing in Islam By Amil Imani

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/10/tolerance_not_really_a_thing_in_islam.html

One of the most salient passages in the Quran is 2:106, which shows us the basis for the doctrine of abrogation: “We do not abrogate a verse or cause it to be forgotten except when we bring forth one better than earlier verse or similar to it. Do you not know that Allah is over all things competent?”

Abrogation has an impact on the arguments about the true nature of Islam. At endless interfaith dialogues, the early tolerant verses are quoted to show the nature of Islam as peaceful. When both verses are quoted and then abrogation is applied, we see that the later verse trumps the earlier tolerant one. Jihad abrogates tolerance. In general, the Medina Quran abrogates the Meccan Quran. There are several verses of tolerance that are abrogated by jihad against Christians.

But the earlier verse is still acceptable and in use. Abrogation does not negate the early verse. Indeed, the earlier “peaceful” verse that is abrogated is the one most apt to be used in public discourse.

This creates a logical problem, since if two things contradict each other, at least one of them must be false. This is a fundamental element of Western unitary logic. In Quranic logic, two statements can contradict each other, and both are true. This is dualistic logic.

To put it simply, Allah changes revelations as he pleases, and the latter revelations supersede the earlier ones. There are deviations among Muslim theologians as to which verses have been abrogated and replaced, but the overall idea has been clear. When Muslims are weak and in a minority position, they should behave peacefully according to the Meccan passages (which reflect the early time, when Muhammad was vulnerable and building his power base), and when strong, they are obligated to wage war according to the later Medina passages.