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Ruth King

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Lying about Amsterdam By Bruce Bawer

By on July 29th, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/trending/lying-about-amsterdam/

“Why, then, did Arre Zuurmond give such a dishonest interview? I don’t know the man, but when I read AFP’s story (before I saw Moran’s), my first thought was that this silliness was part of a desperate attempt at deflection – an effort to draw attention away from Amsterdam’s real problem. And that problem has nothing whatsoever to do with young guys from Britain, let alone from the Dutch provinces, roaming the inner city at night. No, it’s about the Islamic communities on the fringes of downtown and in the city suburbs. Hand me a map of Amsterdam and I’ll show you just how far you can go in any direction from the center of the city before you start risking real trouble. It’s not that far – heading west, it’s only a matter of four or five tram stops.”

Writing at this website on Saturday, Rick Moran summarized a report from Agence France Presse about Amsterdam. In an interview with the Dutch daily Trouw, that city’s official ombudsman, Arre Zuurmond, had complained that its “city centre becomes an urban jungle at night.” There are, in AFP’s words, “illegal car and bike races zooming through the streets, open drugs sales and general mayhem.” As Zuurmond put it: “Criminal money flourishes, there is no authority and the police can no longer handle the situation….Scooters race through the pedestrian areas. There is a lot of shouting. Drugs are being bought. There is stealing. People pee and even poop on the streets.”

Who are the culprits here? Zuurmond was clear on that one: “enticed by cheap travel, groups mostly of young men – mainly from elsewhere in the Netherlands or Britain – frequently roam the inner city’s canal-lined streets at weekends, on pub crawls or to celebrate stag parties drawn by easy access to drugs and the notorious Red Light district.” Zuurmond singled out for concern the downtown square called Leidseplein, where, he claimed, “The atmosphere is grim, and there is an air of lawlessness.”

Sorry, but this is all the purest of nonsense. I’m in Amsterdam quite frequently – most recently in June, when, as it happened, on several days in a row, I walked a great deal around parts of the city center, including Leidseplein and the fringes of the Red Light District. I did much if not most of my walking during the hours between midnight and six A.M. I like walking, and after forty years in New York City I know how to keep my eyes open – and I know Amsterdam well enough to know where I’m likely to be safe.

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MY SAY: THE FAIL-SAFE COLLEGE APPLICATION

By on July 29th, 2018

This is the silly season of college applications for seniors throughout the nation. Besides scores and grades and recommendations, the essay is paramount in garnering attention. So here is an essay that is bound to gain consideration and even an offer of a scholarship:
“I don’t know if I identify as a male or female and I am open to all possibilities. I apply to college with serious doubts.
I doubt the value of capitalism; I doubt the concept of American exceptionalism; I doubt that we are a Democracy; I doubt the motives of our military – the fascist ground troops trained to commit war crimes in imperial conquest; I doubt that socialism and communism are as bad as racist right wing conservatives pretend; I doubt the culture that promotes music, prose and poetry with its recondite racism; I doubt the integrity of the slave owning founding “parents.”
I would rather study the mores and gentle life style of the Dayak people of Borneo and learn to speak Ngaju, than all Western culture.
I know that the syllabus and faculty of your great institution will focus on and allay all my doubts with facts and truth.
Please consider me for the freshman class of September 2019.”

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Germany: Rise of the Salafists by Soeren Kern

By on July 29th, 2018

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12773/germany-salafists

“Salafists see themselves as defenders of an original, unadulterated Islam…. As a consequence, Salafists want to establish a ‘theocracy’ according to their interpretation of the rules of sharia, one in which the liberal democratic order no longer applies.” — Annual Report of Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV).

“Under the guise of humanitarian aid, Islamists succeed in radicalizing migrants. In the past, Salafists in particular tried to reach out to migrants. They visited refugee shelters for this purpose and offered assistance. The target group was not only adult migrants, but also unaccompanied adolescents, who, due to their situation and age, are particularly susceptible to Salafist missionary activities.” — Annual Report of Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV).

The BfV report makes a direct link between the increase in anti-Semitism in Germany and the rise of Islamist movements in the country: “The ‘enemy image of Judaism’ therefore forms a central pillar in the propaganda of all Islamist groups…. This poses a significant challenge to the peaceful and tolerant coexistence in Germany.”

The number of Salafists in Germany has doubled over the last five years and now exceeds 10,000 for the first time, according to Germany’s BfV domestic intelligence agency. BfV estimates that Germany is home to more than 25,000 Islamists, nearly 2,000 of whom pose an immediate threat of attack.

The new figures are included the latest annual report of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, BfV), and presented by Interior Minister Horst Seehofer and BfV President Hans-Georg Maaßen in Berlin on July 24.

The report, considered the most important indicator of internal security in Germany, draws a bleak picture. The BfV estimates that the number of Islamists in Germany increased to at least 25,810 by the end of 2017, up from 24,425 in 2016.

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Turkey: Detained US Pastor Brunson Vilified by State-Supporting Media by Uzay Bulut

By on July 29th, 2018

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12774/turkey-brunson-vilification

It appears that Pastor Andrew Brunson, as both an American and a Christian, has become a perfect scapegoat for the Turkish government and its media outlets. If Ankara were a genuine ally of the West, Brunson — who lived and worked peacefully at a small Protestant church in Izmir for 23 years — would not have been arrested in the first place, let alone robbed of his freedom and prevented from returning to the US.

Andrew Brunson, the American pastor detained in Turkey for two years on false terrorism and espionage charges, was released from prison on July 25, only to be put under house arrest until the resumption of his trial in October. The court ordered him to wear an electronic ankle-bracelet at all times and banned him from traveling outside Turkey.

Moreover, according to the Washington Post’s Carol D. Leonnig:

“President Trump thought he had a deal with Turkish President Erdogan to free Andrew Brunson, the American pastor imprisoned in Turkey for the last two years on what the administration considered bogus terrorism charges.

“As part of the deal, on July 14, Trump asked Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to release Ebru Ozkan, 27, a Turkish woman who was detained in Israel on charges of acting as a smuggler for Hamas. The day after Trump and Netanyahu spoke, Ozkan was deported from Israel.

“Several U.S. officials insisted there had been no misunderstanding of the terms of the deal, but the Turks, transferring Brunson to house arrest, failed to send the pastor home.”

Brunson, detained in October 2016, is accused, with no evidence, of working for two groups that Turkey lists as terrorist organizations. One is a movement led by the US-based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gülen, referred to by the Turkish government as the Fethullahist Terrorist Organization (FETO), and whom President Recep Tayyip Erdogan accuses of organizing the failed military coup attempt in July 2016. The other is the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). If convicted, Brunson faces up to 35 years behind bars.

Erdogan has made it clear that his intention is to make the US administration extradite Gülen in exchange for Brunson’s release. In September 2017, Erdogan said:

“America wants us to return a priest… You also have a priest. You should give him to us too. Then we will try and return the one here.”

Brunson’s 62-page indictment states, among other allegations:

“The suspect… under the guise of being an evangelical church pastor… acted as an agent of unconventional warfare, per the doctrine of intelligence and psychological warfare and… acted within a group of personnel, most of whom had received special training and had military and intelligence backgrounds.”

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A Tentative Trade War Win By Julie Kelly

By on July 29th, 2018

https://amgreatness.com/2018/07/29/a-tentative-trade

Ever since President Trump launched a so-called trade war back in January, the expert political class has been in a tizzy.

Economists warned that U.S.-imposed tariffs aimed at Canada, China, and the European Union would devastate the economy and destroy millions of jobs. Politicians on the Left and the Right condemned the president; some congressional Republicans are threatening to limit the president’s future authority on trade policy. Pundits claimed (hoped?) the measures would most hurt Trump supporters in red states.

But Trump’s latest sucker punch to the expert political class follows a familiar pattern that Our Betters still haven’t figured out. They are the unwitting sparring partners in the president’s entertaining rope-a-dope. Trump makes a hasty, impetuous comment or policy announcement and various experts howl that it will fail and commiserate about the president’s stupidity. Pundits warn it will yield harsh political consequences. The public catches on to a problem it didn’t know existed. The president’s foes capitulate; public views it as a win. Expert political class loses again. (See “Trump will never get 3 percent economic growth” predictions as the most recent example.)

Europe Comes to the Table
Admittedly, it is too soon to say whether the United States will prevail in Trump’s hardline trade gambit, but he can already claim one victory: After referring to the European Union as a trading “foe”—and unleashing the usual chorus of naysayers—Trump issued a joint statement with European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker pledging to resolve long-standing trade disputes.

“This is why we agreed today to work together toward zero tariffs, zero non-tariff barriers, and zero subsidies on non-auto industrial goods,” the statement reads. “We will also work to reduce barriers and increase trade in services, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, medical products, as well as soybeans. This will open markets for farmers and workers, increase investment, and lead to greater prosperity in both the United States and the European Union. It will also make trade fairer and more reciprocal.”

Score another one for—as expertise expert Tom Nichols calls them—“Trump and the Know-Nothings who support him.”

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How Conservatives Won the Law A liberal political scientist recounts the rise of the Federalist Society—and explains his sympathy for some of its ideas. By Jason Willick

By on July 29th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-conservatives-won-the-law-1532126300

STEVEN TELES IS A PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL SCIENCE AT JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY….

When I was a freshman at the University of California, Berkeley in 2011, the College Republicans announced plans to hold an “Increase Diversity Bake Sale.” The idea was to offer minorities and women discounts on cupcakes while white males would pay full price. This led to an emergency meeting of the student government and widespread calls to defund the group or shut down the event. For its organizers, that alone made it a wild success.

“Affirmative-action bake sale conservatism,” as Steven Teles calls it, has an intellectual legacy dating back to the 1960s. Influenced by the counterculture left, activists aim to provoke a crackdown on conservatives, thereby exposing elite education as a coercive “hegemonic project” that represses disfavored ideas. A more familiar term for this, he says, is “trolling.”

Mr. Teles, a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University, is more sympathetic to a different model of conservative campus activism, epitomized by the Federalist Society. Instead of seeking to embarrass liberal institutions, the goal is to build conservative ones with social and intellectual resources sufficient to compete directly. In his 2008 book, “The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement,” Mr. Teles chronicles how a coalition of right-leaning law students in debating societies managed, over a few decades, to dethrone liberalism from its dominant position in legal thought. Assuming Judge Brett Kavanaugh is confirmed, judges influenced by this project will soon constitute a majority on the Supreme Court.

Liberals, as they defend their domain, insist that the conservative legal movement is the product of a deep-pocketed conspiracy and that its ideas are fronts for power and greed. Mr. Teles, although a liberal Democrat, wrote his book partly to challenge these preconceptions. “Liberals have this myth of diabolical conservative competence,” he tells me. They imagine their own side as “bumbling . . . but benevolent” and the right as “evil” but “totally farsighted and competent.”

The main achievement of the conservative legal movement, Mr. Teles says, hasn’t been fundraising but education, study and debate. The Federalist Society’s premise is that “we’re going to be smarter than the liberals,” he adds. “We’re going to be more bookish. We’re going to be more intellectual.” Conservative law students would “go down to first principles” to show that liberal students “can’t even describe why they’re in favor of what they’re in favor of.” Many of the early Federalist Society members were former liberals; their goal was to “draw people in” as they had been drawn in, by demonstrating “how thoughtful and how intellectual that project is.”

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Devin Nunes, Washington’s Public Enemy No. 1 What did the FBI do in the 2016 campaign? The head of the House inquiry on what he has found—and questions still unanswered. By Kimberley A. Strassel

By on July 29th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/devin-nunes-washingtons-public-enemy-no-1-1532729666

Tulare, Calif.

It’s 105 degrees as I stand with Rep. Devin Nunes on his family’s dairy farm. Mr. Nunes has been feeling even more heat in Washington, where as chairman of the House Select Committee on Intelligence he has labored to unearth the truth about the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s activities during and after the 2016 presidential campaign. Thanks in large part to his work, we now know that the FBI used informants against Donald Trump’s campaign, that it obtained surveillance warrants based on opposition research conducted for Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and that after the election Obama administration officials “unmasked” and monitored the incoming team.

Mr. Nunes’s efforts have provoked extraordinary partisan and institutional fury in Washington—across the aisle, in the FBI and other law-enforcement and intelligence agencies, in the media. “On any given day there are dozens of attacks, each one wilder in its claims,” he says. Why does he keep at it? “First of all, because it’s my job. This is a basic congressional investigation, and we follow the facts,” he says. The “bigger picture,” he adds, is that in “a lot of the bad and problematic countries” that Intelligence Committee members investigate, “this is what they do there. There is a political party that controls the intelligence agencies, controls the media, all to ensure that party stays in power. If we get to that here, we no longer have a functioning republic. We can’t let that happen.”

Mr. Nunes, 44, was elected to Congress in 2002 from Central California. He joined the Intelligence Committee in 2011 and delved into the statutes, standards and norms that underpin U.S. spying. That taught him to look for “red flags,” information or events that don’t feel right and indicate a deeper problem. He noticed some soon after the 2016 election.

The first: Immediately after joining the Trump transition team, Mr. Nunes faced an onslaught of left-wing claims that he might be in cahoots with Vladimir Putin. It started on social media, though within months outlets such as MSNBC were openly asking if he was a “Russian agent.” “I’ve been a Russia hawk going way back,” he says. “I was the one who only six months earlier had called the Obama administration’s failure to understand Putin’s plans and intentions the largest intelligence failure since 9/11. So these attacks, surreal—big red flag.” CONTINUE AT SITE

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Reinvigorating the Liberal Arts Matters More than Free Speech on Campus By Justin Dyer & Ryan Streeter

By on July 29th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/liberal-arts-education-prepares-students-for-public-life/

A liberal-arts education prepares students for participation in public life.

During an era of “fake news,” post-truth politics, political intolerance, and polarization, various solutions to these woes have been proposed. Potential reforms range from changing political institutions to establishing new standards for social-media companies.

Much less-discussed — and almost forgotten in the fray — is the educational role of universities.

Liberal education, when done well, puts Americans into contact with ideas that are challenging and difficult. It teaches them how to talk with — rather than past — each other. Today, university administrators need to reckon with the ways in which the hollowing-out of the liberal arts has exacerbated rather than mollified the distemper in our public discourse.

More than calls for free speech and the need for ideological diversity on college campuses, we urgently need a renewal of the liberal arts. “The free search for truth and its free exposition in the liberal arts, are essential components of a functioning democracy,” noted the American Association of Colleges and Universities and the American Association of University Professors in May.

The debate over free speech on college campuses is symptomatic of a deeper problem: Many colleges have abandoned the core liberal-arts commitment to pursue truth about the human condition. Liberal arts –whether literature, history, or philosophy — have become attenuated. Certain disciplines are now heavily politicized, and core curricula have been dismantled in favor of an à la carte approach to class selection, as the American Council of Trustees and Alumni has documented.

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Six Miscarriages of Justice in Winona, Miss. By Daniel Payne

By on July 29th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/in-the-dark-podcast-reveals-miscarriage-of-justice-in-mississippi/

A new podcast sheds light on the case of a man who’s spent the last 22 years in prison, tried for the same murder over and over and over again.

American Public Media’s In the Dark podcast has done more in its two years than many podcasts will likely do in ten. Last year, it won a Peabody Award for what Rashida Jones called its “tour de force reporting” on the 1989 kidnapping of Jacob Wetterling, which examined the absurd, almost comical ineptness of the law-enforcement officials in charge of the Wetterling case. Nothing exposes the incompetence and corruption of bad government like journalists doing good old-fashioned journalism.

This year, In the Dark performed not so much a tour de force as a magnum opus of investigation. The show, hosted by journalist Madeleine Baran along with a crew of reporters and producers, headed to Winona, Miss., to examine what may be the most bizarre legal spectacle in modern American history: A man who has been tried in court six times for the same crime.

That man, Curtis Flowers, is black. He has been charged repeatedly with a gruesome, execution-style mass murder perpetrated in Winona in 1996, at a downtown furniture store where he had briefly worked and from which he had been fired a few days before the crime.

The local district attorney, Doug Evans, a white man, charged Flowers with the murders, claiming that there was enough evidence to place him at the scene of the murders on the day they took place. The verdicts in five of the six trials that subsequently ensued were overturned on appeal; each time, Evans simply charged and tried Flowers again, using the same evidence to convict him once more.

Piece by piece, In the Dark deals serious blows to the evidence that Evans has used to convict Flowers over and over again. The testimony of a ballistics expert is shown to be pointedly dubious; witnesses cited by the prosecution, some of them obviously unreliable, have recanted or contradicted their testimony; the star witness for the prosecution later explicitly admitted that he had lied under oath about Flowers’ having confessed to the murders.

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MORE ABOUT JOHN JAMES -THE MICHIGAN PRIMARY IS ON AUGUST 7TH

By on July 29th, 2018

Battle Tested

A husband, father, combat veteran, and businessman, John James is a conservative Republican. The former Army Captain and West Point graduate is President of James Group International, a supply-chain logistics company in Detroit.

John James is a husband, father, combat veteran and businessman. He is a pro-life, pro-Second Amendment, pro-business conservative who has demonstrated energetic leadership, clarity of vision and a passion for service from the battlefield to the boardroom. John James is a proven servant-leader who will represent all Michiganders and help unify Washington.

At 17, John made the decision to serve his country. After graduating from West Point in 2004, he became a Ranger-qualified aviation officer. John went on to serve with distinction in Operation Iraqi Freedom where he earned a Combat Action Badge (CAB) and two Air Medals, among other awards, while logging 753.8 flight hours in theater leading two Apache platoons.

After eight years of service to the nation, John James was honorably discharged and returned to Michigan to work in the family business: James Group International. Currently its President, James has led the company from $35 million to $137 million in revenue while creating 100 additional jobs in Michigan and around the country since 2012.

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